This piece was submitted by guest writer, Branko Gradišnik. It is an excerpt from an upcoming book, and published with his permission.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
I first came across a hint of the division of mankind into two groups, defined by the ontic difference in the functioning of the brain, as a teenager when I first read my precious History of Mankind / Cultural and Scientific Development, Allen and Unwin 1963 – a multivolume fruit of collaboration of West and East –I found it mentioned in the first volume, entitled 'Prehistory'. The editor/author was Jacquetta Hawkes and the book translation was published in 1967 by the National Publishing House of Slovenia. I still read the book and carry it around with me when I move around Europe. If I ever want to get to the end, I have to go back to the beginning.
On page 107 it says: “A recent discovery in the field of brain research may have at least indirect relevance for linguistics. It has been discovered that, according to the differences in the electrical rhythms of the brain cells, people are divided into two main types: those who tend to think in visual images and those who think mainly verbally. It is obvious, then, that these two types indicate a profound spiritual difference. Is it possible that nations which, like the Japanese, for example, are extremely receptive to the fine arts and skills, but apparently have no interest in logical thought and its means of expression, have a very large number of individuals who think in images, while among Europeans and members of other Western nations, who are keen on abstract thought and have developed their language accordingly, there are a correspondingly large number of verbal thinkers?« (Translation is mine – from the Slovene edition.) Unfortunately, there is no reference to the study in the book.”
I found what was said very interesting but not really useful. I mean, where does one go to measure “differences in the electrical rhythms of brain cells” in order to know which of the two groups one belongs to? I myself thought that my electrical rhythms must be very confused, because from the time I was three years old and all the way through to puberty I drew every day like a man possessed, especially horses which I could see in person occasionally trotting past our windows at 14 Cankarjeva Street in Ljubljana, where firewood and country goods were allowed to be driven in during the fifties, but most of which I knew only from picture books and art almanacs. I was definitely in love with them - but when the old relative named Viktor put me on a real living horse in my mother's hometown of Majurec, I froze in horror and they had to forcefully untangle my fingers from its mane. On the other hand, I was reading and reading, even later in adolescence, at least for five or six hours a day.
So was I a verbalist or a pictorialist? Or perhaps both?
Who could tell.
Anyway, I have not yet grasped the essential difference between the two during those years and neither for a long time afterwards.
A little later after the History of Mankind I also read Suzuki and Fromm's joint work Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, published in Yugoslavia around that time (1968), but I didn't arrive at a synthesis - I stayed in the zone of the fashionable westernized Zen thinking and the mechanical separation between the analytical thinking of the westerners and the Zen of the easterners, where I counted, of course, especially the Japanese.
And I certainly did not count myself among the latter.
Later, I don't know when or how, but almost certainly while reading Nikola Milosevic's »Dostoevsky as a Thinker«, so after 1981, when his book was first published, I was introduced to the concepts of Slavophilia and Pan-Slavism, and at least I got a sense of it, namely that especially among the Russians but also among some other Slavic peoples there is a present element of “Orientalism” which had been integrated into the Russian spirit under the rule of Tatars as well as later on when the empire expanded to the East. Today we can see the similarity between the Russian sobornost of the 19th century and the current Chinese social compliancy (which has automatically prompted people to willingly wear face masks since the first outbreak of SARS).
Boris N. Chicherin (1828–1904), the founder of Russian statecraft theory, envisioned in his History of History of Political Theories a possibility of forming a harmonious fullness between the elements of social (and spiritual) life in freedom, power, law and common purpose. Which he interpreted as mutual blending of order and freedom. This is how he arrived at his definition of the good state as »the union of a people bound together by law into a whole, governed by authority for the general common good«. He called for a free society in a free state and defined a formula according to which the less united a society is, the more united the state must be. This equation applies to Russia today, while the anarchistic theories of Bakunin, Tolstoy and Kropotkin, which were based on a belief in the inherent goodness of man as a species, have proved to be unviable.
As for the Russians being the only European easteners to retain statehood in the Middle Ages, there is no doubt that, despite the modernizations of Peter and Catherine the Great, they defended themselves against the encroachments of Western »modernity« in the 19th century. When the concept of Slavophilism was developed, they viewed it, except insofar as imperial interests were concerned, mostly from sceptical distance because they considered that most of the other Slavic peoples who at that time longed for freedom and turned to Mother Russia for help, were already »on the Western side«, culturally as well as in many instances also religiously.
N. J. Danilevsky (1822—1885) argued in his Russia and Europe (1871) that there was no generic human culture as such. In Europe we have the Romano-Germanic type on the one hand and the Russo-Slavic type on the other. The task of the former is to strive for self-preservation, so that the Slavic world does not become mere »ethnographic material« or fertiliser for the Romano-Germanic world which is founded in violence. (I first read about Danilevsky around 1980 in Viktor Spektorsky's History of Social Philosophy, an extremely illuminating survey of human ideas about how human society should be ordered. Spektorsky, who was fleeing the Russian Revolution, also stopped for a while at the University of Ljubljana, and his book in two volumes was published in a translation by Josip Vidmar in 1932-33 – and nowhere else, at least to my knowledge.)
But again, I didn't know how to help myself getting all of these elements together, and I left the hints unheeded. At that time, I was a disillusioned cynic as far as political philosophy was concerned, and I liked to repeat Bismarck's bon mot that he was free to do whatever or anything because there would always be professors who would confirm the rightness of his actions. Today, his motto Macht geht vor Recht has become almost universal form of statesmanship.
In May 2006, I was writing a humorous book about my native country of Slovenia and I wanted to find out whether Slovenians are of Eastern or Western origin. This information would come in handy as a judgement over the then popular quasi-academic »Venetian question«.
Are Slovenians inheritors of eastern Slavs or of western Venets/=Etruscans?
For if we are descended from a common Proto-Slavic community, from there we have brought that disposition which, despite the pro-Western reforms of Peter the Great, kept the Russian Weltanschaung distinctly doubtful of the West. If it were to turn out that Slovenia is dominated by easterners it would mean that regardless of Central European cultural influences, regardless of the Habsburg educational heritage and regardless of today's kowtowing to the West we have retained a predominantly Slavic-Asian preliteracy pattern. A Venetian origin would mean the opposite.
In 2007, I came across a personality test offered by a company called Personality100.com. I answered the questions asked, sent it off ... and in reply received a 99-page report, the so-called “Branko's Personality Report”.
I still keep it and the company still exists, but at least my computer cannot access it. What is wrong, this I do not know. Try your luck. It is definitely not a money-milking operation. They also offer a free version. I myself paid for my report -- I don't know how much, but it was certainly worth it: it opened up insights into depths of my personality that I had been previously completely unaware of.
First of all, right there in this report I also found »proof of the immutability of the brain's functional pathways created in early childhood”.
The proof was predicted by the following definition of how we humans grow into the descendants of our progenitors and ancestors.
Humans learn from an early age to act in accordance with what seems acceptable to those who introduce us to the world, and to think in a way that seems useful and meaningful to them. We learn almost all of this from our parents and peers, and some of it from neighbors, in kindergarten and school, from our language itself, and in the last hundred years, as we have grown up a little, from radio and various screens.
An example: the report maintained that if people as children, having been asked what word they associate with the word blue, respond with the word sky, they will respond with the very same word after fifty, sixty years if asked again.
Of course, all these adults whose words and stances we absorb were once toddlers themselves, and of course they too learned similarly from their ancestors. This heritage goes back through the generations to the very roots of human conscious thought and language.
In fact, there exist two roots of not quite the same length, stretching back through. One branch is rooted in a primitive, concrete and holistic conception of the world as an all-encompassing whole (sobornost), the other in a modern, abstract and categorial conception of the world consisting of many kinds of different particularities united only (if at all) by different forms of comparable qualities. The first is supposed to be the foundation of preliteracy (where words were being expressed by pictures, such as hieroglyphs, Chinese proto-literature etc.), the second the foundation of alphabetic, that is to say abstract literacy. Some of the Old Germanic runes stand somewhere in between since they can be read as pictures and as letters.
On the next page, I found the differential test. It was ingenious in its simplicity or, if you like, in its primitivity. It had already been carried out in 1996 in one giant testing by neurolinguistic psychologists throughout the world's major cultures.
The test consists of a single open-ended question (the term means that there is more than one possible correct answer and that there are no tricks involved).
One demonstrates presence of one’s predominant mental model by one’s choice.
The question in front of me allowed for two different responses.
This test was exactly what I had always been looking foe: a simple way of determining one's mental affiliation without the complicated and difficult-to-implement »measuring the electrical rhythms of brain cells«.
I’m offering you this test to participate with your immediate answer. Mind you, not to solve it, since there exist two different yet “right” answers!
Of the four items listed below, please feel free to exclude the one that obviously do not belong to this group. There are two solutions and both are correct/right, each in its way.
The items are:
AXE
SHOVEL
(TREE)LOG
SAW.
That was that.
I am sure it has taken you only a split second to eliminate the not-connecting word/object.
Anyone who still ponders should decide RIGHT NOW!
So, now you know already which of the two groups you belong to.
The results have been explained below the test as follows.
In Western civilizations, but also in other cultures that have been adopting its values for long enough through mirroring, adopting and learning subconsciously, the vast majority of respondents exclude the LOG since it’s a natural (wooden) object and not a tool.
In »Eastern civilization« - not only in Asian cultures, but also in Russia and partially also in the Slavic periphery of Europe, the vast majority exclude the SHOVEL since it cannot be of any help with the log.
In Western learning systems we are taught to appreciate the abstract value of objects, to categorize and analyze. In many non-Western cultures, however, children unconsciously learn to look for connections and relationships between different objects or categories: they learn to synthesize, to link different and even differing things into a “whole of relationships”. Pictograms had been originally made like this, showing their content by putting various pictorial concepts into a combination: for example, the Chinese sign for the word TRAIN is made up of the signs for chariot and fire. (Similarly, the American Indigenous people called brandy fire-water.)
This was the conclusion of the argument in the Report.
I myself eliminated the SHOVEL (although I saw the other solution also, but it seemed to me to be irrelevant).
I was so impressed that I immediately carried out a small survey among my relatives, friends and acquaintances. More on that later, but now I must return to the explanation in the Personality Report.
On the Western side, the extreme form of categorially would be scholasticism as a logically constructed/construed and cemented ideology, and on the Eastern side, the extreme form of concretism would be Zen as a logic-defying but redemptive meditation in the midst of and about the concrete world/life. Let’s open the Wikipedia entry “Zen” and you can see what happens when Western scholastics try to define it. But in reality Zen expresses the confluence between what we are, what we perceive and what surrounds and envelops us.
In his part of the book Zen-Buddhism and Pschoanalysis, D. T. Suzuki gives a prime example of the distinction between analysis and synthesis when he first cites Basho’s haiku on the little nazuni flower (Capsella bursa pastoris):
When I look closer,
there, under the hedge,
the flower of nazuna!
to which he compares Tennyson's ABCCAB rhyme:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
I think no further comment is needed.
So now I know what I did not know before: that I am a woodcutter (as I shall call all people who think according to the Eastern model).
Just before the start of the current turbulences that are hitting humanity, in the year of 2020, I was translating the book Range, written by the very readable and insightful David Epstein. He sets out to explain why »in an age of hyper-specialization, the jack of all trades continues to win«. Already in the second chapter, he reveals the work carried out by the father of neurolinguistics, Alexander Luria, during the Soviet »modernization of the countryside«.
He writes as follows:
“(...), in 1931, amid that incredible transformation, a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting ‘natural experiment,’ unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds.
When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations— teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. (....) Pressed to make conceptual groupings—akin to the similarities questions on IQ tests— remote villagers reverted to practical narratives based on their direct experience. When psychologists attempted to explain a ‘which one does not belong’ grouping exercise to thirty-nine-year-old Rakmat, they gave him the example of three adults and one child, with the child obviously different from the others. Except Rakmat could not see it that way. ‘The boy must stay with the others!’ he argued. The adults are working, ‘and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.’ Okay, then, how about a hammer, a saw, a hatchet, and a log—three of them are tools. They are not a group, Rakmat replied, because they are useless without the log, so why would they be together?
Other villagers removed either the hammer or the hatchet, which they saw as less versatile for use with the log, unless they considered pounding the hatchet into the log with the hammer, in which case it could stay. Perhaps, then, bird/rifle/dagger/bullet? You can’t possibly remove one and have a group, a remote villager insisted. The bullet must be loaded in the rifle to kill the bird, and ‘then you have to cut the bird up with the dagger, since there’s no other way to do it.’ These were just the introductions explaining the grouping task, not the actual questions. (....) To use a common metaphor, premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest.”
So here I was back at the original test of the distinction between »modern« and »primitive« thinking. I doubt, however, that in the original test Luria was really offering a »hammer«; it seems more likely to me that it was an unfortunate translation offered to Epstein. Perhaps the original translator from Russian was a westerner and did not care - a tool is a tool is a tool. Epstein says that the main source for the quoted chapter was »Luria's fascinating book Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976«.
In 2007 I tried to use “The Log and Shovel Test” to show the then US ambassador to Croatia, Robert Bradtke, obviously an intelligent man, why the Americans could not get along with the Russians and the Chinese, but he just looked at me blankly, even after I had illustrated, by pantomiming chopping and sawing a log, the woodcutter solution. The effect on him was the one that a good joke has on a man without any sense of humor. His Excellency finally nodded, in a polished but unconvinced manner: “I see that the saw and the axe and the log are somehow together in the case you are presenting; however, they are still clearly on opposite sides: the tools are active, the log is passive, the tools are attacking, the log is defending itself, or would be defending itself if it were alive.
The only way I would agree with you is if it were an old bow-saw with a wooden holding, because all three would have a certain degree of woodenness in common then - but even in that case the log, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do here because there is nothing ironlike about it, except maybe a drawknob later on, whereas with the saw, the axe and the spade we have the three iron blades.«).
The above also shows how it is possible that the Russian soul turned to the eastern side - there were many eastern peoples living in the gigantic Soviet Union. And beforehand. Otherwise Tolstoy could not have written in his dedication of War and Peace: 'He did not wish to be educated in anything in particular, but it was like before any single part of anything he had already grasped the whole... And Nicholas's administration bore the most splendid fruits.'
Hence the incredible comprehensiveness of Demons and The Brothers Karamazov in which the author manages to assemble into a polyphonic synthesis the irreconcilable contradictions between revolutionaries (in Demons) and between relatives (in The Brothers Karamazov).
And hence, I presume, the success of Putin's sobornost economy even during wartime.
Back to the results of my test in Slovenia.
Only 30% of the tested came out as the shovelers (who preferred the »tools argument«). 68 % were like me, the loggers. The remaining 2% could not decide, because she saw both options at the same time as perfectly equal. (Sample = 50)
Years later I repeated the slightly modified test on a more appropriate sample of my readers (>120); this time the woodcutters won even more convincingly, with almost 75 per cent. Among the tested were also 13 Slovaks since me and my wife used to live there then (2014—2017).
In the light of the above, we Slovenians seem to be much more connected in thought and therefore in everyday life to the Eastern Europe than to the West, much more connected to the Russians than to the Americans.
The realization of two ways of seeing the world, the researchers in my Personality Report optimistically continued, in itself widens up an openness to others that would otherwise remain closed. The test shows us impartially that there are different possible solutions to experiencing the world, all of which may be correct, even if they are mutually exclusive. This should by itself improve communication between groups ...
But the conclusion was flawed, I think. The “non-excludable diversity” of the two systems of thought can, in fact, only be unreservedly accepted by woodcutters who know how to perceive the relational whole, while westerners will continue to experience and perceive the Eastern solution as wrong, nonsensical, inferior, in short, savage, backward, barbaric, 'Asiatic' and perhaps even “undemocratic”.
What does the above test have to do with the common identity and destiny of the European Union? And even more so with the West's war against Russia?
The past has an impact on the present, even when the present is pretending and reinterpreting the past out of tactical reasons..
The surprising Slovenian results are surely due to the fact that, as our archaic language (with dual, neuter genitive, three genders) proves, we are descendants of the preliterate, eastern Protoslavs. In other European countries of roughly the same latitude - Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland – westerner mind has at some point appropriated segments that would otherwise seem to be the natural preserve of the woodcutters. That is why European democracy, environmental protection and social welfare have long ceased to be the products of an equal confrontation and the ferment of ideas, but of a vote-counting, rigid political correctness, an administrative everyday life that dares to enthrone unelected and irrevocable commissioners, bankers and bureaucrats at the head of the continent. Slovakia of late is an exception to this, as can be seen from the current political turn, which has seen it distance itself from Ukraine and from its war against Russia. The Hungarians are similar - despite their bad historical experience with the Soviets (1957!), and by all accounts they are proving that they know how to navigate between East and West.
The most noticeable Slovenian “easternism” can be perceived in our rather relaxed attitude towards those who think differently, for example in the field of humor, lively language, political »incorrectness«, which we mostly tolerate. The only Slovenian schism that is seemingly irreconcilable is the legacy of the civil (and national liberation) war of 1941-1945. It seems most likely that the bloody Civil War was fought between two forms of categorialism, Catholic-Western and Communist-Soviet. But where were the woodcutters? They were the silent majority, just trying to weather the storm and the schism as best they could.
As for the European Union, its exponents may pretend to be defenders of diversity, but it is a very exclusivist diversity - one that absolutely rejects anything that does not conform to its catechism. At the same time, the mechanisms of suppression and propaganda have ensured that the EU is now an example of quasi-ignorance: with its left hand, its top brass bans the throwing of children's squibs during holidays and yet silently condones the throwing of two-ton bombs on children in Gaza.
Ideological and now psychological intolerance is the outward symptom of Europe's forced unification. European conglomerate has been deliberately uniting for several decades now – and it understands this uniting as unification in the manner of the European Commission - precisely out of a need to escape its past, a past that has torn it apart, that has united peoples in “dungeons of nations” or torn them apart with an “iron curtain”, driven them into cataclysmic ethnocides and entombed them in an inexhaustible bestiary of destructiveness.
Western Europe of the Middle and of the Industrial Age is the conceptual originator and exporter of every form of social and economic evil from the slave trade and colonialism to concentration camps, imperialism, medical experiments on human beings and the atomic bomb. (Read about this in Edgar Morin’s Penser l'Europe, Gallimard, 1987.) Its common identity, especially that of the West and the mythical Centre, is based on the root crimes of imperialism, colonialism and racism. That is why we also need to get out and about and listen to all this ranting about the common European values, which should drown out the sad and cruel truth that we Europeans are the descendants of Cain.
Today's war 'for the unified Europe' being waged in Russia/Ukraine can only be understood (at least by those of us who do not make a living from the sale of arms and ammunition) if we remember the mental division of humanity into two parts which is the basic subject of my reminiscences here. The war between NATO and Russia is at the same time a war of two modes of thought, born of the desire of the categorialists to have only two categories left: them as the superior and definitive conquerors and exploiters of the entire planet, and all the others as the »burden of Western man«, at best as the object of »moral and religious re-education« according to Western standards, at worst as unnecessary ballast on the planet to be »depopulated« by hook or by crook.
This view is rooted in the fundamental blindness of categorists to non-categoriality. That this is not a clash between double categories, as was the case for the most of the Cold War between the two blocs, is evidenced not only by many of Putin's statements, but also by his and Russia's tolerance, even acquiescence, for a long time, in dealing with the problem of Ukraine's Nazification and ethnical terrorizing of native Russians in Ukraine.
I know, my text seems contradictory in the light of the historical facts. Do not Stalin, Mao ze Dong, Pol Pot, Hirohito, Ceausescu, etc., prove that easterners are no better?
Not at all, I dare say, they only prove that any political system based on classification, whether by clan, tribe, caste, race, ideology, class or election, is functionally at the mercy of Westernism which has mastered the arts and skills of reducing, sorting, stratifying, internalizing, isolating, ignoring, expropriating, (dis)qualifying, censoring and, finally, eliminating The Other.
The categorialists are blind as far as the whole of the relations within a system is concerned; and so they don’t care about people that “don’t belong to the category”.
The carelessness, which the Western brain justifies as humanism and a mission, the manifesto of the destiny of a rules-based society of Europe, of this well-kept park, while everything else out there is a jungle (as, I think, the Vice-President of the European Commission Josep Borrell said recently), gives the westerners a strong tactical advantage in areas where ruthlessness is rewarded - in politics, economics, industry, trade, banking ... This is why they have been able to co-opt or even appropriate all such institutions as the IMF, the UN, the WHO and, of course, the promulgators of the Western Right - the Associated Press, Reuters, the France Press, which are the sources for 99% of all the orthodox news in the Western hemisphere. Not to mention the diabolical WEF.
With the beginning of written history, westerners actually took the initiative and the power: the first prehistoric man who met his fellow man, saw in him another category, a “not-me”, attacked, defeated and subjugated him as his slave, was the first westerner. Westernization makes expropriation possible, makes exploitation viable. It also enables Nazism and racism and imperialism - the three are really one and the same thing: the colonialists saw the people of the newly discovered lands as cattle, the Nazis saw them as rats.
Categorization, at the same time as classification, just isn’t able not to exclude.
That is why, in systems that are not prone to categorization, complex social problems can be solved - remember Prigozhin's coup attempt last year, which Putin resolved without bloodshed? Putin's reference at the time to this being a repeat of Russia's “1917 crisis” suggests that he is one of the “loggers”.
I am not saying that there are not many honorable, honest and intelligent people among the Western-minded people - after all, according to my poll, I have at least one such person even in my family - but I am saying that the categorialsts, and especially the hoarders, the profit seekers among them, have an advantage in the societal-political economy. For they fail to see that in a closed system like the Earth, every gain is also a loss, every victory is also a defeat, every success at the same time an exploitation (of people and/or of the Earth).
When Stephenson invents the steam engine, the age of industrialization begins: in Britain, forests are being systematically and massively cleared to obtain the beams needed to build railways and mines. And nobody seems to mind. Even today, the British Isles are predominantly bare and barren. The damage done to Nature and people remains hidden in plain sight.
When a billionaire makes a new billion from his AI, he does not think about from whose pockets it came from.
But in this world of ours, anything material could only be extracted from natural resources and human labor. Now that raw materials are getting scarcer and scarcer and most of us humans have become Harari's »useless animals«, the only way to extract material things is through financial jugglery where money is being legally transferred from the pockets of unsuspecting non-affluent people to the accounts of multi-billionaires. Except perhaps in Russia, where Putin has clipped the wings of the oligarchs.
Speaking of Russia: when the famous Tarkovsky was making his even more famous film Andrei Rublev (1966), he ordered a cow to be doused with petrol and set on fire in one of the sequences depicting the inhuman barbarities of the Tartars. For him, the end justified the means and the film surpassed the reality. When the local men, common kolkhozniks, heard about this, they came to the filming set with pitchforks and tried to lynch the director. He had to run for his hide. I even remember something about the police forces finally taking him away by helicopter. My source in this case are the controversial but persuasive memoirs by Shostakovich entitled Testimony, 1979, translated by me after the famous English translation by S. Volkov).
This case speaks not of the peasant barbarism, but about the indignation of people who see the other side - not just the effect of the film, but also the agony of the cow.
Here I must remember Ivan Karamazov returning to God with the utmost reverence his ticket to heaven - just because of one tear shed by one helpless and suffering child.
I have been writing versions of the above theme at least four times (including this one), starting in 2007, and each time I kept adding to my own thinking and writing new insights and/or facts that have emerged in the meantime. And as I have written, I have become a “woke woodcutter”. The proof is my preconversional reflection »The least ruthless empire« in the Saturday supplement of the Delo newspaper in the spring of 2003 where I publicly advocated the intervention of the »coalition of the willing« in Iraq. But it seems one cannot fool oneself all of the time if the evidence comes out at last as obviously falsified.
At this point, I’d like to end this confessions by apologizing for my past sins.
The most interesting article I have read in a long time. Of course I am biased, being myself a fellow Slovenian, although I was born and raised in Western Europe. I also lived 2 decades in the US, where I could never fit and felt a complete alien. There, I felt best in the company of Russians, Serbs or Chinese. I now live in China where I feel totally at home.
Brilliant article, as an Anglo Saxon. I found it fascinating the differences in our thought processes. How interesting it was to learn these things. It made so much sense to me. The psychologist who discovered the little test to show the differences is or was a genius.