When you come from an East European country, were the breath of Russia can be felt to the bones and can be seen penetrating each soul, you bear wounds and scars. Your worldview is shaped permanently by impulses that are nowhere to be found in the West. You may be similar, physically, but you are mentally structured or wired in a slightly different way. For instance, you are not naïve; you have the reflex of noticing possible outcomes faster than someone from the West. You are more prudent, more careful, more practical. You are also more independent, you rely more on yourself and less on chance, luck or everybody else. And it is significantly harder for someone to fool you.

The East has experienced tens of years of communism, of socialism, of the leftist doctrine. Therefore, you are born with antibodies; you know how to recognize danger – the authoritarian or tyrannical reflexes of someone or something, leader or institution.

Of course, if you are intelligent.

More, you know what can happen if the same ideology from the East is embraced, tolerated or advertised in the West. You have already seen it in action in your own native land; you know where it leads, you know what it can cause, you have left the East because of it. Your antibodies can immediately detect the “disease”, the “virus” of the authoritarian establishments or mentalities that aim to impose their viewpoint and reject or undermine the other possible explanations, interpretations or opinions.

For instance, when you have lived enough in the East and you have witnessed how “people with connections” have been promoted in positions of power, and then you witnessed the collapse of your country because the system ended up being led by imbeciles, you are wise enough to know that the same thing will occur in the West if the same things happen. The collapse of the society is not a myth, it is not an “exercise of imagination”, it is not a possible theoretical outcome; it is something that you actually witnessed, it may be one of the reasons you left your native land. So, seeing now people being promoted for diversity reasons and not for meritorious reasons, as a result of a will to equal opportunity and not as a result of a competitive process, makes you feel uneasy. You remember that physician without a medical degree, or that leader without sufficient school education who ended up academician, or that administration worker who looked at you with superiority because he was “a member of the clan” and you weren’t. And you imagine a nuclear plant being managed by illiterate people with fake qualifications.

And you freak out.

There is a virus on the loose. An ideological virus. If you are from the East, you’re already vaccinated, probably before even being born. You know the song, you know where everything is heading to. You have an advantage, you are already well informed about the future, about the trends that are to come.

Yet, this is not exactly what you left the East for. You didn’t escape from the East so as to see the same history repeating in the West. And you are definitely not willing to live, or relive, the same story twice.

There is an unseen bug among us. A self-destructive philosophy, foreign to the human soul, an old demon some of us know very well. The question is: will the West wake up fast enough?