Hi. I’m Stepa Mitaki. Morning Walk is a personal weekly newsletter where I share some musings on tech, working on startups, productivity and some nerdy stuff.
This issue was sent out to 77 subscribers (+4 from the previous week). Last week’s issue received 282 views.
Unfortunately, this week I won't cover any tech, startup, or business-related issues. It's simply impossible to even think about when the war is unfolding.
📝 Seventeen days
It's been seventeen days now. I wanted to tell you how drastically my life has changed in those seventeen days. What's going on, where I am, what sort of bereavement I've faced, what kind of emotions I'm going through, but the constant feeling of guilt won't let me. Because having to start my life from scratch being ousted from home is nothing compared to what people in Ukraine are going through. I don't have any moral right to complain. I have to just shut the fuck up.
I am responsible for this. I am one of 143 million people who let this happen. I've tried my best, but it didn't work. I went to all of the major Anti-Putin protests in 2012 and 2013 at the peak of Russian political opposition. I've been volunteering at an independent monitoring group during the 2012 presidential elections; I ran the biggest opposition media in my hometown. I've tried so hard to change my parents' mind to not vote for this lunatic we stopped talking. But we all have collectively failed. Putin had outplayed all of us easily with his media and military armies. I'm sorry we let this happen to the world. We deserve our punishment as Russians.
I’ve been researching a lot about collective guilt this week. The most relevant case might be Germans opposed to Hitler in the 1940s and how they felt about their responsibility.
The most notable work in that philosophical field was done by a German-Swiss psychiatrist Karl Jaspers.
In his book Die Schuldfrage, he examined the culpability of Germany as a whole in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. Jaspers distinguishes four concepts of guilt: criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical.
In the summer of 1945, we find Jaspers’ earliest mention of a different type of guilt. This mysterious metaphysical guilt seems to be connected to the experience of great tragedy like Jaspers experienced under Nazi rule. Understanding metaphysical guilt will show whether the relationship between metaphysical and political guilt functions analogously to the relationship between moral and criminal guilt.
Metaphysical guilt is intrinsic because it does not cease. Criminal guilt can be atoned for through punishment, political guilt is alleviated by political restrictions and treaties. Yet guilt from within weighs on the individual for the rest of their lives. That is why Jaspers thinks the question of German guilt is such an important question to ask.
👓 Things I've been reading/watching/enjoying
Ukraine on Not Boring
Donating, ways to contribute, credible news sources and a little optimism.
Emergence from catastrophe was one of the necessary precursors to the kind of collective genius that pushes the world forward. COVID was one such kick, and it spurred a ton of progress in the world of bits. I think that this invasion will have a similar effect on atoms-based innovation.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.
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