All of Their subspecies — from the commissars of gray powers down to the last peon, all of the beasts marked by Their sign, seek the same thing. They suck, devour, and ingest your essential powers, the inner strength, thanks to which you are human. They devour people, but leave them looking perfectly healthy on the outside. They suck out just the insides, leaving an ashen emptiness inside. They suck out fantasy, inspirations and intellect, as if it were everyday food or a refreshing drink. They are able to adjust to circumstances better than any other living creature. It’s impossible to avoid Them; They are everywhere. It’s They who fixed things so that in the eternal war between the darkness and the light a soulless gloom always wins. They discovered the near truth, which is worse than the blackest lie. If the human race really is doomed to extinction, it will be solely thanks to Them.
A hundred times I tried to logically refute Their existence. But I reached the opposite goal — I unarguably proved that They really exist. The simplest proof — an argument ad absurdum. Let’s say They don’t exist. There is no such subspecies of live creatures whose sole purpose is to kanuk people, to take away their intellectual and spiritual powers; that kingdom of sullen, flat faces doesn’t exist. Let’s say none of that exists.
Then how can you explain humanity’s structure, all the world’s societies, all human communities, their aspirations and modes of existence? How can you explain that always and everywhere, as far as you can see, one idiot rules a thousand intelligent people, and they quietly obey? Whence comes the silent gray majority in every society? Would a person who wasn’t kanuked think of vegetating in a soulless condition and say that’s the way everything should be? Why is it always enough to arrest a thousand for the just cause of a million to be doomed? Who raises and sets all governments on the throne, who hands the scepter to Satan’s servants — to all sorts of Stalins, Hitlers or Pol Pots? How do thousands, even millions of people disappear in the presence of all, and the others supposedly don’t even notice? How does humanity manage to forget its history and repeat that which has already caused catastrophe more than once? Where does everyone’s intelligence and memory disappear to at such moments? What instills the tendency in a human to betray the seekers of justice, knowing perfectly well that they are seekers of justice? Where does that secret desire come from, when a person is up to their neck in shit, to use all his strength to drown another who’s still trying to scramble out? How could censorship, whose sole purpose is to hide the truth, exist in a human society that hasn’t been kanuked?
Why doesn’t a single theory answer these simple questions? Why do all the great philosophical systems, all the Hegels and Kants together, fail to explain these basic things? Why?
Maybe that’s the way, and just that way, that man unavoidably is? Maybe all of these horrifying things aren’t the province of theory, but rather axioms that you’ll neither prove nor disprove? Maybe a soulless doom is programmed into all of us from the start? Every nation has the kind of government it deserves, and so on?
I cannot bear assumptions like that, assumptions that acrimoniously belittle people. I can’t bear them! But an investigator must be calm and objective, he must rely only on facts.
Children deny those revolting assumptions. The very existence of children. A foolish boy who tries to boss the neighborhood kids around will be ridiculed immediately. There is no silent gray majority in the world of children. You could arrest a thousand, a million children, but as long as at least one remains alive and free, there will be a child’s view of justice in the world, there will be someone to shout that the king is naked. An unspoiled child tries to be more like the stronger or smarter ones, not to pull them down. No, no, a human isn’t born a kanukas!
The ruination takes over later, when children are taught to rat on others, when they learn it’s not worth ridiculing the kid with pretensions to be a little king, since he’s the boss’s son. When someone convinces them (convinces without presenting any arguments) that it’s imperative to participate in the idiotic play of life, even knowing it’s idiotic. Convinces them there is no choice — either float in the ship of fools, or drown.
How can you explain all of this, supposing They don’t exist?
ERGO: THEY EXIST.
Thank God, even Their system isn’t omnipotent. Not everyone gives in to being kanuked. Some people have an incomprehensible metaphysical power (frequently not even suspecting it themselves) to elude the thickest of Their nets. Alas, there’s very few of them, terribly, tragically, few.
At that time I hadn’t comprehended Their abnormal logic (Their patho-logic). I didn’t know even a hundredth part of their methods, but I had already started to grasp what sort of threat hung over all of us. Gedis was the first victim to die in my presence. To this day I’m not sure he knew about Them. Without a doubt, Gediminas was better, smarter, more energetic than I am. Unfortunately, it’s by no means a given that every good and intelligent person will come across Their system. You must experience a great deal of evil in your life, real evil; you must thoroughly scrutinize its pupil-less eyes. Besides, you must have a seed of real evil in yourself. It’s awful, but that’s the way it is: if you don’t have evil within yourself, you won’t be able to recognize and comprehend the evil in the world. So I cannot be sure that Gedis knew. He was only the first victim I recognized—who can count how many of them I had seen just in the Stalinist camps, without even suspecting they were Their victims. I have no doubts about the reasons for Gedis’s death. I hastened to find regularities of a more general nature. I searched gropingly: I tried to remember all mathematicians, all musicians, all car crashes. At last, I turned up a significant car crash in my memory. I remembered how Albert Camus died. That was how my research moved into a completely new sphere.
The entire story of Camus’s life always seemed somewhat strange to me. Hidden in the sands of Algeria, he could, of course, come across more essential things than the inhabitants of large metropolitan centers can. In a center of culture and science, in the hum of people, They feel safe; They blend into the throng, into the profusion of words and opinions. They always dictate intellectual fashions, by this method concealing things that are troublesome to Them. Inhabitants of obscure places have far more time to delve into the essence of the world, but also far fewer chances for their ideas to reach humanity. Camus successfully reconciled the qualities of a hermit and Europe’s darling.
His spiritual activity was twofold. Some of his writings, let’s say, The Myth of Sisyphus, seem to indicate that Camus was practically an apologist for Their activities. This is confirmed in part by his Nobel Prize (almost always it’s Their emissaries who determine the awarding of official prizes: I emphasize — neither Joyce, nor Kafka, nor Genet received any prizes).