A Soviet Prisoner's View on What's Important
butwhatfor.substack.com
butwhatfor.substack.com
No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives (and heaven forbid it to be an integral part of our identities). Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. And the tragedy is that even as we've put more and more stock in the former, we've been actively sabotaging the latter.
Personal responsibility doesn’t mean taking care of yourself, and stop there, it means taking care of your world, your community and as you say, fix small things together. Insulation is the real pandemic imo.
On project Gutenberg!
The Wikipedia page says it's the highest selling book in American history, or something. And, people read this at taverns, apparently.
But I maybe shouldn't make the assumption that that's how it's used here.
It’s more about an appeal to our common humanity, if that makes sense :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
Whether that corresponds to your modern rhetorical trend is, I suppose, up to you.
I'd be happy to leave politics alone, if only politics would deign to leave me alone as well. Only it doesn't, it's a cancer that eats it's way through society until nothing outside of it is left. We either kill this cancer, or we die of it.
Some people just think of boring men and women in suits shouting in adverts, blaming the other person for all our failures. Yeah, we all hate that.
But politics is bigger than that. To my mind it is the process through which any group of humans decides how to work together (or possibly annihilate together).
Its how we agree to build roads, schools, hospitals. Its where we build them, who builds them, who gets to use them.
It's how fairly or not we share the burdens. It's about who is an enemy and who is a friend. It's about taxes and rebates, of course, but if we dont collect and spend the taxes to, say, build a school, politics is about do we want to have someone else build the school? Is that fair? Will it educate the children correctly. Even when government does not do something politics is still there.
Because its about everyone who is not us, and how we interact with everyone who is not us.
Franz Oppenheimer (1908), "The State"
Please do not confuse the social and societal with the political, that's a fallacy.
It's a common reaction to bad politics - dictators and purges and so on. It's surprisingly common in post Cesaer Rome - but at least they wanted to go back to a Republic.
Sorry but humans work better when they work together - from hunting Mammoths to building skyscrapers. So the answer is to find better ways to work together. I see that outcome as society and the process as politics.
Edit: an interesting example is right in the front page - https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-... which roughly says "video games allow private industry to grow a village into a town pretty linearly, it it never worked like that because (weather / war / some bugger owned the land and would take more surplus than would let you grow - plus it was often planned like urban planner planned)
Oppenheimer would say that's evil politics, let's stop politics, I would say that's incentives and power balance and economics and military power imbalances and lack of medical and public health.
Oppenheimers not wrong I guess, just the solution is a moderation of the politics not going back to a simpler time.
None of that requires politics, it requires a free market. Things do not get done forcibly, but voluntarily. Trying to get things done forcibly is immoral as well as inefficient, but it's an oh-so-sweet temptation for the profiteers of the arrangement.
Getting rid of politics will not get us back to a simpler time, it will bring us forward into a time where we can concentrate our energies on our own lives and endeavours of making the world a better place bit-by-bit instead of permanently having to fight off the incessant hectoring of wannabe know-betters, do-gooders and world-savers with grand schemes and utopian visions who think that everyone should do everything the way they think is best, "for their own good".
Honestly it seems politics is just the bits of the current system that you don't like.
We all don't like some bits. If we want to change them we need to, work together to compromise on which bits we keep and which we get rid of.
Like turtles, its politics all the way down.
And please stop trying to explain my own motivations to me, it's really grating. It's not "bits of the current system that I don't like", it's the whole inhumane, extortionary and murderous shebang that I don't like!
It's politics all the way down only until you hit what's been buried beneath, the bedrock and basis of a true society worthy of the name, as opposed to enslavement light: the individual's freedom to make their own choices!
I remember a few years back the Libertarian party candidate saying "yes a driving license seems a good idea" and almost being forced from the job. Is that where you are coming from?
I disagree that politics is "deciding for others without their consent". That seems to describe violent dictatorships. (Yes that's a form of politics but not one I am advocating)
Pretty much the central tenet of western capitalism is that it can and will grow; indeed, all sorts of sacrifices of fairness are made in the name of increasing the total size of the pie. Nor is the total number of pie-consumers and pie-producers fixed.
It may be counter-intuitive, and it is certainly not obvious if you've spent your life in the Soviet system, but it's important to consider.
It's true that even the poorest Americans often have smartphones or even cars but it's also true that for most of them smartphones and cars have become a necessity rather than a convenience and they may still go hungry or postpone important doctor's visits to offset the cost.
The widely cited IMF statistic "demonstrating" that poverty has globally gone down over the decades has been widely debunked for using an arbitrary and meaningless definition of poverty (where you could literally be unhoused and "food insecure" without being considered poor). Sliced more realistically, the data at best demonstrates that poverty is stagnant in total numbers. At worst, it's tracking population growth.
I have a magic wand. When I wave it you will be reborn in any time of your choosing, past or present. You will be randomly assigned a race, gender, IQ, sexual preference, family wealth, health status, and country. What time would you choose?
Beyond that, no one believes that material wealth is fully useless. But we know that material wealth is not useful beyond a certain baseline to one's happiness, except as a means for the exertion of power. The hedonistic treadmill is inexorable.
If I could live in a world free of rent seeking and social domination with the equivalent of ~40k/year in material product each year, I would do it. Most of the reason most people work beyond that is to acquire fundamentally scarce goods such as housing ans land for which capitalism won't make the pie grow, is due to artifical demand brought forth by marketing, or simply doesn't actually benefit to individual happiness.
We already have fairly conclusive research on this, once you have enough money to be insulated against catastrophy and acquire stable living conditions as well as a sufficient social status, the marginal effect of increased income on your happiness is roughly zero.
Which is, by the way, not the opinion of the Soviet ideology, they were fairly committed to growth for a prolonged amount of time, though their economic system did not necessitate it to survive (geopolitically it was necessary for military reasons though)
You don’t get bonus points for spreading a miserable worldview.
You're also completely sidestepping the original point. Defining all scientific and technological accomplishments as the products of capitalism because capitalism is the dominant system is begging the question. We know that scientific and technological accomplishments and improvements to the general quality of life were also made before capitalism existed. We don't know that capitalism has had a positive effect on these trends.
Plus if you want to take the primitivist route you could argue that if you believe the data on climate change, the status quo is literally built on killing us over the next few decades and "benefits" like getting a thousand new smartphone models each year or being able to choose between twenty nearly identical brands of bottled water are entirely offset by the externalities that are rapidly becoming tangible problems even to the wealthier among us.
Sliced more realistically, the data at best demonstrates that poverty is stagnant in total numbers. At worst, it's tracking population growth.
Beyond that in some sectors capitalism can't make the pie bigger. For example, housing in desirable localities will stay a roughly equivalent part of your income.
It's also wrong that people in the Soviet Union find growth unintuitive. Until the late stages of decline, the Soviet system saw incredibly significant growth even for the average person.
Old institutions affect the prosperity and quality of current institutions surprisingly much:
Hapsburg empire:
https://voxeu.org/article/habsburg-empire-and-long-half-life...
An old inca highway:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/31/an-inca-...
LOTS of old borders which obviously demarcate centuries old polities, treaties and circles of influence (you need to know what they are to observe them in this map) - mapped nicely into how strongly higher education is inherited:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211019890
As an example we can take Finland that has an obvious area more dark in the east than rest of the country. The funny thing is this area delineates a territory that fell under the Novgorod sphere of influence in 14th century in the treaty of Nöteborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_N%C3%B6teborg
Daron Acemoglu has a fantastic book discussing the tenacity of historical institutions make or brake current affairs centuries after: Acemoglu: Why Nations Fail (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d... and so on)
This was extremely interesting, and at the same time quite depressing that present-day corruption levels depend on last centuries instead of just the strength of current institutions.
Shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.?
But such involvement from the top in minor issues is characteristic when the top accretes too much power. Everyone lower just delegates it upwards because nobody wants to take responsibility.
Back in the 70s when the dorm at Caltech I attended went coed, the bathrooms weren't set up for that. So the students solved the problem themselves. A sign was made with a circle divided into 4 quadrants and a rotating pointer in the center. The quadrants were labeled:
1. men
2. women
3. don't know
4. don't care
which seemed to satisfy everyone.
I think prioritisation is half the problem in politics, everyone thinks that their issues ought to be a priority and it's very hard to have a centralised authority wade in and decide that for people without looking at best out of touch and at worst actively malicious. It's a big reason I'm a fan of liberalism (in the British rather than American sense) and subsidiarity, central planning in my opinion usually leads to poorer results because the people on the ground in a given situation tend to make better and more informed decisions than someone sitting at a desk in London with many degrees of seperation from the situation at hand. The solution I think is to make government as local as possible so that different places can have different priorities without breaking things for other people.
I believe that politics ought to be as decentralised as practically possible and political abstractions are employed only when absolutely necessary (ie it'd be a bit silly to ask Ceredigion County Council to run its own nuclear energy programme). Not only does this reduce tensions between ideologically diverse areas, it also frees up what remains of the central government's power to focus on long-term globally important issues rather than flitting about with the issues of the day. We need to dispense with this "winner takes all" approach to politics where the most powerful ideological minority can lord it over everyone else for five years at a time and instead adopt a much more "each to their own" approach in my opinion.
The two big barriers to this approach are a) politicians that currently rule the roost of a highly centralised system would be loathe to give up their power - it's very rare that powerful people have the moral fibre to selflessly abandon power and influence for the greater good of humanity and b) current local government infrastructure is pretty atrocious, it's often made up of ridiculous retirees with nothing better to do than exercise their instincts for petty tyranny.
I'm not so sure. It kinda seems required sometimes if you're going to keep your coalition together. For instance, there are some people who are part of the Democratic Party base, who of all the issues out there, care the most about gender and bathrooms (I know some of them). Their stridency has inflected a good fraction of the rest of the party.
Unless you are an empire and want to oppress the majority…
No? A coalition is A + B + C + ... ~= 50.1%, you might need that vocal minority to make the math work. And those factions won't agree on everything, so there will be intra-coalition tension, but they know they have to work together to get what they each want. However, there are limits, so if the coalition totally abandons C's issues (or even just severely de-prioritizes them), then C will leave.
One person's divisive, minority issue is another's fight for the fundamental right to be treated equally under the law.
The backlash was immense with many companies and the NBA pulling support out of North Carolina. They "lost over $400 million in investments and jobs." [1]
As a result the governor that advocated this bill lost his election that year.
But no, Obama didn't "just decided" to "stick his nose" in the bathroom debates. The Republicans decided to take up a new culture war because attacking gay people after they were allowed to marry was no longer socially acceptable. The President responded because it was a stupid law put forth to attack vulnerable people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_...
You can interpret what I wrote as you like, but I'd appreciate it if your quotes were accurate.
This thinking is nothing new. It was identified long back that the rulers/politicians are reflection of the society. There is a very well-known old proverb in the language Marathi: "Jashii prajaa, tasaa rajaa". It means, "A king is a reflection of his subjects". So that tells us, this understanding that the king/ruler/politician is reflection of the society was understood long back.
Some how, the way democracy is defined and taught has created this misunderstanding that the elected few will serve the electorate and do good for them.
I don't think that's quite right. IMHO, there's a feedback loop between those things and they're both important, especially on the negative side, but even on the positive side, too. So politicians won't be our salvation, but they will be part of it.
>Politicians are just a reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives. Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count.
I've added those to my personal list of Great Quotes! Not as poetic as the Russian, but more succinct.
I sometimes wonder if gems like this are scattered throughout the social media firehose "like tears in the rain." Maybe the singularity will pick 'em up one day...
I think there are certain problems that do require top-down coordination from everybody, and there are certain moral issues that really are so fundamental they deserve to be enshrined in law. It's just that these days we tend to overestimate the size of these categories and target everything we think to be wrong with our society using this extremely large and imprecise "hammer". Many things, especially small and personal and compassionate and nuanced things, will simply be smashed instead of fixed. And people, in particular, have to improve from the inside out.
This (my part at least) also isn't a "government efficiency" argument, it's a "government precision" argument. Governments (and political factions, and corporations for that matter) cannot know things like morality; they can only respond to very imprecise signals sent to them by the populace. If you look to them as a personal north star, you will end up empty and broken inside. And as you look to them as levers of change, expect that everything they do will be at best a clunky, wide approximate of what you hope for. Factor that in when you set your expectations for which things they can and can't solve.
As Epictetus said, "If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters." As true today as it was 2000 years ago.
This was powerful to me.
After all, a victim status is not without its sweetness. It commands compassion, confers distinction, and whole nations and continents bask in the murk of mental discounts advertised as the victim’s conscience — but try to resist it. However abundant and irrefutable is the evidence that you are on the losing side, negate it as long as you have your wits about you, as long as your lips can utter “No…”
On the whole, try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships, too. They are a part of the game, and what’s good about a hardship is that it is not a deception."
This resonates with me-- it's something I have always held as a core belief. I made an appointment to be where I am today-- good or bad. The moment I blame my situation on someone or something I cede control of the situation.
But it is oh so easy to do that; to his point, there is a sweetness to it; I find I have to remind myself of the idea of ownership and personal responsibility all the time... it's so easy to end up blaming something or someone else.
At the same time: for the victims themselves, their best chance of overcoming their circumstance is often to not think about it that way.
It's one of those tricky cases where a realistic mindset is not a useful mindset. You have to hold reality, and set it aside, and suspend your disbelief. It's hard to do that, so instead different people fully buy into one reality or the other and then get into conflict over the cognitive dissonance.
Longer term, with recovery focusing on taking back agency the conversation does change to a "you were a party to your own depression, own it. be mindful etc"
But it's a pretty big view change.
One prominent goal of the Western world was always to destroy Russia (last prominent example: German invasion in 1941 which clearly stated that the final goal is to exterminate Slavs). There were and there are numerous plans in the current Europe and USA that continue the work of Hitler. Almost every day you can read in the news on the new plan of USA/NATO/GB to start a war with Russia.
So, all the news, all the books, all the history you get on the West is dedicated to one thing: paint Russia and Russians as the most evil savages, the history of Russia as a bloody bloodbath, etc, etc.
There's simply no English source on Russia/USSR/Russian-USSR history I've seen that was free from that bias. Even English prose contains absurd exaggerations when telling about Russia.
Speech of famous USSR/Russian dissidents require different explanation, but most of them exaggerate the rusophobic bullshit with even more zealousness than anglosaxons themselves. I think the main reasons are that they need to find vindication for their treason and they need to demonstrate to the Western world that they're loyal. Also, it's possibly the only source of income for many Russian emigrants that have some humanitarian degree (writers, journalists) is to write rusophobic pamphlets.
Very fitting.
If you open social network, like reddit.com/r/worldnews, it would be even more obvious. If you open comments under any news about Russia there, you'll find even direct appeals to kill Russians (BTW, always ignored by Reddit, Facebook and Twitter moderators, but try to write the same about any other nationality and you'll be immediately banned).
My comment was about a small part of russophobes - Russians that emigrated abroad. Most of the time they become the most zealous russophobes.
I don't really know the explanation, nor do I really care. I've just made a rule to avoid Russians abroad as most of them hate themselves to the point of schizophrenia.
The general feelings that permeated Soviet society were apathy and misery. It was so pervasive that modern Russians fetishize it and even feel nostalgia for it.
There was an excellent little movie from the 80s called Moscow on the Hudson, with Robin Williams, which beautifully portrays the Soviet immigrant experience. Robin Williams' character says the following lines, which resonate with me completely:
"When I was in Russia, I did not love my life... but I loved my misery. You know why? Because it was my misery. I could hold it. I could caress it. I loved my misery."
Nevertheless Russian expats are praising these third world countries as "best in the world" and endlessly vilify Russia. In fact, vilifying Russia is the main talk topic everywhere where 2 or more Russian expats gather, main reason why I avoid making friends with Russians abroad. You can easily find lots of proofs on Facebook and travel forums.
Please read The Prince, The Karamazov Brothers, Eugene Onegin, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or Dead Souls before writing this kind of grotesque sweeping statements.
This country is dystopian af too; the American dream died with 9/11. We’re just another empire that’s rotting from the core.
America is beginning its decline, there's no question. I think you're worried about the wrong things, but that's simply a matter of opinion.
Thankfully, we're nowhere near the insanity of 40s-50s Soviet Russia. Here, we have a right to freedom of speech, and at least ostensibly a right to bear arms. Hopefully we can maintain those rights and avoid the hellish police state phase of the collapse.
The police state is here, and if you own guns they’ll just storm your house with a swat team, shoot your dog, and charge you for assaulting an officer.
You need some Socratic Method in your life.
That's a very werid take. I don't see how e.g. the Strugatskii are darker than Gogol. Have you read the books you allude to?
"What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory."