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Well, maybe it's a pointless and obvious point to make, but I'll talk about it anyway. The people in one part of the world aren't just naturally different than people in some other country on the other side of the world, they become different because of what are surrounded by in their lives. But while there might be some differences in beliefs and stuff like that, their basic human nature is the same, or at least it was originally.
For example, are people in America stupider than people in the rest of the world? Are they just naturally genetically and biologically born with inferior intelligence? If you were to argue that Americans are stupider than people from the rest of the world, you would need to understand that that couldn't be the case. If it was true that Americans are less intelligent than people from other countries, it would have to be because of the influences and systems that exist within the American society and culture, which are complicated and complex systems which develop slowly over long periods of time. For example, the American education system (an institution) could be blamed, but you could also blame the values that developed among the people in America, such as putting higher value on sports and various forms of media entertainment, rather than placing a high value on education and technology.
However, the whole stereotype that Americans are less intelligent (probably more accurate to say less educated), comes from the idea that Americans know very little about history, geography, and hardly know anything about any country outside of America. While that's almost definitely generally true, the next thing to question would be whether or not that means Americans are stupider or less educated than people from other countries.
First of all, you could put into question what kind of knowledge is more valuable, and what makes someone smarter. Is it better for someone to know a lot about cars, and a lot of practical knowledge that can be used and applied on their day to day lives, or is it better to know more about history and that other stuff? Who is smarter, the guy who knows a bunch about history but pays someone to work on his car, or the guy who knows less about history but can take the engine of his car apart and put it back together? Because that's the thing about many Americans that I've noticed, and I think it's a general characteristic of middle class/lower class people. They put more value in information and knowledge that is applicable and relevant to their everyday lives, and they put less value in that extra kind of information, considering it to be a "luxury knowledge", if you know what I mean. When I say "luxury knowledge", I mean random information about history and knowledge of other cultures in the world and stuff like that, which doesn't necessarily affect them in anyway in their day to day lives. After all, is knowing a lot about Lenin or George Washington or Newton really going to provide any benefit on a working man's life on their day to day basis?
Anyways, I got too side tracked making that 1 point, and I wanted to make others too but now I talked too much. But as for the Russian example, people who are subjected to violence and see it more regularly are more likely to become more desensitized towards violence, so their standards of what is right and wrong are altered to an extent. Like if you've ever heard of child soldiers in Africa, there are little kids who are taught to do extremely violent things, and not think anything of it. It's because they're surrounded by so much violence that they become desensitized to it, until they can do extremely violent things and not even think that what they're doing is bad. And yeah back to Russia, they had a pretty violent government for a very long time, and so it isn't surprising that the people would have been subjected to violence or surrounded by it at times, so they would become desensitized to it, and so their ideas of what is acceptable behavior and what isn't has probably shifted a bit.
But then on an individual basis, people can always break out of that, but it's always subjectified by the culture you live in, and maybe your culture's values are not always right, so you can't necessarily judge other people's cultures (you can and you'd probably be right a lot of the time, but you need to try to understand them and see things from their point of view). AAAAAAAAAnyways, I got very sidetracked with us.... I need to be working on my college shit :'(, I must give a presentation in Spanish today :-\. Giving presentations suck, but LET'S DO IT IN A COMPLETE DIFFERENT LANGUAGE!@111!!
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