In his memoir Big Russ & Me, the late host of NBC’s Meet the Press television program, Tim Russert, recounted a conversation he had with New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan inside the U.S. Senate chamber. Russert had just been hired as an aide in the senator’s Washington office. Prior to that, he had spent his entire life in a middle-class neighborhood in his native Buffalo, where he attended college. To help pay for his university education, Russert worked as a garbage collector during summer breaks.

In the Washington office, the unsophisticated Russert found himself surrounded by privileged Ivy League graduates and was intimidated. After several days of worry, he mentioned to Senator Moynihan that his colleagues were “serious, high-powered intellectuals whose idea of a good time was a two-hour argument over the intricate details of arcane left-wing [politics].” Russert added: “I have a Jesuit education and a law degree, but half the time I have no idea what they are talking about.”

According to Russert, Senator Moynihan burst out laughing. He put his arm around Russert and said: “Let me tell you something: what they know, you can learn; but what you know, they will never learn. Remember: none of these guys has ever worked on a garbage truck.” Those words worked like magic on Russert, who “walked back to the office a couple of inches above the ground.”

Russert flourished in that job, and went on to become one of the most respected political journalists in America. The self-confidence that he so badly needed was provided by someone who himself understood what it takes to go from rags to riches. Senator Moynihan is said to have grown up poor in a single-parent household in New York City. He and his brother worked as shoeshine boys in Times Square in their youth. He later became one of America’s leading political thinkers, served four presidents, was ambassador to India and the United Nations, and was a professor at Harvard prior to running for the senate.

I read Big Russ & Me many years ago but it is on my mind a lot lately, particularly that conversation between Russert and Senator Moynihan. The recollection has been triggered by many of the things I have heard some people say in the period since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022.

There is a school of thought out there that suggests that there are two broad categories of nations in the world: predators and prey. The predators are countries like America, China, and Russia that are so powerful militarily that they can choose to, whenever they wish, subjugate weaker nations and take over their resources. Sovereignty and national borders seem to be mere abstractions to the people who hold this view. It is this sphere-of-influence concept that some in this camp have used to rationalize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I have struggled to make sense of this. Such law-of-the-jungle approach to life was quite normal in medieval times. Nations fought vicious wars of conquest across Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. Enslavement of humans by other humans was an acceptable practice in the past but today it is seen as an abomination that no one even dares to think about starting anywhere. Enlightenment drove the shift in thinking that brought about these behavioral changes. The Age of Enlightenment wasn’t supposed to be a one-time episode only. As humans, we are expected to constantly refine our beliefs about life and make improvements where needed. I fundamentally reject the notion that some humans, or nations for that matter, are meant to be permanently superior to others and are thus entitled to exercise dominion wherever and whenever they please. This personal view has been shaped by how my own life has unfolded.

At birth, I slipped into a deep hole that I had to climb out of. I expended enormous amounts of energy to get myself to ground level. Once I got there, I unwittingly set myself a goal that, in order to achieve, required me to compete with children who had been born on the fifth floor. That was how I found myself on an elite secondary school campus surrounded by students who I had absolutely nothing in common with. I arrived at boarding school as a raw village kid who didn’t even know how to eat his meal in the dining hall because I had never used cutlery in my life. At home, we ate entirely different foods and everyone, including my illiterate parents, used their fingers.

I was facing a worse form of the Russert problem. Apart from my difficulties at meal times and trouble navigating life elsewhere on the campus, I lived day and night with these students that I couldn’t have any conversations with. Unlike Russert, I didn’t have a Senator Moynihan around to put his arm around me and give me assurance. Those were miserable years, but I decided that I would tough it out. I just kept to myself.

Today, through education, travel, professional and other lived experiences, that unsophisticated village boy has turned into a man who can sustain conversations on all manner of subjects with just about anyone on the planet. Along the way, I learned how important hard work, discipline, persistence, and curiosity are in life. Those are the attributes that determine the fortunes of individuals and nations. More crucially, I have also become convinced that thinking about any life condition as permanent is quite a fatal error.

The thing that bothers me the most when I listen to geopolitical discussions nowadays is the sense I get that lots of people, especially Africans, hold on to this predator-and-prey notion in transnational relations. That is a huge problem because we live in a world in which people everywhere engage in fierce competition for finite resources. The predators will happily stay on the rampage so long as they know that there are people and nations that see themselves as too weak to do anything about external aggression, and readily accept their fate as permanent prey.

Singapore is not even a country. It is a city-state that, just a few decades ago, people didn’t think much of. Today it is one of the wealthiest and most respected societies in the world. Taiwan is a similar story because China considers it part of its territory. There are small nations like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, and Finland that were prey in the past but are very much in control of their own destinies today. There are a host of others like them around the world that can be viewed in the same way. The key, for individuals and nations, is knowing how the world works and figuring out how best to position oneself within that complex web.

The reality is that countries like America, China, Japan, and Germany enjoy some special privileges by virtue of their wealth. Poorer nations rely on them for developmental assistance and as markets for some of their products. But such dependence should in no way be so complete and so permanent as to result in loss of national dignity to the extent that we observe in most parts of Africa today. The examples of Singapore and South Korea are instructive.

Every nation’s character is an embodiment of the dispositions of its individual citizens. The path that I traveled to become an adult who is now able to navigate this complex world is one that I strongly believe nations can follow as well. And as Senator Moynihan told Russert, I am now convinced that there are some things that no amount of learning from books can teach. Over the last couple of years, I have listened to celebrated geopolitical experts say repeatedly that we should accept the world as it is—that powerful nations can redraw national borders at will. I would probably have bought their flawed argument if I had not learned those hard life lessons.