On a small and worthless man

When New Vac Times was launched, I had only vague ideas on what the opinion pieces are to be about. But I had the firm intention of never writing about Orban. That's a cottage industry nowadays, I despise the man and I'm loath to see that he is getting the attention he visibly craves.

But the conviction must have been shallow because a single podcast episode with two political scientists was enough to change my mind. Not because what they said about Orban was novel or interesting. Just the opposite. Their take on him is now common wisdom among liberal western intellectuals. It is also wrong. Plus, the New Vac Times has been created to be a safety valve to vent out stark opinions, so the columnist's friends and family won't get burdened with them.

So let's get it over with.

Viktor Orban is misunderstood, opined the podcast guests, misunderstanding their subject themselves. When people say this, what they mean is that there is more to Orban than meets the eye. My opinion is the exact opposite. OV is exactly what he looks like. People just don't look closely enough.

But I grant it that Orban is misunderstood. With some oversimplification, by two separate groups of people for two separate reasons. One group consists of ordinary liberal people. To them, Orban is a shamelessly corrupt, immoral, cynical wannabe dictator who supports Putin's fascist war against Ukraine because of cold, economical reasons (cheap Russian gas, the benefits of playing for the two sides, etc) and perhaps for personal benefit.

The other group is made up of liberal intellectuals and political scientists who see Orban as a kind of enfant terrible, a dark wunderkind of international politics. A gifted, amoral authoritarian, who was at least a decade ahead of his time and recognized that the era of liberal democracies might be a historical anomaly. That the future might belong to strongmen, and authoritarian rule might suit Hungary's interest better than clinging to the declining institutions and ideas of the West.

Both groups are wrong. The former because of the lack of imagination, the latter because of too much of that. Ordinary people are less off the mark, though.

What people on the street get wrong

Here is why I think the idea that Orban is simply playing a cynical game is wrong. Orban is not a shrewd, cold-hearted accountant who has carefully measured the pros and cons and come to the conclusion that it's in Hungary's best interest to be a Russian lackey (again). And he is not in it only for the money for himself, either. But because he is a genuine believer in the idea that democracy's era of supremacy is over, and he welcomes it. He never met a dictator he didn't like. Insiders described years ago how impressed he was by the way Putin treated his subordinates (that is, humiliating them). He said openly that he feels much more at home in post-soviet states than in Brussels. States run by ex-communist functionaries when not by ex-KGB men. Where torture and murder are still part of the political culture. He is also a megalomaniac narcissist obsessed with power. One can find interviews on the web from ten years ago where Orban is talking in cringeworthy English to Western journalists and every second word he utters is "I". Every third is "strength". The motto of the Hungarian Presidency of the EU in 2012 was "Strong Europe". And this was the way he spoke not to his base but to a Western audience he still tried to woo then. 

Orban supports Putin not because it's in his long-term interest. But because he wants a world where the strongmen rule openly. Men he craves to belong to.

and what academics get wrong

Many intellectuals and political scientists see Orban as an exotic, intriguing specimen in their fields. He is a bad man, but a statesman-caliber leader with dark and grandiose ideas. He recognized the flaws of liberal democracy and offers an alternative in the form of Christian nationalism. But there is a much simpler explanation for his actions and his turn from a liberal politician to an authoritarian strongman. Orban is an incredibly corrupt politician who made his friends and family billionaires and enough of his supporters millionaires. As a reigning prime minister, he was caught on tape advising his wife's company on the smart strategies for winning government subsidies. Preempting the democratic ways of removing him from power is simply a way for him to stay out of prison. This is not a hyperbole. To Orban and his clique, a lost election and a politically independent Chief Prosecutor could mean years behind bars.

No one likes to face being a simple piece of thieving shit, so I'm sure Orban convinced himself that his authoritarian turn is necessary for the country, and showering taxpayer money on friends and allies is just the way things are done everywhere in the world.

So why do intellectuals ignore Occam's razor and project the image of an ideological adversary to a base criminal? I think because of two simple reasons. One is overdoing the basic requirement of scientific analysis. Avoid confirmation bias by trying to steelman your opponent's argument. But too much fairness turns into a self-congratulatory exercise. Too many people are patting themselves on the back for their generosity of giving the benefit of doubt to people who really and obviously don't deserve it.

The second reason has even more to do with vanity. If you are a political scientist or public intellectual whose vocation is to ponder abstract ideas like liberty, ethics, morals, value systems, etc, your profession defines the framework in which you think about real-world problems. You can't use your knowledge and tools to understand, let alone predict, decisions made based on a single person's greed, resentment, and insecurity. Honestly, you are useless at best and a distraction most of the time. So let's pretend there is more to Orban. Let's imagine there is some malicious but grand idea animating the man that is worth grappling with. Otherwise, no one will ask for your opinion, and the Viktor Orbans of the world are not only dangerous and depressing but boring.

what I get wrong

Here is my very brief take on Orban, beyond what was said above. I'm sure don't hit the bullseye either, but I'm close enough. Orban is an insecure man who has always had a chip on his shoulders. First, as a child of a lowbrow country-bumpkin family when he went to study in big-city Budapest. The second time as the leader of a small, not very significant country on the international stage. He is indeed a megalomaniac with other personality disorders in the medical sense. He feels that he is a statesman of historical caliber and Western leaders don't appreciate him. This resentment, the need to justify his venality and to escape its consequences, and historical contingencies are what made him what he is today. A not very interesting story.


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Bruce Lee

My earliest memory of Bruce Lee places me in the kindergarten yard in a conversation with one of my teachers. I was explaining her how Lee died. Early childhood memories are unreliable, they are more like re-prints of memories than of real events, but this one can't be too far off reality. My father had The Big Boss on a VHS tape at home and no qualms about what I can watch (the 1984 Terminator was the cause of years of early nightmares). He also possessed a wonderfully illustrated book about Lee in English, a treasure in a child's eyes, with a removable poster of The Way of The Dragon, and even a biography. The latter I read only a couple of years later, but many then times. 

Born a decade after his death, I shared my childhood hero with millions of kids of many generations around the world. And as to many of them, I probably owe my lifelong fascination for martial arts to Lee, the most famous martial artist of all time, and one of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century pop culture. If there is anyone deserving to be in my Hall of Fame, it is him.

Who was Bruce Lee?

Bruce Lee alias Li Jun Fan was born on 27 November, 1940 in the United States where his father was on a long tour with the Cantonese Opera Company, accompanied by his wife, Bruce's mother. Thanks to her own mixed heritage, the boy who came to the world in San Francisco,  California was 5/8 Chinese, 1/4 English, and 1/8 Dutch Jew. The family went back to Hong Kong three months later, and the son, although technically an American citizen, didn't set foot in the US until 18 years later.

In Hong Kong, thanks to his father's business acumen, Bruce grew up in a well-off family. His father, an occasional actor, also helped him into the movie business. Bruce started a career as a child actor at the age of six. By his teens, if not a household name, he was a recognizable face in Hong Kong. He excelled in roles of a street urchin with a good heart or of a rebellious teenager but was generally stiff and unconvincing in other types. His thespian fortes were not accidental. As a kid, he was a hyperactive boy who only stayed put when reading comic books. He performed abysmally in school and struggled in every subject but English so much so that he was held back twice. As a teenager, he was a troublemaker with serious problems with authority. But Bruce was also funny, witty, and charismatic, a prankster and a natural gang leader. 

He got into street fights a lot. At 14 he was defeated by a boy named William Cheung who practiced Wing Chun. Bruce, to regain his dominance, decided to learn martial arts, too. He soon became passionate about it, eager to try out every new technique he learned on the street. He was also equally passionate about another physical art, dancing. After winning a dance championship, later in life Bruce has always referred to himself, stretching the truth a bit, as the cha-cha-cha champion of Hong Kong.

In high school, he participated in his first and last official combat sports event, a boxing match against a student from another high school. He won the bout but wasn't satisfied with his own performance.

Not long after that, he got expelled from the school for threatening a teacher with a knife. By then he has brought enough shame to his parents that they decided to put him on a boat to America with the warning: make something out of yourself or don't come back.

Bruce arrived in Seattle in 1959, aged 18. His father secured him a tiny lodging and a dishwasher job in the restaurant of a Chinese acquaintance. He finished high school and, to the surprise of everyone, in 1961 he even enrolled at the University of Washington as a drama major. Eager to stop washing dishes and waiting tables, he started giving cha-cha-cha lessons. In the breaks between the classes, he entertained his students with Wing Chun demonstrations. Eventually, he opened his informal kung-fu studio with a handful of students at the age of 19.

There were only a few Eastern martial arts enthusiasts in America at that time, but Bruce quickly caught the eyes of some of them. He was charismatic, fun-loving, boisterious and an incredibly gifted athlete. He gained both friends and admirers quickly, and the two groups almost perfectly overlapped. In 1963, with an American friend James Lee (not a relative) he published a book about Wing Chun kung-fu, what he later, after breaking with traditional martial arts, regretted.

In his early twenties, Bruce had two aspirations. Either getting into Hollywood or opening a chain of schools overall the US and dedicating his life to martial arts. At first, he had moderate success in the second endeavor. He opened multiple studios, but their attendance was meager and the revenue barely enough to pay the bills. 

He also quickly discovered another challenge. In America, he started to get disillusioned with traditional martial arts, even with the more practical Wing Chun style he learned. They were stiff, impractical, and put more emphasis on practicing unrealistic techniques than on real sparring excercises. The Wing Chun techniques didn't really work against the bigger and more athletic Americans. He realized that he has to move beyond what he learned in Hong Kong.

His fame among martial art practitioners grew and eventually caught the attention of Ed Parker, the father of American Kempo. Parker organized the 1964 Long Beach Karate Tournament and he invited Bruce to give a demonstration of kung-fu, which at that time was an just obscure Chinese martial art few even heard about. This was Bruce's first chance to perform in front of a large audience.

Multiple demonstrations followed, on which he often spoke about traditional martial arts in disparaging terms. In 1964, the kung-fu community of Chinatown, Oakland where Bruce opened a studio had enough. Not only was the cocky Lee badmouthing their styles, he was teaching the art to non-Chinese. A local martial artist, Wong Jack-man, decided to issue a formal challenge to Bruce, which lead to highly controversial duel. Bruce defeated Wong in a matter of minutes, but as after his boxing bout, he was extremely dissappointed with his own performance. After the short fight he was exhausted, his fists were bruised, and realized that Wing Chun's close-quarter techniques were not effective against someone who avoids direct engagement. This experience reinforced his growing dissatisfaction with kung-fu.

Eventually, becoming disgusted with its obsession of forms, rigidity and ineffectuality, he turned his back on Chinese Kung Fu completely. His personal style, what he in 1967 christened to Jeet Kune Do, was mainly based on Western boxing, fencing, and some Wing Chun techniques and principles. Even the name "the way of the intercepting fist", esoterically Oriental as it sounds, is adopted from the fencing tactic "stop-hit" that aims to intercept the opponent in mid-attack instead of a parry and counter-attack combination.

He watched boxing matches endlessly. He especially admired  Mohammad Ali, whose matches he would watch for hours, shadowing the champ's moves over and over again. His training ethos put free sparring at the center of the training session and dispensed with traditional Eastern training elements. Bruce was an early proponent of a totalitarian art encompassing all forms of stand-up fighting and grappling - Mixed Martial Arts, as it's called today.

He also become obsessed with nutrition and body-building. In his early twenties, he could still be described as slightly pudgy a young man with still some baby fat on. He explored many diets and imposed some exotic ones on himself over the years. Apart from running every morning, and the hours honing his martial art skills every day, three times a week he lifted weights. The boy with a baby fat transformed his body to that paragon of physical perfection we can see in his movies.

In 1964, he married one of his students Linda Emery and not long after they had their first baby, Brandon. Linda's family was not enamoured by the prospect of having a pennyless Chinese wanna-be-actor as a son-in-law (the racialist resentment was not unrequited when Linda visited Bruce's family in Hong Kong later), but after the marriage Bruce quickly won them over with his characteristic charm.

In 1966 came a breakthrough in his acting career when he was cast into the role of Kato, the masked Asian martial artist sidekick of the vigilante Green Hornet. The show lasted only one season but it propelled Lee into the right circles, of both Hollywood and the martial art world. Still uncertain about the future, he moved back and forth between opening schools and vying for new movie roles.

With acting, teaching, and having a family, he had no time for University. Although he silently dropped his studies in 1964, his interest for psychology and philosophy only deepened. He was a voracious reader. One of his early aspirations was to own a second-hand bookshop. By the end of his life his personal library contained over 2,500 books.

Utilizing his newfound fame as a minor Hollywood celebrity, Lee continued touring the US giving demonstrations on Karate tournaments, which were starting to become the big thing in the mid-sixties. As the guest star Kato, he demonstrated his famous one-inch punch, 2-finger push-ups, side-kicks that sent his partners flying in the air, his preternatural speed, and performed free sparring. He befriended several champions of the era. Between 1967 and 1969 Karate champions Joe Lewis, Mike Stone, and Chuck Norris, or Jhoon Rhee, father of American Teakwon-Do became not only his friends, but training partners/students as well.

Getting friends and admirers was easy for him. He was a natural showman. Witty, charming and always fun. This wasn't lost on his female acquitances either. Beyond the traits his male friends admired, Bruce was gorgeous. Despite being a loving husband and father, he often had relationships, and didn't even put too much effort in keeping them secret. This was something that his wife Linda, his always supportive and devoted wife did not deserve, but apparently didn't know about them either.

Despite all the successes and friendships of Hollywood men and elite sportmen, Bruce's teaching fees and rare movie roles barely covered his expenses and now he had a family to feed, too. In 1967, a sturdent and friend of him, Jay Sibring, the hairstylist of stars, gave him an idea. As a personal self-defense trainer, he should angle for big Hollywood names. To catch the eye of the creme, he should charge extraorbintant fees. Lee, not fully convinced, nevertheless went along, and to his surprise, soon he found among his students James Coburn, one of the biggest stars of the time, and Steve McQueen, the King of Cool, the biggest star of Hollywood. His slowly forming but eventually deep friendship with McQueen was a mixture of mutual admiration, envy and rivalry. McQeen wanted Lee's physical gifts and Lee wanted the stardom.

In 1968, Bruce and Linda purchased a house in Bel Air, Los Angeles. On the surface, Bruce achieveved the dream of every American immigrant. He married an American, made into Hollywood, befriended the stars, owned a beautiful house. But everything was built on debt. The family often lived from one paycheck to the next. Bruce was as financially irresponsible as flamboyant. Shortly after buying the house he could not afford, he spent the full 7,000 dollars he unexpectedly got from his mother who sold one of his father's buildings not to pay off some of his debts, but to buy a red 911 Porsche. His prospects were not rosy. At the time, there were not that many roles to go around for Asian characters in Hollywood. He refused to play the traditional role of the subservient Chinaman, and he spoke English with heavy accent.

Even though his career as an actor did not progress as fast as he wanted, his reputation as a martial artist wunderkind and teacher, the legends of his feats, and his circle of Hollwyood friends grew. He rubbed shoulders with Frank Sinatra and taught Roman Polanski. If not yet a successful actor, he was the most sought after martial arts instructor in Hollywood.

Too turbocharge his career, Bruce had a idea for a movie. An X-rated, allegorical martial arts epos, combining martial arts and philosophy. He named it The Silent Flute. He tried to convince first McQueen, then Coburn to partner up with him on the movie, but after some promising start on Coburn's side, he was eventually rejected by both men. That really hurt him personally and Bruce woved that one day he will show them. He will be a bigger star than McQueen.

He also had another idea of a TV-show featuring a Chinese martial artist roaming the American West, the Warrior. Unfortunately, he tshow was dropped in favour of another of a similar theme, the Kung Fu. Lee auditioned for the lead role of that, too, but he was found too intense for the character of a reluctant, contemplative dispenser of justice. The role was given to David Carradine.

In 1970, Lee suffered a debilitating back injury during a morning work out. He was forced to bed for 3 months and the doctors told him he would never kick high again. 3 months of bed-confinement would be a torture to anyone, but it was especially cruel for someone whose life revolved around his physical abilities. To make the most of it, Bruce turned his energies into writing. The sketches, notes and essays in which he tried to capture both his philosophy to martial arts and technical repertiore was collected and published after his death by his widow Linda in a book titled The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Not unlike popular books on fencing of earlier times, the Tao covers techniques, tactics, psychology, physiology, training advices and discussions of concepts like rythm and timing. In the end, Bruce recovered completely.

By the early 70s, he temporarily gave up on Hollywood, and took up an offering of making a movie in Hong Kong, The Big Boss. Lee with his family sold their Bel Air house and moved to Hong Kong. Lee, who by then had got used to American standars was appalled by amatuerism of Hong Kong movie makers. He clashed heavily with the director and the producer. His behaviour on the set was typical Bruce Lee and the opposite of normal stereotypes. He was loyal to and gracious with the stuntsmen and the crew and rude and disrespectful for those above in the hierarchy.

To his surprise, the low budget and amateurish Big Boss which was based on 3 pages on script, terrible acting, and lousy directing turned out to be thunderous success in Hong Kong. His second movie, the Fists of Fury in 1972 was even more of a blast. The audience have never seen anything like Bruce before. Hong Kong cinema was flush with Kung-fu movies of course, but the fight scenes in them were extremly long and artificial. What Bruce Lee did seemed frighteningly real. Amazing, but at the same time something that can both work in real life and can be learned. Secondly, in both movies, a Chinese guy sticks it up to the British and the and hateful Japanese. The Hongkongers who were mostly refugees from the mainland living under their British overlords, were in a desperate need of national pride. Bruce gave it to them. Audiences raved and literally were throwing chairs in the air in the theaters. Bruce has become a superstar literally overnight.

Fame pressed hard on him. Paparazzis, constant challenges for duels, intrusion in his familiy's privacy, attacks of Hong Kong media mocking his rusty Chinese and questioning his nationality made him stressed and paranoid. He hired bodyguards from his former stuntmen friends and - the human weapon himself - even started carrying a gun. 

Bruce decided to keep total control over his next movie, The Way of The Dragon. He wrote, directed, and starred his spagetthi Eastern. He offered the role of the bad guy to the most famous American Karate fighter of the time, the then middle-weight world champion, Chuck Norris. Even though its climax is arguably one of the greatest martial art fight scenes of all time and it was a big commercial success, Lee didn't think the movie was good enough to be released in the West as a vehicle to get back into Hollywood.

In 1972, he started to shoot the Game of Death, another movie where he wanted to demonstrate his philosophy to martial arts, even more explicitly than in The Way of The Dragon. Negotiations started to have George Lazenby, the latest James Bond, as a co-star of the movie. Perhaps 20 minutes material was produced, and the movie was released only 1978, 5 years after Bruce's death.

1973 came the Enter the Dragon, Lee's first superproduction meant to conquer Hollywood for him. As one of the international cast of main characters, Bruce played an unstoppable killing machine driven by cold revenge. The movie made Lee a houshold name all over the world but he didn't live to see that. On July 20, 1973, in his mistress's flat, Bruce died of cerebral edema. The indirect cause of death is still debated. The most probable theories are that of heat stroke and medicine allergy. After his death, Enter the Dragon made the so far obscure Asian actor the Hollywood superstar he had always wanted to be. The audience loved it and even the critics had to grudgingly admit that despite its extreme violence (the threshold was lower in 1973), the movie is something they haven't seen before. Fights in Western movies still followed the John Wayne-type coreography. Lee broke the way of a new genre that was carried on later by Chuck Norris, Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and countless other actors cum martial artists ever since. But he was only followed, never replaced. Bruce Lee's name has irrevocably fused with the image of the ultimate martial artist, the unbeatable fighter.

His body was put to rest in Seattle, the city where he and Linda fell in love. Among the six men carrying his coffin on his last journey were James Coburn and Steve McQueen. 

Lee has become a superstar, far beyond anyone, even he could have imagined. He did become bigger than McQueen. Apart from the remotest corners of the world, practically there is no one over 30 who hasn't heard about Bruce Lee, a man who died fifty years ago at 32. They might not recall the titles of his movies or when he lived or they mistakenly think he was a Japanese Karate champ. But they know Bruce Lee, the icon. 

For us who watched his movies when we were kids, and take his presense in the public consciousness a given, it's almost impossible to appreciate the enormity of his achievement. Similarly nigh impossible to find any name or face that is more recognisable than his, with the possible exception of Elvis. But perhaps not even the King can push him off the throne of pop culture. Bruce Lee, after all, was invincible.

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On Cryptocurrencies

I'm late to the party. I've been continuously postponing writing about my take on Bitcoin for years, and now, with the whole crypto-market crashing through the floor, it will look like I'm just projecting hindsight wisdom back in the past.

But on second thought, religions never really die out. And Bitcoin has had crashes before and always bounced back stronger. It might not be the end yet.

So, why do I think that when the end comes, it won't be pretty?

I owe my antipathy towards Bitcoin at least as much to gutfeel as to rational argument. The former can be summarized quickly. Every second crypto-advocate I stumbled into on Youtube or in real life came across either as a second-hand car dealer, or a fresh convert to a cult - where the leader is an ex-second-hand car dealer. With all the unbearably irritating mixture of smugness and ignorance.

That was the gutfeel part. On the rational side, I never understood what exactly cryptocurrencies are good for. What problems do they solve? They are inferior substitutions to fiat money in almost every respect. According to Economics 101, money has three functions. Medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account.

A bitcoin is a unit of account, that's alright, but as a medium of exchange, cryptos have very limited use. With Bitcoin, I could buy almost nothing I need on a daily basis. Food, books, petrol, clothes, paying the bills - I need local currency for all of these. As a store of value cryptos would need to be stable. They are anything but. If I had converted my savings to Bitcoin half a year ago, I would have lost half of them. If to Terra, they would have been just wiped out.

I've heard two main arguments from crypto fans. One, cryptos are anti-cyclical, two, their built-in scarcity prevents inflation. 

Anti-cyclical means that in times of financial turmoil, cryptos would be safe havens - like traditionally gold has always been. That theory has been just crushed, along with the markets. Everything is in free fall now, but nothing falls faster than cryptos. I have no idea why, but even if I knew it wouldn't make me feel better, had I invested my wealth in them.

The scarcity argument is not convincing either. Whenever I heard someone extolling Bitcoin's virtues, they were always depicted against an apocalyptic view of today's financial world. "Governments will start printing money any day now and we are accelerating toward a new Weimar!" Yeah, sure. 

One, governments don't print money, central banks do. 

Two, independent central banks and fiat money are actually two of the great inventions of humankind. The amount of money in circulation has to be aligned with the size of the economy. The ability of central bankers to control the money supply can be misused, but that possibility doesn't automatically turn a country into Zimbabwe. Rather, it provides tools to mitigate economic turmoils, which central bankers have used quite effectively during both the Great Recession and the pandemic. And didn't use during the Great Depression - hence there was a Great Depression.

So, contrary to libertarian fanatics, who see crypto as a way to freedom from government tyranny, central bankers are not bloodsucking monsters whose only purpose in life is to rid you of all your savings, but professionals whose job is to keep the economy running. They make mistakes, but the last 70 years were, by and large, the most stable and prosperous period in human history. 

Three, the general wisdom is that deflation is even worse than inflation. I'm really out of my wheelhouse here, but if the money supply was constrained and in the growing economy constant amount of money chased a growing number of things, that would lead to deflation. I guess.

But leaving all theory aside, babbling about the inflation-resistance of an asset that loses 10% of its value in a day of its value whenever Elon Mask wakes up on the wrong side of the bed? If a South-American country's currency had this kind of volatility, it would be a laughing stock even in the region. Who are these guys kidding?

Even if cryptos didn't have these shortcomings, I'd have a long list of doubts. What if I invest my savings in Bitcoin, then it falls out of vogue, and another crypto takes its place (which might allow for more than 3-7 transactions per second - just for comparison, for Visa, the number is 1,700)? What if I forget my master password? Normal banks will never seize my money even if I lose all my papers. Speaking of safety, is my money insured by the state? Who I go to complain if I'm the victim of fraud? If I accidentally sent money to the wrong place? What about the unknown unknowns that would manifest only once we moved to a crypto-based financial world? 

Long story short, I think cryptos are Ponzi schemes. You make a profit if more people buy into it after you than the ones before you. The rest is techno blah-blah, hype, FOMO, and libertarian fever dreams.


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What makes Putin tick - The Myth of Russian Greatness

Time for another session for some armchair expertise. Coming to think of it, New Vac Times engages in this kind of punditry so often that it merits its own tag. Created.

Much has been said in the media and on public forums about what made Putin launch the war against Ukraine. The intellectual bottom comprised of arguments like "Ukraine used to be part of Russia, didn't it?", or "the USA started it!". One rung up on the sanity ladder came those who, just having left the pandemic behind transformed themselves from epidemiologists into geopolitical experts (but not historians) overnight, claiming confidently that what forced Putin's hand is "the aggressive encroachment of NATO".

But Russia invading its neighbors and playing the victim is nothing new. This is a recurrent pattern that existed before Putin, before NATO, and before even the Soviet Union. 

There is a long tradition of Russian thought, according to which the Russians are a chosen people. Russia is not merely a nation-state like any other, but a civilization itself, a land with a destiny. Moscow is the Third Rome, and Russia as a whole is the successor of the Roman Empire. The bulwark against the heathen hordes of the past and the Western decadence of the present. Even without the theological/cultural charge, it is a superpower rivaled only by the United States, that deserves a place in the highest decision-making circles.

This grand delusion gives the Russians a superiority complex that immediately crashes when they look beyond their borders and get confronted by the fact that Russia is inferior to the West in everything that counts. Military might, economic clout, soft power, cultural influence. 

The West dominates all major international institutions from the IMF to The Hague, American military budget and might dwarves the rest of the world combined, Western countries are the richest, most envied places on Earth. People all over the world chose English as their second language, not Russian. They watch and listen to American products, and they go for their news to the BBC, not Russia Today. Artists, scientists, and media personalities of all kinds measure their success by the extent of their breaking into the Western consciousness. The land of dreams for people from poorer countries is America and Europe, not Eurasia. Even Russians choose to school their children in Swiss or English boarding schools and send them to American universities. They park their money in London, go skiing in the Swiss Alps, and spend the summers on the French Riviera.

Russia has a GDP just below Italy's, and in the words of Barack Obama, the Russian economy "doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy", except oil, gas, and arms. In the even blunter words of the late John McCain, "Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country".

The gaping chasm between the grand delusions and reality yields resentment, envy, jealousy, and anger. If we are the chosen people, how come it's not us who are calling the shots here? They just start a war, and don't even bother to ask us anymore? Why do nations that used to belong to our sphere of influence choose Western alliance over us? Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, the rest. Love us, you ungrateful scum, or else...!

When the trollish Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly opined that NATO had "become a purely geopolitical project aimed at taking over territories orphaned by the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and the Soviet Union", former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski retorted, as our age demands, on Twitter: "We were not orphaned by you because you were not our daddy. More of a serial rapist. Which is why you are not missed..."

The "conversation" exposes not only the characteristic ghoulish cynicism of Russian leaders dating back to at least Stalin, but also a yearning to be seen both as a victim and great power simultaneously. A great power that has the right to "protect" its neighbors.

And like any other country with a serious inferiority complex, Russia explains away its failures by blaming them on the meddling of malign foreign powers. 

When the Soviet Union, after brutalizing every land it could lock in its sphere of influence for 40 years, fell apart - due to its own incompetence, corruption, and bankrupt ideology, it wasn't invaded by its former enemy, nor by the countries it has trampled on for decades. Nor were reparations demanded. Instead, Russia received billions of dollars worth of foreign aid. Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were celebrated as heroes in the West. In 1994, Russia joined the Partnership for Peace program, and in 2002 the Russia-NATO council. In 1997, Russia was invited into the G8 - despite that it didn't meet the standards required for joining, and in 2012 it gained membership in the WTO. In an effort to integrate Russia into the international order, the US has made constant gestures, London (disgracefully) offered its money-laundering services, and Germany chose to unilaterally increase its own dependence on Russian energy.

Even beyond economical and political nurturing, Russian leaders have been in constant need of ego-stroking. Tony Blair's advice to George Bush in the early 2000s was to treat the Russians as a superpower. French presidents, who seemingly fancy their country as a diplomatic superpower, have been running regularly to Moscow to ask what the West should do so the Russians feel better about themselves (ironically, France is a country that also has an inflated view of its own importance and probably not accidental that in the strength of anti-American sentiment in Europe, it is second only to Russia).

And yet, in the Russian narrative, they were disrespected and mistreated. Putin is reported to engage frequently in hour-long monologues reciting his grievances to anyone who cares to listen. The West lied to us, deceived us, bullied us, and the rest, on and on.

Even when Putin disappears eventually, I don't see how this ugly side of Russian national character would go away. The only effective salve on bruised ego is success. The structure of the Russian economy and the endemic corruption prevents an economic one, and in the absence of that, Russian leaders will only measure their accomplishments in military achievements.

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Debate circle

 "We couldn't do these meetings in person in the last two years because of the pandemic", explained G. to another newcomer as I entered the room, the last word preceded by a measured pause and accompanied by scare quotes drawn into the air with his fingers. "Well, this is up for a good start", I thought.

I attended this meetup the second time, the first after the second wave of the "so-called" pandemic. That time I was invited by a former colleague and the conversation was about climate change and the role of fossil fuels in it. The speaker then, who customarily gave a presentation that was followed by a free-style debate, was a representative of the coal industry. So I was prepared to hear some controversial opinions about the Ukrainian war as well, which was tonight's topic.

G., who is the chief organizer of these events, is a fellow countryman of mine. He has lived in Switzerland long enough to lose his Australian accent which he had acquired before. Despite the decades of absence, he hasn't lost his touch with our motherland, as I learned five minutes later when the conversation with the nice Canadian lady strayed onto Hungarian politics. "Orban is a center, very center-right guy, who just refuses to go along with this woke craziness" - he explained. "Maybe I should add some nuance to that?", I wondered silently for some seconds, then decided to pass.

Slowly, people started pouring in, and at seven, the official start time, the oblong table was densely surrounded by circa twenty people. The age distribution of the participants ranged from the early twenties to late fifties, the gender ratio was 6-1 for men, and a depressing 80% of us were software developers. And this is a talk about geopolitics. I'm not sure whether there is something wrong with software engineers or maybe with everyone else.

In absence of a designated speaker, G. kicked off the meeting with a quick overview of the situation. This is a terrible tragedy. It's incomprehensible why no one in the world stood up and demanded that the warring parties stop this immediately and sit down to the negotiating table. The Swiss are equally incomprehensible, giving up their hard-earned neutrality? If they freeze the bank accounts left and right, who will keep their money in their banks in the future? The media is biased and unreliable, and this heroic picture they paint of that corrupt Zelensky is just ludicrous. Still, it's a terrible, terrible situation. And so confusing. What does Putin want? What do Ukrainian Nazis want? Just sad. 

I stopped any effort to be subtle about my facial expression halfway through the speech when it dawned on me that I made a terrible mistake. God, there is still two hours left. But luckily, the situation slowly began to improve and a real conversation started with a diversity of opinions. There were a couple of guys who were, not experts by any means, but well-informed. Some were not very well-informed but were arguing in good faith. Then the mandatory useful idiot, chewing on the Monroe-doctrine (what would the US do if Canada wanted to join a Russian military alliance? it wouldn't behave any differently, would it?) and the stealthy, creepy encroachment of NATO upon Russia (that is, the rudeness of the Baltics towards their neighbor for looking for protection). Anyway, what's been wrong with Finlandisation? A like-minded young historian kid chimed in musing on what right the West has to condemn Russia after Iraq? At that point, I was exercised enough to challenge that but someone else raised his hand quicker.

And then there was the highlight of the evening, the guy who bravely made the next step over G.'s hand-wringing lamentations. Ukrainian Nazis are indeed active in the Donbas. How much do they influence the government? Well, who knows, can you prove they don't? Euromaidan protests, orange revolution? The CIA staged them. Russian incompetence? He is not so sure about that, he read some articles. Mariupol? The Ukrainians themselves are shelling it. Bucha? You shouldn't believe the media uncritically. Nothing confrontational, just asking questions. Politely taking notes, nodding. Then the next observation (the Ukrainians were developing nuclear weapons, you know). For a while, I was genuinely puzzled by him. Is he on Russian payroll or simply enjoys being a cretin, just for the thrill of it? In the end, I decided it's the latter (judgment confirmed later in the bar when he said he knows about international banking and finance - that's why he knows it for a fact that the US is about to collapse - because...prepare...he is a software developer in a bank).

But there is was a real and pleasant surprise in the evening. A young Polish guy, A., who, unlike the rest of us, knew the topic in depth. Not my own "30-days podcast crash course on Ukraine" type of education. He was respectful, but argued forcefully, almost passionately. So passionately, that at one point his voice cracked. He had friends in Eastern Ukraine. His dismantling of the nonsense was merciless, and I leaned back and enjoyed the show. 

At 9:30, I almost felt sorry that the conversation ended, but my bladder was on the verge of explosion. I went to shake the hands of A. and joined others in the bar for an after-event beer.

The topic of the next event will be "Books vs Tik-Tok". I'll think about going.

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History calls - and says playtime is over

As a teenager, I had the unconventional view that we live in a very pleasant age. I didn't know that it was unconventional and I didn't know too much about the past apart from what I was taught in school, but that seemed like a no-brainer. According to those high-school history books, before the second part of the twentieth century, people stumbled from one war to another. In peacetime, they simply lived in poverty, religious intolerance, and under the oppression of the nobility and the Church. Those who were too loud about not liking it faced horrendous torture and ended up serving as common entertainment when they were executed in public. Even if you were well-off and left in peace, there was no medicine, hygiene, education, policing, impartial justice system, and all the rest we take for granted today.

My own, more recent, family history didn't paint a much brighter picture either. All of my grandparents were dirt-poor as children. Apart from one grandfather, all of them lost siblings while growing up. They had six years in school tops, spent part of their teenage years in cellars during WW 2 hiding from bombs and Russian soldiers, then started their families in the darkest period of the communist dictatorship. My parents' lives, growing up in the sixties and seventies, were incomparably better. And I and my generation had it the best so far.

So it was baffling to find out that others didn't share my opinion. A cousin of mine was a devout Catholic and very much into medieval history, so for her, the Middle Ages rocked. It was understandable, in a way. But I also recall a conversation that happened around 11th or 12th grade. I don't remember how we came to the topic, but an otherwise very smart, though probably a bit naive, boy argued that peasants in the olden times must have had a much better life than we. They didn't need to hurry anywhere, had a great community, and were able to enjoy small things in life. Well, I thought, since they buried a third of their children, had not much to eat, and were brutally exploited, they'd better enjoy the small things they had. There was a couple of similar conversations in the following years. Not too many, but all reliably similar to make me feel rather lonely with my worldview.

Things are going well...

Much later, around 3-4 years ago, I came across Steven Pinker's books, in which he demonstrates the decline in violence through the ages, and the progress humanity has achieved in almost every part of life that counts. Life expectancy, security, material well-being, education, freedom, tolerance, etc. It is a very long list. Pinker's work has been either a massive boost to my confirmation bias, or just a welcome vindication of my default worldview.

Around the age of 23, when I started reading newspapers, my view changed a bit. I still thought that from a historical perspective, life today was great - although not everywhere -, but I also had the impression that a day will come when it will be viewed as a golden era - that is, the good times won't last forever. Not because the trends showed a downward trajectory, more like the opposite, but there are ups and downs in everything.

...too well

The point I want to make with this long-winded rambling is that things are really much better today than they used to be. Having done so, now I can present the central thesis of the post: this state of affairs has some unforeseen and negative consequences. Our life has become so safe and comfortable that we can afford to be unserious. Not only in the political sphere, but in the general social realm.

It's been demonstrated in plain view by the ubiquitous attitude towards public safety and the well-being of others during the recent pandemic. Many people who could work from home, watch Netflix 24/7, and in general were not very affected by the pandemic, when facing some mild inconveniences (like the requirement of vaccination for entering restaurants and theatres), cried immediately tyrannies. The obligatory mask-wearing on public transport was "unbearable oppression". Vaccine certificates are the proof of a "dictatorship". Everything was about "my rights" and no mention of "my responsibilities" towards others. Perhaps the restrictions were overdone. But those who think that they now live under tyranny have no idea whatsoever what real tyrannies look like. 

Back to politics, when Boris Johnson became the mayor of London back in 2008, I joked that the English are doing so well that they can afford to choose a clown as the mayor of their capital. At that time, I meant "clown" as more of a compliment. I didn't know anything about BoJo but he seemed like a cool guy. 

On more recent events, I never bought into the story that the voters for Brexit and Donald Trump were the losers of globalization who felt that the "elite" is despising them. I thought both disasters were brought about by people who were simply bored and wanted entertainment. Practically no one starves today in the UK or in the States. No child is without a roof over her head. No one is facing religious persecution, everyone has access to education. No one seems to remember why the European integration started (spoiler alert, the Second World War). We live a pampered life, where the fiercest battles we can find are fought in Brussels, the House of Commons, and in the US Senate, and it's boring.

Politics used to be about material things because just two generations ago material things were of life and death importance. Today, politics is mostly about identity and feelings. People can make incredibly stupid decisions at the polling booth and nothing really bad will happen. And when the lower level desires of the Maslow pyramid are satisfied, our attention turns elsewhere. We want entertainment and to feel important, righteous, and smart.

I heard recently a historian explaining how well Hitler understood the underlying principle. Promising fight and glory, even hardships for the noble cause, captures people's hearts and imaginations more than "gradual change", "material prosperity", "steady improvement", "insightful debates", etc. The latter ones are what democracies should be about.

The infantilization on the Left

Being unserious manifested itself in different ways on the two ends of the political spectrum. Many on the left, feeling disappointed that the great battles for liberal ideas happened before they were born, decided to pretend that we live in the most homophobic, misogynistic, racist world, so they can feel good about themselves by fighting against it. In reality, no human in history ever lived in a place where it was better to be a woman, homosexual, or brown-skinned than the present, in the West. It's not that the wokes remind us that there is still much to do to lift up minorities. Many of them say with full seriousness that so far, there has been no progress at all.

 ... and the Right

On the right end, people started to fantasize about non-existent enemies (hordes of Muslim migrants in Hungary, power-hungry, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, godless liberals destroying the nation in the US), and to wax lyrical about older, better, more God-fearing times of national greatness and their strong, wise leaders. Paranoia about international philanthropists, like George Soros, was always present, but now, when there was no Cold War to fill people's hearts with real dread, it has grown a hundredfold.

It is fascinating that it doesn't matter how much a leader steals openly, trashes democratic norms, or even orders the murder of journalists and political opponents, he only needs to say: "I stand for Christian/traditional values", to get an out-of-jail card from religious right-wingers of otherwise democratic affiliations and high education. The majority of American public intellectuals on the Right, after getting past the mandatory throat clearing ("yes, Orban is overstepping the legal boundaries, his media-handling is heavy-handed, blah-blah..."), will continue on expressing their admiration for the kind of country that obnoxious tin-pot dictator has been building. Recently, up until a month ago, even Putin was a strong, masculine, Christian role model for not a negligible portion of Republicans. And for the full Hungarian right-wing elite.

Brexit has been a great example of making a decision that had clear, numerous, and thoroughly explained drawbacks, mostly imaginary benefits, and was made in a fight against non-existing enemies. Trump is the best example of how people can descend into complete, bottomless madness.

Reality calls

Putin's attack on Ukraine was a jolt of common sense into the common consciousness. Life can be serious, and decisions have consequences. Reality doesn't care about your pet fantasies. Our brief, ahistorical era of complacency is over.

It won't wake up people who are already invested in their beliefs. Almost nothing does. But it will sway people who are sitting on the fence. Many liberals will realize that the West might be not the worst place to live, and who goes to what toilet might be not the most important problem of the world today. And some strongman-sympathizer Christian nationalists will sympathize less. On both sides, the taken-for-granted advantages of liberal democracies, like not being sent to Siberian prison camps for opposing the government, or beaten up by the police just for protesting against a war, will be a bit more appreciated.

Regardless of how individual thinking on these issues will change, the public tolerance for people whining about hurt feelings and the oppressive nature of Western democracies will sink. Same for public admiration of "strong Christian leaders" (aka Putin&Orban).

The hardcore won't change, but as we finally have real problems to talk about, they will get less oxygen in public discourse. That's a good start.

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