Бесплатный фрагмент - Digital Ruler

DIGITAL RULER

The eternal Colosseum

Humanity is entering an era of new feudalism. The old lords controlled land, resources, and people. The new lords control digital infrastructure, data, capital, attention, and access to the future. Their power does not always appear as a command: it manifests itself in whom we see, whom we trust, and whose thoughts we consider significant.

The Digital Ruler is not merely a wealthy entrepreneur or a technology magnate. It is a new form of concentrated power in which algorithms, money, popularity, and the human pursuit of status merge into a unified system for controlling visibility.

Why does a free person voluntarily seek a lord? Why does society defend those who possess power, even when it remains dependent itself? And why does the struggle against one feudal lord so often lead only to the emergence of another?

Drawing on the RECON system, Almaz Braev explores the relationship between ancient instincts of struggle, historical hierarchies, the market, technological progress, and digital domination. The author examines the architecture of visibility, the fragmented individual, voluntary vassalage, and Digital Lawing — a mechanism in which freedom is formally preserved, while the ability to be heard is gradually taken away.

From Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor to the algorithmic systems of the modern world, the book raises a disturbing question: Has humanity truly freed itself from the need for a lord — or has it merely created more sophisticated instruments of submission?

Digital Ruler is an exploration of power, money, ambition, and human nature, intended to reveal the formation of digital feudalism and raise the question of whether an architecture without a lord is possible.

Yes, the modern world is obsessed with the illusion of technological progress and personal freedom. But if we strip away its digital gloss and geopolitical rhetoric, a harsh, archaic mechanism is laid bare — a mechanism this book seeks to investigate.

RECON is a radical diagnosis of the age, breaking with the bureaucratic fog of academic sociology. The book traces humanity’s journey from primitive archaism and tribal communities to a global digital matrix governed by an invisible operator — the Digital Ruler.

— —

Chapter 1

Graduation Day

In June, when the final school examinations come to an end, the city holds a Graduation Day celebration. This tradition existed back in the Soviet Union. Times change, along with the monuments — the symbols standing in front of the city administration. But the rituals remain the same.

The graduates are gathered in front of the akimat, the city administration, on the central avenue.

A ceremonial address from the authorities is read aloud, offering the graduates guidance as they enter “the wider world of adult life.” The top-performing students are recognized. Certificates and badges are presented, and award ribbons are placed around their shoulders.

Speakers address the gathering, first the teachers, and then the graduates themselves.

Several pairs of graduates begin to dance a waltz. They have been specially trained for this occasion. At least, that was how it used to be. I am not sure whether it is still done that way today.

Then something resembling a public celebration begins.

From the beginning of the central avenue to its intersection with another main avenue, cafés, summer cafés, and ice cream stands bring out plastic tables and chairs. They set out refreshments, and ice cream, of course. The graduates are expected to remember this night — the night they stepped into adult life.

By morning, the avenue, from its starting point to the intersection with the other main street, is littered with all kinds of waste: labels, plastic bottles, glass lemonade bottles, and plastic cups. Some of the tables have not yet been cleared, and some of the chairs have not yet been put away.

But morning always comes.

And with it comes adult life.

The graduates have come into contact with a new vertical.

There will be several more such verticals in the lives of these young men and women.

The verticals are all the authorities a person encounters throughout life.

First come the parents — the family and relatives.

Then the teachers: kindergarten educators, schoolteachers, neighborhood figures of authority, and the influential figures among school bullies.

Then comes the time when the authority of power itself takes hold.

Alongside the authority of power, young people are influenced by the authority of ideology, naturally, and by official religion — the spiritual vertical, which often does not coincide with a person’s inner spirituality.

And finally, there is the modern vertical: the digital vertical, the most powerful one today, and the foundation of techno-feudalism.

The parents of these graduates went through something similar, except for techno-feudalism. Their parents did not have digital devices. That is why they believed in the authorities, in the system, in communism — perhaps — and in God — perhaps.

In general, people need a vertical.

They live with it throughout their entire lives.

People need something to rely on.

Times Change, Emphases Shift

And so, public celebrations are now held farther away from the main administration building.

These days, when I return from work and walk home through the President’s Park, it is simply impossible to get through.

A huge, dense crowd blocks the way. Families come to various celebrations and “Metallurgists’ Days.” Show-business stars arrive, shout greetings into microphones, and then sing heartfelt songs, love songs, and patriotic songs. People stand and watch a large screen where the faces of entertainers and singers glow with the light of success. There are many mothers with strollers, carrying infants — sometimes pushing a stroller with each hand. Some young fathers hold their babies in their arms so that they can get a better view of the entertainers and singers.

This is already a combined vertical.

But we will discuss each vertical separately.

P.S.

I do not know what happened to all those graduates throughout their lives. Let us hope that everything turned out as they had planned.

But we will record the triumph of the digital vertical over all those graduates from the very beginning.

Chapter 2

Supports

People are people everywhere. Whether five thousand years ago or today.

People are born, and they already need a vertical — something to lean on. People rely on all kinds of things, not only on parents, authority, or religion — God. This immediately confirms the vertical nature of the human essence.

Before that, people relied on talismans: animal teeth, feathers, scalps, and even the skulls of their enemies. While power and religion were developing their own forms, people practiced with whatever they had at their disposal. They deified mountains, rivers, and the heavens. They asked for help and support. Over time, these mountains, rivers, and heavens were transformed into an anthropomorphic god.

But in time, even such gods, together with their religions, could no longer satisfy the demand for support.

As people acquired new knowledge, they once again found support within themselves. That is why revolutions took place and militant atheism was established.

This happened because faith in yet another source of support was beginning to waver.

Until that point, religion had seemed like an absolute foundation. After all, religion contained the accumulated wisdom of previous generations — and therefore the experience of earlier supports.

We must understand why society, and humanity as a whole, abandons verticals that have outlived their time.

That is why we will go far back into the past. And we will understand what this resembles.

We will begin with the Colosseum.

The Colosseum is a symbol of Rome’s power.

Many inhabitants of Rome, not only citizens but even Romans themselves, relied on the might of Rome. Being a subject of an all-powerful lord has always had its appeal. Many “non-citizens” dreamed of becoming Roman citizens in those days. Over time, all non-citizens became citizens.

But several centuries later, everything fell apart. Rome fell. The Latin language — the language of the masters of the world — became a dead language.

Rome, as a source of support and a material symbol of the vertical, ceased to exist. It became merely a symbol. Later, Germans and Russians would use this symbol of power and authority to strengthen their own German and Russian verticals.

But for now…

The Morning After the Great Games

Early morning after the great games. The sun has not yet risen high above the hills, but its pale light is already cutting into the eyes, exposing the underside of imperial triumph.

Yesterday, tens of thousands of voices roared here. Senators, plebeians, gladiators, merchants, and slaves merged into a single ecstasy beneath the roar of fanfares and animals. The crowd demanded bread and circuses, and the empire generously provided both. The rulers looked down upon this sea of faces, intoxicated by their power over the swaying mass.

And now — silence.

And this silence is more deafening than the triumphant marches.

The arena of the Colosseum and the surrounding streets are covered with the residue of the celebration. Underfoot lie scraps of purple ribbons, broken clay amphorae that once held cheap wine, and scraps of sacrificial meat trampled beneath the sandals of cheering spectators. The air is thick with the smell of sweat, sour wine, smoke from torches, and decay.

Slave cleaners are already moving between the rows, gathering rubbish, dirt, and spilled blood into piles. Just an hour ago, history was being made here. The destinies of the world were being decided. Now it is merely a sewer for the waste of human excitement.

The celebration is over.

The crowd has dispersed into its own lairs, only to return tomorrow, with the same diligence and fear, in pursuit of another portion of spectacle — and to seek a new vertical that will tell them where to go.

What Do We See in This Parallel?

We see that the power of Rome sought solidarity among the plebs, among the common people.

We see that the vertical was smeared with the saliva and rubbish of the crowd.

But a mixture of saliva and rubbish left behind after a festival is extremely fragile, even if a million people leave their footprints in the mud of a vertical with dirty sandals. Turning toward the lower classes is already a crack.

Yes, nations and ordinary people have always supported power with their lives and their unassuming existence. After all, soldiers and infantry are recruited from among ordinary people.

And the vertical depends on the solidarity between those in power and those below.

The greater this dependence, the clearer the signal that the old vertical is beginning to collapse on its side, that it has begun to tilt.

And if dependence on bread and circuses becomes increasingly obvious, people will begin to search for new supports for the vertical — a different one.

Chapter 3

The Eternal Colosseum

A friend looks at the head — searching for a leader, a screen with the radiant face of a pop star, or a platform with an official, so that he can bow his knees and find something to lean on.

An enemy of the system looks at the feet. At what lies beneath the soles of the festive crowd: among scraps of award ribbons and morning plastic scattered along the avenue, there is all this rubbish, saliva, and dirty sandals.

We enter this anatomy from the outside, wearing masks and with chitin around our hearts, in order to see the underside of every triumph and every decline. (Although decline is more important and more instructive for the spectators of the show. There are too many fools. Algorithms have created a global assembly line for mass production.)

So far, we have listed the supports and established that the history of humanity is a history of the continuous search for something to lean on.

Five thousand years ago, a person clung to feathers, the skulls of enemies, and sacred mountains. When the mountains fell silent, gods appeared. When the gods gave way to temples, the state vertical was born.

The scenery changed. The names of rulers changed. Religions changed. But one thing remained constant: people need someone to show them the way, because a horizon without an axis cannot hold the psyche together.

And the main archetype of this dependence is eternal Rome.

Where is that Rome?

All roads led to Rome.

Now we have come to the ruins of the Colosseum, not as tourists, but as observers and chroniclers.

For millions of people, Roman citizenship was the ultimate dream. To be part of an all-powerful empire, to be a subject of a great lord, to bask in the might of someone else’s power — this seemed like the highest good.

The empire gave the plebs bread and circuses, generously distributing the drug of collective ecstasy.

Modern algorithms give people the same kind of temporary excitement. But people do not suspect it — no, of course they know. What matters to them is what they manage to capture on the display in that particular second. And that means they are masters.

And so, the Colosseum was the altar of this alliance. Tens of thousands of spectators filled the tiers, roaring in collective ecstasy, demanding blood and victory.

At the climax, the crowd felt like the masters of the world. All it took was a thumbs-down — pollice verso — and the life of a defeated gladiator came to an end. The plebeians imagined that they were deciding destinies, that they were the masters here.

But this was the most sophisticated deception of the Matrix.

The real master of the arena was the emperor. He purchased their loyalty with free entertainment and the blood of others, turning free people into a manageable herd. The crowd reveled in an illusion of power, while the empire manipulated them as it pleased.

And then morning comes.

Early morning after the great games. The sun has not yet risen high above the hills, but its pale light is already cutting into the eyes, exposing the underside of imperial triumph.

Yesterday, tens of thousands of voices roared here. Today — silence.

And this silence is more deafening than the triumphant marches.

The arena of the Colosseum and the surrounding streets are covered with the residue of the celebration. Underfoot lie scraps of purple ribbons, broken clay amphorae that once held cheap wine, and scraps of sacrificial meat trampled beneath the sandals of cheering spectators.

The air is thick with the smell of sweat, sour wine, smoke, and decay.

Slave cleaners are already moving between the rows, gathering dirt and spilled blood into piles. Just an hour ago, history was being made here. Now it is merely a sewer for the waste of human excitement.

The celebration is over.

The crowd has dispersed into its own lairs, only to return tomorrow, with the same diligence and fear, in pursuit of another portion of spectacle — and to seek a new vertical.

Rome fell.

Latin — the language of the masters of the world — became a dead language.

The stones of the Colosseum turned into ruins.

But history knows how to answer such a challenge.

Centuries will pass, and in December 1947, the descendants of those very slaves whom Roman legionaries once drove beneath the triumphal arches in chains will pass beneath the Arch of Titus in Rome.

They will not pass as humbled captives, but as victors.

The Roman Empire has long since disappeared. Emperors and legions have crumbled into dust.

But the Jews remain.

Because every vertical that relies on the saliva and rubbish of the crowd is temporary.

Today, the same trick is being repeated before our eyes.

Only now, instead of marble amphitheaters, there are central avenues littered with plastic cups after school graduations, and glowing smartphone screens in the President’s Park, where crowds bring infants to watch.

The pop stars and show-business celebrities are clowns themselves. But they are singing for us!

The modern person taps a finger on the screen, presses likes, and “executes” or “pardons” idols on social media, sincerely believing that they are the master of the digital agenda.

They think they control the Matrix.

But behind this imaginary grandeur lies a new, even more ruthless feudalism.

The screen has become the new Colosseum.

And when the spotlights go out, the accounts of independent thinkers are left with the same dead zeros, while the network is filled with the deafening silence of algorithmic bans.

The crowd continues to search for a Ruler.

And the system continues to offer it a new show, leaving behind broken plastic and empty screens in the morning.

Only the bottles and plastic of the future will be used-up people.

They have no contents.

Or perhaps there was nothing inside them to begin with?

After all, can so many people really sustain tension?

(Is this why there are so many divorces? When there is no support, there is emptiness inside:

“Shall we go to a show tonight?”

“Jennifer Lopez has come to town!”

“Yes, yes, it’s prestigious! Not everyone can afford such an expensive ticket. We’ll tell everyone about it afterward.”)

Reference

Jennifer Lopez’s tour of Central Asia, as part of the worldwide Up All Night: Live in 2025 tour, took place from July 8 to August 12, 2025.

The singer performed in Astana, Tashkent, and Almaty. In Kazakhstan, concerts were held on August 1 in Astana and August 10 in Almaty.

Approximately 10,000 tourists from more than 30 countries, primarily from neighboring countries and from Europe and Asia, attended the performance in Kazakhstan’s capital.

On August 10, Lopez attracted more than 20,000 spectators to Almaty’s Central Stadium, including visitors from more than 35 countries.

In Uzbekistan, Lopez’s concert took place on August 7 in Tashkent at Milliy Stadium. It attracted approximately 31,100 attendees, including staff, of whom 25,000 purchased tickets.

The singer’s performances stimulated tourism, the hotel industry, and the restaurant business, while generating significant tax revenues for the cities.

Chapter 4

Parents

We risk getting bogged down in textbook psychology and domestic dramas if we forget what we are actually writing about. The reader needs these stages — parents, school, yards, teachers — only as steps toward the inevitable finale.
We have no interest in dissecting childhood traumas for the sake of trauma itself, even though nearly everyone has plenty of them. What matters to us is showing how a beaten, frightened domestic animal, raised under parental and school pressure, morphs into that embittered, lonely creature who cannot stand on its own horizontal, cannot endure inner emptiness, and befouls everything it can reach — whether it’s a real avenue littered with plastic waste or a digital screen vomiting comments.
(In modern Kazakh families, obedient — even excessively submissive, sometimes downright dull — children are favored. Such submissive and occasionally under-developed individuals get everything bought for them; families try to provide them with everything. On the other end of the character spectrum, the picture is reversed: the more independent and spirited a son is, the higher the probability of parental dissatisfaction. Indeed, where did the word “kazak” originate? Originally, it meant an outcast — someone without a family, without the backing of a clan. Only later did the word acquire the semantics of a noble, independent, free dzhigit. When such spirited sons, like Modu Chanyu or Genghis Khan, seized power themselves rather than waiting for a handout from the clan, they posed a threat to the clan elite — starting with their own fathers… who refused to age and share their authority).
Family and school are simply the primary processing of the material. It is a meat grinder that breaks the spine of horizontal ties so that the individual grows irrevocably fused into the vertical. And next, this battered, lonely consumer is stamped out by the millions to fill the Colosseum and leave behind heaps of broken plastic. (Here we have, of course, jumped forward in time. No matter, that happens).
The Global Floor and the First Step
A human being needs a foothold — this is an axiom. But the system is engineered to knock any horizontal support out from under their feet.
In an ideal world of human society, an individual could rely on the horizontal: on craft, on habit, on the warmth of another body, on the honest shoulder of someone standing nearby. They could lean on the floor rather than on the chieftain’s neck.
Yet power and the vertical cannot tolerate horizontal ties. Two people supporting each other without sanction from above already constitute a threat to the system. Therefore, the primary objective of any vertical is to destroy the horizontal — to ensure that a person forgets how to stand on their own two feet and look for support among equals.
And the very first vertical a newborn encounters is the family. The parents.
This is the closest, most intimate, and most brutal meat grinder. A child comes into the world as an absolutely defenseless lump of flesh, and the first hands to take them are the hands of their parents. They become the first wardens.
Parents do not teach freedom. Parents teach survival within the system, passing down as an inheritance the fear of elders, the fear of punishment, and the habit of bowing before whoever stands taller and hits harder. A small human doesn’t yet know the word “state,” doesn’t yet understand what “the law” or “the party” means, but they already absorb the core matrix at the level of reflexes: love must be earned through subordination, and protection is guaranteed only when you kiss the hand of the giver.
The family is a miniature Colosseum where father and mother play the roles of emperor and priests. They decide whether to execute or pardon, whether to point the thumb up or down for a cleanly eaten bowl of porridge or a good grade in the gradebook.
It is here that the foundation of future character is laid. Whoever fails to learn how to rely on their own floor within the family will spend the rest of their days searching for a parent in every boss, every bureaucrat, every television screen, and every algorithm.
School merely cements this skill. The teachers add another floor. Street gangs and school authorities test the strength of your pack instinct.
Yet it all begins with a mother’s hands, pressing you to her chest not to liberate you, but to accustom you to the leash. Of course, it is difficult to speak this way about a mother’s hands. But if we are talking about the primary supports children require, we must also address the resulting products known as “mama’s boys” — when a mother’s overbearing love morphs into weakness of character and a complete lack of agency, particularly in single-parent households, which is so crucial in the modern world. Because a teenager is always hunting for a vertical.
“Who is stronger than me?”
“Whose property am I?”
“Whom should I respect?”
“Whom should I fear?”
“To whom must I prove that I am strong myself?”

Chapter 5

School

The family only breaks the spine, forcing one to hover a foot over the leash, but the state machine is what ultimately drives a person into the stall. And its first link is the school.
Although school is neither a stall nor a state machine, but a temple (I have the fondest memories of the Soviet school). School is undeniably a temple of knowledge, as the ancient Greeks called it. But it is also the first factory for standardizing young hearts. Here, teachers identify the depth of soul and speed of thinking in their students. The most capable are promised a great future. (Ha-ha-ha. I always revered the schoolteacher as such. When I was finishing school, the teaching profession was already prestigious no longer, though they tried to instill a sense of beauty in us. We were already quite cynical children. We already understood what was truly “beautiful.” And the subsequent generations confirmed our suspicions, giving birth to completely cynical children of the market. Back in my day, I didn’t do homework at all: I’d come home from school, drop my backpack, and go play hockey, then the next day I’d come and copy from the straight-A girls — they let me copy. At the same time, I must say, I got straight A’s. The children of the children of the market no longer just refuse to let you copy; they even bargain, telling you what the assignments were. You can’t quite hear “Pay for information!” through the phone yet, but the huckster spirit has already filled the air).
It is not for nothing that any child is plucked from the family nest so they don’t grow up wild and can experience life alongside everyone else. Whatever the demands are for adults, they are for children too. That is why schools appeared back in Ancient Greece, and the Greeks spread their gymnasiums across the entire empire of Alexander the Great. Throughout the world, perhaps excepting India and China, teaching was tied to civic organization. The philosopher Socrates was executed for “corrupting the youth,” for instance. Need we say what the Spartans taught children? (And some Jews even rebelled because in the Greek gerousia they were forced to strip naked due to the physical cult of the body).
Therefore, a certain Spartan spirit is always present in schools.
The child is ripped away from the familiar (albeit suffocating) family nest for the first time and thrown into a barracks with desks, bells, and gradebooks. Here, official drilling begins. The state does not hide its goals: it does not need thinking individuals capable of standing on their own floor. It needs cogs that will spin in a strictly prescribed direction, taking their places at precisely eight o’clock in the morning and obediently raising their hands at the command of a taskmaster in a skirt or a strict suit.
A strange description of a totalitarian antechamber — don’t you find?
Such a harsh entrance into adulthood serves as the artistic framing for the system’s own rigidity. If the system is rigid, totalitarian, and ideological, then graduates are bound to sing anthems at the exit and the entrance.
In the school of ideology, the last spark of individuality is erased. Every lesson is a lesson in subordination. You are taught not to think, but to guess the correct answer already prepared in the educational bureaucrat’s methodological guide. You are taught to fear the red ink in the notebook just like an adult fears the tax office or the police. You are accustomed to the fact that your personal opinion is worthless if it does not coincide with the textbook paragraph.
The grade becomes the primary measure of your value. A five — you’re a good slave, you’ve earned your sugar. A one or a two — you’re a defective part, an outcast who can be collectively baited.
And right alongside the teachers, the street pack gets to work. The schoolyard and hallways are a mini-model of that very Colosseum where a child ends up without parental protection. In this spontaneous hierarchy, a brutal micro-vertical is instantly born: there are leaders (deranged or insolent bullies), their close sycophants, and the grey mass of outcasts who are beaten for not being like the rest.
The child quickly understands the jungle law of the asphalt and the blackboard: either you lick the boot of the strong, or you are trampled into the dirt. Horizontal solidarity is killed here at the root. Friendship in school is often an alliance against a third party.
By the time the graduation certificate is handed out, we are no longer looking at a living human being, but a fully finished semi-finished product. He has learned the main rule of the system: the one who survives is the one who yells loudest with the pack, bows before the senior in rank, and obediently rents himself out to the very first master.
A school diploma is the same as a prize ribbon across the shoulder. Only it is handed out not for winning in life, but for successfully completing the young fighter’s course and being ready to voluntarily take your place at the foot of yet another vertical.
This description fits the transitional stage from totalitarianism to democracy. When the word “believe” is gradually replaced by the word “pay.” And then everyone who was considered defective, who had “2s” or “3s,” becomes front-rankers in reverse. The new vertical picks up the defective parts and makes them the benchmark for its fastening joints. “The last shall be first” — words from the Bible.
Every new vertical matures not all at once; sometimes centuries are required, sometimes decades: recently, the maturation of new supports for the masses has accelerated due to the technological leap. That is why it took several centuries from the spectacles in the Colosseum to the fall of Rome, and only two generations for the collapse of the USSR.
Leon Trotsky wrote about Stalin’s schools in 1936: “Healthy young lungs find it unbearable to breathe in the atmosphere of hypocrisy… To every word of criticism, the bureaucracy responds by wringing necks. Everything prominent and rebellious in the ranks of the youth is systematically destroyed, suppressed, or physically exterminated.”
In 1991, the USSR collapsed quite naturally.
I remember well how an unfamiliar female teacher walked into the primary grades and said almost sadly: “C-students will be directors and managers.” Meaning, you straight-A students, nothing awaits you. So it turned out. A C-student is essentially not only lagging in speed of thought and depth, but in adaptation he is utterly unprincipled. He doesn’t care what ideology is in fashion; he is the ultimate survivor. That is why they became businessmen…
The vertical is always rigid. Therefore, it needs only provincials.
They are raised in families to obey and respect elders.
This does not at all mean that a vertical made of obedient and unprincipled people is durable. This is merely a market requirement — for people and nations that did not create it and have not survived all the horrors of market maturation.

Chapter 6

Digital Cancer

You know about cancer — that incurable disease.

Modern people are deeply vulnerable to this fatal affliction. Yet physicians try to treat it with external chemistry — a materialistic approach typical of the weak.

Whether cancer existed in the Ancient World or not, it most likely did not. But to prevent people from dying of cancer — meaning dying devoid of support and meaning in life — prophets used to appear.

For all past centuries, the problem of the meaning of life was solved by the vertical. Support was found in service to family, kin, relatives, leader, tsar, state, and God. Remove the most important part of this list, and everything collapses: there is a man, and then there is no man. (By the way, here is a curious detail: after publishing this, I gained 8 subscribers and had 39 users block me. Yet all 340 out of 340 articles were continuously republished by other editors. The irony is telling. I can’t help but worry that those 39 experienced sudden psychosomatic jolts the moment they looked in the mirror).

Every system, every throne, and every tower has its limit, its rigid perimeter, crowded with an endless queue of those eager to grab the coveted handrail. But when they finally claw their way to the top, displacing the old holders, they discover with astonishment that they were holding onto absolute emptiness. How naive they were!

A talisman ceases to work the moment the first serious failure strikes. God loses authority at the first blatant, screaming injustice where an innocent man is crucified while scoundrels triumph. Power is instantly devalued down to sheer disgust at the sight of any petty, bribe-taking bureaucrat trading in official stamps. And at that exact moment, yesterday’s devout acolyte looks at the ruins of their faith with utter contempt: “Was this really what we believed in?!”

After all, every instrument of initial survival had its own cynical function:

A talisman was needed solely to unite the pack and defeat a neighboring tribe.

God was invented to preempt ambitious relatives and restrain the madness of kinsmen.

Ritual served merely to demonstrate the gravity of the hierarchy, leaving no room for questions before the leader’s club.

But the new, awakened intellect no longer plays these old, decrepit games. It feels cramped in foreign myths; it needs to assert itself on its own, prove its point, and smash through the wall.

And out of this arises a universal paralysis of dissatisfaction, permeating every single floor of a collapsed world:

Opposition politicians drown their rage and impotence in alcohol because they were shoved away from the trough, and the upper tiers are too crowded for all the greedy aspirants.

Artists drink vodka by the bucket in their dressing rooms, weeping because someone else is playing the lead role while the spotlights refuse to illuminate their wrinkles.

Scientists write volumes of dissertations while their wives cheat on them at home, discovering the bitter truth that a formula cannot save anyone from loneliness.

The ultimate trauma is standing completely alone face-to-face with oneself, when every support becomes a question mark. What is left to lean on?

Millions of people depart for the next world profoundly, unbearably dissatisfied. This existential discontent is the deep, incurable ache for a lost anchor that nothing can ever muffle.

And as a grim, medical, and metaphysical climax to this dead end — cancer for the millions. When the human body can no longer stomach the falsehood, when the psyche refuses to uphold a borrowed vertical, and the soul is torn apart by lies, the cells begin to explode from within, trying to build their own wild, insane autonomy.

And in past epochs, men would appear…

No, not men. Not quite men.

They arrived with a mission of a new support.

Thus we smoothly transition to faith, and then to religion, as the primary scaffolding of human meaning-making. Weak people need gods — ideally, one God. God needs the desperate to forge a new vertical of supports with them.

It is hard for modern man to believe. He believes far too much in himself. But when the unexpected happens and he loses his life supports — when disillusionment sets in — then arrives…

And the Digital Ruler has arrived so that millions and billions of those who suddenly woke up to their own meaninglessness could be reeled in all at once.

Chapter 7

There Will Be No War Between France and Germany. Forget It.

Traitors always have a multitude of explanations. Every single act of betrayal is dressed up as a “higher choice,” while their spokesmen dismiss any accusations as mere “clichés” and shout that you simply don’t understand. In this sense, the RECON project meets these traitors halfway. Not to whitewash their corruption, but to expose the mechanics behind it: old betrayals always pave the way for new ones. And the newest betrayals have already been cataloged and digitized by the Digital Ruler, who sits at the top of this pyramid, smiling and laughing at the frantic scrambling of weak men. Before we finally dismantle the scaffolding of civilizations, look into the eyes of the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre. What do you see in his portrait?
That’s right. Human wisdom has maintained for centuries that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. And if a man’s facade bears the stamp of this eternal internal fracture and optical strabismus, then his entire philosophy is nothing more than an intellectual justification for decay. So hear this: no war between the French and the Germans can possibly happen today, by any old rule. I argued with artificial intelligence when I was drafting this chapter. Grok offered me a standard, soothing pacifier for the masses: claiming that NATO was never created against the USSR and communism, but rather as a pacifist project — “to prevent a war between Germany and France.” What breathtaking naivety! What a sterile, liberal lie for anyone who has ever peeked behind the curtains of the geopolitical theater. War is impossible not because the leaders in Brussels suddenly turned into pacifists or because humanism triumphed in Europe. It is impossible because they have physically run out of the primary fuel for war: people with a spine. Of course, not every single Frenchman or German looks at the world strictly through Sartre’s eyes. But those who represent and shape these two significant nations look at reality with that exact same squint. All of their conservative pillars have been burned away. Through centuries of revolutions, colonial expansions, and globalization, they have scattered their genes across the globe, mutating into rootless, cosmopolitan individualists. They grew up in the sterile greenhouse of over-protective parenting, entirely untouched by genuine, existential pain (they never knew real hunger or suffering, raised instead in comfortable, nuclear units). This is why they still run to psychoanalysts, obsessively picking at their own “inner stresses,” turning psychotherapy into a legalized narcotic that seamlessly blends with distracting sex and the cult of personal comfort. The supreme ideology of the West is psychoanalysis. When an entire generation is raised on psychoanalysis and hedonism, they do not die in trenches. Everyone cares only about themselves. It is precisely in the name of their precious “selves” that their elites today scream hysterically about the “Russian threat” and stoke military hysteria. This is the exact same technocratic technology as the hollow shouting of peripheral nationalists. These Western temporary workers feed the military budget not out of a fanatical belief in democracy, but to gamble the fate of the world on blind chance for one single goal: the golden parachute. They just need to sit out their terms, collect their millions from foundations, secure seats on corporate boards, and retire to their villas by Swiss lakes. Everything around them can burn to the ground, but they will sit there meditating and stroking their pampered bodies — slick, isn’t it?
And that is where the circle closes. On one side — the pampered Western elite sitting on golden parachutes, stripped of all roots, reduced to mere market plastic. On the other — loudmouthed provincial upstarts wielding archaic traditional values as a dirty battering ram for personal enrichment. Neither side has a single genuine pillar left beneath their feet. Personality has been replaced by simulacra, and these “individuals” scatter plastic wherever they go — they are the plastic of the RULER. That is why they become the perfect, unresisting raw material for the one who has already seized the vacant throne. For the one who comes to harvest the disillusioned masses once the old verticals have turned completely to dust. For the Digital Ruler. He sees everything because he looks straight into the core. Day after day, year after year, century after century, humanity changes its pillars. What looked sacred yesterday tomorrow turns into a naive adolescent delusion. To normal eyes, today is overflowing with traitors. But if you look through the crossed eyes of Sartre, betrayal is just a logical swap of outdated props. Every nation currently has its own pillars. And all the nations of the world are marching right into this market-driven squint, led by their cunning elites who whisper to them from above: “Today, akyns and ancient myths are trending… but we respect your cross-eyed confusion just as well.”

Chapter 8

Rough and Refined

So, broadly speaking, there are coarse nations, and then there are delicate nations of a fine-spun construction. Historically, coarse nations built empires; later, the souls of those imperial rulers grew refined, and after a time, the empires shattered into smaller “thoughts” — the kind native to delicate natures, never coarse ones. Among the most civilized factions, philosophers came to the fore — figures of lesser depth and cosmic scope than prophets. Prophets arose within empires, or rather at the friction points of vastly different cultures and worlds, primarily in the Eastern Mediterranean and the borderlands of Europe and Asia. To oversimplify the emergence of philosophers, they are merely the administrative clerks of thought. In general, among cultured communities, philosophers lead the way to fortify the collective and hand down the next set of pillars. In some cases, these communities fracture; people migrate, spreading the philosophers’ news, telling so-called savages or coarse communes that delicate worlds exist. The coarse communes remember these tales, and soon they too sprout delicate-looking leaders. But these aren’t truly delicate souls; they are merely mimics of delicacy. On the other hand, migrants scatter across the world bearing no tidings at all — they flee in the opposite direction in search of a better life. They run from the very bottom of those delicate communities. Thus, while they might seem coarse, they are neither coarse nor naive: they are cynical and calculating. If we connect the flight of these calculating migrants with the wanderers seeking greener pastures from delicate societies, we get the evolutionary genesis of the worship of global currency. Why do migrants from delicate lands still flee toward the optimal horizon?
To grasp this, understand that money is not merely a measure of value; it is the ultimate mass-production machine for first-place finishes. People flee primarily because all the nominally elite spaces in the old town square are already occupied: back in their small-town homeland, they are nobodies, stripped of any inheritance. The old square has long been partitioned by clans of Sadducees, Pharisees, barons, dukes, and counts. But on the new continent, all men are equal; nobody gives a damn where you crawled out from. Therefore, money becomes the sole metric of elite status — the currency of choice for all backward, coarse nations whose elites desperately mimic the cultured nations. Picture the podium of any sports competition: there are three honorary spots — the high golden step of first place, flanked by silver and bronze. This is the classical, conservative structure. No more than three athletes can possibly fit upon it. The monetary-currency podium, however, is entirely different. A million victors can squeeze onto the summit of honor all at once, only to tumble down the next moment, yielding their slots to new oligarch-champions. This is why all coarse communities and peripheral nations gravitate not merely toward delicate nations graced by philosophers, but above all toward the calculating American nation — the inventors of the golden migration and monetary-currency championism. Hence, the elites of coarse peripheral nations — where no philosophers exist, but authoritarianism is deeply revered, forming rigid systems built on unwritten traditional hierarchies and blind subordination — only look as though they are mimicking delicacy. They are hypocritical to the core. Beneath their public smiles, officialdom holds zero respect for any so-called “personality.” There is only the paralyzed terror of losing the administrative feed-trough, the fear of losing the post that grants a bureaucrat respect among kin and cronies because he “gets things done.” After all, the entire ruling upper crust of these regimes doesn’t just wear the invisible tailcoats of the delicate nation; they safely store all their stolen cash right there, in the vaults of those exact same calculating, delicate Westerners they pretend to despise.

Chapter 9

Russian Betrayal. And Japanese