And Your Heart's the Moon

How do you tell someone you love that their dysfunction is destroying everything around them?

A few Russians have tried in vain to tell their countrymen, but could change nothing, despite their work being well known. Anti-intellectualism firmly triumphs when the best ideas are readily available, even well known, but are not suppressed for their insight and consequences. Such a social climate is tolerant of all ideas, with all considered merely equal, often dismissed as just another opinion or theory, so none are deemed preeminent or modestly important, and thus no action is taken. The danger described typically comes to fruition as predicted, and though the fate of centuries hangs in the balance, all sentient people can only warn and then watch the disaster align its forces to enact its crippling damage.

In Mussorgsky's operatic adoption of Pushkin's Boris Godunov, the dynamics of the mob and mob manipulators illustrate a society without intellectual brakeshoes on corrupt excesses. With everything on the line and the dreadful consequences obvious, the Russian Revolution still happened, burying Russia for centuries.