Author: Curt Doolittle

Curious. Why would it matter who said it? 😉

FYI: It’s a paraphrase of a russian intellectual explaining how the west doesn’t understand russia – and russia can’t comprehend the west: they have no experience with trust just as we have too little experience with other civilizations’ low trust.
For Russia it’s a legacy of not only their own communists and the import of jewish pilpul and critique by them for propaganda, but their boyars before them, and the mongols before them.
Worse they were all effectively slaves (Serfs) and only ‘free’ for a few decades between serfdom and communism. So they have no experience with the rise of middle classes which is the origin of scaling trust from the familial or tribal to the general political (society, market).
When I travel through Russia I have fun asking the question: “If one person tells a lie to another, who is at fault – the liar or the believer of the lie.” In most of the world it’s the liar. In russia it’s the believer of the lie. This little experiment tells you a great deal about russian civilization.
It also tells you why they think we are deceptive rather than naive and hypermoral. Our unconscious trust informs everything we do. So, you know, hence why our ‘tolerance’ has been suicidal. Because we expect the best of one another (trust) we assume the best of others. Yet we are, other than the japanese, the only high trust civilization. Even then it applies almost entirely to germanic europe.
Cheers