Abandoned world: the Awareness - стр. 15

You can't show citizens that you're doing things on your own. That's the second rule. And for his ostentatious duties, he had Tannet Knight working just fine, listed as a deputy and showing up in person whenever someone important from security was needed. Tannet was no-nonsense and executive, which was why he'd held the job for as long as Sterling had been Elder and Chief of Security.

The third rule kept him in check. Restraint as a character trait of a man with power. How many women he wanted to fuck at the station and in what positions. To change every day one girl for another, and sometimes to have sex with several at the same time. He wanted to do it, but Sterling didn't do it, because he considered it dangerous for his position. Dangerous for his self- perception, because it would be easy to go off the rails.      That's why he slept with only one girl at a

time and didn't change her at least once every two years. For two years no one would think anything bad about him, and certainly not say anything bad about him. After all, others in his place would not have observed it, and he had not long to live. He's already in his seventh decade.

As for the fourth rule of restraint, it wasn't for him, it was for everyone else. Everyone must be restrained. Order is achieved in this way. As long as people don't overstep their boundaries, then safety is achieved all around. Everyone knows these boundaries, knows what will happen for violating them, and, thinking with their own head, they do not violate it. They restrain themselves.

All of these rules had been in place for twenty-four years, and what-not, but Bill Sterling wasn't about to change them. They're time-tested. And no one had ever come up with a better

one… But then it turned out that the boundaries themselves were changing. And they were being changed by a complicated term: treason.

He'd read about such a term in the books that were forbidden to the public, but that the elders and section leaders had in their possession. Those books, of course, were determined by the Curator, but there was no doubt that something of value would still fall into their hands. And Sterling had two favorite books: Hanni Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially the part about totalitarianism itself, and Jean Delarue's History of the Gestapo.

In the first one, he picked up on the fact that people tend to idealize. It doesn't matter what… What they are offered. Even the most disgusting thing can be served with the right sauce and it will be devoured by the masses. You can say anything and say anything you want – what matters is the subtext that is emphasized to the masses. And thus, the process of execution and the process of pardon are absolutely no different from each other. Except for the name. People do not care what happens to someone, they may be more or less involved in the general process, but they will not oppose it. All this, of course, applied to large masses. As for individual personalities, it is exactly the same with them, only in the opposite direction – there will always be someone who is against it.