Julian Macfarlane
JULIAN MACFARLANE
The Video
If you are a coffee buyer, and you have read my very long articles on Russian history, culture and civilization, you will know that I adopt a multidisciplinary approach to analysis, which I believe contributes to the accuracy of my findings. That means a lot of sideways thinking.
Know Putin=know Russia
Despite ethnic discontinuities, including religious and linguistic differences, most Russians have in common social collectivism born of necessity that a harsh environment imposed on a largely agricultural society where people had to cooperate to survive, not only within their own villages but in concert with others.
Compare this to the US of A, an immigrant culture emphasizing individualism, competition, and for three centuries focused on completely marginalizing if not exterminating the original inhabitants of North America, always in conflict with nature. A lot of people with no connection out for themselves.
Yes, Americans do cooperate on a community level – when they have to. And there are many kind-hearted, good people.
But individualism and competition represent drives that feed each other. Sometimes religious belief doesn’t help either.
The Puritans believed, for example, that God chose only a few to go to heaven – the Elect – the great majority of people were dumped in hell. God knows why! LOL. a sort of proto-Zionist philosophy.
The Russians had several religions, Russian Orthodox, Islam. Buddhism, and animism, all of which emphasize community, family and collective well-being. There was no “Chosen People”.
Of course, collectivism in Russia varies by region, with Moscow and St. Petersburg influenced by European culture and many affluent Russians formerly seeking education in the West – the so-called “Atlanticists”.
But as a whole, “collectivism” dominates in Russia, just as it does in China and Japan.It offers significant advantages.
Social Support
No, Putin did not “suffer” from communal housing as a child— it supported him.
Psychological Resiliency
Because well-being is tied to group identity rather than isolated personal success, individuals in collectivist frameworks often experience lower rates of alienation and loneliness during shared societal hardships or economic downturns or war. In fact, they are less lonely in general. They have both family AND community.
Harmony and Cooperation:
While Western individualism fosters competitiveness to drive personal innovation, collectivism prioritizes group cohesion. This leads to smoother team dynamics, reduced interpersonal friction within organizations, and a higher willingness to sacrifice immediate personal gain for the collective good.
I am very, very good at some things —incredibly shitty at others and friends help a lot,
Shared Responsibility and Risk:
In a collectivist group, responsibility and risk are distributed across family, friends, community and, of course , organizations. This mitigates the intense pressure, performance anxiety, and fear of failure often experienced by individuals in highly competitive, individualistic societies.
Western analysts are always talking about Russia falling apart –and it surely would have were it a Western country. But it isn’t. It is not a “me” culture but a ‘We” culture.
That’s why just about every Russian these days has a “dacha” — a cottage with a garden for vegetables in or near a village in the countryside. It is also why Russians are obsessed with children and family—despite declining birthrates.
Productivity
Collaboration
Because maintaining harmony is prioritized, collectivist environments experience fewer disruptive, personality-driven conflicts saving the resources typically spent managing toxic internal competition.
Loyalty and Stability:
Collectivism means h higher organizational commitment and employee retention, which reduces the heavy productivity losses and financial costs that go with high turnover rates and continuous onboarding.
Error Correction:
When mistakes happen, collectivist teams focus on resolution rather than isolating and blaming an individual. This environment encourages employees to flag operational flaws early without the fear of reprisal or getting fired.
The Arts and Creative Expression
Greater Creativity"
Orchestras, large-scale theater productions, architectural ensembles, and massive animation studios depend heavily on horizontal collectivism. The ability of hundreds of creative specialists to subordinate their personal aesthetic egos to a single, unified creative vision produces monumentally complex works that are nearly impossible to achieve via fragmented individual efforts.
Preserving culture
Collectivist artistic traditions build on culture historical techniques, and folk arts rather than destroying them. Artistic expression gains in terms of technique and creative use of heritage rather than just off-the-wall novelty.
Excellence in Visiospatial/Structural Formats:
Cross-cultural psychological research indicates that participants from collectivist cultures often outperform individualistic counterparts in creativity tests, excelling at design and composition of figural gestalts over purely abstract verbal concoction.
Art as sharing
In collectivist societies, the arts serve a functional purpose to reinforce societal solidarity, document shared hardships, or celebrate communal resilience, making the art deeply integrated into the community rather than treated as an luxury commodity for elites.
Crime !
The “Obshchak” (The Collective Mutual Fund):
At the absolute center of traditional Russian criminal culture is the obshchak, a communal fund collected from members and prison inmates. It is not treated as a corporate treasury or personal wealth for a “Godfather.” Instead, it functions as a dark social safety net—used to support the families of imprisoned members, bribe guards, and sustain the community.
This directly mirrors collectivist ideals of shared risk and the sharing of resources.
Shared Consensus
Unlike the cinematic Western trope of a singular, all-powerful “Capo di Tutti Capi” (Boss of all Bosses), the Vory v Zakone operate as a polycentric fraternity. New members are inducted (”crowned”) only through a collective consensus of peers, and major disputes are resolved through shodki (tribunals or communal assemblies). Power relies on horizontal and vertical patronage networks rather than isolated despotic rule.
Krysha
In the chaotic post-Soviet transition of the 1990s, the state could not guarantee contracts or safety. The Russian mafia stepped in to provide a krysha (literally “roof”)—an institutionalized system of protection and dispute resolution. It functioned as an alternative, highly collectivized rule-of-law system (ponyatiya) that businesses relied on to operate in a fractured society.
Hierarchy and Heterarchy
It all depends on how much less-powerful members of a society accept and expect –or, as in the case of the US, can be persuaded to accept or expect that power is distributed unequally. Collectivist nations often appear as hierarchical while also being meritocratic.
Some nominally individualist nations like Denmark score nominally egalitarian but Denmark practices “social capitalism” which means a kind of social-economic collectivism.
There are obvious contradictions and to explain them we have to turn to the concept of heterarchy.
I have written a lot about how heterarchy works in Japan in my articles for coffee buyers. Throughout Russian history, heterarchy has been the shadow engine that keeps hierarchy from collapsing.
In the West, Soviet Union is normally thought of as a hyper-centralized, top-down structure—whether under the Tsars, the Soviets, or modern Vladimir Putin— but the sheer size and logistical impossibility of governing a huge multiethnic Federation requires a lot of lateral horizontal networks.
Heterarchy makes it all work. Which is why the police as mentioned in the interview often don’t enforce laws that nobody agrees with.
The Soviet Era
The Tolkach
Soviet state-run factories were given impossible production quotas but faced permanent shortages of raw materials. So, factory managers hired a specialized agent known as a tolkach. The tolkach had no formal power in the Soviet hierarchy. Instead, they operated purely heterarchically—traveling the country, leveraging informal friendships, and swapping favors to illegally secure steel, bricks, or electronics for their factory.]
Blat
For regular citizens, the official distribution system was broken, resulting in decades of rationing and empty shelves.
The population adapted using blat (an “economy of favors”). Blat was an intricate, unranked web of horizontal social networks. A butcher would give prime cuts of meat to a doctor in exchange for preferential medical care, who would then write a note for a university professor to get their child into a good school. It was a pure horizontal collective structure operating beneath the vertical state.
Institutional Factionalism
Even at the highest levels of Soviet power, governance was heterarchical. The Communist Party, the military-industrial complex, the regional governors, and the KGB operated as competing, overlapping interest groups. Rather than a single leader dictating everything, Soviet policy was usually a messy, horizontal negotiation .
The 1990s
The Rise of the Oligarchs
Oligarchs bought up privatized state assets and built massive, corporate networks that bypassed formal laws. Power shifted away from Moscow to independent regional governors, wealthy barons, and multi-ethnic criminal syndicates (the Obshchak).
Patronalism
Rather than operating via a market democracy, Russia devolved into a patronal system. Society was ruled by cross-cutting, informal networks of acquaintances that ignored formal borders between business, politics, and organized crime. You know how that works in the US of A.
Putin’s Sistema
Today, this is known simply as Sistema (The System) and is quite different.
Managed Heterarchy
Modern Russian governance features a dynamic combination of horizontal and vertical factors. Presidential rules are not absolute Below the President are the Siloviki (civil service elites), the technocrats, the state corporations, and regional leaders, each with their special expertise. . Putin referees these different groups drawing on their respective capabilities, but not allowing them to dominate the public interest.
Formal and Informal
In the West, institutions are thought to be configured so that political , corporate business, and intelligence agency interests are strictly separate when the opposite is actually true. . In Russia’s Sistema, separate groups cooperate and exchange members -- a corporate executive might be tasked with funding a state geopolitical objective abroad, while a state security officer might run a private commercial empire—it is meritocratic.
Network Management
State actors function as network controllers. They pick and choose partners from civil society, corporate sectors, and private entities, utilizing them to execute complex social or security goals. If an entity fails or becomes uncooperative, it disappears ; if it succeeds, it is rewarded with greater autonomy and access to resources
Village Culture
Russia and China’s concepts of a multipolar world see the world as one large community of many different communities. A village of villages.
Ummm… one of those videos with an irritating commentary…
Still, I like the animals.
One Earth, Many Worlds.
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Please contribute. As I mentioned earlier, I am still waiting for some kind of response from the Canadian Pension people in answer to my appeal , and every coffee helps. A LOT.
Ichi and Chappy and me. We are not dangerous animals. And we don’t need commentary.
All we need is coffee!
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Thinking Sideways
War with AIs
For Coffeebuyers!
If you are a coffeebuyer, you can access cloud links to previous long articles in multiple formats.
Just go to my coffeebuyer site and look to the right hand menu. Look for “publish”and click. It will open to a submenu. Click on posts. It should on topl!
Last night
I learned a lot writing last night’s article, which took some time to do—I ended up getting to bed around 5AM!
Like most people these days, I use AIs as search engines, which has obvious advantages and also disadvantages.
AIs give you a lot of information, but are biased by:
“consensus” thinking, the “mainstream” in their database
programmed algorithmic bias to support the Western belief system
The algorithms present their findings in a “logicized” format, which can be persuasive. Some of it may be lifted verbatim from various “sources”. This is not plagiarism, exactly, because the AI will give links to the sources (which most people ignore). Remember “AI” is not “AGI”.
Contradictions
My initial AI search offered just a couple of hundred words in results, which was relatively succinct.
But checking sources and focusing on contradictions, let to questions, which caused the AI to revise its findings, with irritating sycophancy as in “Oh, you make a brilliant point”… Or “That’s a brilliant question…”.
What’s with that word “brilliant”? Guess its better than “OK, dumbfuck, let me make things clear for your tiny brain!”
I am not a lateral, rather a linear, binary logic thinker, which is to say that I think holistically in gestalts rather than syntactic chains. Syntax is a strait jacket, at best a kind of verbal algorithm.
So, I query a lot.
In this case, I have am very familiar with cultural “collectivism” from having spent most of life in Asia — and also “individualism” from studies of historically-oriented social anthropology and social psychology, as well as having been brought up in Canada.
It is pretty obvious that collectivist cultures are all different, as, in fact, individualist cultures are.
Getting at the differences of Russian culture - its “particularity” to use an academic word, means dealing with any generalizations based on personal experience, as well as as those programmed into the AI.
Yes, Mr. Dumbfuck has a tiny brain
But I hope I gave a fairly accurate run-down of Russian collectivism in the context of the video I posted, which is very good, and less academic.
I think a major point that surface from the AI is its algorithmic assumptions that:
Russia is “totalitarian”
Russia is hierarchical
These things caused by “collectivism” also apply to China and, to an extent, Japan.
However, if you ask the right questions, you can see that collectivism is not functional in the long term unless balanced by heterarchy, which means equality and meritocracy.
When you look at Putin’s bio’, one striking point is his intellectual autonomy, yet his commitment to his core communities — family, friends, then his culture and society. He does not just accept things - he thinks —using a kind of cognitive synergy.
Hence, the heterarchical “system” he innovated on becoming President, which is synergistic, pragmatic and meritocratic.
He balances the needs of hierarchy and top-down management in government against bottom-up creativity. He does not make he mistake of thinking he knows everything but works from the assumption that he does NOT know a lot of things. Hence, the need for trusted advisors and his famous gradualism .
The AI had a different take, of course. But its arguments were shallow and pointed in the direction of standard Western conclusions.
Keep in mind that AIs can be very useful tools, especially in technical matters, like figuring out why Windows doesn’t work! But in terms of geopolitics and culture, Western bias floats to the surface.
I am looking for a video on taming who-mans
One Earth, Many Worlds.
Support News Forensics.
Please contribute. As I mentioned earlier, I am still waiting for some kind of response from the Canadian Pension people in answer to my appeal , and every coffee helps. A LOT.
Ichi and Chappy are working hard to tame me. Not that I am dangerous. They just tame and train.
Help them manage their who-man zoo— with coffee.
You can contribute by clicking on the graphic or the url below.
I would really like to get to 5000 subscribers. If you like my work, share the urls on other blogs and sites and in comments on podcasts.