BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 6 | July 7, 2022
Robert McTague, Mychailo Wynnyckyj, Julia Ovcharenko,
Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
Copenhagen—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv
Summary
Participants discuss the use of the word “держава” [derzhava] to refer to the Ukrainian state. The need for a new Constitution is raised. Post-industrial civilization is moving away from hierarchy and toward heterarchy, and new constitutional principles and institutions must reflect this. A historical analogy is drawn to the U.S. Constitution and the process of its creation. What is ethics in our Western culture? Is Ukraine’s frontier mentality? The concept of personal responsibility is discussed in relation to the right to bear arms. The principle of personalism and the right to bear arms. It is argued that ostracism is a de facto punishment mechanism for individuals who transgress against the community. The effects of violence in society on the communal psyche are discussed. The need for Bildung; the case of the Israeli educational system. The possibility of a russian nuclear strike is discussed. The value of talking about the future.
Key words
nation-state Constitution Ukraine ethics post-industrial civilization hierarchy heterarchy gun ownership frontier mentality personal responsibility community violence Bildung war value the future
Timecode
12:27 nation-state and the system of checks and balances
16:40 religion and ethics
23:52 trust networks
28:52 suspicion
31:11 Ukrainian volunteers
38:07 hierarchy vs. heterarchy
43:37 experience of anarchy
46:52 personal responsibility
56:51 gun ownership models
1:00:19 criminals and crime
1:06:03 ostracizing the oligarchs
1:09:26 heterarchy as incompatible with ownership of weapons
1:15:13 the psychology of gun ownership
1:20:19 Marion Hammer
1:28:03 the case of Israel
1:35:48 European Bildung Manifesto
1:42:24 the war in the news
1:50:03 Western intervention scenario
1:57:27 the value of talking about the future
Participants
C: Chris Keulemans
D: Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J: Julia Ovcharenko
M: Mychailo Wynnyckyj
R: Robert McTague
THE DIALOGUE
J: Welcome Robert, welcome Mychailo to our circle. We use a Bohmian Dialogue format for a free-flowing conversation. Usually if we know each other there is no need to moderate this conversation.
Just to start, we take the essay. Do any of those questions inspire you or outrage you? Perhaps you find something you’ve been thinking about yourself in the essay?
M: When I looked at the first point, with respect to «state», «держава» [derzhava], «государство» [gosudarstvo] and the issue of constitutions and the words that are written in constitutions, Demyan, I want to actually say something: I become very suspicious when I see thoughts that mirror my own. Because this means that someone is trying to find kompromat on me, and is somehow trying to pull me into a web of trust and clearly eventually that web of trust will be used against me.
First of all, I want to thank you for talking about the word «держава» [derzhava] and pointing out that it is something very different from «state». I like to ask this as a provocative question of what we are fighting for. Is it “за державу” [za derzhavu] or “за країну” [za krayinu]? Which would translate to are we fighting for the state or for the country? But I think in fact the word «держава» [derzhava] in this case does not translate as «state», and I think that that’s something that’s very much worth pointing out. In my experience, most people that I meet when they realize this, they pause for a moment before answering. The obvious answer is — for the country. But this is something that is very difficult to make public because as soon as you talk about that immediately you are being anti-Zelenskyy, and how can you possibly be anti-Zelenskyy because Zelenskyy is the hero of our time and the greatest world leader that ever lived, according to Time Magazine anyway. Many of us within Ukraine are very skeptical with respect to Zelenskyy precisely because of the authoritarian tendencies that he certainly has, and I think that pointing out the use of the word the «держава» [derzhava] versus «країна» [krayina] is probably very, very useful.
The second thing that I wanted to talk about was the question of constitutions. I think it’s certainly very obvious for many of us in Ukraine who are thinking about what Ukraine is going to be like after the war. Certainly many of us believe that we need a new constitution for a variety of reasons. As a person who actually wrote a Master’s thesis on the Constitutional process of 1996 in Ukraine, can say that I was critical of the Constitutional document back in 1997 when I was writing the piece, and certainly I’m even more critical today. But it was very much a needed Constitution at that time, and it was certainly a consensus document for that time. No one particularly asked the people whether they agreed with it. It was very much about a document that was consensual for the political elite, and was very necessary because the political elite at that point was unsure it recognized itself as an elite of Ukraine, and not as an elite of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or some colony of russia or whatever. The point is that it was very much a required transitional document, but certainly we are out of the transition at this point, and to call Ukraine a post-soviet country at this point is frankly to humiliate us.
We do need to be talking about constitutional principles, and this is the third point I wanted to make: we are moving away from a society that is built upon hierarchies, and this is something that I think is universal to what we call a European civilization. For lack of a better term, I don’t like the word «West». European civilization also includes the United States, Canada and Australia, so it’s not «West» anymore. In some cases that includes Japan. To talk about European civilization is not adequate either. Civilization is moving away from hierarchy and we have good examples of that among the changes in social structure that are spawning in the post-industrial society. That depends on whether you’re a Weberian or a Marxian. What we are seeing in Ukraine is a massive laboratory of heterarchy because the Ukrainian Armed Forces are organized in a very heterarchical way, the volunteer movement since 2014 has always been about heterarchy, but it’s about a different style of leadership, it’s about something that I’ve written about which is much more similar to a beehive, than it would be to a classic hierarchy. These types of social structures require different political documents to constitute them. It’s not about social contract; the concept of a social contract is passé. It is something that is very foreign to heterarchy.
What is the way to capture this new social reality in a document? I think it’s something very exciting because we’re living in a time right now where we will eventually come to that document. I think it’s interesting that the first Constitution that institutionalized hierarchy was written in Ukraine and so the next one that deinstitutionalized hierarchy should also logically be written in Ukraine.
I probably disagree with the third point Demyan makes, which is perhaps a point of discussion for another time, and that is with respect to religious institutions. I’m a big believer that we need to separate discussions of politics and discussions of religion. Although from a holistic standpoint any non-governmental organization — and certainly a religious institution is a non-governmental organization — probably needs to be talked about in the context of government, I think at this point there’s enough to talk about without going into discussions of religion.
[12:27] nation-state and the system of checks and balances
C: Thank you, Mychailo.
J: Robert, you have experience of living in different countries. Now you’re based in Romania. How do you see that question of fighting for the state or for the country?
R: It’s kind of hard to follow Mykhailo and sound like I know what I’m talking about. I say much of this with great circumspection. For decades now, I have read about the imminent demise of the nation state, but it still exists. Yes, we might transition in decades ahead into other kinds of entities. Some people think that city-states will come back into vogue, and it’s still something that people understand, which goes a long way toward it being viable.
I do know a little bit about, of course, the U.S Constitution and how it came to be, and interestingly enough before that was written, John Adams wrote the state constitution in Massachusetts, and it has a lot, a lot of similar things in it. There’s a lot of marvelling about the genius of the Constitution, meanwhile, there’s other people that say it’s completely outdated, and I’m not sure exactly what they mean. One important facet of it is the system of checks and balances. The idea that nobody is supremely supreme, there’s always some way, some mechanism, sometimes it’s a very hard mechanism but it’s a mechanism nonetheless by which this thing can be diffused or thas entity can be diffused, or limited, or have to work really, really hard to get what it wants, etc. We live in a complex world, and while I’m all for elegance, true elegance, not simplicity, there’s going to be devil in the details as there is hopefully an evolution of a Ukrainian Constitution.
I kind of echoed Mychailo’s thoughts on the religion thing. But I had a question: Is it time to move away from religious institutions? Move away in what sense? Is there an issue with religious institutions affecting the state? I know here in Romania they do, the Orthodox Church here wields quite a bit of influence.
[16:40] religion and ethics
J: This question may be inspired by the influence of Orthodox Church on politics in the russian federation and how much the church is used by politicians to get more influence on people’s minds. Another story is about ethics. What helps people maintain their ethical compass, if it’s not belief? Religion used to have this strong role, but it has grown weaker over the last few centuries. What can keep the ethical code? If it’s not a constitution, if it’s not the church, then what? Literature can and in some periods of time did, like Renaissance or Romanticism. But still we are not completely sure what is ethics in our Western culture.
M: I think one of the things that excites me about projects like this one as well as projects that I’m involved in other areas, is that we’re not repeating history exactly, but what is happening at the moment is very much about the federalist papers. It’s very much about people thinking and talking about what society including state, including religious institutions, including NGOs and much broader than that, including healthcare, is supposed to look like, and what educational system we’re going to need for that, and what kind of armed forces we’re going to need. These are all things that are very exciting to me at the moment because we are very much in the middle of creating something that is new.
The historical analogy with the American Revolution and the War of Independence is very obvious to me. Both the American and the French Revolutions happened at the beginning of a shift in global society from agrarian feudalism to an industrial age. What we are seeing at the moment is a global shift from an industrial age to something that is post-industrial, and that’s going to be accompanied by revolutions and wars. Ten years ago, when we looked at societies shifting, nobody predicted that there would be a war specifically in Ukraine or there would be revolutions happening in Ukraine and in this part of the world. But if you look at it retrospectively, it is logical because wars and revolutions happened at the periphery of, not at the core of civilization. Ukraine is very much a peripheral country with respect to the European Union, and with respect to the capitalist core, that is somewhere between Frankfurt and New York. It is logical that Ukraine would be the place where these changes would be happening.
Now the question is: are we — you probably have heard this podcast from Volodymyr Yermolenko and his wife Tetyana Ogarkova which asked the question — are we a frontier or are we a province? Because there’s a very big difference between being provincial and being a frontier. On a frontier the social temperature is always at 99 degrees if not 101. In a province there is no social temperature. It’s because, in a colony things happen as a reflection of what’s going on in the metropolis or in the center. I really believe that what is going on in Ukraine at the moment is not a reflection of anything. It is actually a creation of something new. Now the question is what are the principles of that creation, and I think that hierarchy is one of those principles. The reason we talk about checks and balances being so important within the U.S context is because it is still a hierarchy and we still have people in that hierarchy who have legitimate power which needs to be checked and balanced. If we’re looking at a flat society or if we’re looking at a society that is organized around different principles, network principles, much more participative, communitarian, then checks and balances are important but it’s a different kind of checks and balances, right? Because power is structured in a different way, and I think the differentiation between power and influence is a wonderful thing. I certainly believe in it, and I see this on a daily basis in Ukraine where people, sorry for being a little bit immodest, people like myself who have absolutely no power, have an inordinate amount of influence. That is something that is not normal for a western society, and I think something that also frustrates people with respect to the influence of religion. Religious organizations don’t necessarily have any power but they certainly in very many cases have an awful lot of influence. Is that bad? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.
[23:52] trust networks
C: This is super interesting to listen to, and it ties in completely with the talks we’ve been having over the past few weeks. I am not an insider as well. I’ve been to Ukraine a number of times. I follow closely, I’m learning a lot during these conversations, and I like the way this essay by Demyan triggers these conversations. Mychailo, I would like to go back to what you said at the very beginning. To me it is very positive to hear from you, from Julia, from Demyan, from others that you can look at this destructive as the creation of something new. Julia too used the word «beehive» last week to describe the heterotical, communitarian way that people are now organizing themselves.
Then, Mychailo, you said when you’ve read Demyan’s essay, you were alarmed because you recognize some of the things he writes, and you said you know that if there’s a web of trust being created, it will be held against you sooner or later. That’s a fascinating thing to say. That means that anytime you step into a company and somebody says something that you recognize or agree with, you immediately go into mistrust. That’s a very difficult basis to create something new upon. Can you explain?
M: Good that you brought this up. One of the things that you learn in Ukraine is that trust networks are built interpersonally, and they are actually very difficult to build online. It’s easy to take a personal trust that already exists and move it online, but to build something from scratch online is sometimes difficult. As a sociologist I will tell you that this is a country of massive trust but a very short radius of trust. There’s this concept of «свої» [svoji], right? And «свої» [svoji] means — our own. Within the circle of «свої» [svoji], trust is immeasurable, but as soon as you get beyond «свої» [svoji] — problematic. I think what we are experiencing at the moment is a realization that there is someone that is beyond my circle of «свої» [svoji] who is thinking exactly the same things that I thought would be limited to my circle of «свої» [svoji]. I apologize if I’m pushing you away, Demyan. My intention was quite the opposite: to show that I was surprised by the fact that everything that was written was so close to my own, my own values and thoughts.
[28:52] suspicion
C: My question is this, so this doesn’t cause you to open up, to embrace Demyan online but to realize that this recognition or even trust will be held against you sooner or later. That seems to me like a very difficult question…
M: No, Chris, suspicion doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a realization that this will be used against — quite the opposite. I think this may also be a question of this being wartime and what I have personally lived through in the last eight years. I’ve been in a scenario where people have tried to gain my trust, knowing full well that it’s extremely difficult to gain my trust any way other than intellectually. I’ve been involved in various things in government. I have found that in politics people will very often try to gain one’s trust not because they actually believe in the same things you do, but because they’re saying the right words, right? I apologize. I think it came out wrong.
[31:11] Ukrainian volunteers
C: No, no, I wasn’t looking at it that way. But I can imagine that there are many reasons for people in Ukraine before and after Maidan to live in a state of suspicion or to withhold trust until you’re absolutely sure that you can trust. From the outside looking in, I can understand that suspicion could be very well the default mode for a lot of people living in this society. I’m just curious how from this obvious state of mind we can see the creation of something new as you meant it, as you mentioned. The creation of a new heterarchy society which will require a lot of trust among strangers.
M: I think your questions are excellent. This goes to a conversation that I had this week with several volunteers. When we use the term «volunteers» that means that they’re not actually fighting but they’re involved in logistics, getting supplies, etc. One of the things that happened immediately after February 24th was analogous to what happened in the latter half of 2014, 2015 and into 2016. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were undersupplied, and people spontaneously organized into these volunteer organizations. Now the Ukrainian Armed Forces are much better supplied, so the volunteers are looking at themselves and saying what exactly are we doing, why should we continue to do this, etc. They’re starting to fight amongst each other. Not necessarily fight, but the level of trust has suddenly decreased. In a crisis situation, at the beginning of March, we might have people who had never seen each other, had never even contacted each other passing, arranging the logistical supplies of multi-million dollar shipments. Now when that crisis requirement is less, those people are starting to compete. There’s a much less trusting environment. Perhaps it’s a question of crisis, perhaps, it’s a question of when you get out of crisis mode, some form of institutionalization needs to happen. Because of course those volunteer organizations have institutionalized. I’m thinking of Повернись Живим [Povernys’ Zhyvym, The Come Back Alive Foundation], I’m thinking of Serhiy Prytula — those types of people who continue to be magnets for trust, depersonalized trust. But others are finding it much more difficult. Perhaps that’s now a question of what’s the link between trust and leadership and personality.
But you’re absolutely correct that the «beehive» concept works well in times of crisis. Now can it become the basis for a stable society? And I think that really is a challenge and an open question. Unfortunately the history of Ukraine for the last twenty years certainly, but even before that I would even claim for the last 400 years, is a history of rejecting hierarchy. This is what makes us a frontier society. It’s a history of not accepting the sheriff. It’s a history of cossacks, it’s a history of Machno. We can use countless examples of this when Ukrainians just do not accept living under a hierarchical society. Now that is usually explained by theorizing that the hierarchy was never seen as being of our own making, meaning that it was always an imperial hierarchy that came from somewhere else, but I think that’s a cop-out. I think that in fact there is something about this frontier mentality which is very anti-hierarchical. I see this in universities, I see this in schools, I see this in my kids that are growing up here. As soon as Zelenskyy was elected president, we started hating him even though he got 73 percent of the votes, right? There’s something in the social fabric here. We desperately need to find the answer to how to build stability without hierarchy. The answer that we came up with 300 years ago in the United States and in France was we build stability without a king, but we do it through checks and balances and democracy and nevertheless hierarchy. That worked then.
[38:07] hierarchy vs. heterarchy
J: The election itself is a gesture of trust to a president but as soon as a person is in this role, Ukrainians become suspicious — now you have to prove that you are the right person for this position. If you are not the right person, Ukrainian society takes this trust away.
R: One comment that came to mind as I listened to this, was that hierarchy is so wired into the way the world works now. If we’re talking about heterarchy, flatter organizations, perhaps they are possible forty years from now, but in the meantime, how do we deprogram other human beings, right? I think one way this can work to Ukraine’s advantage is this partial disavowal of hierarchy in trying to institute a new model of society and leadership. Because it isn’t so reliant on this unshakable belief in hierarchy that actually can be worked to advantage especially in the long run.
M: You don’t have to convince anybody here of the need to move away from hierarchy. That’s something that Ukrainians are very, very much convinced of. Again, I’ll use the analogy to the United States. In the late 18th century it was much easier to convince colonists in the thirteen colonies that they could live without a king, than it would have been in France to convince the French that they could live without a king. That needed reprogramming. In other words, the closer you get to the core of whatever you want to call it civilization or the world system, the more ingrained traditions or social inertia are. We are a frontier society; we have much less in terms of ingrained traditions. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have any ingrained traditions, we do. But those traditions are not foundational for how we govern ourselves. Government here has always been through force and through the threat of force, or things were pretty anarchic. So there is a need to create a peaceful, to the extent that this makes sense in the English language — a peaceful anarchic society. You know, that actually is very difficult in English because we can’t even imagine peaceful anarchy, right? In English «anarchy» is by definition chaos and therefore life is, «nasty, brutish and short» to quote John Locke. But strangely enough here there’s a wonderful term I have no idea how to translate into English. In Ukrainian it’s the word «відчепись» [vidchepys’].
(Julia laughs)
J: I would translate it, but it would be really rude in English.
[43:37] experience of anarchy
M: In English it’s «leave me alone». I’m coming to you in this meeting from a village that’s about 100 kilometers south of Kyiv where we have a dacha. People here get together amongst themselves in the evenings particularly. During the day you don’t talk to anybody else because everybody’s busy on their own plot. You don’t get into what other people are doing on their own plots because that’s private, you talk in the evenings, and if anybody ever wanted to govern this place, they would probably get shot and run out of town real quick. When something needs to happen communally, people throw their money together and they do it, including bringing in gas and fixing electricity lines, etc. I guess it’s anarchic. To some extent it is. But it’s also about freedom. I’m starting to sound like a republican, and I apologize.
[46:52] personal responsibility
D: I am thinking, dreaming about how we might transfer such a demanding attitude towards governments to other professions. I thought about the responsibility of people. Do we want from ourselves the same what we demand from the government? My dream is about the great responsibility which Ukrainians are practicing right now. It’s about volunteering, yes, but also much more. There are so many small groups that do many good things, and in our future we will have to pull together. I’m thinking of more questions, without answers.
M: Demyan is of the opinion that responsibility in our society requires people to be armed. We have a big discussion at the moment, amongst our political elite, about whether this constitution that eventually will have to be passed will actually guarantee the right to bear arms. For someone who like myself grew up on the North American continent, not in the United States but in Canada, which of course is very contrasting when it comes to this issue of arms, I immediately look up on Google how many mass shootings were there in the United States in 2022, and I come up with a number of 314, which I think is over six months rather scary. For those of us that live in societies where guns are not readily available, and the right to bear arms is not a constitutional right, that to me is a very important argument about why we should not be repeating the same mistakes in Ukraine. Although I certainly understand a society that comes out of a war where everyone at this point that wants to be armed is armed. For many in the political elite this is a way to get out of having to collect the arms eventually after the war is over. It’s kind of an interesting argument but I think it’s a problematic one.
One of the things that we miss and perhaps a key to understanding where we’re going is when we look at, from a political standpoint, the Revolutions of the 18th century moved us into industrial society and they moved us away from this divine right of kings, meaning that we would have God that would be supposedly anointing the power structure and we would have monarchies, etc. We moved into a society where individuals have rights, and there is a state that is hierarchical that protects those rights or is supposed to. It can do it better, it can do it worse. It has better checks and balances, worse checks and balances. We have more corruption, less corruption — doesn’t matter, the point is that at the end of the day, there is an individual who comes together with other individuals, creates a social contract, gives away part of his sovereignty to a hierarchical state, and that hierarchical state will then supposedly protect those rights, but in many cases not, in fact, protect the rights but become an infringing power on those rights. That’s the story up to the twentieth century. It’s a story of an esoteric philosophy called personalism. Personalism is about the fact that we recognize individual rights, but we state that human beings as persons cannot be whole if they are simply individual persons, personalism means also being part of a community. In fact, that communitarian aspect is the source of government. There’s this idea of horizontal transcendentalism if you like,so the idea that no individual is simply an individual but we transcend ourselves into communities that become part of both of our identity and our existence, and that by the way, Julia, is a source of ethics because if we are part of a community, then the community will be a source of ethical norms, not necessarily from top down, through religion, but in fact horizontally.
But in that scenario being armed is to reject the community. Because if you trust the community, there is no need to be armed. If everyone is armed and everyone remembers that everyone is armed, it indicates that no one trusts the other. Because that’s why you have arms, right? It means that you are very individualistic, you must protect yourself and everybody else is a wolf that’s trying to eat you. I get back to my own experiences of what I find attractive about living in Ukraine for the last twenty years, and it’s about being part of a community. I think it’s part of the romance of this region, right? It’s something that I feel here, and so I’m very concerned about this concept of arming ourselves individually because I think it’s something that moves us in the wrong direction and away from where we need to be.
[56:51] gun ownership models
R: I just have a couple thoughts on the arming thing being an American, how can I not. You know there is one other gun culture model and that is Switzerland which is I would say a decidedly more benign state of affairs than the United States. I think you bring up a great point, Mychailo, because let’s just roughly analogize the Ukrainian fight to the American fight for independence. That is a core, core event in the myth that is prevalent now in America. Something I was educated on in my military education is that United States citizens have a long-standing distrust of large governments and large standing armies, and also belief that if we just have a gun in our home we can mobilize at any time and defeat the greatest Empire on Earth because we did it, right? And this was not something that was problematic until post-world War II. It wasn’t a problem, until it became a politicized thing and then the NRA became a malignant tumor that’s taken over the brain.
Ukraine is going to potentially form a very reformative culture and mythos going forward, and thinking about how personal arms play into that is going to be important. It could be something that 100 years from now people are still talking about. Maybe there is a way forward to do it, to pair it with a heterarchical kind of paradigm in society.
[1:00:19] criminals and crime
D: About trust in our community. I cannot fix the criminals already living in our community. They are living here, they seem to be living with us in our future, and this is a question without an answer for me because it’s about ethics too. Criminals don’t use education systems, don’t use any rules in our society but they live in every country, and they live in a tribal state.
Y: And they are already armed, so that’s the question of where the enemy is. I know current Ukrainian society as a very peaceful society. There is no internal need in society to be armed unless we see the enemy and we have to defend ourselves. But we forget that in our everyday life, criminals who are already armed are around. It is important to protect civilians against them.
M: Julia, let me stop you for a second. This is absolutely fascinating: this is a repeat of a conversation that I had in 2016-17. Kyiv is a city of almost four million people, right? We have statistics on violent crime, on murders from Kyiv. After 2016, after the police reform it was basically an accurate statistic.
J: Yes.
M: Do you realize that Kyiv is the safest city in the world for its size? We have this narrative about criminals amongst us. But the facts show that the communitarian ethic of Ukrainians, in fact, has created a safe city. I explain it through a communitarian ethic because you and I both know that the police system is not exactly effective. It’s people policing themselves and they don’t have guns because in 2016 and 17 they didn’t have guns. Even Troyeshchyna which is considered to be the worst area of Kyiv has a lower violent crime statistics than many others cities. The point is that I think the argument about criminals amongst us is probably a question of narrative versus reality.
[1:06:03] ostracizing the oligarchs
M: My other point is that since 2014 and certainly now we have had a series of cases whereby our oligarchs or our politicians, or the rich politicians and people that came to their wealth and power in ways that society saw as illegitimate were allowed to leave the country. I’m talking about Yanukovych, Tabachnyk, all of the people from that former regime. Several journalists in 2019-20, before the war started trying to find out what’s going on with these people. They are in a very rich purgatory, meaning they consider their lives to have become hell, even though they’re living in fantastic riches, they have wonderful houses, they have yachts, etc. But Yanukovych’s son was killed in an accident, his other son has basically left him and wants nothing to do with him. Tabachnyk is living in exile in Israel, not a very happy person at all. I go back to the ancient Greek kind of ethic, that if you wanted to really punish someone, you would ostracize them, you would throw them out of the community. That was a punishment worse than death. I’m not convinced that isn’t de facto working in Ukraine. The people that you would call criminals what they fear the most is to end up like Kolomoyskyi. To have to be in Switzerland. To be like Tabachnyk who has to be in Israel. To be like Firtash who’s sitting in Vienna. I wonder if we are already punishing our criminals, in a very humane way.
R: I like it.
[1:09:26] heterarchy as incompatible with ownership of weapons
C: Let me say a few things. First about Baghdad, Mychailo. I lived there as a son of an agricultural engineer in the end of the 60s. During that time in my memory, and when I speak to Iraqi people of that generation, Baghdad was beautiful, it was green, it was peaceful, it was rich, it was culturally very rich, and this was a few years before Saddam Hussein came into power. Those were the Golden Days. Over the past twenty years, of course, Baghdad has been in the grip of violence for a lot of reasons, but partly because of tribal behavior, partly because of the fact — and that is something that we might have to discuss in Ukraine as well — that war leaves a lot of weapons behind. When war is so-called over, the weapons are still there.
If we’re looking at a future of communitarian self-governance of the beehive, of the communities that govern themselves and link up in order to govern the wider region, this has to be built somehow on a basis of trust. Within that community, weapons and using weapons to stake your territory should be pushed out, as you described, should be ostracized. This future system of the beehive should by itself root out the need for people to have weapons. Demyan is not confident that human beings are capable of taking that step, and I can imagine it’s an obvious difficulty.
Finally, one of the defining characteristics of the nation status, as we know it in Europe, is the so-called monopoly on violence by the state. I’ve grown up in the Netherlands where that worked more or less for a long time. The only people who legitimately had arms were people in service of the state, or the government. Today it’s more difficult because we’re seeing a surge of heavy drug-related crime across the country as in many other countries. One of Ukraine’s neighbors is another example of how the state monopoly on violence works — Belarus. Very clear-cut case. That’s also not the kind of society you want to go towards. With that simple sentence, Demyan, you’ve opened up one of the most important questions about the society of the future, post-war, post-victory — what to do with crime and weapons and violence, and do we believe that human beings will be able to adapt to a situation post-victory where they don’t rely on weapons to safeguard the existence of people in this new society.
[1:15:13] the psychology of gun ownership
J: I remember a conversation with a Ukrainian soldier in 2016. He just came back from the Donbas to Dnipro, so it felt like a really peaceful society, but he shared his perception of not being armed. He said, if I have the weapon with me, I feel that I can get anything I want much easier than if I don’t. It doesn’t mean I have to use this weapon but just having this with me gives a higher level of power, and being this just in a peaceful society, there is a need for more conversation, for more mutual understanding, you have to explain what you want and why, and not just ask, and or just take it. For him it was like, — I would prefer to have my weapon with me, but I understand how inhumane it is, how the weapon changes my place in the community, and my attitude to people. He was a smart, engaged guy. But his coming back to the peaceful society with an experience of having a gun was very hard for him. This makes me think about changes in people’s psychology, changes in the basics of how our contacts are organized, what do we have in mind if everyone knows I could be killed for any reason, or having a gun also means I can kill.
M: I think the only person who could ever say that I want to have a gun because I’m afraid that someone else might have one and I need it for self-defense, is frankly someone who has never been in a position where their life has been threatened. At Kyiv-Mohyla Academy we have a psychology department which is a series of relatively large groups of people that work in PTSD and generally trying to bring people back into society, those that have gone through massive stress. We have 4,000 clients in Bucha. 4,000 clients in a city of forty thousand people. That’s a lot of clients. I met with many of those people and I had an opportunity to chat with them. I’m not a psychotherapist by any means, but I did meet also with our people who are psychotherapists, who are psychologists, who are very well trained, many of them from Luhansk, from Donetsk and have experienced war themselves. People that go through real stress situations are very often very peaceful people. They want nothing to do with violence and as a matter of fact, anything that has to do with even a semblance of violence meaning armaments, for example, will generate very bad reactions. I really think that the argument that I need a gun to protect myself is only valid if you’ve never been in a situation where you’ve had to protect yourself. That’s been my experience anyway.
[1:20:19] Marion Hammer
R: My one counter to that would be the case of Marion Hammer, the infamous NRA lobbyist in Florida, whose entire genesis in wielding influence was being held up at gunpoint in her car some years ago. As usual in America, you just take reality and reverse it, and then that’s how, that’s how we perceive it.
D: Let me expand on the issue I raised. I would like to talk not so much about firearms as about the powerful moral and physical training of citizens. It’s important for me to see warriors of the spirit in the future and not armed people. For me the question of confident life is a question of the culture of death. I want to see people who can look death into the eyes.
M: Well, if that’s the case, Demyan, let’s expand your essay, and let’s talk about education because, of course, that’s what we really want to be talking about. The arms issue comes up at the point when socialization fails: we need to have a backstop, and the backstop is let’s have weapons for everybody so they can defend themselves. But of course if we have a proper system of education — or at least education in the wide sense, educato, meaning not just training for a profession, but with development of your mindset and your moral fabric, what we sociologists call socialization — if it’s done properly, then having weapons is really unnecessary, except for external threats, and at that point that is a separate issue about armies. I think you raise a good question because this is about Bildung. There’s a paradox in the Ukrainian education system in that it has been excellent at training and horrible at education. Ukraine is a powerhouse in IT outsourcing because we have probably the greatest concentration of mathematicians on earth. But talk to a mathematician about philosophy — and it’s a very boring conversation.
Last week before going to Bucha, I did two seminars which would fall into the category of executive education with the leadership of two medical universities, in other words, people who train doctors. The medical universities in Ukraine are in a fantastic quandary at this point because they’ve had three quarters of their budgets cut because they lived off of foreign students. Chernivtsi, for example, would have 5,000 students total, two thousand of which would be foreign students, and they would be paying four times the amount that a Ukrainian student would be paying. Suddenly there are no foreign students because foreign students are banned. How is the university going to survive? Suddenly they actually need to talk about strategy. You would think that executive people would at least have heard of Kant’s categorical imperative. No. No one ever heard of Kant. No one ever heard of ethics and of Ethics coming from a categorical imperative. You would think perhaps even on a banal level they would have read The Black Swan, or they would have heard of Michael Porter, of Philip Cutler — none of them! I mean, none of them had any kind of management knowledge. I use that as a proxy to illustrate that they are excellent doctors, but we do not have a holistic education system which is a requirement of the type of responsibility Demyan is talking about. It’s something that is not just about universities, it’s about preschool, school system, it’s about everything that the Scandinavians have clearly gotten right. I would really encourage you to talk about those types of things, rather than talking about everyone being armed. Because if we get those things right in the next ten years, we won’t need weapons.
[1:28:03] the case of Israel
J: Yevhen Hlibovytsky recently wrote that the Western, European society got just too relaxed by the peaceful years. We forgot about threats; we forgot how to be aware of war.
M: If you want to look for examples of who has done this, look no further than Israel. Israel is a country that has been under existential threat for the last seventy years. Everyone does military service, they don’t have guns at home but they do have everyone trained. But the issue is that it’s not just about military service, I did a lot of research on the Israeli educational system up until higher education, and what’s more important is the system of education that they get in the army. Trainees get a very large proportion of ethics. Now the issue is it’s very easy to do ethics when you’re Israeli because you have this thing called the Torah. Ukrainians don’t have a Torah, we don’t have a text that we all agree upon as being the formative text that we discuss, and this is why Chris’s example about the Netherlands is actually a much better example for us. But the Netherlands was not under threat. Finding an exact analogy is very difficult. The American analogy is really good for us when it comes to the 18th century. The Israeli analogy is really good for us when we talk about education with respect to the external threat, but they have a Torah.
C: There’s more at stake than the Torah, I think. It’s very good, Mychailo, that you bring up the question of education because, Julia, Demyan, your work is partly about creating new forms of education. The Bildung network is very important in that, in which Robert has a lot of experience.
J: A lot of the future is being created right now. There will then come the question of how to be prepared for that future, what kind of education we should have, right now, already. This educational system also has to be flexible enough to change with the needs of our society.
R: We did away with the draft in 1973 when I was four years old. My father made the prediction back then that for all of the goodness that it created with our all volunteer Armed Force and etc., there would come a time where we would partially regret doing it because he saw it as a very formative, a forcing function on society that produced more of it, let’s just say, a corporate mentality of what we are. Even people that hated every minute of service, there was some sense of shared ownership, responsibility, etc., that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Now we have 45 years, almost 50 years now, of Americans who don’t have a clue what that is. It’s telling. We could never reinstitute the draft now, but maybe you could do other kinds of service like, like the Peace Corps, or working for the government. I think this dovetails with where we’re going to see Lene Rachel Anderson‘s point of inflection, in gap year programs. I would say the canceling of the draft is among the faults of baby boomers. Boomers didn’t invent crisis, they just put it on steroids. It’s still a manifesto I’m trying to write that I haven’t published yet, in time for everyone to vote them out of office. Sixty percent of Congress is still boomers and they’re 58 or older, so do the math.
[1:35:48] European Bildung Manifesto
M: Ageism, of course, is very important for understanding.
R: Absolutely. I’m even more critical of Gen X: we’ve been asleep at the wheel for a decade now and there’s no signs of it improving. Unless you’re the three Supreme Court Justices who just voted to end abortion. They’re all X-ers. Thank you very much for disgracing my generation.
D: About Bildung. I think I’m worried about how Bildung helps not only to build after victory, but also to strengthen us right now to come to victory.
R: By the way, as an aside, has anyone here read the manifesto that Lene has been propagating? It’s called the «European Bildung Manifesto».
I think there’s certainly useful information in it in understanding and I think it’s certainly a perspective, it’s trying to wrap itself around a larger direction and purpose, you know. I think it’ll hopefully become a useful voice in the way forward.
D: We have 10 minutes, and then we finish. What question do you ask the people you talk to? And what questions are you being asked?
R: I’ll go real quick first because I probably have less to say. I mostly ask military questions because people know I’m in the military. Is Ukraine going to win, is russia really as bad as they look? Americans are somewhat engaged but definitely more distantly than Europeans.
[1:42:24] the war in the news
M: I spent last week other than the day in Bucha in Lviv and in Chernivtsi, and things are different in Lviv and in Chernivtsi than they are in Kyiv, very different. Whenever I talk to anyone from outside the country, it is a completely different reality, and that’s just, that’s just the way it is. We are no longer in the top news. The Ukrainian war is still in the news but it is in the news in the context of global famine, energy crisis, inflation and domestic political issues. Whereas for three months, the global media was united in carrying the narrative of Ukraine, that has ended. Strangely enough the January 6th committee I think was probably the start, the beginning of the end. The general question that I get from foreigners is what exactly is going on in Ukraine, right? Media coverage is atomized, and that is a logical reflection of the fact that we are divided into nations, and nations have their own priorities, nations are communities that have their own media, and those media will talk about their own priorities.
D: Nations or cultures?
M: In most cases, it’s one and the same.
I think that we are now out of our state of shock. Shock is done. People have started to plan significantly beyond the immediate future, a week. That planning horizon increases a lot of uncertainty. The questions are about what’s going to happen, how long does this last, etc. When I talk to my military friends, when we get beyond a conversation of, everything will be fine by the end of the year, we get into the realities of war and the reality is that there is a «catch-22» that most people are trying not to verbalize. Ukraine needs Western weapons, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will begin counter-attacking once they have Western weapons to the point of russia beginning to lose. Then russia launches a nuke. When russia launches a nuke — please, note that I said «when» not «if» — no one understands what happens after that. When you talk to people in the British intelligence community or you talk to British government officials, the answer is — well, we’ll cross that bridge, when we come to it. No one even wants to think about that possibility.
[1:50:03] Western intervention scenario
R: Well, I think there’s going to be tremendous pressure in Western governments to intervene at that point. I think nuclear inevitability is always a little overstated. It was in the Cold War, it is now too. It doesn’t mean that it’s not very real but I… I will say this — when I was at CENTCOM, James Mattis was the commander, and he took part in a table-top exercise that began with Pakistan getting nuclear weapons. He basically said — well here’s where I come in, and I basically want to go in and kill everybody. That’s what I’m going to do. Roger McDermott went to Washington to talk to the Obama Administration about russia in the wake of Crimea and nobody would even meet with him. I’m thinking about Iran. I haven’t talked to anyone else in the military myself recently but I had a similar synopsis — that by the end of the summer Ukraine would start to get more depth and that they would eventually start rolling back russia, and that’s when it would get interesting. I think it’s interesting because wars are often about resources and no one talks about that now, but russia’s main interest in the Donbas is oil and gas. People don’t even talk about it but they’re close to getting what they might be happy with sticking with. What’s that going to mean? And industrial capacity.
M: All destroyed.
R: Well, probably, so but it’s, it’s probably going to get rebuilt, or at least one would think?
J: No, nothing to rebuild.
R: Well, it’s interesting because that’s, that’s in the mathematics of a piece I just read only three days ago.
M: I would really, if you have, I’m sorry for doing this, but I’m going to plug my book, so have a look at that — «Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War». One of the things I do in that book is I really criticize very strongly any kind of economic materialistic type analysis. This war, this war is about ideology.
R: I primarily agree.
M: In other words, we’ve been brought up in the 20th century and, by the way, you as a military person would have this as well in your education, we’ve been brought up in what we call a realist paradigm. Realism is very much based in Marxism, and the idea being that economics is always at the foundation of everything that we do, and if you want to really find the motivations of anybody that’s doing anything, you look for economic interests. That is a misnomer in this part of the world and certainly with reference to putin. You know, the classic example that I have on this one is I get revisionist analysis of the history of hitler, as in hitler was trying to create an economic empire for himself, and that’s why he came after Ukraine because he needed the black earth because he needed to feed the German nation. That’s true, but then why did he kill off the Jews? The point is that with respect to the Donbas, there is no economy, Donbas is Yorkshire. It’s never going to be rekindled into some industrial heartland anymore. What I’m very afraid of is that the similar thing will be able to be said about Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia where Demyan is from because that is in the process of being destroyed, and I hope that we were able to not get it to be destroyed. russia has enough gas and oil to last for the next 70-80 years. They don’t need these little shale gas fields in the Donbas.
With respect to the nuclear thing, I wasn’t meaning inevitability, I apologize if it came off as an inevitability, I certainly wasn’t talking about it being inevitable. But we could talk about most likely scenarios, and the reality is that when russia starts to lose, the most likely scenario is escalate to de-escalate, that’s part of their military doctrine.
R: Absolutely.
M: In 2015 I wrote an article about russia policy, or the lack of the West’s russia policy. At that time I remember talking to people, again, at State and other places and they looked at the article, and said — why are you bringing this to us at all? Because the gist of the article was that the West’s policy with respect to russia was reactive. In other words, there was no proactive policy at all. What we’re seeing today is the fruit of those seeds. We didn’t have a proactive policy and what I’m afraid of is that when the most likely scenario does not have an answer, we again don’t have a proactive policy, we will be in a scenario where we will have to react. When we react, we are reacting based on emotion — one, and we are reacting based on a small group of people making a, perhaps, not thought-through decision. We can avoid the most probable scenario if we have a proactive policy. In the meantime, I want to talk about hierarchy and new governments and, and new constitutions, and no one’s asking about that, other than you guys.
[1:57:27] the value of talking about the future
C: That would be my final question for this session. Listening to you talk about possible scenarios or very real scenarios for what’s going to happen in the course of this year, what is the value of discussions like these about heterarchy, about a future society where not everybody is armed, where education works, etc?
M: I did get asked several times about that after the two conferences that we did on the future of Ukraine after the war. What is the point of talking about what Ukraine is going to be after the war? We have a war to fight, we have a war to win, and we’ll think about what kind of country we’re building after we win the war. My answer to that one is not my own. I will quote a very fantastic student of mine who’s since become, strangely enough, a Jesuit priest. He’s now one of the chaplains of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His name is Andriy Zelinskyi, and he says the one of the worst things we could ever imagine is victory on the battlefield but «ruskiy mir» under a blue-and-yellow flag being the result. In other words, we win our territory back but we become an authoritarian, historical narrative oriented type of society where we have a new cult of personality, where we no longer have freedom that we’ve become accustomed to, etc. That is a very real possibility, if we throw our resources 100% at the present. When you throw your resources at the present, there is a tendency to try to justify those resources in terms of the past. In other words, what we’re doing is victimizing ourselves, or we’re glorifying certain elements of the past. Which is exactly what putin does. It is exactly the politics of eternity that Timothy Snyder writes about, as being the basis of tyranny. So as long as we are thinking and talking about the future, and as long as we are thinking and talking about things that create an image of where we are going, then I think we are mobilizing in the present for the sake of the future, rather than mobilizing in the present for the sake of the past. That makes us different from the russians.
Questions
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Participants in the dialogue discuss the concepts of trust and suspicion. How would you personally describe the experience of trusting someone? Of being suspicious? What is the link between trust and leadership?
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Many people now have experienced heterarchial, ‘beehive’-like communities. What practices, in your opinion, do such communities need to institutionalize to remain sustainable? By what means? Is a constitutional document something appropriate for such a community?
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Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski speaks of “the culture of death” as a condition for confident life. What does the phrase “culture of death” mean to you?
Resources
UkraineWorld. “Three months of full-scale war: key conclusions.” Explaining Ukraine podcast, Episode 102. 24 May 2022. https://soundcloud.com/user-579586558/ep-102
Wynnyckyj, Mychailo. “Towards a Proactive Russia Policy: What Constitutes Checkmate?” Circus Bazaar. 13 February 2015. https://circusbazaar.com/towards-a-proactive-russia-policy-what-constitutes-checkmate/
