"Дон Пендлтон. The Iranian Hit ("Палач" #42) " - читать интересную книгу автора

earth increased geometrically - sometimes with quantum leaps.
The problem, as Bolan saw it, is that we do not all expand in the same
direction, at the same time, or from the same stimuli. Equality between
individuals was a political idea - and one not in conformity with natural
law. The jungle knew better. All of man's great social inventions were,
after all was said and done, a mortal attempt to repeal the laws of nature.
Anomaly. There was a word popularized by the space scientists (who had
their own ideas about how to deal with natural law). Anomaly. It had to do
with events that had not been planned, or intended....things existing
outside the established order, something irregular or abnormal.
Abnormal was another word for crazy. So maybe that was why so many
people were arriving at the conclusion that the world was headed that way.
But it was not. Actually, the world was anomalous, a natural product of
abnormal expectations in the human mind. The world of men was not a fixed
system. It was not of a single piece but composed of many individuals and
diverse elements, classes, types. Therefore, anomalous - because everyone
expected everyone else to think and feel and view the world precisely as (or
within narrow limits, the same as) he or she did. The world was not crazy,
nor was it endowed with a natural sameness. And that was the problem for
mankind. In complexity, things were never equal.
Men who could discuss learnedly the chemical composition of a distant
star occupied the same time and space as aboriginal peoples who believed
that star to be a tiny light imbedded in some celestial web suspended just
beyond the earth. Men who right now were devising exotic environmental
systems for human colonies in space share the planet with others who
devoutly insist that man's adventures upon the moon were actually filmed in
Hollywood as some godless hoax upon the world.
Anomalies, sure. They sprang naturally from the conflicting world views
held by individuals who were not, in any sense, equals. If a man or woman is
the sum total of all his or her experiences, how then can there be any claim
of sameness between a Nobel physicist and an Australian bushman - or, for
that matter, between a Beverly Hills housewife and her counterpart in
Karachi. How do you get these widely disparate individuals to share a common
world view when their basic thought processes do not follow the same track?
More than a difference in language, or even in social cultures, the
difference that divides is a conceptual chasm: the one simply cannot
communicate with the other except toward the most elemental biological
needs.
So... back to Square One. The world is not crazy. Its parts simply do
not understand one another. And these parts need not be geographical
divisions, particularly. The parts may exist side by side within the same
city or village - within the same family, even. The parts are called human
beings - and each is awfully isolated from everything else that exists,
totally alone in the jungle of survival and crying out that "the world" has
gone crazy because anomaly is the order of the day.
An anomaly can occur only where some specific expectation exists. An
expectation is a human invention, usually born somewhere outside the jungle.
It often finds form as an attempt to repeal some natural law while clothing
itself as conventional wisdom.
Now and then, however, the expectation is no more than jungle law