Thread by @pavel23

You can not believe anything Putin, his officials, his oligarchs, his media or his useful idiots and bribed politicians in the West say.

Putin does not have friends, only servants.

He is not a private individual, he is a function of Russia - a Russian ruler.

A Russian ruler has one necessary attribute: Appear strong. Everything else is optional.

As long as a Russian ruler appears strong, he can do what he wants, e.g. kill many millions of his own people, and still have the approval of a majority, like Stalin, with 70% recently.

It appears that Putin is unhappy whenever his approval drops below that of Stalin and needs to take appropriate action.

Russias political system is over 500 years old and has not fundamentally changed since then.

It is based on five main pillars of social interaction:

Lying, bribing, stealing, threatening and killing.

Together they create order, which is always seen better than chaos.

It is basically the classic autocratic oder feudalistic system that develops as a default. It is mainly based on basic behavioral patterns that come with our genes and our biology.

It does not require much education on the part of the ruled, and not much sophistication to rule.

The only necessary qualifications for state officials are to be strong and brutal towards those below in the power hierarchy, and loyal or at least obedient to those above.

That’s why such a system ist so resilient. If you destroy the ruling class or kill half of the population, the system just reconfigures and reconstitutes itself based on the same principles.

Together with Russia‘s geography this is the reason why Russia has existed for a long time, and by perfecting the principles of autocratic rule, Russia has grown into the largest state of the world, mainly driven by paranoia. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terr…

While the USA wants to extract energy, raw materials or other useful things from it‘s empire, Russia wants security buffers. As a state governed by deception, violence and corruption, you assume that this is how the world works and everyone is out there to get you.

Also Russia has more energy and minerals than it can make use of for itself, so it does not have to look that much to the outside for these things. However, the problem is that because of this neurotic security paranoia there can never be enough.

Once you have acquired buffer territory and integrated it into the empire, you have to protect it with more buffers and so on, until there is nothing left that you perceive a threat, but because the perception is not based on rationality, everything not controlled seems a threat.

The western liberal democracies are much more sophisticated and fragile systems; they require a lot of cooperating institutions, complex rules, openness and more consent from the ruled, so they can be destroyed and won‘t easily recover from destruction on their own.

Another nightmarish thought is that when the whole world would be ruled by one autocratic system, it would rule forever until the end of humanity because there would be no system competition and no chance for a successful internal uprising.

However, democratic and liberal systems are much better at allocating resources, less wasteful and therefore economically, technologically and culturally more developed. They pose a real threat to Russia, but are also a source of technology and stuff Russia can‘t produce.

The reason why Russia can not make complex things the world wants to buy, is manifold, but the fact is undeniable. When have you last bought something originally invented and made in Russia? The direct reason is that in an autocratic system the people who hold power are brutes.

In addition to the mentioned cultural deficiencies and lack of the nessecarry modern institutions and feedback and checks and balances that improve governance and provide much better error detection and correction, Russia suffers from the curse of oil.

Most countries who are oil-rich have autocratic rule or their society and culture has been compromised by this easy source of wealth that does not require much sophistication to extract, which invites brutes who don‘t care much about the environment and human rights.

Oil also stifles development because alternative, more complex means of value creation like high tech manufacturing and complex services require more upfront investments, are risky and often need a complex supply chain, training and different, less hierarchical management.

Because the ruling class in an autocratic system can not manage them, it regards these emerging high-tech companies and their owners as a threat to existing power and therefore limits their growth or destroys them if they become too big, too rich and to powerful.

The world tried to help Russia to turninto a modern, democratic state, and failed miserably. It would be easy for NATO to contain Russia militarily, but very expensive for a very long time, very dangerous and cause a lot of suffering around the world.

It is pointless to give Russia the buffers it wants; it would just be a stopgap measure, and after some time Russia would want more buffers to protects the buffers because Russias perceived threats are an irrational projection fueled by paranoia.

Democratization has failed because of the arrogance of the West and the belief that democracy is something that creates itself if you just give people freedom, but that is not how it works. Yes, the idea is appealing, but that is not enough; you have to make it work, too.

A lot of eastern Europe is struggling with democracy, but it has the EU as framework with political templates, support, oversight and incentives, so countries like Czechia and others already reside higher on Democracy indices than the U.S. who are considered a flawed Democracy.

The most developed Democracies in the world are the nordic countries, and they have developed democratic tradition over hundreds of years, originating in Denmark from the bottom up. In Russia Democracy gained a bad reputation due to the Yeltsin years, and is despised by many.

The only way left seems to push back, contain and weaken Russia, which will be expensive and cause lots of suffering. Isn’t there a better way of action that has a realistic chance of success? But how do you reason with a paranoid country that only believes in the logic of power?