LABYRINTH No. 4. Today I want to share with you one interesting parable that I heard when I was studying at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in St. Petersburg. The story was about a maze and a rat. So here it is. The rat was put into a box from which there were exits to five mazes. At the end of maze number 4 there was cheese. The rat was hungry and very smart (very likely due to the latter). She sniffed out which maze smelled of cheese, entered it, wandered around and, ultimately, finding the right path, ate her cheese. The rat was placed in the maze every day. Naturally, soon she was running headlong, without sniffing the air, into the fourth labyrinth and, without getting into dead ends, quickly got to her favorite cheese. As soon as the rat began to behave so confidently and automatically, the cheese was very insidiously transferred. To maze No. 2. The rat was not warned about this. And when she was seated in front of the five labyrinths as usual, she ran into labyrinth No. 4 as usual. Having run a third of the way, she stopped and began to sniff the air. She took a few more steps, sniffed the air again... And realizing that labyrinth No. 4 no longer smelled of anything except her unfulfilled fantasies, she returned back to the exit. Finding the cheese-smelling entrance to Maze No. 2, she went into it. She wandered around in new, unusual corridors, but ultimately ate her cheese. And the moral of this story is this: a rat is not looking for justice, a rat is looking for cheese! Therefore, it is considered one of the animal species most adapted to survival on Earth. What about man? Can you imagine how long he would have gone to labyrinth No. 4, complaining about injustice, and about the fact that cheese has always been here, and even looking for who could be blamed for the lack of cheese in the usual place... And very likely he could have died from hunger in the struggle for ephemeral justice. How often do we conservatively try to draw water from a stream that has long dried up! I don’t encourage you to become rats, but it’s still worth thinking about. ) Nikolay Strelkov