Clarissa's Blog

This doesn’t work with people who are not fighting for material considerations, and people almost never fight for material considerations.

We’ve seen the exact same problem with both the Biden and the Trump administrations being utterly unable to comprehend the nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine and Ukraine’s response. Both administrations have tried to explain the war in the terms that they understand, but those terms are completely alien to the people whose behavior they were trying to analyze. The two administrations were different in that they applied a different set of terms to explain the Russia-Ukraine war. But both were completely wrong, as we have seen time and again.

Now the Trump administration is doing the same regarding Iran. This is the “replaceable widget” theory of the mind that I keep talking about. People never manage to liberate themselves from the need to project their own way of being onto other cultures, nations, and historical eras. The biggest (and also the hardest to access) opportunity for personal development is to understand that the architecture of other people’s minds can be completely different from our own.