kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: tivasyk You’re right about the fascination of Russia in the West, but I think ...
tivasyk (nprofile…p03a)
You’re right about the fascination of Russia in the West, but I think it’s easily explained in both cultural and socioeconomic evolutionary terms
When you live inside a culture, you naturally see its deficiencies from inside - whereas at the same time you see other cultures at bird’s view only. People who are tired of cultural conventions inside their own country tend to look at other cultures, often drastically different, with more optimism and less nuance. Russia is pretty good an imaginary picture of itself to a specific sector of Western audience, addressing their dreams of less regulation and more disorder. Most people who move into Russia run away screaming shortly after, but the point is that most of the Russophiles never go to live in Russia :)
Then, socioeconomic evolution relies on cultures trying different solutions to social problems. Every such experimenting results in mistakes being made and entire cultures being lost. A culture’s survival is a complex equation that depends on social cohesion, ability to address cognitive biases and fix tactical mistakes in a specific geographic, temporal and possibly genetic environment. It can be thought of as a kind of mutation in biological evolution - altruism or democracy are examples of mutations or subsequent strains which emerged because cultures that were more egoistic and authoritarian succumbed to those, whose members valued altruism and democracy more.
But each such “strain” is constantly challenged by other ideas which breed on obvious issues caused by the fact that democracy enables Popper’s paradox, and altruism enables free-rider problem. When the statistical prevalence of these achieves some threshold, the alternative strains - e.g. ones based on egoism and autocracy - become more popular.
And then we go into the whole dynamic systems theory, where all these features are continuously mixing, sometimes resulting in violent eruptions caused by temporary system changes, but ultimately returning to some attractor. And so on…
I think Russia is such an “alternative strain” here. Nobody living under democracy that its processes often are frustrating due to endless debates and indecisiveness caused by leaders panically trying to avoid “offending” anyone. When that indecisiveness reaches stages that threaten the whole system, people naturally look our for alternatives - and here’s Russia, happily offering an idealised vision of Putin solving all economic problems with an ukaz….
You’re right about the fascination of Russia in the West, but I think it’s easily explained in both cultural and socioeconomic evolutionary terms
When you live inside a culture, you naturally see its deficiencies from inside - whereas at the same time you see other cultures at bird’s view only. People who are tired of cultural conventions inside their own country tend to look at other cultures, often drastically different, with more optimism and less nuance. Russia is pretty good an imaginary picture of itself to a specific sector of Western audience, addressing their dreams of less regulation and more disorder. Most people who move into Russia run away screaming shortly after, but the point is that most of the Russophiles never go to live in Russia :)
Then, socioeconomic evolution relies on cultures trying different solutions to social problems. Every such experimenting results in mistakes being made and entire cultures being lost. A culture’s survival is a complex equation that depends on social cohesion, ability to address cognitive biases and fix tactical mistakes in a specific geographic, temporal and possibly genetic environment. It can be thought of as a kind of mutation in biological evolution - altruism or democracy are examples of mutations or subsequent strains which emerged because cultures that were more egoistic and authoritarian succumbed to those, whose members valued altruism and democracy more.
But each such “strain” is constantly challenged by other ideas which breed on obvious issues caused by the fact that democracy enables Popper’s paradox, and altruism enables free-rider problem. When the statistical prevalence of these achieves some threshold, the alternative strains - e.g. ones based on egoism and autocracy - become more popular.
And then we go into the whole dynamic systems theory, where all these features are continuously mixing, sometimes resulting in violent eruptions caused by temporary system changes, but ultimately returning to some attractor. And so on…
I think Russia is such an “alternative strain” here. Nobody living under democracy that its processes often are frustrating due to endless debates and indecisiveness caused by leaders panically trying to avoid “offending” anyone. When that indecisiveness reaches stages that threaten the whole system, people naturally look our for alternatives - and here’s Russia, happily offering an idealised vision of Putin solving all economic problems with an ukaz….