> At the same time before we go idealizing that system, what Western folks often see are the best of the best examples. Individuals who went to great schools, emigrated and excelled in the West. They may have gone to better schools, with better teachers, or had parents who cared more etc. They don't see a representative sample.

That’s a bingo. Most people meet the Russians who escaped during the post-Soviet brain drain, they don’t meet the people who stayed behind. Many of whom became gangsters and turned the country onto anarchy. They were products of the Soviet education system as much as anyone.

they were not gangsters during the soviet times, so its hardly an argument about them as persons. But rather a sign of decaying times (the fall of the USSR and the economic hardship).

Remember when the US had a hurricane somewhere in the South (Kathrina?), people just went looting all retail stores, same as what happened during BLM riots, the current riots in Paris, etc etc

Meanwhile in the west we're lead by the weakest who merely got good grades but never built a thing of their own. People who caved time and again for money and sold our infrastructure off undermining our own learning and growth as individuals and a collective

The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow and do the work, leaving leadership ignorant and inexperienced but lauded for some reason

It's a weird reverential system where figments of imagination still earn great amounts of deference; figment of out imagination being the American civil religion and hierarchy of figureheads who don't even know you exist; why would they care?

How reliant this culture is on bowing to figureheads painted on walls while talking like it isn't is a bizarre cognitive dissonance that should be studied for centuries