What westerners don’t understand about Russia:

In Russia, there is no shame in lying. Words are just sound you make to distract people while destroying them.

Yes, westerns lie too, but they attempt to hide it or deny it. There is shame in it. In Russia, all the shame goes to the sucker who believed the lies — that person is perceived as weak and hopelessly naive.

This is why Russians are so bad at cooperating with each other, or with outsiders.

– So they have an honesty problem

me- a metaphysics problem

– metaphysical?

me- They seem to assume that the fundamental nature of the world is that everybody (and everything) is trying to cheat them.

Even their sciences often take the form of attempting to reveal things being hidden from them — that great bounty and possibility which is being unjustly hidden from them by malevolent nature. “Life is really easy and plentiful, but nature is cheating us.”

From the theologian Vladimir Solovyov, 1893:

“[The Russian] imagines dangers that do not exist, and builds upon them the most absurd propositions. It seems to him that all his neighbours offend him, that they insufficiently bow to his greatness and in every way want to harm him. He accuses everyone in his family of damaging and deserting him, of crossing over to the enemy camp. He imagines that his neighbours want to undermine his house and even to launch an armed attack. Therefore he will spend enormous sums on the purchase of arms, revolvers and iron locks. If he has any time left, he will turn against his family.”