We are getting stronger, wiser, striving for progress, exchanging Amazon forests for scaffolding. But sometimes it's worth looking at the world differently. Men are created by creators, but they rarely create.
My friend, clever and genius, a worthy husband and father, has been working for the fast food giant for many years.
Any man will say that his main concern is protecting his family. And he will be right. A breadwinner who leaves for work in the morning and returns in the evening tired, but with daily bread and confidence in the future. The canonical image of a male hero. Who can argue with that? What woman does not dream of such a defender of her hearth, her children? And what, in the end, does it matter where he went in the morning and how he earned his bread? Whether he is a warrior or a thief.
Many years ago I was visiting a small island in Thailand. One day I came across a young monk sitting on a mat right on the road. Gifts were laid out around him: bottles of water, soy milk, oranges. I also brought him gifts, we got into a conversation. It turned out that a conscript soldier had hanged himself at this place recently. The place is passable, and the monk sat down to clean it so that the bad karma of the place would not be passed on to passers-by. "How long have you been sitting here?" "Month." "And how much longer to sit?" "Until I feel clean here."
I felt embarrassed to be around, because I realized that I myself was not capable of such an act. Seeing so far Think of many. And the main thing is to live for the benefit of all living beings.
At the dawn of my career, I lived like everyone else: for the benefit of myself and my family. As a man, I only cared about two issues: size and firmness. The size of my salary and the firmness in my voice when I called the name of my employer. A big, prestigious name. The occupation did not matter.
The first doubts came when I was working for a large fast food chain in the States. One day at lunch my attention was attracted by a black mother, who was spreading over the bench with her heavy hips. Obesity is not uncommon in the Midwest, but the way she stuffed a French fries and ketchup into her one-year-old daughter's mouth on a highchair gave me a jolt. I suddenly saw in one flash the whole life and death of this little girl, and I felt scared, it seemed that I was stuffing potatoes into her mouth, turning her delicate body into an accordion of flabby fat folds.
Then it was as if I was replaced. I began to notice. Signature bakery, more like a chemical plant, an inhuman system of procurement of "ingredients". At the AGM, an animal activist showed a video of cows being skinned from still living agonizing cows in a slaughterhouse to speed up the butchery process. For what? To make the hamburger cheaper for the benefit of customers. How cute. The defender was taken out of the meeting. The case was hushed up.
I was far from taking a position. I worked in finance and believed that all this did not concern me much. But the fact remains. I invested my mind, strength, time, education so that this mother could feed her child with poison. And I don't care that this is her personal choice. I helped her in this choice. He brought the money home, but did not tell his wife and tried to forget himself that having given health to his family, he took it away from that girl. I was an accomplice of a "criminal gang" which is obsequiously called a "billion dollar corporation" in today's forgetful society.
We leave in the morning for the benefit of our family, taking the benefit from other families. We compete, fight, conquer, consume and tame. Men are created by creators, but they rarely create. They often fight and steal.
If we do not create something new, we redistribute, but simply steal from those who are weaker. Poor, naive people, children, animals, plants, water, land become objects of looting. We rob, sitting in offices, and drag into the house, like trophies from the war, calling the loot wealth and security. And our women admirably call us earners and heroes.
President Nestlé is a model man by modern standards. The head of the water empire. And so the emperor says that the water should be transferred to private property. That we need to take all the drinking water on Earth and sell it back to us. Then he adds that his task is to take care of his shareholders, his employees and their families, only 4.5 million people. Truly, fatherly concern for the good of a large family.
Only now it is no longer possible to live for the good of your family, large or small, at the expense of others, no matter how much you hide behind the walls of a warm house. We'll have to pay, not now, then later, not us, so our children. The world has become too small. Our homes swell with material prosperity, while our land, our schools and our hearts are turning into bare deserts.
Or have I messed it up? Maybe, on the contrary, we are getting stronger, wiser, striving for progress, exchanging Amazon forests for scaffolding? My friend, clever and genius, a worthy husband and father, has been working for the fast food giant for many years. I asked him: "Before, when we were young, we could not see beyond our noses, but now we are grown-up men. Don't you feel an inner conflict from participating in the deployment of weapons of mass destruction?" He replied: “You don’t understand, at my level we are solving problems that go far beyond the burger. We are managing the processes of demography, we are on the verge of unique discoveries.” He's right, I really don't understand. Not a single word.
At the end of my corporate career, I gave headhunters a whole list of industries that they shouldn't call me: natural resources, chemistry, food processing, banks. Almost the entire current economy. It is clear that I did not find a job. But despite this, there are more and more such people, even in Russia. They leave commerce and civil service, lose their salaries, go to charity, to NGOs, create their own companies, societies for which there is no personal, no private, if we are talking about the common good. They are united by responsibility not only to the family, but also to the country, planet, and something else higher.
There won't be enough monks in Thailand to cleanse our karma. It is no longer enough to protect your families, they have already become hostages of our war. The time has come not to produce, but to create, not to work, but to create. Let the woman ask her man, seeing him off in the morning on the doorstep: "Who do you work for?" And he will turn around, remember the monk on the road and say: "For the good of all living beings."
