The First Circle, named for the rather painless part of hell from Dante, refers to the question of prison, technology and, in turn, its relation to conscience. Freedom is defined in relation to conscience, and this is the central core of Solzhenitsyn’s early work. The basics of the plot are of secondary importance, but need to be mentioned: in the Circle, Innokentii Volodin makes a phone call to the west, France, specifically, to warn about a visiting doctor, Dobroumov, who is presenting research on atomic energy in Paris. A trap is being laid for him. The call is traced. By warning the French government, he is alerting them to the sting operation being hatched by foreign NKVD agents.

The phone call, and the spy apparatus of the NKVD that it provokes, are far more important than the plot itself. When this call is made, from a “public” phone, the entire apparat of the NKVD is alerted. It is described as a “spider web” of cause and effect (with Stalin at the center of the web), as the voices on the phone are being recorded, and the (at the time) hi-tech materials of the Soviet system are simultaneously activated. It is a gnostic imitation of nature, of the interpenetration of each element of the system to create an organic whole. In this case, it is an inorganic whole aimed at enslavement of labor.

As it turns out, the central core of this rather lengthy novel is not the phone call itself, but the “voice recognition” software that is being developed in an NKVD prison, euphemistically referred to as the Mavrino Institute.

The nature of the phone call is Solzhenitsyn’s first systematic attempt to create an “anti-Soviet,” or more broadly, an “anti-Enlightenment” metaphysic. The voice is captured by Soviet recorders and voice recognition technology. It is “broken down” into its “component” parts and recreated so as to isolate its more characteristic features. This is classic Enlightenment ideology. Marx fully believed himself to be the very end of the Enlightenment orientation. This is what separated him from the anarchist movement. Marx was the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, as the anarchists were its negation. Legitimate, philosophical anarchism is the opposite of Enlightenment mechanization. The USSR believed that it was the last incarnation of Prometheus, and sought as its goal the complete manipulation domination and control over nature. Nature was to become, quite literally, human, and to function at the command of man, or rather, the party, in precisely the same way as our fingers obey our volition.

In the USSR, the Promethean myth was being proved for what it really is: a method of not merely controlling nature, but of controlling man, who is, after all, a part of nature, and its’ integral part. It shows the “double talk” of Promethean ideology by making reference to the liberatory nature of technology, i.e., control over nature, while deceitfully ignoring (or misdirecting) attention away from the idea that man is a part of nature. “Nature” was defined by Trotskii as the “peasantry,” the “ignorant, dark masses” in need of liberation, which, in this Janus world, is regimentation within the factory system. So just as the NKVD voice recognition software creates a catalog of human voice though breaking down its vibrations, Solzhenitsyn is breaking down the Promethean mythology of the enlightenment and its final manifestation in the USSR.

At the same time, part of this Mercurian “breaking down process” also points out the Enlightenment idea of man–man as merely a series of atoms. It should be noted that Marx’s doctoral dissertation at Jena was on atomism and Democritus of Athens. Man is nothing more than a series of atoms that create the “personality.” Hence, the NKVD’s voice recognition is a part of this: science as a means of control. By treating the human voice as distinct from personality, a treating it as merely a series of vibrations rather than as embedded into a personality and moral conscience, technology has been stripped of any liberatory properties and rendered as a servant of the state, though the USSR was far from alone in this approach.

But the Circle is really about the Institute that developed this software, an Institute that is both a scientific research facility of the first order, as well as a prison. The fact that these two ideas can be combined together is a characteristic idea of the USSR. It is a comfortable prison, since all its inmates are well educated in the sciences, and hence are put to work building the technology of domination, the technology of the security state, the technology of the Enlightenment itself.

All the inmates, the zekii, are treated well. They are an integral part of the Soviet machine. There is no pain in the typical sense, though there is always the desire to be free abstractly (which reminds one of the famous line in The Cancer Ward, where the hero realizes the radiation will make him sterile, which then questions the purpose of continuing on living).

There seems to be two types of prisoners here: the first is the misunderstood party member, here represented by Rubin. Then, there is the idealistic dissident, represented by Nerzhnin. Rubin is the scientist ordered by Stalin personally to analyze the tape recorded by the spy apparat that ends up getting Volodin arrested. Rubin had been an NKVD spy during the war, and, as was typical of the era, promised good treatment in exchange for loyalty while at Mavrino. He was put in prison after the war, because he had refused to put into practice Stalin’s orders to kill all POWs. This earns him a ticket to the camps, but because of his technical education, he is sent to Mavrino. He knew Volodin, and liked him very much, but Rubin is a very typical Solzhenitsynite character: his conscience is externalized into science and the party, which always manifested itself as the final word on science, as Marx himself viewed his approach to “liberation.”

The “externalization of conscience” is the central core of the “anti-Soviet” metaphysic, and will recur over and over through Solzhenitsyn’s career. It is the removal of moral judgement from the individual to some other, externalized entity: the Enlightenment, ideology, party, even a person. For Rubin, it is the party as the embodiment of science, its final expression. Hence, he follows orders without question because the party is greater than he, and represents Marx’s understanding to be the last understanding of scientific thought, beyond which was nothing but bourgeois distortion.

Because everything is material in Rubin’s world, there is no conscience outside of science, and of science whose final word is being pronounced by the party and the interior cult. The party is the exo-skeleton that holds the chaos of atoms together: atoms within the brain, within the human body, within society. The party is the skeleton of the New Soviet Man.

The Circle itself is a dialogue, a dialogue between Rubin, and his idealist opponent, Gleb Nerzhnin. The latter upbraids the former by pointing out the strange inconsistency in Rubin’s thinking, an idea that Solzhenitsyn will carry as central through his career: That the state somehow is exempt from the moral laws that are regularly imposed on individuals. Solzhenitsyn will spend the remainder of his career in working out the political ramifications of that notion, that the state is as much subject to morality as the person, and thus can be judged by the same criterion; a simple concept, but radical in its implications. Of course, Nerzhnin represents the idea that there is a part of man that is not reducible to material atoms or their vibrations like the voice, and that this is the conscience. But if this is true, freedom is possible regardless of the physical surroundings of the person, a common idea of one who has been confined in harsh conditions. Conscience is inviolable in that it can not be externalized, those who seek this externalization are performing it out of bad faith.

Nerzhnin is the most poorly treated person in the prison, yet he remains the happiest, because there is something other than his physical body, his soul/conscience. Happiness does not depend on physical surroundings, it depends on the guarding of the soul, the freedom that exists solely because this soul is not material, and hence is not amenable to manipulation by the state. But the most important element of this character is the idea that freedom is happiness, and happiness can only exist when the soul remains itself, and is not distorted by external elements.

Nerzhnin is offered his freedom. He refuses. He would rather be sent to Siberia, where he “can be free.” The fact that Mavrino is the creation of the state, of the materialist, Enlightenment anti-culture, the treatment there can never be equated with happiness, but only of comfort. He is a slave regardless of the treatment, since he is merely a cog in the wheel of the modern world. He is offered his freedom to become a full time cryptographer, but since this necessitates taking orders from the state, he refuses. He can never be free if his abilities are merely part of the state security apparat. Only in Siberia can he be free, for, in the USSR, the harshest prisons alone are conducive to freedom and happiness, since it is here, and here alone where one can actually live as a full human in permanent opposition to the state and to the Enlightenment which created it. The beatings, the starvation rations and the cold are constant reminders that only here can the soul be left alone and subject only to itself: the demands of conscience. He is in prison precisely because he rejected te idea that the party, or the Enlightenment, is his conscience, hence, he retains his integrity.

Solzhenitsyn is building a moral vision. It is vision, in the Circle, comprised of eight elements:

1. That happiness (but not comfort) can be found anywhere. It is a state of mind, one that is independent of external factors, and that in reality, external factors are the sole barrier against happiness. He turns the western utilitarian myth on its head. Things, that is, objects external to a person and demanding obedience, force a distortion of the soul. The attachment to things of this world force the “materialization” of the soul such that the happiness of the man is related to the external world, over which he has little control. If the soul is immaterial, it can be materialized, as Rubin shows. The true nature of conscience remains as only potential.

2. There is an immediate connection between the state and the Enlightenment. The latter constructed a world built on material objects. The control over the (unexplained) motion of such objects is the job of science, who can analyze their motions and, as a result, predict their course. Once this is done, a set of institutions can be built around “happiness,”which, strictly speaking, according to the Baconian anti-metaphysic, is the application of stimuli such that the motions of nature are conducing to “good feelings.” (E.g. men desire money; if fines are levied for anti-social behavior, such behavior will stop, given the axiomatic claim of man’s wanting money, etc.). This is the basic Victorian morality based on utility and the pursuit of pleasure in Millian, rather than Benthamite axioms.

3. The Enlightenment is based on the interconnection of all external stimuli (since they are all reducible to atoms and their vibrations), hence, totalitarianism is a practical and scientific necessity. If force applied in one direction will eventually affect all elements, then everything is connected. This is graphically shown in the beginning of the novel when the vibrations of Volodin’s voice create a chain reaction of activation of the NKVD’s entire apparatus in an inorganic dystopic anti-nature. All is motion, all is cause and effect, hence all is connected, hence there is no autonomous element of life. This is the main thesis of the work as related to the USSR and all materialist visions, its negation is the basis of the dialogue between Rubin and Nerzhnin. The Enlightenment, as a result, must become the totalitarian state: Marx/Lenin are the proper successor to Bacon, Compte, Darwin and Huxley.

4. Nerzhnin is a humanist in the best sense of that word. He is not motivated by ideology or any externalized sense of identity. If Rubin is Huxley, then Nerzhnin is Tolstoy: questioning, suffering, searching, but always cheerful, for this is the proper state of man, a man striving to understand. This impulse is snuffed out by ideology, or the full identification of society with a historical idea, in that all ideologies claim to be the “end of history.” 5. The janitor, Spiridon Yegorov, is another example of the happy life, one possible in the USSR. He fought for both the reds and the whites in the civil war, went from high society to prison after it. He remains barely literate, and yet, like Nerzhnin, retains his basic cheerfulness. He, as it turns out, is the wisest of all, since he has learned that he cannot base happiness on external fortune. He has experienced it all, and has come to the conclusion that sadness is possible in the highest and most exalted positions. Material progress is not related to happiness, a revolutionary proposal that would, if adopted, cause the questioning of all modern institutions and social theories. If happiness is a certain peace of soul, a soul that has freed itself from the “spinning atoms” of the external world, material progress is not just unrelated to happiness, but becomes a barrier to it. For the more production develops, the more the society comes to identify with its “progressive nature.” But if this “progressive nature” is itself based on technology and science, then society has, through the medium of its elites (societies do not “act” like people), created the moral axiom that the more one has, the happier one will be. But this is untenable from an empirical point of view.

6. Siberia becomes the symbol of freedom, a concept certainly not new in Russian literature. It becomes the symbol of freedom because prison is the only place in the Enlightenment mentality where one is freed from all attachments to “spinning atoms.” If atoms are directionless (of themselves, in a vacuum), then science has taken its role as providing order with the goal of “maximum pleasure.” But again, there is the other face of Janus, the face that says that if all is material, then science is totalitarian, science by its own self-definition, it is in charge of placing order on the chaos of material, which, ipso facto, is everything. Hence, utilitarianism is totalitarianism. Prison, then, becomes freedom, because it implies rejection and resistance. It is the new face of Dostoyevskii’s underground man.

7. The incomprehension of the Janus-like nature of modernity is graphically illustrated near the end of this novel where Nerzhnin is being taken to Siberia in a truck. The truck is disguised as it rolls through the Russian landscape, disguised by the word “meat” written on the side. It is disguised as a food truck delivering meats to local groceries. A French journalist, writing on the USSR, dispatches a story home which rhapsodizes about the “plenty” to be found in the USSR, given the large number of “meat” trucks he has seen since he’s been in Russia. This black humor is brilliant, but is shows in a pathetic way the nature of western reactions to the USSR. It has yet to understand the relation between Victorian Darwinism and totalitarianism. The liberal-conservative nexus, the two pillars in the Masonic Temple of Solomon that undergird the two wings of modern life.

8. If the pure soul is at the basis of happiness, part of this purity is the untrammeled ability to make moral decisions. Similar to Kant’s vision of autonomy, material distortions vitiate, by definition, the nature of moral choice. This is because, if the soul is being influenced by material (more accurately, external) forces, then moral choice will be distorted, ipso facto. Moral law exists precisely in that it is not dependent on external forces, but exists in itself, self-defined as an integral part of the personality. Moral idealism, despite Kant, is radically incompatible with the Enlightenment, since the latter bases its own identity in the progressive nature of production. But if one sees moral choice as based on the pure soul, not mixed with material forces from outside, then moral choice is possible anywhere. A pure soul will shine more brightly when it is placed in a dark room. Only when material comforts are removed from the day to day life of the agent can the soul untrammeled by “progressive production” actually be able to see itself and identify itself.

If all of this is true, then happiness is not to be found studying philosophy or psychology, since these are disciplines that come to exist through history, that is, outside of the moral autonomy of the person. Moral theory renders the agent as a thing; even the word “agent” has the air of dis-humanity. Moral purity comes to exist only through suffering, for only through suffering is the usual props and buttresses of external comforts not a part of the moral imagination. Autonomy, then comes through suffering, and Solzhenitsyn has now built the structure of a moral idea by equating freedom with suffering, and this freedom with happiness.

Very similar ideas come into play in the Cancer Ward. In place of Rubin, there is Rusanov, nearly identical characters expressing the same idea: the evils of placing one’s trust in external things: ideology, theory, the party, the state, or any other external creation of fallen nature. Rusanov is a servile informer, and expresses everything evil not merely in respect to the USSR, for that is obvious enough, but the far more abstract notion of the “externalized conscience.”

Solzhenitsyn’s writings are not attacks, per se, on the USSR, but the absurdities of the system are merely an excuse for an attack on the Enlightenment and its open worship of Prometheus, the “light bearer,” that will permit the domination of nature in exchange for sacrifice, that is, the slavery and enserfment of labor, and of course, a huge grid of power that must come into existence in order to keep the wheels of industrial society running: a huge, regulatory state, foreign wars and colonies, maintenance of cheap fuel sources, the continuing battle between the state/employer complex and labor, and the continuing squeezing of labor for increased profit and market share. In addition, a Regime is formed (in the literal definition of the word), a System where private, state and quasi-private capital all create a authoritarian grid of thought and action that is put in the service of power.

The veneration of progress, of which the USSR was its highest achievement, means the creation of an entire complex; a maze of foreign and internal entanglements that permits of complete regimentation. Technology must be served by an entire web of forces that keep the system going. It is this reality that Rusanov manifests. This system, that of the Enlightenment and progress, requires servility, the bureaucratic mentality and struggles to come to terms with criticism.

Rusanov has a nightmare: he is crawling through a pipe of some kind. At the end, he sees a small girl, the daughter of a man who Rusanov had placed in prison, that is, he concocted crimes to get this man put away, in exchange for a better apartment. As it turns out, Rusanov had become quite famous for creating crimes and blaming them on people whose living space, or car, etc., he wanted. Therefore, regardless of the long-time, habitual materialization of the pesonality/conscience, a spark still exists, though one which can only manifest itself during dreams, a world where the will does not function.

But this is a cancer ward. It is a hospital environment not unlike the prison in the earlier novel, and all the main characters in it have cancer, excepting the doctors. Like Chekhov before him in Ward #6, the hospital is a metaphor for social life, the state, and the System that encapsulates both. There is an interesting exchange between Rusanov and Poduev, another inmate of the ward. There is some discussion of the nature of “spontaneous” healing, or, more accurately, a direct action of God upon the human body. Here, Poduev is saying, in good Old Believer tradition, that a pure soul is capable of self-healing. Asceticism is the key. Of course, a strict regimen of fasting can cure most diseases, in that the body will begin consuming diseased cells and tissues. Hence, there is a solid secular and legitimately scientific understanding of fasting. But the more spiritual understanding of fasting is that it brings people beyond the here and now, beyond the vulgar world of cause and affect, that worst element of created things. Fasting opens the senses, permits greater insights and deeper concentration.

The Enlightenment had rejected all this. Immediate pleasure through technology was the goal, and became the very exoteric nature of progress. Fasting was mere “folk medicine” and medicine was now to manipulate nature to get what it wants, rather than using it, which is the medieval view of medicine. This is the nature of the battle here, and is not mentioned in any of the literature on this massive tome. Purity of life and conduct do have a central healing quality. It is a secular reason why all traditional religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, practice fasting. Once one departs from the cause and effect nature of fallen objects, the ultimate, religious and spiritual core of the world can be seen. Over a long time, such things are regularly experienced. “The Holy Spirit cannot be perceived on the full stomach,” as all the church fathers say. The mind’s eye must be heightened: hence the nature of ritual, a strict regimen of fasting and manual labor, as well as a regimen of intellectual labor, leads to a completely new relationship to created objects.

Rubin and Rusanov are believers in “doctrine,” in the very worst sense, that reality can be expressed through written manifestos and ideological pamphlets. This is the cardinal sin of modern academics. The hero of this novel is Kostoglotov, very much like Nerzhnin in the former novel. It is this parallel that permits the literature in this field to deal with these two novels as almost one. Plots are not significant, rather, they are excuses to deal with the very serious philosophical problems brought up by the Enlightenment: progress, the state and the industrial economy. The USSR is different in this respect because Stalin demanded that the USSR overtake the west in industrial production in only a few years. From a purely economic point of view, this was the point of the camps. When the “normal” economy struggled, the slack was taken by the camp population. Later, the camps became an important prop to the economy, it alone gave the pretense of fulfilling the 5 year plans, and the population, dying at an alarming rate, needed to be refurbished by manipulated arrests from the outside.

Again, the concept of the relation between camp life and “normal” Soviet life is brought up, but also in a way that is applicable to any society whose elites have chosen the Enlightenment over traditional agriculture and home industries. Since only the former that creates the necessity for all-out social regimentation and centralization, the parallels between prison, and work life become too serious for comfort. Both these novels are utterly focused on the nature of freedom in the advanced Enlightenment. Both the US and its allies, as well as the USSR, claimed to be the final word of Enlightenment, both believed themselves dedicated to “science” and its handmaiden “scientific rationality,” both believed production to be the greatest calling of man, both believed to be in the process of solving all social and medical problems through “progress” and “industrialization.”

Rusanov has not merely externalized his conscience, but, like all rationalists, has externalized his reason. The final point to both these novels is that rationalism becomes an idol, it creates institutions and movements that claim to be in the position of interpreting nature and history, providing it with a goal, a telos, to which all society needs to be oriented. The slang word “backward” takes this presupposition as axiomatic.

For Solzhenitsyn, the characters of Rubin and Rusanov are used to express the final guttering out of rationalistic approaches to “progress.” They speak in cliches, slogans taken out of the party handbook. Such approaches to “knowledge” are very common in the post-Enlightenment age, where everything from evolutionism to “the woman question” is treated as coming from a canon, a catechism that needs to be quoted from. In so doing, the quoter becomes a “part of the system,” and in return, receives mainstream approbation, which certifies one as “reasonable.” Those who refuse become internet publishers.

Kostoglotov realizes something: such catechetical answers coming from those who definitely know better: politicians, bureaucrats, philosophers, scientists, clergy–is not a matter of epistemology, but is a matter of survival. Modern academics provide the best example of this. The young grad student comes into the academic world. She is called an “intellectual” and given captive audiences to lecture to. She is treated as part of the modern cognoscenti, is given a high salary (certainly by comparison to others her age), an office with her name on the door, little work, and few classes. This is a comfortable life. However, it is clear that there is a corporate culture, not unlike every other job she can get. A way of thinking and acting that is not necessarily laid out dogmatically, but in the air, part of the day to day groupthink of the institution, the institution that has given her this job. Certain things are expected of her, certain ideological assumptions–not arguments per se–but a basic mindset from which arguments derive. This is an adjustment to the corporate culture, more obvious in the case of white males than females, but the expectations are the same. With a very high price attached to non-conformity, the young recently minted Ph.D., taken by the such lifestyle of modern professors, had no difficulty touting the line, one that is in her professional interest to tout anyway.

It is a matter of being part of the culture, being part of a large and often very prestigious institution, idea or movement. This is the psychology of groupthink. It comes with substantial rewards as well as serious punishments, the ultimate punishment is rejection of tenure, which is a professional death sentence. No one but tenured academics in the department can vote on tenure. Not students, not alumni, not the community, only the tenured. Hence, conformity is enforced by a rigid and highly secretive system of hierarchy. It is typical of that hierarchy that literati might read this novel and be convinced that Solzhenitsyn is talking about the proverbial “someone else.” He is talking directly at them, and they are too conforming to see it. The bureaucratic institutions dedicated to Enlightenment progress work in an identical fashion. It is certainly no coincidence that anti-modernists, such as this writer, speak of the middle ages’ nearly complete lack of bureaucracy for all aspects of life. Even the Byzantine Empire and the papal curia pale in comparison to the modern megastate, the creation of the late Renaissance and its “Enlightened Absolutism,” whether parliamentary or royal. The state created modern relationships, contra the libertarians, and thus the state needs to regulate them. The state consciously destroyed traditional ways of living from the local, autonomous farm community to the urban artel, so as to clear the way for the new “rational and efficient” economic system. Liberalism and capitalism, let alone socialism, are the creations of state power in conjunction with local interests, eliminating the natural state of man: in a small, tightly knit farming community based on religion and the extended family; a general will far beyond the writings of Rousseau, a sort of contract far beyond that of Locke.

For Solzhenitsyn, progress and technophilia are not “about making life better.” That has never been the case. The Lunar Society of England took into itself hundreds of the highest elites in capitalist society at the time. It was secret, quasi-masonic and dedicated not to “the improvement of life” but technological innovation to improve their own standing in society to benefit the elite and the state. The same might be said of the Royal Society, though they were less secretive. The Lunar society spent millions funding revolutionary groups in France, Central Europe and Russia. Technology, as manifest by the USSR and the USA, is an excuse for evil. Anything goes if it is done in the name of progress. Certainly a growing number of formerly numb persons are getting a dim outline of the price, the sacrifice, necessary for progress: permanent war, permanent empire and permanent bureaucracy and regimentation. The World Institute for Development Economic Research claims that the world’s wealth is concentrated in exactly 2% of the world’s people. The interests of the remainder, then, become sacrificed on the altar of Prometheus.

Solzhenitsyn asks the common sense question about technology and its proper use. Those with money commission technological innovation, done according to their wishes. They will then use it for their interests. This can be the state, private capital and semi-private capital such as the major tech companies of Northern Virginia. Science cannot think objectively, as their corporate myth demands they believe, because they require money, and money exists solely in the hands of the elite. And it makes no different if that elite is party, state, or private, elites and the bureaucracies that serve them think alike, at least in the articulation of their interests and the corporate methods of manifesting it, such as Bildeberg, the WCC or the Party Plenum.

Solzhenitsyn is creating parallels between the state, the Enlightenment, party thinking, conformism, technology and freedom. He is convinced that the concept of freedom needs to be redefined in a situation where the omni-state is not going away, in fact, more and more mobilized interest groups are demanding favors from it. In fact, long ago, this writer made the claim that modern politics is easily reducible to bargaining agreements between the state on the one hand, and mobilized groups (feminists, banks, universities), on the other. The state provides favors, while the group promises loyalty.

There is no significant element of the population, east or west, that is not either getting something from the state, or expecting to. Freedom must be redefined internally, as a rational and radical response to imprisonment. Moral compromise is necessary in the open world. Every act that brings on into contact with the Regime (in the sense described above) forces compromise. Freedom is impossible here. In the early writings of Solzhenitsyn, prison and death are the two elements that manifest freedom. Death, or the end of one’s earthly life, forces a purely objective portrayal of life, hence the cancer ward, or the concentration camp. The other is the prison: where compromise is not necessary, because one is not directly working for the Regime, but is rather pronounced as its enemy, hence, prison promotes integrity. This is why Nerzhnin prefers to be deported to Siberia rather than work as a cryptographer for the NKVD, with a high salary and great public prestige.

Thus there are several worlds, all nearly identical in content, but different in form: modern society at large, the prison, the hospital and political leadership. Each of these differs in form in obvious ways, but not in content. Like the wide-eyed assistant professor example, the more subtle forms of coercion are the most effective, when rewards are great and punishments more so. Freedom of conscience, in the non-cliche way it is appropriated in these works, is a very rare gift. The mind seems forcibly canalized given the world where one is forced to conform. Freedom of conscience necessary entails punishment and pain. Liberalism demands an amorphous “freedom” that usually resolves itself into bourgeois greed: free sex, abortion, money making and easy divorce. None of these examples are manifestations of freedom, but rather of slavery to the passions. Certain forms of coercion and conformity that go under the cover of “freedom” solely for the reason that if the have-nots in America can purse their interests, then there is noplace to stand to criticize the elite for pursuing theirs.