If you intend to prove your vitality as a living man, demonstrate it through the fruits of your research and the courage you have shown in following your faith in God, your conscience, and your love for others. And after that, transform your own experience into knowledge that will help people see their own strength.

 

We wish all people on planet Earth good health, joy, and true happiness. And we thank God for all that He gives us! We continue our research and, without delay, set out to meet the new challenges that open up to us through our dreams; and, preserving our loyalty to one another, we find within ourselves the strength and steadfastness to remain faithful to a life path that, though not easy, is beloved and consciously chosen.

 

Here is a small but telling example of how we live and how we choose the subject of our research.

 

And it is always God who decides how we come to be involved in the subject of each of our studies.

 

Once, we conducted independent scientific research on the phenomenon of the sense of injustice among people who had experienced the humiliation of their dignity at the hands of their abusers. Many people always turn to specialists like us for help – those who have been deceived, deprived of their means, had their trust undermined, and left in a state of inner confusion and pain. In our research, we set as key objectives understanding the mechanism of experiencing injustice and identifying the fundamental principles of self-help in difficult life situations. During the research process, we drew upon the legacy of philosophers, lawyers, anthropologists, and psychoanalysts. We carefully studied their works, compared theories, and contrasted eras and cultural traditions. However, none of the explanations we found fully satisfied us. Something was missing in every theory, and we reached an internal impasse. The unresolved question would not let us go. We turned to God for help. In response to our request, we had a dream in which God told us that we must find a man with a beast’s head and pay him money to perform a service that would seem utterly absurd.

 

Following the instruction received in the dream, we did exactly as we were told. We found a man with an animal’s head and gave him our money. And we had another dream. In this dream, God told us to inform the man with the animal’s head of our decision to cancel the order for his service and ask for our money back. We followed the instructions to the letter, but after our request, the man with the animal head did not return the money, citing his code of honor, according to which he never returns anything.

 

So we found ourselves in the very situation we had previously studied in theory. What had been the subject of our theoretical research became our own experience. Now that’s a gift – only God could have come up with something like that! We found ourselves holding the most authentic material for research. We experienced a sense of injustice and the acute pain of losing a significant sum, followed by confusion, anxiety, and the unsettling realization that we would never see the money we’d given again. But the reassuring knowledge that we had acted in accordance with God’s will – and that God never makes a mistake – gave us inner strength and the certainty that we would succeed and uncover the fundamental principles of self-help for people who find themselves, in essence, in any difficult life situation! Through our own experience, we clearly understood that the loss of money was worth it to discover new knowledge to help all people who find themselves in difficult life situations.

 

In our search for new knowledge, we turned to our longtime friend, a respected professor, Doctor of Philology, and specialist in sociolinguistics and closed social dialects, who works in the Department of Language Theory at a major university. He researched language as an instrument of power, as well as the theory of how the slang of people leading fraudulent organizations evolves. Above all, the professor charmed us with his ability to replace direct, harsh labels and apply euphemistic formulations to the word "scammer" – softened designations of a negative concept – and while these formulations do not justify the behavior of ill-wishers, the task of any scholar is to understand.

 

The professor introduced us to new terms, sanctions, roles, vocabulary, and descriptions of the statuses of treacherous dialogue partners. He showed us that the text of those who espouse unprincipled concepts is a clever maneuver to translate economic decisions into the realm of status, while ordinary correspondence is transformed into quasi-legal discourse, where the vocabulary of honor and principles serves to cement hypocritical power. Such adherents of a manipulative system always enshrine the principle of the irrevocability of their decisions. Their word is not subject to revision. The professor explained that all insiders of evasive normativity define themselves through the formula "we are people of honor" and only in this way secure their status position. We also learned that reputation is the primary capital for actors of cowardly normativity, and consistency in adhering to their rules is a condition for maintaining their status.

 

It became important for us to understand what terms the speaker of the criminal sociolect used to refer to us after taking our money. It turned out that if a man voluntarily "brought inside" one’s money and then began to politely ask for it back, they were called someone who "doesn’t know how things work," "is getting out of line," or "went back on their word." There are established terms in the slang to describe people who gave money to a stranger. The most common is "sucker," meaning a man who showed naivety and an inability to foresee the consequences. The word "square" is also used. If the emphasis is on the fact that a man has ended up in a losing position and is unable to change the situation, the word "doormat" may also be used, highlighting passivity and a lack of resources for self-defense. We realized that, to our counterpart, we were the ones who had gotten "out of line" and didn’t understand our place in his system; in other words, in the eyes of the slang speaker, we were low-status figures and those who didn’t "think it through" and were now bearing the consequences of our suckerish decision. The help of our wonderful friend, the professor, became a turning point for us. It was precisely thanks to his knowledge and precision of thought that we were able to uncover the core vulnerability of the one who represented the head of a cowardly normative system. Having deciphered the hidden source of power behind his evasive, pseudo-honest construct, we clearly saw exactly what was capable of undermining his status and reputation. From our own experience, we realized that the knowledge we gained brought inner relief and a sense of the restoration of our dignity.

 

Thus, the first principle was formulated for the self-help roadmap:

1. If you find yourself in a difficult, unjust interaction, you should first seek help from expert scholars who research the field to which your abuser belongs. Next, armed with verified information, you must identify the abuser’s strengths and weaknesses. This requires intellectual discipline and inner calm. Once you have uncovered the entire configuration, you can pinpoint the abuser’s main point of vulnerability, around which the outward appearance of their power is maintained. Once we understood what the leader of the criminal group feared most in the world, we decided that under no circumstances should we use this knowledge to destroy the offender’s status and reputation. That would lead to our victory. But such a victory would mean that we remained trapped within the game of the head of an unscrupulous organization. Refusing victory is the inner test that people who have been unjustly wronged must pass with dignity. Moreover, we have absolutely no interest in victory in any form, since we are peaceful people and have no enemies. Thus, a second principle appeared in the self-help roadmap:

 

2. Reject victory, which means rejecting the narcissistic temptation to demonstrate your intellectual superiority, to outmaneuver and win by exploiting the vulnerability of a follower prone to betrayal. Revenge is a continuation of the connection and a continuation of dependence on the offender. The strength of decent people lies in the ability to forgo victory by recognizing the opponent’s vulnerability; in this way, a complete break from the connection with the manipulator occurs, followed by the recognition: you yourself found these captives of deceitful principles. No one forced you. No one compelled you. It was your choice. You entered their system voluntarily. And here we wish to remind all people who have found themselves in a difficult life situation of the principles of preserving and violating the integrity of any system. This knowledge also contributes to the restoration of inner emotional balance, so this can be designated as the third principle:

 

3. Any closed structure strives to maintain its illusion of absolute stability. And therefore, a man leaving the system inevitably affects everyone who remains in it. The very act of leaving the system becomes an event that the system cannot ignore. The act of leaving exposes the system’s boundaries. This is precisely why leaving the system changes not only the fate of the man who left, but also the state of the entire system, forcing it to react in two ways. The first way is primitive and defensive. It is characteristic of intellectually undeveloped leaders incapable of reflection. Faced with the fact of one participant’s departure – and thus with clear confirmation of the system’s finitude – the system’s leader is unable to bear this fact. To avoid seeing the beginning of the inevitable end of their system, the head of the system declares the man who left to be weak, ungrateful, foolish, or a traitor. However, there is also a second way to react. The leader of the system initiates a process of self-destruction. They begin to make mistakes, make wrong decisions, and lose managerial clarity. He allows the system to shut down due to external reasons: "family circumstances," "unfortunate accidents," "sudden deterioration of health," "unforeseen financial losses" – and the system leader himself begins to suffer from symptoms of various origins or even physical illnesses, completely losing his physical capacity to act.

 

It is high time to add a psychoanalytic dimension to the knowledge gained and understand why exactly "those hypocrites" were chosen? Why were gaze, attention, and trust directed toward "those treacherous bearers of pseudo-honor"? Let us begin with the fact that any man instinctively avoids danger. Upon seeing a predator, they seek shelter, and upon sensing a threat, they retreat. Consequently, if we ever approached, if we ourselves took a step toward the dangerous, it means we were driven by a sense of false security. And then the following question arises – where does this feeling come from, and what is it based on? The answer has become the fourth principle:

 

4. To approach a dangerous man, you must be convinced that this other man is just like you, and therefore poses no threat; and it is precisely the inner voice that every man possesses that convinces you of this. This voice is a product of the socio-cultural cradle into which every living man is born. And if your inner voice leads you to consequences that turn out to be destructive, then that inner voice is not serving you. On the contrary, this inner voice reproduces other people’s scripts, pushing you toward a seemingly safe path. The biggest secret is that you have become so accustomed to hearing this voice inside yourself that you have identified with it. You believed that this voice is you, and therefore you could not distinguish where the imposed constructs ended and your authentic "I" began. It is precisely this inner voice that has convinced you that you are the one who was meant to be a "sucker," a "square," and a "weakling who’s getting out of line" – humiliated, betrayed, and deceived. Your most formidable enemy is the one you allow to live inside you without your knowledge. So, right now, find the strength within yourself to disidentify with the inner voice that is not you, and see – who you truly are without that voice: the amazing you!

 

The next stage of our research was a systematic study of man rights – from civil and international law to related legal disciplines. The situation itself forced us to take this path, and we became, without exaggeration, the most diligent students: the cost of education was extremely high, and we had no room for error. In the end, this journey gave us not only knowledge and professional grounding, but also unexpected gifts – new opportunities, connections, and outcomes that were impossible to predict at the start of our journey. And our legal training has become an additional tool for precision and protection.

We, the indigenous Veps people of the Laksha clan, possess both legal thinking and remain independent scholars and researchers – a rare combination that allows us to view a man and their situation holistically: both in accordance with the law and in essence.

 

We thank God for all His gifts!