Only the lonely

Who would deliberately make themselves rich? The eye of a needle revisited with a Russian hero.

Colonel Stanislav Petrov, to whom I’ve referred in a recent post (and a note somewhere: see the foot of this article), was a Soviet military officer who is now known around the globe as the man who saved the world. He is featured as himself in the documentary of that name, made shortly before he died in 2017. He was on duty at the Soviet radar installation whose job it was to detect a nuclear attack on the USSR by the United States on the evening when it detected a nuclear attack on the USSR by the United States. How Colonel Petrov saved the world was to deem the attack a false alarm, as well as the four subsequent attacks that night in 1983.

The documentary, which verges on the docu-drama, is well worth watching, and, in my view it throws up three surprising conclusions.

Image: Sergey Shnyryov as the younger Stanislav Petrov in The Man Who Saved the World from 2013.

Surprising Conclusion no. 1

The Americans in the documentary, including politicians and well-known faces like actor Kevin Costner, fundamentally haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. They repeatedly shake hands with Mr Petrov and hail him as a hero. When Petrov addresses the United Nations, he says in his broken English, “I am not a hero. I was just in the right place at the right time.”

He correctly identified the alarms as false, but not without a great deal of anguish. If he’d been wrong, much of the Soviet Union would have been obliterated, and it would have been his responsibility. That was how tenuous his accolade as a hero was. He could just as easily have been damned for all time. Despite the title of the documentary and its ultimate truth, the reason the title of hero is bestowed upon him by the Americans is not because he saved the world, but because he saved America. And the responsibility he could have borne for Soviet lives is utterly discounted by those who congratulate him. They see only how he saved them, not how a misjudgment on his part could have condemned his fellow citizens to a horrible death.

Surprising Conclusion no. 2

On that night in 1983, regardless of what nationality they were, his acts (or rather his restraints) preserved the lives of something like half a million people, if not more (in his talk with Costner, he gives a chilling account of how many lives were actually at stake). Fourteen years afterwards, his own wife, Raya, died a horrible death from cancer. Her doctors gave up on her, and she coughed and spluttered her way to death’s door as Stanislav clutched her in his loving arms, unable to do a single thing to save the one person he loved in this life more than any of the half a million he’d saved all those years previously. He spent the rest of life inconsolably lonely. How cruel fate can be, even for heroes.

Surprising Conclusion no. 3

Colonel Petrov was lambasted by his superior officers. He could not be shown to have demonstrated greater bravery, pluck, courage and judgment than they, so they picked holes in his reporting ledgers and he was never rewarded as such for his acts, since that would have implied that he had needed to make up for a fault in the detection system, and that had been designed by his superiors, so no fault was found for many years. As a result, the third conclusion is that Petrov never really reconciled within himself whether or not he had done the right thing. In some ways, he had tossed a coin, and thereby landed as a hero, and he felt himself very unworthy of such a fate, as the result of such a wager.

If you study the Russian language and haven’t yet amassed a comprehensive understanding of its expletives, this film will—quite rightly—fill every gap in your knowledge. The link is below.

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Regular readers will already have suspected that this article is not about Stanislav Petrov. The above narration is intended to set a scene, in which I actually want to talk about myself and about an important passage from the New Testament of the Bible, one I have referred to on a number of occasions (the related articles are listed also at the foot).

So, what does Stanislav Petrov have to do with me? Well, who knows? Perhaps I too will one day, if I haven’t already, unwittingly save the world. I say that because you can’t prove I didn’t. But, by the same token, I can’t prove I did, and that’s precisely the point: whilst we recognise Colonel Petrov for his astounding act of being in the right place at the right time, what he has shown us is that unremarkable acts and omissions can have huge consequences, and, when tragedy occurs, we seek only to identify the elements that came together to cause it. When everything goes off without a second thought, we don’t even know it happened.

When I was in my mid-20s, I had an epiphany, my very first. A realisation of something I thought at that time would hold true for me throughout my life, but which I had no means of knowing in the moment would or would not hold true. It was this: I knew in that moment that I would never be wealthy and, at the same time, that I would never be destitute.

I have paced a track in corridors in my home trying to resolve financial difficulties, and I have sweated pints for the same reason. An epiphany is not a reason to stop trying or to stop worrying. The age-old mantra of place your faith in the Lord is not some formula like holding out your arm to stop a bus. Placing your faith in anything requires you to redouble your efforts so that your faith is not needed. Then, it will come all the more to your rescue.

But my analysis of that epiphany is a little like Stanislav’s confrontation with his name as a hero. He never came to terms with its reality, and I will never truly come to terms with the reality or otherwise of my epiphany. It is the gap between certainty and not knowing fully how right you are that drives you to want to fulfil your epiphany all the more.

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That brings me to something that a fellow Substacker and I have been discussing off and on for a few weeks, which sprang from a rather strange question he put to me: do you know of anyone who was or is deliberately poor? He asked it when I advanced the theory that poverty gives you such a different perspective on life that it is almost worth attaining it in order to experience the complete and utter havoc it causes in where your … well, ultimately, in where your values lie. And, with my residual faith in the epiphany I had in my 20s, I have for the past seven years acquiesced in a state of penury that is not enviable but that has shaken the world upside down in terms of how I view it.

Another Substacker wrote recently about Dick M., who has now passed but was a ray of sunshine for all who knew him. He braved danger by ascending onto the roof of a church to replace some floodlight that illuminated its tower, but did so without telling anyone. And he lost telephones down the toilet by not paying attention as he stopped to inspect their flush efficiency. Dick M. was by all accounts a happy-go-lucky fellow who always had a kind word and—here is the crux of why I mention him—accepted with joyful philosophy the strokes of bad luck that came his way. When I read of Dick, I thought immediately, because Hans mentioned them, of the poor victims of Gaza, and drew a comparison between them and Dick and put myself in the middle.

Why can’t the hungering population of Gaza accept with a cheerful demeanour the strokes of bad luck that have come their way? The answer is clear: this bad luck has been engineered out of considerations of cruelty and hatefulness. Dick’s bad luck was due to his own inattentiveness. And mine, if you wish to label my penury as bad luck (I would reserve judgment myself), has been neither welcomed by me nor has it been imposed upon me out of considerations of cruelty. I could wail, “Woe is me!” but that would be to deny the epiphany that I had in my mid-20s, because the whole substance of that epiphany is that I shall never know woe, even if I will never be wealthy. Hans doesn’t say so, so I don’t think that Dick gnashed his teeth and moaned about losing his telephones down the toilet, even if he did seem to want to dig up the plumbing in order to pursue them down into the sewer, which he was eventually dissuaded from. By contrast, it is unimaginable that any of those suffering in Gaza are counting their lucky stars. If they are, their resilience is far beyond that which I could ever imagine myself mustering in a similar plight. These are the contrasts I want to establish in your minds.

We have three situations: the happy who have occasional misfortune, the faithful blessed by an epiphany who resign themselves to penury or wealth, as the one may come and the other recede, and those who face bravely a fate imposed on them out of cruelty.

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Now, I come to the biblical passage. Because it is Mark Chapter 10 verses 21 et seq. I find that it is one of the most difficult passages of the New Testament: the story about the rich prince who asks Jesus what he must do to attain the Kingdom of God. Jesus tells him to obey the Ten Commandments, and I believe that Jesus is thereby being kind to the man, by not telling him the full story (He loves him, it says). The young man feels this himself, and so he presses Jesus, by saying he has obeyed the Ten Commandments since he was a boy. Is there nothing else he must do? So, with a direct question like that, Jesus hits him right between the eyes. The eyes of needles, as it were. “Go hence and sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. Then you may attain the Kingdom of God.”

At this, the rich man is very sad, and off he goes, and whether he ever sells his possessions or not, we never learn. It is in private confidence that Jesus speaks to his disciples about the difficulty with which the rich can attain the Kingdom of God—in other words, He doesn’t actually say this to the man himself: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

I think I could have added something to that, which Jesus probably also knew: it is easier for a rich man to lose his possessions that to give them away to the poor. And that brings me back to Robert Rado, who posed that question about who becomes deliberately poor? Very few do. Mostly religious: monks, nuns, those who take a vow of poverty, or crofters and shepherds who place their love of their environment above the quest for riches. Let’s say they content themselves with poverty, but they still tend sheep or have stipends from the church to ensure they will have a next meal. Those like the citizens of Gaza, who are thrust into penury through no choice, nor fault of their own, have no such comfort of knowing where their next meal will come from.

In the end, I conceded to Robert. I told him I had given the wrong answer, about seeking poverty. It’s less a question of wanting it, it’s more a question of how you deal with it once you’re in it:

The dichotomy is not very accurate. You’re right to question who becomes poor deliberately? There was once a BBC TV series about this, called “The Good Life”. Tom and Barbara Good live next door to Margo and Jerry Leadbetter in a leafy suburb called Surbiton, in Surrey. The place exists. Tom and Jerry work for a firm in London, Jerry as management, Tom as a designer. One day, Tom announces he wants out. He and Barbara set their Surbiton home up as a self-sufficient commune of two. They aim “to make a go of it”, and the comedy series that ensues shows their ups, downs, failures and successes. The project is not without its worries. Even for a run machine who can bowl.

The dichotomy is rather this: when you become poor, whether through your own miscalculations or positive decisions, do you “make a go of it”—face the realities and temper your existence accordingly, like the people of Gaza have done so bravely thus far—or do you resort to other methods to succeed, like crime, theft, cheating, inveigling yourself in with those who can help, without developing any sense of friendship? It’s less how you get into poverty, and it’s even less to do with how you get out of it again, and much more who you become once you’re in it.

But I think there is just as valid a counter-question, and that is this: who becomes rich deliberately? What is becoming rich deliberately?

The rich man who spoke to Jesus that time, did he become rich deliberately? What do you think? Are you rich? And, if you are, did you become it deliberately? Do you think that, having become rich, you’ll be able to make a go of it, to deal with the unfortunate situation that you are in? Do you think that the rich who abandon the quest to achieve the Kingdom of God are viewed by Heaven’s inhabitants as unworthy of bothering about in this life, because they won’t give up their quest for wealth?

What St Mark does in this passage about eyes of needles is contrast two vast extremes: the status that many of us yearn for our lives long within the confines of this life on earth; and the status that many of us yearn for our lives long within the confines of the life to come hereafter. And what Jesus tells us is that they are diametrically opposed. Everything between Earth and Heaven is diametrically opposed, so this is no exception, naturally.

I could put it as this: you can’t have both, but that would be idiotic. There is nothing that the rich cannot have. Of course they can have both; they can have whatever they want. They have to. Because, whilst they might possibly lose their wealth, it is beyond their powers to divest themselves of it and give the proceeds to the poor. They crow about power and strength and influence, but they haven’t the simple willpower to become poor deliberately.

The rich maybe realise that they can’t take their wealth with them. What that realisation does, however, is make them sceptical about the existence of heaven, rather than the need to give their riches to the poor in order to attain it.

One day someone will devise a clever questionnaire that is able to divine whether, and to what extent, billionaires are lonely. And, if it’s really good, it’ll be able tell us why.