To wissen a worldview

Stories that connect you to all of humanity

Théodore Géricault - The Raft of the Medusa (1818)

The painting above, titled “The Raft of the Medusa,” portrays the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of Mauritania on July 2, 1816. At least 147 people were set adrift, and after 13 days only 15 survived by enduring starvation, dehydration, and cannibalism.

The event was, apparently, a big international scandal and disgrace for the French. It’s also worth considering the global socio-political metaphor of a crowded raft being set adrift.

The story of the Méduse

You might not have thought about it this way, but I just told you a story. I gave you context, details, and a chain of events. If you read into it—if you really thought about what you were reading—you might have even begun to imagine the feeling of being set adrift. The feeling of doom and uncertainty. The lack of fresh water. The burning sun.

Then, as the raft floated day after day, you could imagine those few stoic shipmates, calm in their acceptance of the situation, and those struggling to stifle their hysteria. You could imagine some of them breaking. Then dying. Then eating the dead in stressful, starving, delirium. You could imagine the thoughts you might have had. What did you do to find yourself in that place? You might ask cosmic questions about the value human life—the meaning of human life.

Now, let’s say that after telling you this story of the raft of the Méduse, I asked you what kind of governance structure should have been imposed during those 13 days. Should one person have been put in charge as a kind of tyranny of necessity? Or should there have been a vote on all decisions? Should cannibalism have been allowed? What should have been done if someone broke the rules?

Kennen und Wissen

English only has one word for “know.” You know something or you don’t. German, however, has two words for “know.” There is “kennen” which means something like "to be familiar with" and “wissen” which means "to know and understand."

The way I think of these¹ is that to “kennen” is like saying “I know where the grocery store is.” To “wissen” is to say “I know what it is like to feel pain.”

The people on that raft of the Medusa “wissen” knew what it was like to feel the pain isolation and starvation. Thomas Hobbes “wissen” knew what it was like to watch Royalists and Parliamentarians in England kill each other in bloody civil wars of ideology. The founding fathers “wissen” knew what it was like to feel tyranny weighing on them from afar. By contrast, we moderns can never fully “wissen” know what it is like to live under the tyranny of King George, participate in bloody civil war, or starve on a raft. And without that knowledge, it’s really difficult to know how we would react and what systems we would impose on ourselves and others.

The best way to wissen-know a situation is to live it. This is why certain people make such a big deal about “lived experiences.” But this approach is obviously limiting. If we all limited our wissen-knowledge to the 1 life we each live, no one would be able to relate to anyone else on any issue.

And so, if we believe that it is both valuable and human to be able to relate to others—to empathize with others—i.e. if we agree that humans (1) aren’t psychopaths and (2) shouldn’t aspire to be psychopaths—then we should probably try to look beyond our own meagre single experience of life and try to understand other lives. Stories, especially well told stories, do just this. They connect with what is common to all humans and then take us on a journey through alternative times, places, and people.

What’s powerful about stories

Here are a few more key elements of the Raft of the Méduse.

I told you in the subtitle that it was the year 1818. So, you could have deduced that there were no cell phones or electronics of any kind—i.e. there was no way to call for help or send signal of location. Humans wouldn’t fly airplanes for another 80 years and the light bulb was still 60 years away—i.e. it was dark and isolated. I didn’t specifically tell you any of this, but you can infer it from the context.

I also mentioned that the wreck happened off the coast of Mauritania. Maybe you know that Mauritania is right on the end of the Sahara desert where it’s dry, hot, windy, and sunny pretty much all year. This would have been a brutal place to be set adrift on a raft. You would be baking in the sun.

The point is, The Raft of the Méduse contains elements of space and time. The story did not involve huddling for warmth. It also doesn’t involve a Wilson volleyball as a stand in friend (those didn’t exist yet, but also there was more than 1 person in this story, and that’s important to the whole cannibalism thing). People in the story were not concerned with the effects their actions would have on policing in Chicago. You might not have realized it, but there are millions of complexities that you rule in and out of this story without even noticing. Stories tell you far more than the words on which they are built.

So, how should we behave?

Ok, so if you were on the Raft of the Meduse, how would you have behaved? Would you have slunk into the corner and hoped for the best? Would you have tried to organize everyone? Would you have been the person who snuck food at 2am? Would you have eaten a dead person?

Figuring out how to act morally is obviously complicated, and in most times of human existence it would be trite to state this in writing. But it’s not most times. Today you can hear modern moral advice such as “just be a good person”, which, as I’ve said previously, is about as useful as throwing someone in the cockpit of an F-35 and saying “try hard.”

But it’s more complicated than that. We’ve built a society with many layers of institutions and laws that keep us mostly operating on the “right” path. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably doing fine, and being a “good person” is about all the encouragement you need to keep cruising on the fumes of our Judeo-Christian foundation. I.e. you probably could fly an F-35 if it were on autopilot and you didn’t have to touch anything. But is that even flying?

There’s a guy I recently met who is going through a nasty divorce with a custody battle. He’s now doing a barrel role nose dive in his F-35 and people are telling him to “just be a good person.” But it isn’t helping him. It wouldn’t have helped the people on The Raft either.

The role of religious stories

So where do we get morals? Some evidence suggests that morals are innate, based in biological and cultural evolution. This view has its roots in evolutionary biology and is particularly popular right now. A more traditional view of morality is that it is passed along from person to person in oral or written form. And in these cases, morals are almost always packaged in stories.

Disney movies and fairy tales teach with stories. Books and movies teach with stories. Elders teach with stories. And of course, religions are all about teaching with stories. The Bible teaches with stories, as does the Koran, the Torah, the Upinashads, and every other religion I’m aware of.

In fact, religion teaches with some of the most powerful stories ever created. Religious stories weave together beliefs, values, motifs, and purpose into a coherent package. They show the reader what matters—they show this directly and indirectly—just as I’ve said above. They do this with place, time, action, and situation—and they do this both by what they include as well as what they exclude—by what they state and how they state it. Everything matters.

Moreover, these religious stories are some of the strongest stories humans ever created. They had to be. Today, we live in a society of scaffolding that holds us together. The government requires you to go to school. Someone will arrest you if you kill someone. This was not always the case.

When Moses was wandering around in the desert with 600,000 Israelites, it was no small order to keep everyone in line. Stories were critical. Moses wanted his people to stop killing each other, but he couldn’t just call in the national guard. And so, to get them to behave, he communicated to them a divine story of their place in the universe, a place that was subordinated to God and a divine list of commandments that precluded them from killing.

For the Israelites, the point of their existence—their existence itself—was subordinated to the story. This not only kept their tribes alive; it eventually led to the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham—that he would make of him a great nation of many descendants. And true enough, here we are still talking about him. The story was and is so strong that it not only held together a band of exiles in the ancient desert but continues to guide lives today.

The 21st century critics of religious stories

Of course, unless you’ve grown up in a cave, you will know that religion is not doing so well these days. In fact, it’s possible that we are living at or near a peak of anti-religious sentiment. An embodiment of this anti-religious sentiment is captured by the mid-2000s hit squad of the so-called four horsemen: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and Dan Dennett, each of whom wrote popular books of “new-atheism.”

If you remember these guys, you’ll probably roll your eyes knowingly. If you don’t remember them, just imagine Sunday School with 4 very smart 15 year old boys who recently discovered the art of rhetoric. Here’s a visual to help you out:

Here’s a typical Sam Harris quote, from Letter to a Christian Nation:

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”

Sam went on a crusade during those mid-2000s golden years of atheism, arguing that we should ditch the irrationality of religion for a modern, rational view of morality. And it’s safe to say that a lot of moderns still agree with him.

Non-religious critics of stories

Another and similar objection to stories is laid out in Tyler Cowen’s 2009 TED talk about how we should “Be suspicious about stories.”

“The good and bad thing about stories is they’re a kind of filter.  They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You’re always left with the same few simple stories.”

Tyler points out how real life is almost always more complicated than stories. He says that we should imagine that every time we tell a good vs evil story, we should imagine that we are lowering our IQ by 10 points or more. I.e stories make us dumber.

I’m no expert, but like the four horsemen, I’d guess that he’s probably correct in a rational, abstract sense. I mean that—these guys, like Ivan Karamazov, have pretty bulletproof logic. The thing is, it’s not enough. At the end of the day, humans aren’t just logic machines. That’s not how humans work. The four horsemen don’t understand this, and they sort of switch between being exasperated and marinating in their own self-congratulatory logic. Tyler at least concludes his talk by asserting that “none of this will go away, should go away, or can go away.” It’s like he knows there’s something else important but can’t quite put his finger on it.

The veil of youth

I try to make it a point to never forget what it was like to be younger. Young people, in my opinion, have no obligation to know what it feels like to be someone older than them, but old people have no excuse not to remember what it felt like to be a kid.

One of the great virtues of “kids,” especially those college age ones, is that they have a wonderful optimism about fixing the world. They are overwhelmingly optimistic and idealistic. The arrogant ones among them are especially lovable (if annoying) in the strength of their beliefs about how easy it should be to “fix” the world. To use Tyler Cowen’s language, these kids are especially susceptible to the simplicity of “good and evil” stories—and no surprise, they are usually convinced that they are on the good side.

Something you realize as you get older—something you hopefully realize—is that the world is more complicated than your first realized. That the really difficult problems are the ones where all the solutions are bad. That the hardest choices are not between a good and bad option but between two bad options. That all options have hidden consequences. That good and evil are present in all of us.

Only time and experience can really show a person that this is true. We don’t all get to spend 13 days on the Raft of the Méduse (thank God), but we all have difficult experiences like this that push us to see the complexities in the world and inside us—to see likeable people behave poorly (like stealing food on the raft) or unsavory people behave heroically (like sacrificing themselves). Most of us will also, eventually see these shades of action in our own lives. We will witness ourselves behaving poorly. It’s impossible to live forever in an ideologically curated world. Eventually you encounter hard reality.

A great example of this is the ongoing story of Russia and The West.

The special military operation

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was for many Westerners (especially young ones) a harsh reminder that modern civilization isn’t just an Uber ride to the cupcake café. In 2024, humans still kill other humans in an attempt to forcefully take land. To the moderns who believe that we should all “just be a good person,” these kinds of activities are difficult to understand. Why would Russia do this? How should we respond?

The story often told in the West is that Russia is led by an unjust tyrant who is making an illegal land grab as part of a self-absorbed quest for world domination. If it sounds as simply evil as a James Bond villain, that’s the point. I’m being blithe about it, but there is some truth to this simplicity. “Evil” is a morally valenced word, and it is used to describe actions that are immoral such as the unjust infliction of punishment, suffering, and and death.

A more sophisticated answer is that the Russian invasion collides with the western narrative of global liberalism. The prevailing narrative in the west (at least for now) is one where every human being on earth deserves—nay, has a human right—to individual freedoms of speech, expression, religion, life, politics, and body. We believe that all humans have a right to participate in a democratic system of government that reflects their will. Many westerners view these values as a modern manifest destiny—that all corners of the earth must want and will inevitably have these core liberal values.²

The Russian story

Naturally Russia tells a different story. In fact, we have a glimpse of this story via a recent (2024) interview of Putin by Tucker Carlson. In the interview, Putin spends the entire first 30 minutes giving a history lesson of Russia. It begins with:

“Let's look where our relationship with Ukraine started from. Where did Ukraine come from? In 882, Rurik's successor, Prince Oleg, who was actually playing the role of regent at Rurik's Young son, because Rurik had died by that time, came to Kyiv. He ousted two brothers who apparently had once been members of Rurik's squad.”

If you think about it, that’s a pretty odd way to start a 2hr interview. Putin winds the story through the middle ages, of princes and kings, World War I and II, which the Russians call the “Great Patriotic War” (another “story” told differently in Russia vs the West), and personal anecdotes of driving through Ukraine in the 80s. Finally, after 30 minutes, Putin gets to the Ukraine war:

“Let's get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations, nothing like this happened. You tricked us. I don't mean you, personally, when I say you. Of course, I'm talking about the United States. The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward. But it happened five times. There were five waves of expansion. We tolerated all that. We were trying to persuade them. We were saying, Please don't. We are as bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy, and there is no Communist Party power.”

Then another 25 minutes of history lessons about the overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and the involvement of the CIA.

“It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war, and we did not start this war in 2022. This is an attempt to stop it.”

There are some parts of his story that are, speaking as a westerner, hard to wrap your head around. In a real brain twister in the first 15 minutes, he makes the case that Poland collaborated with Hitler but then refused to give up land in a way that gave Germany no choice but to invade. His story also includes other claims that are probably a revisionist view of history. Fine.

The reason I quote it all here is not because I agree with his story, but just to point out that, if you believe his story, which he presumably does, then you believe that the history of Russia, stretching back to Prince Oleg, created a brotherhood of Russian people united under a common culture and way of life that is now being threatened from the outside by competing powers who want to forcefully impose their values.³ And if you are the leader of this country, which he is, you might make all kinds of conclusions about what you can, should, and must do to stop it.

Two competing stories

Ok so we now have two competing stories about the military conflict in Ukraine. And no doubt many people feel strongly about their story (and the falseness of the other story). I’d say they must. We must. The attachment people feel to their story is what makes them committed to seeing it through. If we don’t believe it, we might not do what it takes to turn the story itself into reality. The strength of the story is the mark of its quality as a story.

If Moses and the Israelites didn’t believe in the God of Abraham; if they didn’t believe their lives were subordinated to a bigger, more important, more divine story, they might not have listened to God’s laws; they might have continued wiling away the days worshiping golden calves and trying to have sex with their neighbor’s wives. Moses might have just been like “F*@k it, Frank is causing problems again, so I’m just going to kill him.” And from there the whole tribe might have descended into chaos. I’m again being blithe about it, but truly, they were starving in the desert for 40 years, and without a serious belief in a way of being that would get them through, they might not have made it.

By the same token, Russia’s ability to believe Putin’s story is probably critical for it to survive. And the same for the West and its story. We need to believe in our story—to truly believe—if we are going to fully commit what it takes to make it reality. We must submit to the story to instantiate it.

Of course, this is why people like the four horsemen and Tyler Cowen distrust stories so much. The power of our stories is a direct function of how much we believe in them. The more we believe in our stories, the more powerful they are. But, the more powerful they are, the more destructive they are as well. The most powerful stories offer salvation that most of us in the West cannot comprehend, but they can also compel people to fly kamikaze planes and wear suicide vests. This is scary to us moderns.

And so, in the West—in modernity—we have neutered our greatest stories for fear of the monsters they create. This prevents some monsters, sure, but it also sacrifices our greatest men and leaves us lolling about like whiny children with no ammo while a pretty mediocre, isolated, shell of a former empire has its way with us in Eastern Europe. It’s too much to go into here, but this is a big part of what Nietzsche disliked so much about modernity.

Ok ok, so this all sounds like a big problem that we are embroiled in here. Namely, conflicting stories lead to conflict; and in modernity we have tried to moderate this by neutering our greatest stories. But, what does a great story look like? I’ll give you an example, from another Russian.

A critique of the importance of special military operations

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) is set in the year 1805. It begins with the invasion of Russia by Napoleon and follows five fictional aristocratic families through the course of these events.⁴

In writing the book, Tolstoy sifted through reams of letters, journals, autobiographies, and biographies in an effort to make the writing as faithful to reality as possible. In doing this, he came to believe that the history of war was (and is) often written incorrectly— as if small decisions made by generals, mistakes made by subordinates, coincidences, and lucky breaks are the deciding points—whereas, in his view, there is always a bigger story playing out above these small disturbances.

“Historians, with simple-hearted conviction, tell us that the causes of this event were the insult offered to the Duke of Oldenburg, the failure to maintain the continental system, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.” “To us it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated.” (Part 9 chapter 1)

He holds his highest contempt for the “great man theory” — and in particular for Napoleon.

“In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.”

Basically, according to Tolstoy, there is a bigger story playing out across time—a story that transcends the little events we dwell on and the little men who we elevate in such esteem. He was instead interested in the story that spanned the human condition across time and that transcended the particulars—the story that is always and eternally playing out in the background of our lives.

When you read War and Peace, it is ostensibly a story of Napoleon and imperial Russia, but the themes that shine through are those of love, family, loyalty, and sacrifice. These are the themes of a greater story. And it’s why, 150 years later, we are still reading War and Peace despite most of us today not really knowing or caring all that much about the battle of Austerlitz.

A greater story

Ok, so here’s the thing… I’ve told you two stories about modern Russia so far:

1. The story the west tells about itself about Russia (evil Putin invades harmless neighbor)

2. The story that Russia tells itself about itself. (proud, well-intentioned Russia, with history dating back to Prince Oleg, resists incursion by expansionist west).

But it’s not “the whole story.” I left out the final 15 minutes of the Tucker/Putin interview. Here, Putin backs away from commentary of the specifics of the war in Ukraine (the stuff that Tolstoy would have found incidental) and talks broadly about humanity.

He talks about the cyclical nature of empires:

“My opinion is that the development of the world community is in accordance with the inherent laws, and those laws are what they are. It's always been this way in the history of mankind. Some nations and countries rose, became stronger and more numerous, and then left the international stage, losing the status they had accustomed to. There is probably no need for me to give examples, but we could start with the King Ishan and Horde Conquerors, the Golden Horde, and then end with the Roman Empire.” [01:47:20]

He talks about the eternal moral foundation of the Russian soul.

“Our culture is so human-oriented. Dostoevsky, who was very well known in the West and the genius of Russian culture, Russian literature, spoke a lot about this, about the Russian soul. After all, Western society is more pragmatic. Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.” [01:45:12]

And he concludes with an assertion about the inseparability of the Russian soul.

“Everyone in the West thinks that the Russian people have been split by hostilities forever. No, they will be reunited. The unity is still there. Why are the Ukrainian authorities dismantling the Ukrainian Orthodox Church? Because it brings together not only the territory, it brings together our souls. No one will be to separate the soul.”

This final fifteen minutes of the interview is the most powerful kind of story. It’s a story that is self-reinforcing and enduring. And if this is the message that is filtering through the ranks, it’s a clear signal that Russia as we know it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Not out of Ukraine and not out of the world stage.

The strongest defense is a great offense

Moreover, this final fifteen minutes is not a defensive story; it’s an offensive story. It’s a grand story that invites the rest of the world, squabbling in is particulars, to join or at least sympathize with eternal, moral values that transcend time and place. Western liberals especially won’t like it, because this is the section of Putin’s story that has the greatest potency as a counter to the liberal west.⁵

Because, in the west, we aren’t telling a grand story like this, at least not anymore. All of our current stories suck. They suck because they are all stories of the kind that Tolstoy is complaining about. They are based in temporally local particulars rather than a transcendent view of our common humanity across time. Our biggest concerns are with the latest NYT headline of injustice, and we will forget about them within hours. If we want to stand for something—we need to tell a story of equal weight as the one Putin is telling in Russia. We need to zoom out and tell a civilizational story about the soul of humanity and the soul of the west.

It wasn’t that long ago that we had politicians who actually did this. Reagan explicitly made the cold war between the West and the USSR a battle of good vs evil. Churchill painted the impending siege of the U.K. as a battle that would carry out indefinitely, until “in God’s good time” the world would be liberated. These leaders were tapping into the souls of real humans, cutting away the superficialities of time and place and telling a story that unified their people. And it didn’t just unify them in any arbitrary way. It unified them in a moral foundation. It unified them in a narrative vision that transcended the particulars of their situation and tapped into the soul of humanity.

A cosmic story

This is what we need. A great story. A story that unites us as humans by the things that we have in common. And if we believe at all that the west and liberalism are worth fighting for, then we need to stop whining and complaining all the time and make our case.⁶

This is why I told you about The Raft. And Moses. Life is complicated. Some situations have only bad options. But stories can unite us. This is also why I told you about them in contrast to the anti-human, life-neutering four horsemen who were unable to posit anything of moral weight—whose rational assertions did nothing but weaken us as a people. And I don’t mean to just pick on the four horsemen. They are more like a symptom than the cause. We need to fix the cause.

The challenge is, doing so would almost certainly require rekindling some kind of religious foundation, education in virtue, and the imposition of moral structure. It would require a more sophisticated understanding of justice. But if we could pull it off, it would reinvigorate our purpose. Orwell tells us, stories are a battle for the future: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” A truly transcendent story creates an unassailable future. A story about the transcendent importance of your civilization can give you reason to fight on.

The oldest parables we know

So, where do we get this kind of story? One place to start might be with great stories of the past. Religious stories. Almost nothing lasts for thousands of years. The reason these stories have lasted is because they investigate the core questions of the human soul: questions of justice, happiness, virtue, and the meaning of life.

But, I have another idea. The stories that matter, the deepest stories, the stories of the universe, the stories of universal appeal aren’t external to you. They are inside of you and they are inside of all of us. What I mean by that is that the truest stories are those that are the most enduring across time, space, cultures because they are inscribed into the human soul—they are the story of what it is to be human.

Stories of the stars and the soul

When you look out at the night sky, you can look into the infinite. The only other direction you can look that is equally infinite is into your own soul. You can delude yourself in either direction. You can try to believe that trees have feelings. You can try to convince yourself that cheating on your spouse is ok. But if you look deeply and honestly in either direction; if you subordinate yourself to the infinite, you may be able to humble yourself to existing within a story that is unconscious, beyond your grasp, and eternally recurring—that has played out many times already and will play out many more times in a form of eternal return.

This is what the greatest writers have always tapped into. Here’s an example from the end of book 7 of The Brothers Karamazov when Aleksey rushes out of the monastery and kisses the earth:

“He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars…”

The point is, you don’t need to be put on a raft. You don’t need to experience bloody civil war. You already have the wissen-knowledge inside you—it is built right into you. If you look inside yourself, you can know the greatest truths. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” It’s the contents of your soul.

And if the stories you tell dictate the course of your life, why would you not want to tell the best ones?

1. The way I always think of these is admittedly shaped by reading German philosophy, so apologies if I misrepresent them

2. Or at least, if there is a country that claims to want these values and that is being bullied away from them, that there is an obligation to step in and help.

3. Honestly, it sounds a bit like how the U.S. perceives China.

4. It may sound like fiction, but it also includes 24 chapters that are just Tolstoy’s philosophical views. Even critics of Tolstoy’s time didn’t know how to characterize it.

5. This is also the section of the speech that makes National Conservatives around the world like Putin so much. People like Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Victor Orban, etc. These leaders are united in their resistance to wokeism—i.e. our subordination of all morality to the care/harm dimension of moral foundations theory. It’s a morality that places grievance and oppression (perceived or real) as the primary motivator of moral action and says that if someone feels oppressed, then it must be true, validated, and alleviated. Putin’s story about the cyclical nature of empires, Dostoyevsky, morality, country, and the inseparability of the soul propose a story that is higher and better than this one—better not because his story is so great, but because it is a story of a more complete morality. It includes more moral dimensions. It’s more representative of the true soul of all humans. Westerners with their wokeism are making it easy for Putin (and the National Conservatives) because they are giving him such a weak competitor. Putin’s story is littered with errors and holes and yet, to the westerner who is paying attention, it is still a better story than what the liberal West is currently pedaling.

6. Or, if you think the ideals that underlie America suck so much that they aren’t worth fighting for, I guess you can move to Russia or something.