Let us agree that what Russia is like and the mentality of the so-called Russian man, world leaders have known for years — they could draw on intelligence reports as well as scholarly works on the subject by, for example, Samuel Huntington or the Polish professor Feliks Koneczny (a staple of any political science curriculum).

The latter defined the matter as a Turanian civilization — a mixture of brutal tribal warfare capable of casually exterminating part of its own society for the peace of the whole rabble, Chinese cunning and trickery, Mongol brutality and primitive force, a total disregard for the fate of the individual, and the Byzantine role of the ruler who decides everything — including what truth is — for he himself is God here. A civilization whose only experience with democracy was the brief Yeltsin era, when national assets were effectively plundered by oligarchs and the ordinary citizen was stripped even of his monthly salary.

All of it light-years removed from the Greek treatises on beauty, goodness, and the aforementioned truth — concepts later enriched by the Christian approach to love, the Magdeburg law established on European lands (as far as the Dniester and the Daugava), and the sanctity of private property that directly flows from it.

Concepts which, I would like to believe still, define the nature of the European — a person who aspires to their ideal with better or worse results, but never negates them; for whom — even when unaware of it — these are matters of importance and often matters of life itself.

The Russians themselves, aspiring to Europe for centuries, promoted a certain imagined self-portrait: that the Russian soul is supposedly filled with melancholy (in reality, with spirits), that there is ballet, music, and literature. It is, by the way, quite a trip to lead a human being from a mix of pathologies — alcoholic visions, prostitution, thievery, and usury — through murders and sentences, to the bosom of gardens of happiness and love. The Russian "per aspera ad astra," one might say maliciously :-)

And that is precisely what Dostoevsky's masterwork Crime and Punishment is about; in a strikingly similar setting appears Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, so beloved by European intellectuals; or the creme de la creme of philosophizing over a simple bottle — Yerofeyev's Moscow to the End of the Line. That last one is probably the direct Russian answer to the hippie ideas of the 1960s, with drugs and free love in the starring roles. To use Maklowicz's rhetoric: a communist pork cutlet toss onto a bump left by a Viennese veal schnitzel.

Unfortunately, the world — the artistic world especially — naively bought this image and effectively promoted it.

That is why I believe Thomas Merton (an Aristotle of the 20th century, if you will) when he says it is important to distinguish comedians from artists and entertainment from art. Merton used to say that the former gives pleasure, while the latter leads to transcendence... I find that definition very convincing.

That is why it is a pity we did not stop at the balls and costume aesthetics of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Tchaikovsky's magnificent Swan Lake — and instead allowed, even in Poland, the image of the Russian man and his contribution to European culture to be built on the basis of strained interpretations of mediocre works.

I also worry about Europe itself — about its substantive definition. What is it? What is it becoming?

Because the European values described above seem to be faring worse and worse in their own cradle.

Truth? Where today are the Greek philosophers' struggles with this concept — with the illusory image of the senses, the passage of time and circumstances, its sophistic relativity — and the definition of St. Thomas Aquinas, formulated in the words "veritas intellectus sit adaequatio intellectus et rei," translated as truth is the conformity of thought and reality? How does this relate to today's politically correct prohibitions on calling things by their name? In this context, does calling a Black person a Negro or a disabled person an invalid — without any judgment whatsoever — not sometimes take on the dimension of a fight for European values? 🙂

I will skip the fact that the French have a big problem with this, because their Les Invalides — the palace-museum built under Louis XIV, a former veterans' hospital where Napoleon's tomb now rests — is one of the places that defines who they are! But we too have our Invalides squares!

The currently promoted LGBTQ movement and whatever else follows contradicts objective truth even further — because even if we accept as true the existence of 6 genders — as in the Jewish Talmud, which stands in contradiction to the New Testament (or rather the Catechism) — with only woman and man, we nonetheless enter a virtual reality of their limitless number, where discussion is truly a matter of pure semantics and sick imagination.

Beauty (classically derived from harmony), goodness, love — all of this is being redefined today in the name of the reigning idea of progress. The only question is: is this still progress? Or are we climbing back into the trees?

We see the effects every day — ripped jeans with sneakers have replaced formal attire complemented by elegant shoes. We have plenty of similar examples.

But all of that looks like small potatoes next to a brief analysis of what is happening with private property, whose quintessence is money — as a measure of its magnitude. Its universal, mandatory digitization is bringing us to a situation in which the system becomes the custodian of private property. Today it is only a controlling body, but when the system fails — and it has done so many times — our property will evaporate. And in the background we have carbon footprints and civic points for minimizing them, trends toward renting rather than owning, 15-minute cities, and so on. In a word: the reality of the Ventotene Manifesto by the communist (that is what he was imprisoned for, after all) Altiero Spinelli, whose name "coincidentally" found its way above the entrance to the European Parliament.

So will Europe soon be nothing more than a swan song for something the entire world has practically envied us for until now?

Will such a reality be worth watching over, caring for, fighting for?

And where will all of this lead us as human beings?

It terrifies me when I realize that there is nowhere else but Europe where I want to live — and I wish the same for my child...