@useless_idiot I think they hate Poles because being Slavic people, Poles still managed to break this cycle of abuse and distanced themselves from the empire — same reason they hate Ukrainians now I think.
You might be surprised, but that's the way they bring you up here — I've been eyeing Poland as a country to move to and nearly everyone, especially the older generation have been telling me: "Why Poland? They hate us!". None of these people of course ever been to Poland.
@useless_idiot I knew a few Poles in person and even online Poles are among the most fun people so I have always found this hard to believe.
The real reason is probably serf's way of thinking — when your master gets attacked you have to protect him, same here. Polish officials often voice something unfriendly towards Russia — the state, not the people — but a lot of Russians take it personally.
That's their upbringing: Russians are brought up in totally collective culture, where everyone is part of one whole. What that whole is exactly at any given moment depends on who's currently in power, but all their tyrannies maintain this collective consciousness as it's useful from control perspective. First you notice it in the language — they always say "we won WW2", "we sent a man to the space", and every single lowlife in Russia had for a moment boasted about "we took Bakhmut". And yes, they do hate individualist societies and are afraid of them, also because being an individual implies responsibility for your individual actions and your whole life, whereas collectivism offers a safe anonymity among the herd.
@useless_idiot
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee I don't think "collective" is the right word. Post-soviet societies are EXTREMELY atomized, that's what totalitarian regimes do to people - they kill ANY horizontal connections, any grass roots, any organizations, any institutions that are not heartless state bureaucracy. Even nuclear family. That's why divorce rates in russia still sky high. That's why russians report on their close family to KGB.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee Soviet human" must always stay alone and naked in the dark before Sauron's eye of state. And they don't know any other reality and don't believe it exists. They don't believe collective action is a thing. If Ukrainians brought down their dictator on Maidan - that must be secretly CIA coup. For russians democracy is some kind of a ploy, it's not real, it can't be real. People can't be subject of politics, you can do nothing, that's a law of nature.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee And that's why they hate the collective "West" - for them it's just another dictatorship that exploits you, but foreign, and hiding behind the mask of democracy. They hate their own state too, but "at least it's honest". At least putin is saying what they feel, not that nonsense fairytales about human rights. It's a zero sum game world where everyone is a slave to those who have more power and an exploitative oppressor for those who have less.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee And that's where famous post-soviet corruption came from (both Ukrainian and russian) - it's not a sin to steal from state, because the state is the enemy, the state is a slave owner, and you are slave. You can't free yourself, because there's no such thing as freedom, but you can take whatever you can as long as you don't get caught.
That’s a very good point, and I have just read a book on the history of serf uprisings in Poland[^1] which is a bit of an eye opener. All social phenomena widespread in the USSR - pretending to do work, workplace theft, passive resistance etc - were exact copies of the behavioural patterns under serfdom, be it in Poland or in Russia. And these patterns seemed to be the only way of resistance or protest available to people who were practically put into position of slaves by an oppressive landlord or state, respectively.
[^1]: https://bookwyrm.social/book/1302546/s/bekarty-panszczyzny-historia-buntow-chopskich
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee does it relate to the "laying low" phenomenon in China?
Some Chinese employees and youth don't seem to see a future and thus only do the minimum necessary.
I see no reason why it would be a different phenomenon - if you look at it from a side, it’s really rational posture: all freedoms are taken away from you, including freedom of movement which is the ultimate freedom that allows any free person to go away from unsatisfactory or abusive conditions. You have no rights to protest about abuse, you have no rights at all (under serfdom even one’s daughter or wife were subject to lawful abuse by the landlord). You have no right to accumulate personal wealth, and your earnings (even though you don’t have actual salary) aren’t in any way correlated to the amount of work you do. So even from purely energetic balance, the most rational choice is to do as little work as possible that doesn’t get you punishment, which is also expense of energy. This way serfs
Also an important thing I’ve learned from the book was that the conditions of serfdom in Poland have changed dramatically between 15th to 17th century. Before serfdom was largely transactional: the landlord gives you protection and you pay back in unpaid work and share of your harvest, while the absolute amounts were negligible, like a few days of work per year. After 17th century these increased by orders of magnitude, up to three days per week (!).
Most interestingly, there were many quasi-religious theories used by the nobility to explain why serfs should be serfs and nobles should be nobles, starting from misinterpretation of Bible to claim that serfs are ancestors of Ham while others are ancestors of others Noah’s sons. This had some similarity to the American highly edited “Bible for slaves”.
At the end of the day however, any abusive situation can go only for so long and at the end of the day they abuser is always at risk of being impaled on a pitchfork, as it happened a lot during serf uprisings in Poland.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @t_mkdf @m0xee Yeah, this is exactly how it works. But if your whole society has lived under these abusive relationships with... well... itself for many centuries - it starts to develop some kind of learned hopelessness ideology, the notion that this is how the world works in general and it can't be any other way. This is of course based on experience, but this ideology, or rather anti-ideology of cynicism is exactly the root of most problems these societies have now.
And that “starts to develop some kind of learned hopelessness” has very good foundation from evolutionary biology point of view. It’s a classic survival bias: those who we see in Russia today in their majority are descendants of those who complied. We don’t see as many descendants of those who resisted, because their ancestors were killed or emigrated. And since many of these features, such as obedience to authority are likely heritable traits, such bias obviously changes the composition of the society favouring those who are more keen to comply.
I realised that quite a while ago when visiting North Caucasus - people there like to believe they’re descendants of proud Circassians who bravely fought against Tsarist army in 18-19th century, but at the same time you don’t see much of that bravery among them today. But then you realise that during the Muhajir (Circassian genocide) only 5% of the native population (!) survived in former Circassia with the rest physically exterminated or exiled to Turkey, Jordan etc. This means that today’s Circassians are in their majority descendants of not those who fought, but of those who complied or otherwise made deal with the occupiers…
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee I would leave evolutionary biology out of it.
The time span is just too short.
But the structural and cultural thread is certainly there.
I wouldn’t separate biology from sociology and psychology, as these are both closely connected - even as the reference to “nature vs nurture” hints. While we describe “nature vs nurture” as a “debate”, I don’t think it really is one. We call it debate because we like dichotomies but it’s really matter of balance between the two and our inability to position the balance in one particular point of our liking.
Quoting from “The WEIRDest People in the World” (Joseph Henrich, 2020) which I’ve just started reading:
Beliefs, practices, technologies, and social nors - culture - can shape our brains, biology and psychology, including our motivations, mental abilities and decision making biases. You can’t separate “culture” from “psychology” or “psychology” from “biology” because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think.
He gives very specific, biological examples of how literacy physically changes human brain, thickens corpus callosum and moves some typical activity zones (such as face recognition) to other regions. These changes are induced by a voluntary (well, not for school children) act of learning to read and write.
Of course this doesn’t directly impact on genetics (that would be Lamarckism) but it doesn’t have to - if traits such as obedience to authority (or attitude to risk-taking, or empathy, or egoism etc) are at least partially genetically driven, then distribution of these traits in given population will significantly impact the social system it will erect. There’s evidence they are heritable to some extent.[^1]
And the distribution may be just as well result of its evolutionary suitability at some point in the past (just as colour of human skin was distributed geographically) but also in secondary order, it could be result of social actions. To put that bluntly, if a society physically exterminates people more keen to show empathy or less obedient to authority, distribution of individuals with these traits dramatically falls.
[^1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886913001384
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee as a former life sciences phd: nope, not in that timeframe.
You'd have to do very thorough (and dark) eugenics to get to that.
@t_mkdf
> life sciences phd
Wow, I didn't know not only that there is PhD in that, but there is an intersection of natural science and social sciences. Interesting 😲
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot
I'm completely abstracting from Nazi and Soviet goals and methods. These were morbid alone and both of them indeed had nothing to do with science (regardless of what Soviets claimed of "scientific Marxism" and Nazis of "scientific racism").
Soviet 70 years long campaign of mass killings and repressions however resulted in very tangible bias in the society, for example almost complete collapse of small and medium scale farming which turned 1990-2020 Russia into a food importer (only after 2014 they partially rebuilt large scale farming, with help of Western companies). Their efforts to create New Soviet Man kind of worked, just not quite the way they claimed — in 1930's Soviet press used the term Homo Sovieticus in entirely unironical sense, claiming the Soviet upbringing actually leads to creation of a new human race, superior to the bourgeois one (again, echoes of Lamarckism with early 20th century racial theories).
It was only in 1980's when Soviet dissidents such as Mikhail Heller started to use the term "Homo Sovieticus" to describe the society stripped from any own identity, any responsibility, entirely opportunistic and ready to pray to any regime, and ready to switch their beliefs on daily basis. As we see today, Heller's description was kind of prophetic.
There's certainly a cultural factor here. What I can't explain by culture alone is that Russians and Ukrainians (or Poles), who are genetically very close indeed, at the same time show drastically different attitudes towards authority and drastically different model of constructing society. And these patterns not only survive through generations, but are actually reinforced by huge waves of migrations, just as the one that happened in 2022 from Russia.
At the same time as we can clearly point at haplogroup clusters that distinguish Western Slavs from Eastern (speaking of Poles or Ukrainians makes no sense at this level), would you categorically exclude the possibility that genetic traits determining e.g. obedience to authority aren't distributed along with these haplogroups?
@m0xee @bjeelka @useless_idiot
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee yes.
There is a lot of evidence for cultural and historical trends leading to this.
And none for genetics.
The grandkids of russian immigrants to the US will be hardly any different on the "political submissiveness" scale than those with Irish, German or Polish ancestry.
From my family's history: the compliance with the Nazis was very much a factor of assimilation into German society. The ones growing up Slovene Vs the one grown up in the Hitler Youth
But any immigrants to the US will be at the same time emigrants from Russia/Poland/elsewhere, so specifically those who could not bear the conditions at home. While I agree there’s not much evidence for the “nature” impact on societal systems, I don’t see much studies looking into it either - the study on “obedience to authority” is from 2013, and the below article indicates these studies at all started around 2005, calling it “genopolitics”:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932723000315
So it seems to be a very young discipline and while I do understand all the concerns about association of anything relating to genetics and culture with eugenics, I don’t see any such risk in studying these relations in contrast to trying to actively change genetic composition of a society.
One reason to study them is right in front of our eyes: Russia. Who everyone in 1991 naively believed will happily turn towards democracy and become a peaceful country. It was all based on an assumption that we all have absolutely identical perception of the world, identical emotions and social norms. But the last 30 years clearly demonstrated that talking to Russians about democracy, human rights and rule of law was just as effective as discussing colours with a colour-blind person: they may listen you with attention and kindly agree, but their perception of the world is dramatically different from yours.
There certainly is a cultural aspect to it, but I think persistence of this effect goes well beyond culture alone. If we accept that e.g. sexual orientation is outcome of a complex mix of “nature and nurture” factors, then I don’t see why we shouldn’t bee researching the same factors in social attitudes. What’s in it for myself is not to try to change Russians’ genetics or anything like that, but learn how to talk to them in a way that will get to them and how to coexist with them peacefully while not putting my own safety at risk of someone’s naive ideas like Wandel durch Handel.
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee to my understanding a lot of these studies have been disproven (see criticism of the "bell curve").
So you see the emigration as proof of your line of thought:
But a) this emigration is rather recent and b) did probably not alter the genetic composition of the societies they migrated from.
And c) what about the oppression of the Muscovite State then? Did it have a genetic impact or not? And why don't migrants from zarist russia pass on this obedience?
Well, the case of migrants is IMHO easy to explain — let's hypothesise that I myself have either an inherited or novel mutation that makes me less risk averse, more prone to adventure and less obedient to social norms. I live in a highly conservative country with moral norms being an antithesis of these features. Of course, I'll be much more likely to emigrate as the composition of my individual features is incompatible with the features of the environment.
This way I remove myself from the gene pool of my home population, and this heritable or novel mutation no longer reproduces there. But of course wherever I've moved to, I'm still willing to reproduce and these mutations will enrich the target population as my descendants will reproduce here too.
At the same time, if I'm lucky enough the target population will have completely different social norms, in which case my "anarchist mutation" will not really have a chance of manifestation simply because the environment is less incompatible than the original one.
I think this very well explains the phenomenon of migrants: activation of specific social features very much depends on the environment.
@bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee we are talking about very few generations.
And back and forth migration happens more often than not (e.g. a sizeable minority of German migrants to the US in the 19th century returned... either very successful. Or not at all).
And human behavioural genetics are really quite tricky. Feedback loops, nature and nurture. Other heritability (e.g. wealth, societal norms) that interfere with results etc.
@m0xee @kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot biophysicist to be precise.
Anyhow: of course there is nature AND nurture.
But genetic differences between distinct populations are smaller than genetic differences between individuals (except when you are a Habsburg on a family reunion).