Someone asked me why so many polymaths were Eastern Europeans and seemed to thrive in conspiratorial environments, sometimes actual secret cities in the old USSR, the initiates of mysteries under hierophants.
Is secrecy part of the creative process? Having a garden that nobody else could enter except you. Oh let me show you this equation, how beautiful it is. Did the element of danger, so often provided by history of totalitarianism in the area, supercharge their intellects?
And when their secret cities were desolated by the fall of the wall and there was nothing left but potatoes and cramped apartments and the memory of the lost secret Olympus there was still the longing for the beautiful equation, wherever it had fled, to Israel or the West.
Perhaps to true polymaths the Woke police are no more regarded than the vapid political commissars, prating their infantile Marxism-Leninism. They are bureaucrats you simply deceive and who if they are any good, simply leave you alone.
Books: The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy’s Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat. The thrilling, true story of the race to find a leak in the United States Embassy in Moscow―before more American assets are rounded up and killed.