Brasileiro. Chapter VI

The Simple Person's Nightmare

I am a complex person. And there exist simple people. Simple people have it really bad right now. A simple person is faced with a crisis and doesn't know what to do with themselves. What is a crisis for them? They used to work as a fitness trainer, and now they can't. They have to rebuild their whole life, but how? Their slightly more advanced friends and relatives tell them:

“Well, you can do workouts through Skype!”

Rule of the Weakest

A dense leader confident in their authority likes to give out orders.

“Because I said so!” the strongman loudly exclaims.

The leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, comrade Trotsky, called all the shots himself. He did it to show that he was the master of life and death. Trotsky was outsmarted by comrade Stalin.

The story of the clubber-programmer, kinesiologist-cyberneticist, and writer-investment banker

— I need to self-determine myself! — our interlocutor started with a banality. Ilya and I experienced a toothache. From the depths of memory rose the shadows of businessmen who had lost their lives in attempts to determine themselves, or rather to put a label on themselves. In the meantime, our vis-a-vis was throwing the names of the great ones on the table:

— Nassim Taleb — this is the second writer after Nikolai Mokhov (Nikolai Mokhov's ego is growing like the bitcoin exchange rate during a hype), John (well, of course, Grinder, co-founder of NLP), Castaneda (no wonder our interlocutor practiced tensegrity)...

And then he told his story. And his story refuted the theories of many respected authors, including those mentioned. I would write this story down with a pen, roll up the paper, and put it in a bottle, go out to sea on a yacht, and throw it into deep waters. But I don't have a yacht, and I don't have a pen, so read the letters electronically...

Babylonian Squabbles

Once again I wondered: why is it so difficult to understand other people? Recently, we had a heated discussion in our chat. One of our readers pondered: what motivates young people these days to join power structures where there is “no place for individualism”? Someone suggested they could be compared to Batman: “Being afraid of bats, he decided to become one of them. So did these people: being afraid of the authorities, they decided to become them.” Someone else had a counter question, “How successful would they be had they not decided to join these structures?”