I was moved. Poetry is compressed language. It expresses more in fewer words. I have toyed with it, but there is much to learn. I do think, however, that there can be poetry in the living of a life. A life of courage and great deeds rooted in diversity of culture, perspective, and experience.
I was prompted to this by a piece by Timothy Snyder.1 If you have not read Professor Snyder, know that he is an expert on authoritarian regimes who has become a voice in the rise of these regimes.2 He speaks eloquently in “Guest, Host, Ghost” about the human side of war and the shadows left in our lives as we lose our people.
At the end of his piece, Snyder also introduced me to Maksym “Dali” Kryvtsov. Kryvtsov was a poet and a soldier.3 As Larissa Babij puts it
Poet, machine-gunner, photographer, Maksym Kryvtsov also got along well with children. He wrote playful verse and performed daring missions behind enemy lines. Everyone who read his Facebook page knew that he loved cats, especially his great big ginger tabby. He had a talent for baking and his brownies were legendary. Like Schrödinger’s cat, which simultaneously exists in two contradictory states, Kryvtsov was many incompatible things at once.4
One of the quotes that struck me immediately, however, was by a fellow soldier who had fought with Kryvtsov. It was here that the threads come together for me.
“I tend to like people who deviate from the norm,” says Oleksandr Chub, who defended the Kyiv region together with Kryvtsov in spring 2022. “They are capable of great deeds.”
In so many ways, this is the argument. This is the disagreement. This is the fight. In different ways, this was the fight of the French Revolution, the fight of the Spanish Civil War, the fight of World War II. Those who favour an authoritarian regime, be it a king, dictator, or similar focus of power, tend to be those who believe that what is different is a threat. That which is out of my control will cause me pain and poverty.
And yet, there is strong evidence to the contrary.5 The United States of America was a relatively small country in global affairs until the wake of World War II when minorities were returning from the war and taking an active role in the society. This is consistent with the business results demonstrated in a 2015 study by McKinsey.6 As summarised by Rock and Grant,
…those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean…7
As I have been saying for many years, a room full of wealthy, white, heterosexual males is not likely to invent a car hailing service like Bolt. No one in such a room has stood on a Manhattan street and had multiple empty cabs pass them by. In the fourth industrial revolution, we create value through a diversity of ideas.
This same concept works on a national level. The difficulties are real, but more real are the reductive results of replicative decay. If we only work with people or ideas that conform to the dominate group, we will fail to generate new ideas.
But there are responsibilities to identify and nurture collective connection and community. Homo sapiens are only able to aggregate beyond their tribe through the use of these conceptual structures, and they need attention.8 Also, our human organisations are only at their best when they are supporting and caring for the sapiens that participate in them. When the organisation fails in this core function, the organisation will be transformed or eliminated, often painfully.
And here again, we see value in diverse perspectives and experiences. Not only because these diverse perspectives offer new ideas and generate improvement, but also because those of us “who deviate from the norm” often have a necessary level of courage and drive to be “capable of great deeds.”
May we all look for that courage in the days to come.
References
- Snyder, Timothy. 2025-07-09. Guest, Host, Ghost: A dinner party in Kiev. Thinking About… https://snyder.substack.com/p/guest-host-ghost (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Wikipedia contributors. 2025-07-03. Timothy Snyder. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timothy_Snyder&oldid=1298549911 (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Wikipedia contributors. 2025-01-24. Maksym Kryvtsov. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maksym_Kryvtsov&oldid=1271529360 (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Babij, Larissa. 2024. Maksym Kryvtsov “Dali”: “Is death the end?”. The Ukranians. https://theukrainians.org/spec/peopleofcultureeng/kryvtsov/ (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Reid, Dawn C. 2022-09-27. Why Diversity Is Really Our Greatest Strength. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/coaching-corner/202209/why-diversity-is-really-our-greatest-strength (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Hunt, Vivian, et al. 2015-02-02. Why Diversity Matters. McKinsey. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/why-diversity-matters (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Rock, David and Heidi Grant. 2016-11-04. Why Diverse Teams are Smarter. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter (accessed 2025-07-10). ↩︎
- Harari, Noah Yuval. 2015. Sapiens. HarperCollins. https://www.ebooks.com/en-es/book/1631238/sapiens/yuval-noah-harari/. ↩︎
Completamente de acuerdo, un reconfortante relato en estos tiempos.
Gracias David!
Great, thoughtful piece, David.
A tease, a quick outline, not a finished piece by any means my son. So much here that can be expanded. This young poet, is he one of the many casualties of this awful war or does he still write? A diversion to the history of our diversity, but so much more can be said, and about the part on the study of teams, surely you have more to say on that, you of the management level. Nicely gathered but it is only a preliminary study, a teaser of what else you can say, of what else you know. You only give me hints. I look forward to the full exposition.
Love,
Mom
Do not forget that brevity is the soul of wit. 😉 And the poet was killed in the war. He died on 7 January 2024.
I will look for a translation of his work. Sadly, far too many have died and will continue until the Russians have enough death and end Putin.
Follow the link for footnote 4. That is his English translator.