We’re not an obvious enemy to the Russian elite, and so their antipathy toward us is derived out of their extensive study of themselves and the differences they’ve got with other people. They also like to believe we haven’t influenced a single thing about modern Russia, and that historically, they have a strong line of successive thought. They also feel satisfied that attempts to do so before have only led to the Russification of the individual and assimilation of the person into their way of life.
Alexander Dugin is a case in point for the argument that philosophers of that heritage have little more to say once they’ve got a grip of the Russian way of seeing things, and also saying it in a characteristic way. Dugin, for example, laments the history of the West as if it’s layered sediment, showing only the passage of time and the violence caked within. In a recent post to Substack, he thinks along these lines as he says religion cracked under the pressure of a form of secularism that made it give way.
“The Christianity in the West is just a phantom pain. It was obliterated long long ago with the Modernity based on the materialist science, atheism, individualism, democracy and capitalism. The Modernity has transformed the West into non-Christian anti- Christian civilisation.
[-] The U.S. is in the hand of cruel madman. EU is the junta of deranged pervert globalists. Pro-Western leaders are clowns, crazy and pathetic maniacs. The collective portrait of the actual West is really total disaster. Nothing attractive. Repulsive. And the future promises worse.”
– Alexander Dugin/Substack
His opinion matches the position of many in his own country’s academic elite who hold their state of affairs to be an assortment of riches and ours as constantly lost to time itself. We need their perspective, and could even benefit from their sense of nostalgia, if only we could breathe the same air as they. The buildup of the same thing into something even more is of course a confusion of the present reality, but Dugin and his graduates are satisfied they don’t need to go anywhere, and are settled in thinking in this way.