There was a remote village high in the mountains.
It is deaf not because the inhabitants are deaf. But because the rest of the world was deaf to him.
The people in the village lived like one family. The younger ones revered the elders, the men revered the women.
There were no words in their speech: resentment, property, hatred, grief, crying, sadness, self-interest, envy, pretense. They did not know these and similar words because they did not have anything that could be called them. They were born with a smile, and from the first day to the last, the radiant smile did not leave their faces.
Men were masculine and women were feminine.
The children helped their elders with housework, played and had fun, climbed trees, picked berries, and swam in a mountain river. Adults taught them the language of birds, animals and plants, and children learned a lot from them. Almost all the laws of Nature were known to them.
The elders and the younger lived in harmony with Nature.
In the evenings, everyone gathered around the fire, sent smiles to the stars, everyone chose their own star and talked to it. From the stars they learned about the laws of the Cosmos, about life in other worlds.
This has been the case with them since time immemorial.
One day a man showed up in the village and said:
- I'm a teacher.
People were happy to see the hallway. They entrusted their children to him in the hope that the teacher would teach them more important knowledge than Nature and Space gave them.
People were just perplexed: why doesn’t the teacher smile, how is it possible that his face is without a smile?
The teacher began teaching the children.
Time passed, and everyone noticed that the children were clearly changing; most likely, they seemed to be replaced. They became irritable, then anger appeared, the children quarreled among themselves more and more often, and took things from each other. They learned ridicule, crooked and sly smiles. The old smile, common to all residents of the village, was erased from their faces.
People didn’t know whether it was good or bad, because they didn’t have the word “bad” either.
They were trusting and believed that all this was new knowledge and skills that a teacher from the rest of the world brought to their children.
Several years have passed. The children grew up, and life in the remote mountain village changed: people seized the lands, pushing the weak out of them, fenced them off and called them their property. They became distrustful of each other. They forgot about the languages of birds, animals and plants. Everyone has lost their star in the sky.
But televisions, computers, cell phones appeared in houses, and garages for cars appeared.
People lost their beaming smiles, but adopted a rough laugh.
The teacher, who never learned to smile, looked at all this and was proud: in a remote mountain village he introduced people to modern civilization...
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru