Introduction: The Form in Which a People Thinks the World
Why do some peoples, after defeat, build a state, while others search for a traitor? Why does the same freedom appear as a norm to some and as a threat to others? Why do institutions that function in one country remain a form without substance in another? And, ultimately, why do nations reproduce similar political scenarios again and again, even when leaders, laws, and circumstances change?
These questions are usually explained through interests, resources, or levels of development. But this is not enough. The difference begins deeper — where a nation does not merely act, but where it is capable, in the first place, of imagining what is possible.
This level is called mentality. In everyday usage, the word has almost lost its precision, reduced to the “character of a people” or to habits. In that form, it explains nothing. In the strict sense, mentality is not a set of traits and not the sum of convictions. It is a form of thinking in which reality becomes intelligible.
The same event can mean different things: defeat — as a lesson or as humiliation; strength — as responsibility or as entitlement; freedom — as a norm or as a threat; history — as a completed process or as unfinished business. The difference is not in information and not in rationality. The difference lies in the form of thinking the world.
Politics is not primary. It does not create this form — it only manifests it.
This article is the third and concluding part of the cycle. The first examined how states experience imperial loss: why some translate it into sublimation, others into revanchism, and still others into myth. The second examined the figure of the ruler, through whom collective trauma receives language, direction, and political form. Now the focus shifts to the deepest level: the form of thinking that conditions both.
States do not choose different fates after loss by accident. Nor do rulers appear in a vacuum. Both unfold within mentality — a historically formed, psychically embedded, and socially reproduced form of thinking the world.
1. Spirit as a Form of Thinking: The Hegelian Level
To understand the mentality of a nation, it is not enough to speak of culture, traditions, or “national character.” That remains too superficial. Mentality begins deeper — where the world acquires meaning for a particular community.
Here Hegel becomes important, together with his concept of the spirit of a people — Volksgeist. But spirit in this sense should not be understood mystically. It is not the “soul of a nation” in the romantic sense. It is the form through which a people recognizes reality as ordered, just, threatening, permissible, or impossible.
Spirit is not what a nation thinks. It is rather how it is capable of thinking at all. It defines what is considered rational, what is perceived as just, what is admissible in politics, what is experienced as humiliation, and what is experienced as normality.
The same institution can have different fates in different countries. A parliament may be a space of responsibility — or a theater of clan struggle. A court may be the bearer of law — or an instrument of force. The state may be perceived as a common home — or as an alien apparatus of coercion. The form is identical, but the semantic structure that fills it is different.
In Hegelian logic, the state is not merely a mechanism of power. It is the objectification of a particular way of thinking. The state consolidates not only laws, institutions, and procedures, but also a deeper answer to the question: how does this community imagine order?
The main question is not only what form of state exists. More important is what type of consciousness it makes normal. Institutions do not function in a void. They enter an already existing form of thinking the world. If this form does not change, new laws often merely settle upon an older logic.
Spirit is not arbitrary. It is historically formed. But once formed, it begins to act as a boundary. It defines not only what a nation does, but also what it is capable of imagining as possible.
2. The Unconscious as Energy: A Jungian Deepening
The Hegelian level is not enough. Hegel gives us form. He allows us to see how a nation thinks the world. But he hardly explains why this form possesses such emotional force: why some themes provoke calm discussion while others produce sharp affect; why some events become lessons while others become wounds; why the same political situation activates different reactions in different societies.
This is where Jung begins. If Hegel shows the form of thinking, Jung allows us to see the energy that fills this form. A nation does not merely think the world. It experiences it. And this experience is not accidental. It is organized around deep symbolic structures that often act more powerfully than rational arguments.
Images of power, enemy, justice, sacrifice, greatness, betrayal, and savior are not created by politics from nothing. Politics only touches already existing psychic configurations — and they become activated.
In this sense, a society often reacts not so much to the fact itself as to the semantic image that the fact sets in motion. Defeat may be simply defeat, or it may activate the image of historical humiliation. Freedom may be experienced as a space of responsibility, or as a threat of chaos. A strong leader may be perceived as a danger to institutions, or as the image of a protector, father, or savior.
Here it is important to avoid simplification. Archetypes are not the “essence of a people,” and they do not operate mechanically. This is not about innate properties of nations, but about historically accumulated and culturally reproduced symbolic structures that, under certain conditions, become politically active.
These structures group themselves around several main nodes through which society unconsciously recognizes the key dimensions of political life. Some are connected with power — strength, order, the savior. Through them society answers the question: who has the right to rule, and what makes power legitimate?
Others are connected with threat — enemy, betrayal, chaos. They determine whom to fear, from whom to defend oneself, and what should be regarded as the destruction of order. Still others are connected with dignity — greatness, sacrifice, justice. Through them a nation experiences its place in history: whether it is the bearer of a mission, the victim of injustice, or the subject of its own destiny.
Politics does not create these nodes. It only activates already existing mechanisms of recognition.
Mentality is not only a way of thinking. It is also a way of giving significance to events. Jung allows us to see what remains invisible at the level of political rationality: society possesses not only historical memory, but also psychic memory. This memory lives not only in books, dates, or monuments, but also in recurring reactions, fears, expectations, and symbolic images.
The same crisis can produce different responses. In one society — reform. In another — revanchism. In a third — mythologization. In a fourth — the search for someone to blame. The difference lies not only in interests. It lies in which symbolic structures become activated.
Hegel helps us see the form in which a nation thinks the world. Jung shows that this form is not empty. It is charged with the energy of the collective unconscious.
Mentality is not a cold schema. It is a living psychic structure. It has logic, but it also has affect. It thinks, but it also fears, desires, feels shame, defends itself, idealizes, and repeats.
For this reason, the political behavior of a society cannot be explained only by institutions, programs, or interests. Beneath them operates a deeper layer — images and symbolic structures through which society defines what is “its own,” whom it regards as a threat, to whom it entrusts power, and which history it perceives as unfinished.
3. How Mentality Emerges: Five Stages
Mentality does not emerge as an idea. It is not invented by philosophers, introduced through laws, or created by political programs. It forms more slowly. It settles into collective experience through repeated ways of interacting with the world. At a certain point, what was once merely a reaction to circumstances becomes a way of seeing reality. In this way, experience gradually transforms into form.
3.1. Primary Experience: What Is Not Chosen
Every society enters history not through an idea, but through a situation: geography, climate, resources, neighbors, the nature of threats, the experience of open space or life between stronger centers.
This is not yet mentality. But it already defines the limits of possible experience. Here a primary, almost bodily perception of the world begins to form: whether the world is safe or hostile; whether space is open or enclosed; whether resources are sufficient or must constantly be fought for; whether the Other is an opportunity or a threat.
This level is rarely consciously recognized. Yet it creates the foundational framework of perception: what the world looks like before society even begins to explain it.
3.2. Repetition: Experience Becoming Fixed
A single experience does not yet create mentality. Repetition does. One war is an event. Many wars become an expectation. One defeat is a fact. Repeated defeats become a way of interpreting the world.
When similar situations return again and again — wars, invasions, dependence, scarcity, experiences of powerlessness or, conversely, domination — they cease to be isolated episodes. They begin to be perceived as a pattern. This is where the crucial shift occurs: the world ceases to be something that happened and becomes something that “usually happens.” Experience begins to solidify into norm.
3.3. Interpretation: The Emergence of Language
Even repeated experience is not yet a complete mentality. It becomes one only when it acquires language. That language is provided by religion, myth, law, philosophy, political narratives, school history, and family memory.
Society begins to explain the world to itself: whether power is sacred or contractual; whether suffering has meaning or is merely the consequence of violence; whether order is given from above or created by people; whether freedom is a norm or a dangerous instability; whether the Other is a partner or a potential enemy.
Experience ceases to be chaotic. It acquires a structure of meaning. And that structure begins to shape behavior.
3.4. Archetypization: The Transition into the Unconscious
Over time, interpreted experience ceases to require constant explanation. It moves deeper — into the sphere of the unconscious. There it exists no longer as a thesis, but as an image.
Figures emerge that society recognizes almost automatically: the enemy, the hero, the victim, the traitor, the savior, the strong hand, the just order. These images no longer need to be specially proven. They are experienced as self-evident.
This is why politics so often operates not through arguments, but through already existing symbolic structures. It does not create them from nothing. It merely activates what already exists within the collective imagination.
At this point, mentality ceases to be the result of interpretation and becomes the condition of thought itself.
3.5. Institutionalization: Fixation in Form
The final stage occurs when inner form becomes external reality. Mentality becomes embedded in institutions, law, economic behavior, education, models of authority, forms of responsibility, and perceptions of the state.
What initially existed as experience then became meaning, later symbolic structure, and now transforms into order. It is precisely here that mentality becomes almost invisible. People no longer feel that they are living inside a historically formed mode of thought. It begins to be perceived as reality itself: “this is simply how the world works.”
Intermediate Conclusion
Mentality passes through several interconnected transitions: experience → repetition → interpretation → archetypization → institutionalization.
It is not created instantaneously and is not the result of a single decision. It accumulates. Its durability is explained by the fact that it lives not only in ideas, which can be changed, but also in self-evidences that are almost never questioned.
As long as this form remains unconscious, society does not simply possess history — it becomes structurally inclined to repeat it.
4. Time as Inertia: Why Mentality Does Not Change Quickly
Why is mentality so durable? Why does it not change together with political regimes, new laws, or even large-scale crises?
The answer lies in the very structure of historical time. Not all historical time moves at the same speed. There is the level of events — rapid, visible, dramatic: changes of power, wars, revolutions, elections, economic crises. But there is another level — slow time. This is where habits of thought, expectations, and modes of interpreting the world are formed. Individual events may change almost nothing at this level. Yet it is precisely this level that determines how those events will be understood.
This is where mentality exists. It possesses inertia — the capacity to continue operating even after external conditions have already changed. Borders may shift. Institutions may be rewritten. Elites may change. Yet reactions remain similar because they were formed not today, but through long historical experience that has solidified into norm.
This is one of the primary reasons for historical repetition. Mentality, formed through repetition, reproduces repetition itself. Society begins to act as though the world is structured exactly as it has become accustomed to seeing it — and by doing so, constantly confirms its own expectations.
Expectation produces action. Action confirms expectation. The cycle closes.
This is why history often repeats itself not literally, but structurally. The scenery changes, but the logic of reactions remains similar.
This is also why the same political model produces different results in different countries. It enters different forms of mental inertia. What strengthens trust in one society may become an instrument of control in another. What stabilizes a system in one context may destabilize it in another.
Society does not live only in the present. It lives in duration — in a slowly accumulated way of seeing the world. It is precisely this duration that often functions as the hidden limit of political change.
For this reason, mentality should not be understood as the “destiny of a people” in any rigid sense. It does not determine the future automatically. But it does define the initial boundaries of what a society perceives as natural, permissible, or possible. And as long as those boundaries remain unconscious, they continue reproducing themselves through political practice.
5. How Mentality Shapes Politics
Once mentality has been formed, it does not remain confined to the sphere of ideas. It begins to act — not as a declaration, but as a boundary of the possible.
Politics always appears as choice: programs, parties, leaders, decisions. But this choice does not occur in a vacuum. It takes place within an already formed structure of thought that determines what appears realistic, permissible, dangerous, or impossible.
Mentality does not merely accompany politics. It establishes the framework within which politics becomes intelligible.
5.1. Why Identical Institutions Produce Different Results
The modern world often proceeds from the assumption that institutions are universal: parliament, courts, constitutions, elections, the market. Forms can be copied. Results cannot.
An institution in itself is only a form. Its functioning depends on how it is experienced and interpreted within a particular mental structure.
Where law is perceived as a norm, it functions as a limitation on power. Where law is perceived as an instrument, it is used situationally. Where the state is understood as a shared construction, it is built collectively. Where it is experienced as an alien apparatus of coercion, it is circumvented or privately exploited.
This is why identical institutional models can produce opposite results in different societies. They enter different historically formed structures of thought.
5.2. Why Reforms Fail to Take Root
Reforms may be logical, professionally designed, and even necessary. Yet they fail to take root. Not necessarily because they are wrong. Often because they do not coincide with the already existing form of political perception.
If the mental structure remains unchanged, new rules are simply imposed onto old logic. And that logic begins reshaping them according to itself.
A law may be technically well written. But if it enters an environment where responsibility is not normative, trust is not foundational, and law is not experienced as equally binding for all, it will function differently from what was intended.
For this reason, reforms often change form without changing the mode of its use. Political modernization without transformation of the mental structure frequently remains superficial.
5.3. Types of Political Response
Mentality shapes not only the functioning of institutions. It also influences the type of response to crisis.
The same situation — defeat, threat, economic collapse, or loss of status — can generate different political reactions. And those reactions are not random. They correspond to how society interprets the very reality of the crisis.
Subjecthood. Society responds through construction. It recognizes reality, accepts limits, and begins building new institutions, systems of security, mechanisms of responsibility, and long-term policy. In this case, crisis becomes a resource for transformation.
Revanche. Reality is not accepted as final. It is experienced as a deviation that must be undone. Politics ceases to orient itself toward adaptation to a new world and instead becomes directed toward the symbolic or material restoration of what was lost.
Mythologization. Instead of real transformation, symbolic compensation emerges: the imagination of a special mission, historical exceptionalism, or unjustly lost greatness. Such a response does not always lead to direct aggression, but it creates a constant tension between reality and the desired image of the world.
Stabilization. The most restrained type of response. Society accepts its scale and builds a functional order within existing limits. This does not always produce ambition, but it often provides predictability and resilience.
These types of response are not rigid categories or “national characters.” They are better understood as dominant modes of political reaction that can change depending on historical conditions, elites, and accumulated experience.
5.4. Connection to the Previous Articles of the Cycle
This is the point at which the three levels of analysis within this cycle converge into a single structure.
In the first article — The Trauma of Empire — it was shown that states experience the loss of scale differently: some transform it into sublimation, others into revanche, others into political myth, and still others into a complex fusion of civilizational memory and national humiliation.
But this immediately raises a question: why does the same event — the collapse of empire — generate such different responses? Why was British political culture able to integrate the reduction of scale, while Russian political culture largely was not?
In the second article — The Ruler as a Form of Trauma — it was shown that historical wounds do not speak for themselves. They receive language through a specific figure: the container, the guide, the director, or the narcissistic arsonist.
But here another question emerges: why do some societies produce political figures capable of containing collective affect, while others produce figures who radicalize it?
The answer lies at the level of mentality.
Sublimation as a political strategy becomes possible where the structure of thought allows reduction of scale to be perceived not only as humiliation, but also as a transformation of historical presence.
Revanche becomes dominant where the image of loss is activated more strongly than ideas of responsibility or limitation.
Mythologization emerges where real scale has already been lost, yet the symbolic horizon of greatness remains psychically significant.
Stabilization becomes possible where long historical experience has formed the conviction that functional order matters more than historical expansion.
Types of rulers also do not emerge accidentally. The container becomes possible where there exists experience of institutional trust and procedural legitimacy. The guide appears where the old form has lost stability, but the need for historical meaning remains strong. The director emerges where tension between past and present can be transformed into political spectacle. The narcissistic arsonist appears where unacknowledged loss combines with a personalistic model of power and a culture of siege.
Mentality does not automatically determine concrete decisions. But it determines which decisions can be imagined at all — and which political figures are capable of receiving social legitimacy.
Politics does not begin with interests. It begins with the form of thought that makes certain interests intelligible and others almost unthinkable.
6. Historical Illustrations: Four Mental Matrices
Abstract typology requires historical verification. Below are four examples that demonstrate how different mental matrices can produce different political trajectories. This is not about the “essence of nations” or immutable national characters, but about historically formed ways of organizing political experience that become dominant during particular periods.
These are the same countries that stood at the center of the previous articles in this cycle, but they are now examined not through trauma or the figure of the ruler, but through the deeper form of thought itself.
6.1. Britain: The Mentality of the Network
British political mentality was shaped to a significant extent by the island. An island means a border that does not require constant maintenance by a massive continental army. It also means access to the world through the sea — that is, through the control of flows rather than continuous territory.
From this experience there gradually emerged a specific logic: the world came to be perceived not only as territory to be controlled, but as a network through which one must move. Power here gravitates not so much toward rigid verticality as toward the coordination of nodes. Influence means not only occupation, but presence. Law is not an absolute command, but precedent. Legitimacy is not a sacred center, but agreement.
This structure partly explains why Britain was able to endure the loss of empire without descending into classical revanche. For Britain, empire was not only part of identity, but also a mechanism of global presence. Once direct territorial control became too costly and inefficient, the British system largely translated influence into financial, legal, linguistic, and diplomatic forms.
The mentality of the network made it possible to perceive reduction not only as humiliation, but also as a reconfiguration of presence in the world.
This does not mean the complete disappearance of imperial affect. Brexit demonstrated that ideas of exceptionalism and a separate historical trajectory continue to exist within British political culture. Yet even in this case, the dominant logic remained not territorial revanche, but autonomous maneuvering.
The British case is important because it demonstrates that imperial loss can largely be sublimated into new forms of influence without directly turning into aggressive repetition.
6.2. Russia: The Mentality of the Besieged Vertical
Russian political mentality was shaped to a significant degree by the conditions of open continental space, the absence of stable natural borders, and a long historical experience of external invasions combined with internal centralization.
From this experience there gradually emerged a specific logic: security is understood through control, control through centralization, and centralization through a strong sacralized center.
Within such a structure, the state is perceived not so much as a contractual construction, but as a vertical that prevents space from collapsing. Freedom is often experienced not as a foundational norm, but as potential instability. Law is understood not as a universal limitation on power, but as an instrument of governance. History is perceived not as a completed process, but as unfinished business.
It is precisely within this mental framework that the loss of imperial scale following the collapse of the USSR was experienced by a significant part of the political system not merely as weakening, but as humiliation.
It is important here to avoid determinism. This is not about some “Russian nature,” but about a historically formed political logic that could strengthen or weaken during different periods. Russian history has also known modernization impulses, liberal tendencies, and reformist moments. Yet under conditions of crisis, the structure of the besieged vertical proved strong enough to become dominant once again.
Within this system, Putin is not an accidental anomaly, but a figure capable of connecting unacknowledged imperial loss with already existing symbolic structures — siege, humiliation, and the need to restore control.
The narcissistic arsonist does not emerge in a vacuum. Such a figure becomes possible where culture already contains a powerful demand for restoring wholeness through force.
6.3. Turkey: The Mentality of the Bridge
Turkish political mentality was formed at the intersection of several civilizational spaces: between Europe and Asia, between Islam and secularism, between imperial memory and republican form.
From this experience emerged a specific type of political imagination: identity is experienced not as a finally stabilized given, but as a permanent tension between several poles.
The world here is imagined not as the space of one final order, but as a field of maneuver between different scales and roles.
After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey followed neither the path of direct sublimation nor the path of open revanche. The Kemalist project was an attempt to create a new republican form through a radical break with part of the imperial legacy. Yet the imperial horizon itself never disappeared completely.
Later, neo-Ottoman motifs returned not as a literal plan for imperial restoration, but as a symbolic resource of political imagination.
The Turkish case demonstrates the logic of political myth. The imperial past here does not always demand direct territorial return, but it continues to function as a source of the imagination of a special historical role.
This is why Turkey often behaves not merely as a regional state, but as the center of a broader historical space — in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, or the Eastern Mediterranean.
At the same time, this logic is not identical to Russian revanche. Despite its conflicts, the Turkish model generally remains compatible with the formal recognition of the sovereignty of other states. It seeks a special role rather than the complete cancellation of a neighbor’s subjecthood.
This is precisely why the Turkish case matters as an example of imperial loss returning primarily in the form of political myth rather than direct restoration.
6.4. Germany: A Mentality That Passed Through Rupture
The German case stands apart because it demonstrates that a mental structure can be radically transformed. But not through declaration or reform — rather through historical rupture.
Before 1945, a significant part of German political culture gravitated toward the sacralization of the state, the cult of force, and the idea of a special historical path. Liberal democracy was often perceived as weak or externally imposed.
After the Second World War, this structure did not undergo gradual reform but profound destruction. Total defeat, occupation, the division of the country, the delegitimization of the Nazi project, and the realization of the scale of catastrophe rendered the old model of political thought largely unusable.
It was precisely within this context that another logic became possible: contractual, procedural, restrained, and integrated into alliances and supranational structures.
Adenauer became possible not only as a political actor, but as the figure of a new mental framework in which greatness was no longer imagined as the right to dominate.
The German case is important because it demonstrates that mentality is not an immutable essence. It can transform. But such transformation usually requires either catastrophic rupture or a very long accumulation of new experience.
This is why the transformation of mentality is one of the most difficult historical processes. It means not merely changing politics, but changing the very form through which society sees the world.
7. The Limit of Change: Can Mentality Be Transformed?
If mentality is formed slowly, reinforced through repetition, and eventually comes to be perceived as the natural order of things, then the central question emerges: is change possible at all?
The answer can be neither simply optimistic nor fatalistic. Mentality is not a single opinion that can be replaced with another opinion. It is the form within which opinions themselves become possible. It is sustained not only by convictions, but by self-evidences, affects, habitual reactions, and ways of interpreting reality.
This is precisely why mentality changes far more slowly than political regimes, economic models, or even state borders.
7.1. Why Mentality Does Not Change Quickly
Mentality is stable for several reasons.
First, it is historically accumulated. It is the result of long, repetitive experience that gradually became fixed as a norm. What generations once experienced as an exception eventually comes to be perceived as a regularity.
Second, a significant part of mentality functions on a pre-rational level. People usually do not recognize it as a construction. It is experienced as “reality itself,” rather than as one possible way of seeing the world.
Third, mentality is already embedded in institutions, law, education, economic behavior, rituals of power, and models of social interaction. It exists not only in minds — it is reproduced through practices.
That is why it cannot be changed through a simple decision or declaration. A law may alter a norm of behavior. But it does not automatically transform the way reality itself is perceived.
7.2. What Can Shift Mentality
And yet mentality does change. But not through abstract persuasion. What shifts it is a transformation of experience.
History reveals several primary mechanisms through which such shifts occur.
The first is catastrophe. A sharp historical rupture that renders the old picture of the world unusable. War, defeat, state collapse, or profound internal crisis may destroy former self-evidences. A nation is forced to recognize that the way it previously understood the world no longer works.
Germany after 1945 remains one of the clearest examples of such a rupture. Yet this path does not guarantee constructive transformation. Catastrophe can produce not only rethinking, but also revanche, fear, or new forms of mythologization.
The second mechanism is prolonged pressure from reality. The old logic increasingly proves ineffective. Habitual reactions cease to produce results. Society gradually accumulates experiences of mismatch between expectation and the actual state of affairs.
In such cases, change occurs slowly. Not through one decisive break, but through the erosion of the old model.
The third mechanism is new experience repeated long enough to become normality. New institutions that genuinely function. A new type of relationship between citizens and the state. A new level of responsibility. New practices of trust.
This path is the slowest, but also the most durable.
After the Second World War, Finland gradually moved from rigid nationalist thinking toward a more restrained and pragmatic political culture not through external imposition, but through the long experience of balancing between East and West.
After 1948, Costa Rica transformed demilitarization from a political decision into part of national identity — not declaratively, but through decades of life without an army.
Ireland moved from revolutionary nationalism toward a stable democratic culture through the gradual accumulation of different social experience.
In all these cases, change was not the result of a direct project of “reprogramming mentality.” It emerged from the prolonged inhabitation of a new reality.
7.3. Why Institutional Reforms Are Not Enough
This is precisely why institutional reforms alone do not transform mentality.
They may change the form. But if that form enters an old logic, it begins to function according to it.
A new law may be interpreted through an old system of expectations. A new institution may be absorbed by old practices. Democratic procedures may formally exist while functioning according to patrimonial or clan-based logic.
Modernization, therefore, is not an automatic consequence of importing institutions.
Institutions function only when they gradually become part of a new experience — that is, when not only the form of action changes, but also the way this action itself is perceived as normal.
The problem with many reforms lies precisely here: they attempt to transform the system from above without transforming the psychic and cultural structures within which that system will operate.
Intermediate Conclusion
Mentality changes not through the proclamation of new principles, but through experiences that gradually render the old form less convincing while simultaneously creating a new one.
Real transformation occurs when not only the political order changes, but the very form through which society reads reality.
This is why mentality is simultaneously the most stable element of history and the principal limit of any long-term political transformation.
8. Conclusion: The Form in Which a Nation Thinks Its Fate
A nation does not merely exist within history. It exists within the form through which history becomes intelligible to it.
It is this form that determines what appears possible, what is perceived as justice, what is experienced as humiliation, and what seems to be the natural order of things. It shapes not only political decisions, but also the very horizon of imagination concerning what the state, power, freedom, or the future may be.
Politics changes events. Mentality determines how those events will be read.
For this reason, the difference between societies lies not only in institutions, resources, or levels of development. It also lies in the way reality itself is thought. The same crisis may be experienced either as a challenge to build a new order or as proof of a global conspiracy. Defeat may lead to modernization — or to revanche. Loss may become a limit that is accepted — or a wound endlessly reproduced.
Mentality is not a biological essence, nor a “national character” in any essentialist sense. It refers to historically formed models of perception and interpretation supported by social institutions, collective memory, and repetitive practices. This is precisely why they can change — although slowly and unevenly.
Such change begins not when society proclaims new slogans, but when its way of seeing the world changes.
Some societies are capable of gradually rethinking their historical experience and thereby altering their trajectory of development. Others change political scenery while continuing to operate within the same logic. In such cases, history does not repeat itself literally — it repeats itself structurally.
This is why the question of mentality is not a matter of cultural exoticism or abstract “national soul.” It is a question of political future. It determines which forms of power become possible, which reactions seem natural, which types of leadership acquire legitimacy, and how society experiences crisis, force, freedom, or loss.
Change belongs not to the one who merely declares the desire for transformation, but to the one who gradually learns to interpret reality differently.
Final Conclusion of the Cycle: Three Levels of Political Psychology
This cycle began with a simple observation: states experience the loss of scale differently, and this difference cannot be explained solely through interests, resources, or the balance of power.
The three articles unfolded this observation into three interconnected levels of analysis.
The first level is the state. Imperial trauma does not arise automatically from the mere fact of loss, but when loss is not integrated as a completed reality. In such cases, the political system begins searching for forms of compensation: sublimation, revanche, myth, or symbolic restoration of status.
The second level is the ruler. Collective affect does not act by itself. It receives political language through concrete figures of power. Some rulers are capable of containing trauma and translating it into a new form of political organization. Others radicalize it and transform it into a program of repetition.
The third level is mentality. Both the mode of experiencing loss and the type of political leadership are formed within a deeper structure — a historically shaped system of perceiving the world that determines what is considered possible, just, humiliating, or legitimate.
This is why politics does not begin merely with interests or institutions. It begins much deeper — with those forms of thought through which society becomes capable of interpreting reality at all.
The state chooses a trajectory.
The ruler gives it language and form.
Mentality determines the limits of what can be imagined as an acceptable future.
In this sense, history is not only a sequence of events, but also a sequence of ways of thinking the world.
As long as these ways remain unrecognized, societies tend to reproduce their own structures — even when external circumstances have already changed.
And that is precisely why the deepest political transformations begin not with new slogans, but with a change in the form through which a people thinks itself, its power, its loss, and its possible destiny.
This text is translated by use of AI.
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