How Humans Extrapolate Their Own Fears on Others

In my previous blog post about propaganda in the US and USSR I wrote about how misleading propaganda is and why it is dangerous to start believing your own propaganda. However, there is more to propaganda then a simple desire to demonize the enemy and unite people behind your flag and ideology. 

However, after some thinking I concluded that demons of propaganda do not even come from abroad. Instead, they originate from within the country itself and represent the native society at its worst. Then these qualities are simply extrapolated on the foreign country that sometimes barely fits the demons, propaganda associate with it. 

After all people can only understand others based on ideas and concepts, they themselves have. When one sees someone doing something they do not get in everyday life, they often dismiss that person as stupid. However, when the entire countries do something so stupid it cannot be dismissed as stupidity and so brainstorming begins in attempt to understand reasons for certain puzzling actions. However often even the best analysts could not discern the actual reasons. After all their perception just as limited as that of the ordinary person. Thus a explanation based on demons of internal origin is the most likely outcome of such brainstorming. 

That works not even on far away countries that locals have little chance to get in contact with but even towards its neighbors. The US have many unrealistic believes about Canada, that are perpetrated in its pop culture. Russia similarly has many unrealistic believes about Ukraine that is far from truth. Yet both societies insist on believing them. Even some Russophones who live in Ukraine believe in Russian myth about Nazis in Ukraine.

All these myths exist because countries that created them have these qualities in themselves. Origin of some of these demons can be traced all the way back to the events under which the country has originated.

Sometimes these myths are so strange and unique to the country that begotten them, that no one else in the world can possibly understand them. EU and the US cannot believe in Nazis in Ukraine, EU and the world cannot understand right wing of the US politics, Russia cannot understand capitalism or liberalism and the West cannot understand Russian oligarchs.

Despite no one else getting it, the origin country tends to stick with its vision, insisting on its own interpretation. It's like a collective trauma of sorts: those who did not experience it themselves cannot get it and think its senseless. However, the country that experienced it stubbornly sticks to its guns. Acute memories of the past, that exist in subconsciousness, prevent them from thinking otherwise.

I will cover Nazis in Ukraine first as this is simpler than the other two. 

Then I will write about capitalism and communism in Russia and finally about totalitarianism and freedom in the US.