Observing all this mess in the opposition camp, and over the reaction of people from different countries and cultures to what’s happening around them, here’s a thought.
It seems that some cultures, Russia appearing to be one of them, have a stronger predisposition to distance themselves from even like-minded individuals and neighbors, on the “us versus them” scale. In many cultures, adversity unites, but in some, it seems to build fences. This individualism has likely been cultivated over generations, ironically, by the method of the reverse. The state forced people to unite, and people might have perceived this compulsion with resistance. Forming strong, authoritative groups has always been dangerous unless these groups were under state control. Even the church does not create such an “interest-based community”.
I am currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and it precisely discusses this topic. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most people took place within three ancient frameworks: the nuclear family, the extended family, and the local community. More precisely, bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.
Back then, a person was never alone. More precisely, they wouldn’t have survived long. A person who had lost their family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. Boys and girls who ran away from home could at best hope to become servants in some new family. At worst, they ended up in the army or a brothel. And then this circle, whether nuclear (immediate family), extended (relatives), or even more extended (friends, neighbors) behaved like one big organism, where each person did not have enough will to change the direction in which the whole “organism” was moving.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in China, the population was organized into the baojia system. A unit of ten families was called a jia (degemena), and ten jia (or one hundred families) made up a bao. Each jia had a plaque, which circulated among the families. The family holding it at a given time was the jiazhang, or elder of the degemena. Similarly, the captain of the bao was the baozhang.
So, when a member of the bao committed a crime, other members of the bao could be punished, particularly the elders of the bao. Taxes were also collected from the bao, and it was the elders’ responsibility (not state officials) to assess each family’s situation and determine the amount of tax they should pay. Imagine how to cheat under such conditions?
As far as I know, a similar system informally exists even today, in societies where individualism hasn’t penetrated yet. Many Muslim territories. Plus, places that “civilization” hasn’t reached yet (from our point of view).
In many such societies, the concept of home is much wider than for people living in the apartment-car-office-vacation format.
Even in developed Europe and the USA, this identification of a person as part of society is still strong. People go to church on weekends not always because they are very religious. But because they are raised to be part of a larger group of people, not just themselves. Of course, this too is breaking down with each passing year. Where individuality has triumphed for various reasons, fences begin, disarray and wavering in achieving common goals. The notion of “why do I personally need this” begins to prevail over “why do the 100 people close to me need this”.
I think this is the main reason why some groups of people can unite for a common goal, while for others it is unnatural. They can too, and it even works out somehow, but it takes more energy and strength. And the brain has to readjust on the fly, and that’s oh so uncomfortable.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 