Yeah, desperation in a community does seem to break down a lot of social niceties, make people meaner, smaller, crueler. So focused on surviving personally that there’s no effort left to give to help anyone else or make things better for everyone.

(An aside below–but it’s related to survival turning people selfish and cruel.)

I follow Kamilkazani on Twitter. He’s a historian of Tatar descent (a minority in Russia), and I think did most of his scholarly studies on China and Chinese history originally, but when the Ukrainian war started, he did a lot of threads about Russia, and how we got here today from a historical standpoint.

He’s been very eye-opening for me, sort of demystifying what happened, and more importantly, laying out the historical and CULTURAL reasons behind it happening. Like, there’s cause and effect, even if it’s not the sort of cause and effect that I’m familiar with in my own country and culture. (His thread alone on “salt” is really astute.)

He looks at things from a very pragmatic historical background, and had a long thread that was the first thing that adequately explained to me why Russia was doing/saying the things it did, things that seemed quite bizarre if you’re looking at it from an American cultural lens.

Part of it is that there’s (and I’m paraphrasing my understanding–you guys should go back and read his threads for the original as I might have misinterpreted) an exaggerated individualism, far beyond what Americans do, in Russian culture.

Like, there’s a lot of “me and mine got ours, so you’re on your own”, or things like “sure, that guy is lying, but it’s MY guy lying so it’s ok.” Hyper-focused on the individual and their family and their local in-groups. And probably an artifact of how brutal the government has been for centuries.

And that “sheer struggle to survive turning people cruel, petty, and mean” has sort of been circling around my head, over and over.