Писатель Илья Розенфельд

We are taught to be ashamed of fear. "Don't be a coward!" they tell us in school. This is anti-scientific nonsense. Fear is not weakness; it is intelligence . It is the work of a powerful GPU in your brain that calculates 1,000 future scenarios in a millisecond and delivers the result: "Don't go in there, idiot, you’ll get killed". Cowardice is simply following this wise advice. Chapter I: The Evolution of Cowards Look at your ancestors. You exist only because your great-great-great-grandfather was a coward. When a saber-toothed tiger appeared on the horizon, the "brave" one took a stick and went to fight. He was eaten. His genes disappeared. The "coward" ran away, hid in a tree, and there, trembling with fear, had sex with a "cowardly" woman. We are the descendants of those who ran away. Planet Earth is populated by the descendants of cautious paranoiacs. Bravery is an evolutionary dead end, like the dodo bird that wa...

We are accustomed to thinking of war as an event. Like a fire that flares up and dies down. Such naivety. War is not an event. It is a life form. An ancient, perfect apex predator that shares this planet with us. We are not its enemies. We are its food source. Birth and Youth In the beginning of time, War was single-celled. Primitive, like an amoeba. Stone struck stone, a club shattered a skull. It fed crudely, tearing off chunks of flesh, and quickly fell asleep. In the Middle Ages, it entered puberty. It had a growth spurt. War became greedy, sloppy, and gluttonous. It mowed down entire cities without caring about tomorrow. The Hundred Years' War was its teenage rebellion—senseless and merciless. It gorged so much that it almost killed the host. During plague epidemics and endless battles, humanity nearly ended. War got scared. It understood the main law of the parasite: you cannot kill the host . If all humans die, there will be no one to feed on.  The teenage rebellion ...

They say that language was given to man to conceal his thoughts. This is only partially true. Language was given to plebeians to lie. Diplomacy , however, was granted to the chosen few to conceal the absence of thoughts. What is diplomacy? It is the art of saying "Go to hell!" with such warmth and concern that the opponent immediately begins packing their bags, anticipating an exciting journey. It is the ability to pet a dog while the muzzle is not yet ready. The First Consultant The history of diplomacy began not in the embassy offices of Vienna, but in the Garden of Eden. The Serpent was not a villain. He was the first cultural attaché. When the Serpent offered Eve the apple, he didn't lie. God forbid, diplomats don't lie—they "contextualize the truth." — "Will you die?" the Serpent asked ingratiatingly, adjusting an invisible tie. — "What vulgar simplifications. Let's put it this way: consumption of this agricultural produc...

Act 1. Vienna , 1913 Autumn that year was rainy. A small, smoke-filled bar in the center of Vienna smelled of dampness, expensive tobacco, and anxious anticipation. Arthur sat at a corner table. He looked about fifty: an impeccable tweed suit, gray at the temples, calm hands resting on the tabletop. He wasn't drinking. He was observing. Arthur knew the old world was living out its final months. Swords had grown dull, cannons obsolete. The coming century required new management. His gaze slid over the patrons. At the bar, a heavy, corpulent man resembling a prosperous banker was haggling with a waiter. He was dressed to the nines but was greedily finishing off the free nuts. — You shortchanged me by a crown, — he mumbled, wiping greasy lips with a napkin. — Wastefulness will lead this empire to ruin faster than bullets. Arthur nodded to his own thoughts. This was Marcus . A man capable of creating a deficit with a single stroke of a pen. A little further away, by the window,...