What is all this all about now? “We” and “they”. So different. But our entire colorful company comes from one single Earth. How is it that we don’t hear or understand each other? Behind the same words in the background, what does everyone mean completely differently? Island empire (and who else could serve as a prototype for the Strugatsky brothers?) When the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons and Normans became crowded in the British Isles, they rushed on ships to different parts of the world. For several reasons. In those days, in the absence of roads, sailing on water was more rational than moving on foot. And having left your island on ships and moored to other shores, it is, of course, impossible to leave the ships for a long time. This could easily result in the loss of transport and the inability to return home. This would be a one-way ticket. In addition, the actual walking route to the east of the Eurasian continent was forbidden to the Anglo-Saxons. In the east lay the great lands of the Slavic tribes. These were truly vast expanses in which any army, even a large one by European standards, would dissolve without a trace. Morals in those days were quite rigid, there was no humanism. What did the daredevils do when they stepped from their ships onto the shores of new, distant lands? Since the stay there was short-lived, it was natural to quickly seize what was available and what would be of at least some value upon returning back to one’s country. This is the principle of alienation of values ​​that underlies commodity and subsequent economic relations among all states, peoples and cultures that build interaction with sedentary neighbors on the basis of short-term raids. Here is the emerging institution of the inviolability of private property. Observed, as is now being demonstrated quite shamelessly, only in relation to the private property of the indigenous inhabitants of the metropolis. These are the origins of the next stage - the developed colonial system, on which the well-being of all metropolises began and flourished. And if not raids and war, then exchange and trade according to rules unknown to the natives. Beads, later candy wrappers, and even later, non-binding loyalty programs for the overlords themselves - in exchange for gold, oil, minerals, labor, excess income from the difference in interest rates on loans, hazardous industries and taxes on CO2 emissions from the same production in geographic territories colonized by carrots and sticks. This is a very brief sketch of the cultural environment currently inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons. And the corresponding values ​​of this cultural environment: maximum immediate benefit, attitude towards everything from the point of view of the possibility of alienation and subsequent ownership, institutions of law and force that provide all this. And the desire stemming from such values, sitting in the depths of every carrier of such a culture - from an individual to business corporations and states: to be first and dominant. Everyone is on his own - with all the wealth he has acquired. Hence the disunity of the members of such a culture on a deep internal level. These are all the fully developed consequences of the current Western culture of the internal feeling of a short stay in a foreign world. In which you can not fulfill obligations, siphon off resources, and disregard the values ​​and cultures of other people and communities. This is basically a “civilized” continuation of the same colonial system. And what about the Slavs in the meantime? And the Slavs, meanwhile, lived quite sedentary. Around the settlements there were virgin forests, in which, through the common efforts of all residents, areas suitable for agriculture were conquered. Community, mutual aid and cooperation were the basis of everything. And this went on much longer than for the inhabitants of the British Isles, whose free territories ran out quite quickly. What led to the spilling out of the most active and desperate members of communities beyond the island territories - in search of.