I was thinking how the Americans don’t seem to understand anyone and have incredibly strange assumptions in communication, and I think I’m starting to understand the “root cause” of their problem.

You see, America is a land of liars; or, more precisely, a land of snake oil salesmen, where everybody is selling something, starting with themselves, and the implicit assumption they have in every interaction is that everybody else is the same. Those snake oil salesmen invented all sorts of theories to be used when marketing your snake oil to people – body language, alpha/beta male divisions, positive thinking, and so on. It all seems to describe some reality, but it works only in America, where everybody is playing the same game of selling snake oil to others, and being wary of others selling snake oil to them. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that others don’t use the same “language” in communication. For instance, they keep wearing some fake smile and being artificially friendly in communication, but that’s because they are taught that such approach is disarming and it improves your chances of selling your snake oil to others. They don’t smile because they like you or because they are happy, they smile because they are taught this approach in some “how to sell whatever stupid bullshit to customers” course. They are also taught to emulate being confident, to stand tall, look you straight in the eyes and never show that they are lying when they are lying, which is always.

It is for this reason that they assume that, when someone like Putin talks, it is safe to ignore everything he’s saying because it must all be false (the way one should ignore everything an American is saying because it’s all lies), and if he appears confident and straightforward, it must be a bluff because that’s how Americans were all taught to lie.

Their problem is that others aren’t playing the same game.

When a normal person is slouched or just has a blank empty look, it doesn’t mean they lack self-confidence, or that they are lying, or aren’t sure of themselves. They just didn’t go through an acting course for liars and poseurs. The actual meaning of the slouched, absent-minded posture might be that an engineer is thinking about a tensor-representation of multiple forces influencing a body orbiting a magnetar, or that one is just mentally tired because he had many things to do today and is just chilling and recharging his energy. You basically can’t conclude anything from an irrelevant thing such as body posture, which is why people outside America hardly ever bother with such bullshit, and instead listen to each other. For instance, if someone tells you to piss off because you’re annoying him, that’s probably exactly what he’s thinking. Also, if he says he likes your attitude and invites you to have a drink with him, the odds are that’s exactly what he’s thinking. It reminds me of one of those jokes about men and women, where a woman says “I have a headache” and it means “I don’t want to fuck you or talk to you because you were polite to the neighbour whose wife was gossiping me behind my back and I’m not going to even tell you what the problem is because if you don’t know why I’m mad, it just means you’re not paying attention to me which means you don’t really care about me so fuck you”. When a man says “I have a headache”, he means “I have a headache”. Well, the Americans think like women. The Russians think like men. When a Russian says “I’m annoyed at you because you are exiting disarmament treaties and amassing weapon systems at our borders; you should stop”, that’s exactly what he means, and the implication is that if you don’t stop, he’ll have to do something about it. When a Russian says “we did something about it, and developed modern weapons, so you better stop fucking with us or else”, this is exactly what he means, and the implication of “else” is that he’s going to use those new weapons to destroy the immediate threat, and then stop to see if you understood the message. The Russians don’t bluff, because they don’t have a national game where bluffing is the main move. They don’t play poker. They play chess. They are also very straightforward people. If they like you, they smile and take you home to cook you dinner, they get drunk with you and tell stupid jokes. If they don’t like you, they tell you to go to hell, and if you don’t, they’ll gladly show you the way.

This misunderstanding of language between people who are all bluff, and people who are all substance, is extremely dangerous, when the Americans don’t listen to the Russians because of their faulty assumptions.

Of course, it’s not that the Americans have patent rights on idiocy; humans in general tend to assume things that are completely unwarranted, and then they get shocked when shit happens; for instance, kids bully the weird kid who just wants to be left alone, and since he doesn’t appear to do anything, they do it more, until he comes to school with a gun and outright murders them. It’s weird that they think that this is for some reason a pathological reaction – it’s not. It’s a perfectly reasonable reaction – someone annoys you, you tell him to stop. He laughs at you and annoys you more. You tell him to stop more forcefully, because he obviously didn’t get it the first time. He laughs at you and continues to annoy you. Then you try to notify authorities, but they wave you off because they don’t give a fuck. You understand that your life is being made miserable by intentional sadistic action by someone who doesn’t respond to your clearly stated wishes, the authorities don’t care, and you see no way you can remove yourself from the situation, so your options are to continue living in hell or to destroy the enemy. So you destroy the enemy, and its a very rational response to the problem, and the fact that people are too stupid to understand that and interpret such reactions as “wrong” and “psychotic” only means that they are the psychotic ones, because they are too fucked up to understand how things work. If you’re a sadist who derives joy from turning someone’s life into hell, and you refuse to stop when told so, that person has every right to kill you. The fact that you assume to be invulnerable and everybody reacts with shock when the obvious thing happens, only means that you are all idiots.

If you fuck with the Russians, they will initially be shocked. Then they will be angry and they will try to explain to you that what you did annoyed them, and that you should stop. If you don’t, they will try to use more direct language because you obviously didn’t understand. If you still continue to annoy them, they will decide that you’re a bad person and they will try to remove themselves from your company and go elsewhere. If you try to prevent this and continue to annoy them and sabotage their interactions with others, they will get really angry and threaten you with violence if you don’t leave them alone. If that doesn’t work, they will kill you.

The American problem is very similar to that of a bully who assumes to be invulnerable and his reaction to “leave me alone” is laughter and escalation of violence, because someone telling you something with words “obviously” means they can’t do anything about it. When they actually do something about it, you react with shock, because you’re all idiots.