It's always sad to watch something spiritual get materialized — turned into a product, packed into a box, and sold. Of course, in that case it stops being spiritual, yet by convention it's accepted that the spiritual is still broadcast as spiritual.
Take, for example, some person who has nothing to say, who starts taking public-speaking courses and energetically airs his “thoughts” in public. His spiritual world gets packed into a box of eloquence. That's exactly why sophistry acquired its negative connotation back in the day.
Another finishes a writing course and writes a book. Now I wonder, what courses did Shalamov or Dostoevsky finish? I recall a wise man once told me: if you can endure it, then endure it and don't write; and only if you can't, then fine, go ahead.
- So where's the sadness in that? Are you jealous that people do such things?
- The people themselves stir nothing in me. The sadness is for a society that generates a demand for this. Inside such a society the voice of worthy contemporaries goes unheard.
- But it's always been this way.
- Yes, it's always been this way, but not to the degree it is now. Rousseau was right about something after all when he reflected on the deadening of morality with the development of capitalist society.