Why We Need Russia More Than We Think

Anglo Saxons Dissociate, Slavs Internalise

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine is inevitably stirring up considerable anti-Russian sentiment in the West. Companies rush to either sanction their goods and services, or to proclaim that they are “planning to do so soon.”

I find it understandable. Putin certainly seems to have commenced a level of military action that he didn’t need to, and the result of that is unnecessary death, injury and hardship.

But, amid this frenzy of anti-Russian feeling, I want to write about why I think the West really, really needs Russia. It has nothing to do with oil or gas or other materialist needs.

What Russia has in abundance, that the West is these days severely lacking, is depth, heart and soul. The Russians feel. They feel deeply. They frequently don’t show or express their feelings but they have a depth of feeling that is unparalleled amongst today’s cultures. There is a fundamental psychological difference between the Slavic and the Western peoples.

When triggered, the default strategy for the average Westerner is to dissociate from the body.

When triggered, the default strategy for the average Slav is to internalise the feeling.

Thus, under sustained stress, such as during the Covid pandemic, Western society tends to become atomised. Mass triggering drives everyone into their own, insular little unit - dissociated from the body and inhabiting a world mostly of endless, cyclical thoughts.

In a similar situation, Slavic peoples tend to internalise deeply the suffering they feel. They carry the wounding inside of them. They struggle on, aware of the pain, moment by moment.

Over the centuries, Westerners have developed amazing technology and have advanced rational science to an unparalleled degree. This has happened largely because we are a more dissociated culture. We find it easier to inhabit the abstract realms of science and mathematics needed to advance technology. Russians have made their contributions. But to the Slavic mind, such disembodied thinking does not make so much sense.

The underlying drive of the Western mind seems to be to escape the body. We may soon have such mechanical lives, and become so obsessed with functionality, that we could anyway be replaced by robots. We may soon be able to spend our lives in VR headsets or have neural micro-chips implanted in our heads to allow us to interact more directly with computers.

This is actually a fate that I feel few in the West really want. Yet we seem incapable of averting it. Thinking about how inhuman it is, is in itself stressful… and causes us to dissociate even more!

What we need are people who don’t react to emotional triggering in this way.

What we need are a people who cannot easily become atomised.

What we need are Russians.

Thank you for reading.