The West, the East, and then there is Russia

The basic and most simple, yet fundamental difference between the East as defined by China and the West. especially as defined by the US:

1. In the US you are told that to achieve and deserve something you must really want it ("I deserve to win because I really want to and I want so much!") The will to power. In a word. Existence is a line, a vector.

2. In the East, you are told by zen masters that if you want and strive to achieve something, you start turning away from it. Quite a paradox. Mastering the dialectics of the opposite (in a rather non-Marxist way). Existence is a circle (by going one way, one comes from the other way back).

3. Note that neither of the two says about anything about loving in this regard. Is this where Russia comes in? "We've come to earth to learn how to love."

The assumed "solution" to the Western way is calculation, statistics, and force. The solution to the paradox of existence is learning how to become a poet the way water catches the light. To learn how to love one must first earn and deserve the right to learn that.

Thus, in the West, man reached its highest form in a financier or stock broker (life just needs to be figured out--literally). 

In Taoism and Confucianism, no one can become perfect (in the state or the military or elsewhere) who cannot compose a perfect poem, however, short, and especially, if it is very short.

Since the time of Peter I, Russia thought of itself as an extension, an archipelago of the West, although one where the waves from the West are coming with delay and often understood and imitated only on the surface, by the surface, and for the surface. However, consciously (in terms of consciousness as its skin), Russia has been part of the West. Putin is still a continuation of this mode. So is Dugin. 

In her actual, national and prophetic ethos, Russia was always closer to the East, and that's why also her best form of expression and self-expression was poetry, whether in music, literature, dance, or chess or math. 

However, where the West, reinforced by Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes and others (including Marx) embarked as a civilization on the path of Phaedrus' Lysias' Non-Lover or Non-Loving, the heart of Russia is bound with the other "Western" (or Platonic) daemon of Eros as Love.

It was also this Love that proved to be the stronger motive than the Nazi worship and cult of death in the Great Patriotic War. The Russians won because they loved more strongly what they were fighting for. 

And it was the nihilistic loss and betrayal of this ethos under the soulless late Soviet leaders that also brought on Russia the shame of the 1980s and the 1990s and its near death.

The message? Love is stronger than death, and poetry without love is useless.