8. Abstraction and Reality

The East, Russia, has also come to a conclusion, but not by way of a concept; the people there are not yet theorists, for they have their reality. The conclusion they have drawn is a different one. They never dreamt of saying: ‘What we have been doing for centuries must now be the salvation of the whole world. We want people to be the same as we have been.’ It would have been possible to find a pretty word for what has been going on for centuries in Russia. Pretty words can always be found, even if the reality is about as horrible as you can imagine. If you pay for it with American money, it will just cost so and so many dollars and you can reinterpret the most golden of ideas as ethical ideals. This, however, is not what happened in the East, for there a real conclusion was reached. People did not say: ‘The world should now accept what we have had so far.’ Instead, the real conclusion which I touched on earlier was drawn: that the premises do not have to be correct. Something has been set in motion, though it is as yet far from what it will be one day. But this does not concern us; I do not want to express an opinion on the one or the other, I merely want to show how great the contrast is. If you consider the contrast, you get a colossal picture of the reality between the West, where people swear on anything which has to do with their past, and the East, where people have broken with everything that was their past.