Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are shuttling between Washington and Moscow in an attempt to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. Whether their intentions are honest and sincere is a matter of your and my conjecture, but the fact is that they travel to and fro.
The Russian side is represented by one Kirill Dmitriev rather than Sergei Lavrov. Kirill Dmitriev is an interesting person. He was born in 1975, in Ukraine – Soviet Ukraine. Nonetheless, between the ages 14 and 25 he studied at… no, not Kiev or Moscow university. He studied at Stanford University and Harvard Business School. His father was – yes, you guessed it right – a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of Ukraine. This did not prevent his son – Dmitriev – from working for Goldman Sachs in the capacity of an investment banker for a couple of years. A son of a staunch communist transitioned to being a capitalist from one day to the next. His father fitted into the communist system because it was then the order of the day; Kirill became a worshipper of capitalism because – yes – now capitalism has become the order of the day. One wonders about the human psyche.
The human psyche seems to be very malleable. Human psyche might fit the definition of what liquid is. You may remember the simple and nice definition from your elementary school that liquid is any substance that takes the form of the container into which it is poured. So does the human psyche. When communism reigns supreme, you become a communist; when capitalism gets the upper hand, you become a capitalist. That’s all there is to it.
Such changes often take place within the same generation. Imagine a German born in, say, 1900, and living to be a hundred in 2000. During his childhood and early youth our Helmut would certainly have been an ardent follower of the German monarchy, of the Kaiser; after the fall of the monarchy in 1918, he would have certainly changed gear and become an obedient citizen of the Weimar Republic; during the national-socialist times of 1933-1945 the same Helmut would have certainly become a loyal member or supporter of the NSDAP; after the 1945 debacle he would have become either a regular citizen of (capitalist) West Germany operating under American tutelage or a regular citizen of (socialist) East Germany operating under the Soviet tutelage, depending on in which part of the country he would have found himself at war’s end; after 1989 he would have eagerly voted for the unification of the two German states, although prior to this event he certainly would have willingly fought in a fraternal war against the Germans across the border if such were the circumstances. More to it: during much of his life our Helmut would have been a German patriot (of imperial Germany, national-socialist Germany, the Federal Republic or the German Democratic Republic) to end up as a globalist and cosmopolitan in the post 1991 reunified Germany. As the citizen of national-socialist Germany he would have looked down upon non-European human races and even on the Slavs; after 1945 – irrespective of his place of residence, be it West or East Germany – he would have sloughed off his racism while in the 2000s he would have embraced not only Slavs but also — and predominantly so – people from the Third World. All those changes would have occurred during the life of one man, during the life of one generation.
In the case of the Dmitrievs it took two generations to transit from anti-capitalism (communism) to capitalism (anti-communism), but the time span during which those epic changes in the worldview of the two related individuals occurred is comparable with that of our Helmut. Both examples showcase the infinitely malleable human psyche.
