Yi: Putin as World Statesman 42-5 > 21 < 23
Russia as the Emerging Central Polity...
Another geopolitical Yi Reading, this one about a person who I regard as possibly the greatest statesman on the world stage in well over a century. Churchill was a Great Man in many ways even with all the glaring shortcomings and hypocrisies which recent history has uncovered. If one takes a 'both-and' versus an 'either-or' approach, he still emerges as larger than life. Along with possessing extraordinary powers of speech, he had a deep understanding of human nature in general and his own society in particular, although he ended up helping to create huge, deadly messes in so many ways that when all is said and done, despite his prominence as a character on both national and the world stage, the verdict is mixed at best. And yet he was still, as he said himself, 'A Great Man' though now we know perhaps not as truly consequential a World Statesman as he and his fellow countrymen at the time believed.
With Vladimir Putin, mainly all we have to go on are his speeches published in English on the kremlin.ru website; that and an over twenty year track record which demonstrates that he means what he says and his actions accord with his words, something rarely encountered thus worth keeping in mind. Mainstream Western press is so twisted as to be useless so I haven't read any of it in years; no doubt have missed a few good pieces but have also avoided hundreds of bad ones - an acceptable trade-off. The problem with only reading the formal public statements, of course, is that one misses nuance, contradiction and all the cross currents that any family, let alone nation, inevitably features. We know there are powerful oligarchs in the Russian polity along with a huge military industrial complex; it's not all love and light. And we know that Putin has to tussle with variegated elements in his complex polity, each of which presumably rubs off on him a little. So he is no Saint nor, like any worldly leader, should be regarded as one as far too many of his Western admirers tend to do. (Neither is he a latter-day Hitler.)
As to this Yijing Reading, the embedded document below speaks for itself. The core hexagrams are traditionally positive and so sparked a strongly positive feeling in response which was welcome because of late have been finding myself stuck in a cynical corner, refusing to believe anything or anybody. The West seems almost irredeemably broken these days, though I believe things can always turn on a dime and 'it's always darkest just before the dawn'; plus I don't trust the self-affirming assertions made by Sinophiles about China having been forever and only a peaceful, ‘non-hegemonic’ civilization.
In the previous Article 77 subtitled 'Hegemony as Mindset not Ideology', I wrote that "the degree to which the Rest of the World – especially China – has absorbed the modern materialist mindset is the degree to which multipolarity will fail because each pole or cultural zone therein will just be more of the same albeit with slightly different language and dress codes; all will be ‘materialist post-modern’."
I believe this a valid concern; but it's not all black versus white; there are nuances. For example, cultural realities comprise both materialist and non-materialist aspects. Yes, the former have muscled out much of the latter, but Nature will redress the imbalance at some point. Non-materialist elements are simply that which is usually labelled subjective, that which is experienced but not only physical; such as feelings, beliefs, moods, fashions, ideologies, cultures, traditions, religions, faith, family ties, empathy, disgust and so forth. All these things which are irrelevancies in the New World Scientist Order. They may be overlooked or outright denied, but they persist nonetheless. Indeed, in most cases these days they exist quite naturally in a parallel experiential universe alongside and within our officially assumed 'One World Objective Reality' which insists they are no longer of interest. Most of us don't think about these sorts of abstraction often but given the strange, and possibly quite dangerous, times we are currently experiencing, perhaps it is worth digging a little deeper to better understand the nature of the ground beneath our feet.
One non-materialist elements in the geopolitical context is, in the case of Russians, the connections they still enjoy with their Tzarist and Orthodox Christian past. The latter still exist, albeit not in the same form as a century ago, whilst the former was largely destroyed the moment the corpses of the Tzar's family were unceremoniously thrown down an abandoned mine shaft by a vicious Jewish communist. Similarly in the United States there is a widespread sense of what it means to be an 'American', a sense of pride, optimism, individuality, loyalty to the country and principles of generosity, honor, service to others, love of God and country and so forth. These things have been under assault by some sort of organized 'neomarxist' Demon hell-bent on undermining social cohesion and collective joy, both within the family and throughout wider society, but they still remain and always will because as humans we are all born with hearts, and hearts tend to love and cherish, they warm to warmth, they love to love, they delight in delight. Such things are natural and no amount of totalitarian style suppression can eliminate them; indeed, such suppression inevitably creates backlash. Which is quite possibly where we now are.
It seems one of the leaders of this backlash at the geopolitical level is Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation. Russia is the largest nation in the world as measured in square kilometers, albeit only of above average size population at about one hundred and fifty million, slightly less than that of Bangladesh, for example. For millennia, 'the Middle Kingdom' of China has regarded itself as the civilizational center of the world; of course all great civilizations regard themselves as such, which is perfectly fine and experientially accurate for those living within those polities, but for a long time it really WAS the center in terms of trade volume, value of exchanged goods and resultant geopolitical heft.
However, after the Mandarin class's successful drive in the mid 1400's to pull back from all engagement with foreign cultures, to which end they imposed a 'Maritime Ban', the world balance of power and trade flows shifted. Put another way: Genghis Khan went too far too fast and his conquest of China in particular created a backlash which involved the native Mandarin class finally expelling the foreign Mongol influence from the Chinese Body Politic, part of which overthrow involved getting rid of the powerful Eunuchs whom the Mongols had depended upon to counterbalance the entrenched, stuffy Mandarin class. I don't pretend to know the whole story, but clearly the Mandarins disliked the Mongols and once they were finally rid of their influence - including their Empire-building ways - maritime trade was shut down in China for a very long while, presumably to restore the purity of their indigenous, sophisticated civilization. It may partly explain why they ended up a few centuries later in such a weakened condition, but that is another subject.
Meanwhile, the Maritime Ban's greatly altered world trade flows and balance of power shifts presented an opening for the less developed Western nations which had no manufactured goods of their own to offer the more developed Orient with its densely populated regions in Arabia, India, Malaysia, Siam (Thailand), Burma, Korea, China and Japan. All the West had to bring to the table was cold, hard gold and silver in exchange for goods like Chinese porcelain, tea, silk, spices, furniture and paintings which they could later sell at huge markups - life-changing fortunes being made on each voyage. So thanks to the fortuitous discovery of precious metals in the Americas, they gradually established lucrative world wide trade routes which in turn boosted the heft and sophistication of their own civilization, indeed according to some spurring the Renaissance.
As it happens, my own family was involved: our line features several sea captains, one of whom helped settle Nantucket shortly before the Mayflower and whose descendants in Bass River became the largest sail makers on the East Coast during the time of the Clipper ships, the fastest means of international trade between East and West until machines displaced sail.
So the West entered into world trade by plundering silver and gold from the 'New World' (far older than theirs, truth be told) with which to trade for Asian goods. When that gold and silver started to run out in the mid 1700's, an Englishman invented a labour-saving mechanical contraption, the 'Spinning Jenny' to undercut domestic cotton production in India (displacing millions of housewives in the process). Not coincidentally I suspect, this was the same period that the Chinese entered a 250 year long recession out of which they finally began to emerge in the 1970's once the Rothschilds helped facilitate their re-entry into the world trading system via their emissary Kissinger, but that too is another story.
This civilizational differential around five hundred years ago is why plunder was the West's main modus vivendi; because of its transactional, immoral nature, no doubt it greased the wheels for the materialist mindset to spread far and wide. Also Plunder creates New Money disrupting established class systems, making socially inferior people suddenly far richer than their betters; among many such tensions was increasing scorn for traditional mores along with the surfacing of long suppressed hatred of the old upper classes exacerbated by the new mercantile leadership's desire to assume equal or higher status. Urban Bankers replaced Landed Gentry. Though of course many of the upper crust were cruel tyrants or incompetent nitwits, as a system wasn't all bad. In Europe there are still from that era so many lovely villages, churches, town squares, country lanes, with family homes small and large, that even centuries later we can clearly see that it was a far richer and lovelier world than the dark culture of filth and injustice so often portrayed by most contemporary (agenda-driven) historians.
So: out of this historical context, Russia has produced Putin, a non-Tzar Tzar in this our so-called twenty first century. Russia spans both East and West. When it included Ukraine, it touched Poland and Northern Germany, going South to touch Turkey and the Middle East, Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and East to touch Mongolia, Tibet, China, Korea and more. As such it is the true Middle Kingdom of the world because it links both cultural and geographical East and West like no other polity. Meanwhile China is all the way out on the Far Eastern shore of the Great World Island, moreover its language and pictographic scripts are hard for non native-born to learn. In any case, eleven-time-zone Russia is the 'World Island's' natural Middle Kingdom given her extensive geographically based cultural and geopolitical connections with both East and West plus now also traditional and modern.
Putin has successfully achieved many significant things: economically, he recovered from the moribund situation he inherited after the collapse of the communist regime and the subsequent rape by internationally connected corporate oligarchs. Further, he has revived core elements of Russian society suppressed by the barbaric, ideology-driven communists. In short, he has restored a sense of health, wholesomeness and pride to the Russian civilization which for long, though originally rooted in Orthodox Christian 'third Rome' Byzantine Imperial culture founded by a Viking tribe known as 'the Rus', is multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, comprising Northern White Rus, Muslim, central Asian and indigenous peoples.
Indeed, Russia is a great civilizational culture which fell on hard times in the twentieth century ravaged by murderous anti-traditional anti-religious anti-sacred materialist fanatics the barbarity of whose Red Terror so concerned their neighbours that, ironically, they later had to fight them off as fascists determined to prevent a Red Terror being visited upon their own peoples. (Ain’t karma a bitch, eh?) So Russia has paid a steep price to make it into the Modern Era, losing a Tzar, a religion, traditional stability and tens of millions of precious, irreplaceable lives.
In short, Russia spans West and East like no other nation-base polity in world history with the possible exception of the Mongol Empire. Russia is now ready to take her place as a Middle Kingdom (without a King) and has given us from among her children the figure of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Let us now see what the Yi may have to say, as interpreted by your humble host:
P.S. I know that not every one of my Readers likes these Yi Readings! I understand and usually don’t offer them here on this substack, only on a Wordpress blog (www.baronbrasdor.art/blog). But to me the conclusion I came to with this Reading is important in that it has helped a penny drop: rather than being entirely cynical about absolutely everything - which has been my default position vis a vis political developments of late - am now able to countenance some sort of hope that there are a few beneficial developments in play. This will be influencing future Articles, I suspect, though few will be about him or Russia; that sort of thing is not really my bailiwick though I do chime in when relating geopolitical and current affairs to principles in contemplative disciplines.
The reason am doing this, am coming to understand, is to bridge some aspects of the traditional Old World (referenced by Dugin in the previous Article about The Hegemonic Mindset) with the materialist Modern. Cultural trends come and go but underlying human nature changes very little, if at all. However, too much of what we share with our ancestors is obfuscated by current language; it is hard to see past contemporary usage of words into what they might mean experientially, moreover what they might have meant several centuries ago. Contemplative practice is interesting because it is largely wordless and thus accesses bedrock, human experience with minimal filters, interface or editorializing. The experience of a person sitting quietly in the forest by a stream today is extremely similar to that of his forebears thousands of years ago and anyone can access such experience in the here and now (albeit not in cyberspace!).
Despite the (cringe-worthily) positive nature of this Reading about Putin as World Statesman, I do not personally regard him as Saint or Buddha as so many of his supporters, any more than I regard everything about the West as irredeemably Wicked. There are mixes of yin and yang, good and evil in every individual or collective - always. That said, though no doubt within Russia he has many powerful detractors, enemies, rivals, sycophants and traitors to deal with, as a Leader of a large polity comprising about one hundred and fifty million souls, the role demands that his way of being has to be at least somewhat inclusive, moreover like that of a large, ocean-going tanker who takes a long, slow time to turn; it also demands steady, long-term planning, cultivating a vision looking ahead in terms of decades and centuries, not days and weeks.
Russia is old, Russia is vast and Putin’s role as her leader both absorbs and reflects much of that gestalt. So this Reading is somewhat playfully taking that sort of larger, longer-term view in keeping with Russia’s larger, longer-term - and now central - role in world affairs.
We don’t often think about it in the West but really: Russia spans eleven time zones from Poland to Vladivostock near China and Japan. It is a truly vast territory literally joining East, South, North and West. I believe it no accident that in these troubled, confused times it is Russia who has thrown up a Great Leader. I offer up this eccentric, even somewhat hagiographic, Yi Reading, because the Yi represents an ancient way of contemplating which combines mathematics, philosophy, contemplative practice, random happenstance and spontaneous intuition. Not in accord with materialist science, clearly, but actually much closer to everyday life experience and experience is the basis of the non-materialist approach and moreover which provides access to the timeless elements of human Beingness on which the more traditional aspects of all extant civilizations were built and to which at some point we all must return, even as continuous change and evolution unfolds from generation to generation.