The anglosphere (US/UK/Australia/New Zealand/Canada) + EU is 470 million + 448 million respectively. That's the entirety of the Western world, and less than 12% of the world's population. One of JFK's greatest speeches [1] hit on this point:
"We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient that we are only six percent [4% now] of the world's population, and that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind that we cannot write every wrong or reverse each adversity and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
The sort of wisdom and pragmatism completely absent from politicians since JFK.
Just because the government of a country considers it politically expedient to treat the situation as morally grey does not mean the population uniformly shares the same opinion.
Vis a vis, just because the government of a country considers it politically expedient to treat the situation as the embodiment of Good vs Evil, does not mean the population uniformly shares the same opinion. In fact, I think this is the case nowhere in the world, including Russia and Ukraine.
Well I mean you can look at what polls do exist, and it's not ambiguous. But I'd also appeal to a logical aspect here. Homogeneous dogmatic thinking, at scale, is not natural - and arguably doesn't exist. Instead it's primarily a product of propaganda and efforts to drive people to self-censor.
Both of these are absolutely rampant in the West at the moment, but not so much in most of the rest of the world (at least not on this topic). People, left to their own devices, are generally pretty awesome. It's only when you introduce self righteousness and propaganda that we turn into unthinking animals. It's no coincidence that self righteousness and propaganda go hand in hand with war.
I'd argue the opposite. Some things, in the moment, are really quite morally obvious — and then propaganda starts doing its work to make them seem more ambiguous than they actually are.
> Both of these are absolutely rampant in the West at the moment, but not so much in most of the rest of the world.
You think propaganda-driven homogeneous dogmatic thinking doesn't exist in China and India...?!
Can you offer any examples? In general, I think you'll immediately run into a relativism problem. What is moral for one person is amoral for another. This is one of the main reasons I think it's safe to say that dogmatic thinking at scale is so unnatural.
As for my comment, I was obviously just referring to this topic.
