Self-occupation

Not long ago, my friend told a story about how his acquaintance, a parquet floor layer, was working at a property belonging to a “respectable family.” The parquet layer had the audacity to butt into a conversation between a lady from the respectable family and a foreman. The lady flew into a rage at such impertinence, her eyes bulged out of their sockets, and she, hissing, squeezed out something like: “How dare you open your mouth in my presence?!” Actually, the point of the story was that my friend was expressing joy at the fact that he wasn’t there at that moment. Otherwise, the lady would inevitably have gotten… eeeee… a rebuff, which could have led to various unpleasant consequences.

The author of these lines also tries not to be in places where various respectable people hang out, and thank God, there are fewer and fewer such intersection points in my life. Because the thing is, I don’t consider them respectable, but on the contrary, by instinct I consider them people “of the basest sort.” And I understand that I can easily offend with a word or an action such a respectable person, when he is especially full of himself. And the saddest thing is that I cannot control this—it happens purely instinctively, like waving away a fly or swatting a mosquito. And finally, I perfectly understand that my friend and I are not an exception, but the rule.

So, all this prelude actually leads to the following. You and I live in a country that has one interesting characteristic, which I will try to explain. All states, with very rare exceptions, like the USA, arose as a result of military conquest. That is, the “ruling class” in them consists of descendants of conquerors (at least until the victory of bureaucracy over aristocracy). Understandably, they mixed with the local population, were reconquered by other conquerors, and so on. Whatever happened in these countries subsequently, and whatever “democracy and prosperity” they eventually achieved, this process had a beginning. So, the respectable class originally existed through military coercion. The boss is that dude with a huge sword, and there’s nothing you can do about it. In any case, the fact of the dude and the sword is recognized and by itself does not cause any emotions.

With Ukrainians, it turned out a little differently. Ukrainians have long adapted to living in foreign empires. To do this, they developed two strategies. The first is to become bosses—that is, to work in the imperial apparatus. The second is to steal from the boss. And both are considered legitimate and often intersect with each other. At the same time, the first strategy assumed that a person shares imperial values only at the workplace. He can be any kind of master, boss, tyrant, but he cannot be a lord. Opening your mouth in his presence is not a sin; his presence is not at all regal. He just arranged things well for himself and wishes the same for us. Not coincidentally, our empires tried not to build their hierarchy, at least its foundation, on “locals.” Because among “locals,” nepotism immediately takes root—that is, structures for pumping the empire’s resources into one’s own pocket are immediately organized.

The empire with its pathos was always somewhere else. Mainly in Moscow. And so it happened that Moscow broke away from Ukraine. Ukrainians began “building their own independent state” and, like in that joke about a person trying to assemble a bed from parts stolen at a military plant, built another empire. They even acquired an “aristocracy” in it. However, there is a significant nuance here—neither these “aristocrats” nor their ancestors are conquerors. They behave as if they just won a war, but there was no war. Therefore, their existence does not fit into the “social contract” in any way. Their legitimacy is not recognized and never will be. We have an amazing situation. Ukrainians created a regime of self-occupation, in which one part of the population openly mocks the second, but unlike ordinary occupation, the second part does not recognize the first. It endures, humiliates itself, but does not recognize. How and with what this will end remains only to guess¹.