One of the essential facts about geopolitics which leads to maybe more types of misunderstandings than any single other one, when people don’t realize it sufficiently, is that every big country and government is made up of an absolute legion of little individuals, all with their own motivations and habits and behaviors.
It’s natural to say “Russian wants this” or “the FBI operates this way,” but that’s not really how it works. There’s a certain institutional momentum, and certain policies and individual behaviors that are common all throughout an organization, but “the FBI” doesn’t really have motivations and behaviors as distinct from the people within it, and even in something like the FBI or CIA, the people are an irregular mix of individuals.
And, one of the most effective ways to turn the entire weight of the organized entity as a whole against you, is to do something to really piss off the people who make up the entity, as individuals.
One of the essential facts about geopolitics which leads to maybe more types of misunderstandings than any single other one, when people don’t realize it sufficiently, is that every big country and government is made up of an absolute legion of little individuals, all with their own motivations and habits and behaviors.
It’s natural to say “Russian wants this” or “the FBI operates this way,” but that’s not really how it works. There’s a certain institutional momentum, and certain policies and individual behaviors that are common all throughout an organization, but “the FBI” doesn’t really have motivations and behaviors as distinct from the people within it, and even in something like the FBI or CIA, the people are an irregular mix of individuals.
And, one of the most effective ways to turn the entire weight of the organized entity as a whole against you, is to do something to really piss off the people who make up the entity, as individuals.