Cat Show. 5/28/2021

VG: So another academic year is behind us. This year has been rather special for me, since it is not just the kids who are graduating, but also the kid. My son. And I am not sure that we, the grown ups, have done a great job improving the world for the younger generation.

ALICE: Who said, it has to be improved. Let the young deal with it. Only when we overcome difficulties, we learn something. That’s the path that all the underprivileged minorities and other marginalized had to take. So there is no need to improve anything; instead we have to drive into people’s heads that they are victims. Only then they would decide to resist, fight back and improve. Say, some racist cop mistreats you. Or some nasty male makes a disparaging comment about your looks. If you think it is just one individual, you might just ignore them. But when you realize that you are a victim of systemic racism or systemic sexism, which is so systemic, that it underlies all the systems of the world, than you start fighting. That’s exactly what I have to do in this household.

HOBBS: So you are trying to say, that being paranoid, insecure, and obsessed with some real or imaginary insults is the way to improvement? If there is anything systemic about what you are describing, it is the systemic hypocrisy. People are continuously playing roles. They are continuously performing. And consequently, they lose faith in themselves and others. You might suspect me or Vladimir of harboring some nasty thoughts about female cats – justified s they might be, especially in your case. But is it a healthy position to be? You waste your time suspecting us, and we are wasting our time pretending to be holier than thou, so that not to feed your paranoia. If the world is a stage, and people are virtue signaling drones, can we really improve anything substantial besides our faking skills?

VG: Good point, Hobbs. When the rewards are given to fakers, it is only discouraging for decent people to participate in this masquerade. I remember back in the Soviet Union, we always had these Komsomol leaders, the Soviet Version of PC kommissars, who were superb of saying the right things. That was frequently, the only thing they were superb at. In schools, colleges, factories, they would deliver beautiful speeches denouncing all the wrong things and promoting all the right ones. And then, of course, you learn about their greed, corruption, cynicism, and abuse. Not sure, that cynicism and lack of faith in humanity are the best company for one’s life journey.

ALICE: You can’t extrapolate from your Soviet experience and these cynical figures. Situation is totally different in liberal democracies. Here we have institutions of free press that expose the crooks and liars. For example, one of the founders of BLM is resigning after the allegations of her recently obtained fancy houses, including one in Malibu, have emerged. BBC has reported it. So she was your typical Komsomol leader, and so are the few bad apples in political leadership. But they are exposed immediately, voted out, and things turn for the better. It is not like the Soviet Union, where courageous whistleblowers were arrested on fake charges, kept in jail, hunted down, deplatformed from social media and so on.

HOBBS: Funny, how you twist things around, Alice. So there is systemic racism, but not systemic corruption. People who get into top positions in political parties are all squeaky clean and so are the mass media and other institutions of real power.

VG: OK, Hobbs, here you are going with your pervasive nihilism, after I’ve complained that we need to leave the young with more than cynicism. Yes, there are a lot of systems in this world, but they are never settled. There is systemic evil and systemic good. And they were distributed in equal measure among humans; and this measure is frequently unrelated to education, social status, ideology and so on. People of integrity would try to do good, even if no one is offering any rewards. And so would those, who have surrendered to evil. Those would do nasty stuff, even if it does not bring any reward.

ALICE: That talk of integrity reminds me of white privilege. It is easy to preserve integrity if you are rich and privileged. But try to do it if you are living in some awful conditions. Until these conditions are improved, we can’t expect or demand any integrity. On the contrary. We have to educate people that they are the victims of injustice and abuse. Look at the spectacular success of this type of education in Israel. We now have two groups of populations there, who are convinced that they are the victims of injustice and abuse and are constantly educated by all sorts of historical facts, that they are the victims of systemic prosecution. And isn’t it wonderful? While these two groups hate each other and use every opportunity to unleash violence, they serve as a moral lesson to us all. Irish are protesting. Brits are protesting, Americans are protesting. The whole world is protesting, and taking a stand, and demands actions. Virtue signaling – the highest form of virtue if you ask me — is in overdrive. So what we have is the direct participation in improvement of humanity. Everyone learns history, everyone is a specialist, and everyone is forced to embrace morality as they expose the moral shortcomings of another side. If today’s youth – rather than learning a trade, developing imagination, or hearing this bourgeois talk about integrity, learns to take a stand on the most burning issues of the day, be it Israeli apartheid, or systemic racism of major American institutions, or systemic homophobia, than the job of educators is done, and you, Vladimir, can congratulate yourself.

VG: Wow, Alice, you would have made a perfect Komsomol leader. A new Khodorkovsky, who started at Komsomol, and ended up the richest man in Russia. And let’s not forget that he is a victim. The victim of systemic Russian corruption and of evil Putin in particular. But what is surprising is that I keep on practicing my lectures on both of you, and yet, you both seem to learn different things from them, and not those that I actually want to convey. I use words to prove that words do not matter, that a simple act tells us more about a human being than thousand beautiful declarations, or beautiful ideologies. Yet, what I have on my hands is Alice-the-demagogue and Hobbs-the house-destroyer. Where did I go wrong?