Tiit Lepik’s mailing list

A fine Soviet-era slogan. Claude AI says that the actual original source is Clara Zetkin’s memories of her conversations with Lenin. Allegedly there is no direct proof that Lenin said it.

Art has played an important role in my life. When I was growing up in Palmse, the sculptor Lembit Kiisson worked as a blacksmith in the smithy next to our home; he gave me the only push scooter of my life and tried to teach me art. That is why I have noticed the recent 700,000-euro scandal of the Estonian Artists’ Association. I too have heard many opinions from friends about what happened and how.

I have thought a little about these topics. Let me try to give my opinion here.

An important role here is played by management and decision-making. In my opinion management is simple in essence. Arrange things into so-called decision points. For each decision, bring out the different variants or alternatives. Try to assess the pluses and minuses as rationally as possible. Make the decision according to the need. The problems start with the assessment. For a decision to be rational, the variants should be assessed in the same way. The human brain, again, is drawn to choosing what seems more familiar. The whole modern world of advertising and marketing is based on this principle. In my opinion the art of management lies in trying to remain rational.

In recent years a viewpoint appeared in sales theories, especially at American universities, on how to achieve great and long-term sales success by using this property of the brain to choose the more familiar. Most of these theories deal with so-called addiction selling. The sellers of LLMs, for example OpenAI and others, are based on them. A special star is TikTok, a 21st-century mathematical solution invented by a Chinese mathematics enthusiast — pure calculation — not a single drop of emotion or feeling.

People are all different and their motives vary. Quite soon the practical tricks of these sales theories began to spread among fraudsters too, who previously posted so-called Nigerian letters and sent fictitious invoices and phishing e-mails. In the age of social media the practical tricks needed for such activity spread quickly, literally around the globe. The new knowledge made this whole crowd, from Asia to Europe, try out these tricks everywhere, since extraordinary financial gain seemed in sight. As a result, for example, the Estonian media is full of headlines — from old ladies to top bankers — who forget everything, distance themselves from their loved ones, friends, acquaintances and colleagues and sincerely believe that the future lies only with that mysterious investment genius at the other end of the phone. Today’s world is open. Each of us has our own dream for which we are willing to abandon all the people around us and believe only the one who promises to fulfil the dream. There are several billion people in the world. Millions of them earn their living from fraud. Often they are not criminals. Ordinary people from poor countries looking for a way to survive.

The probability that sooner or later someone will offer us an extraordinary opportunity to fulfil a secret dream is extraordinarily high in Europe in 2026. I myself think that someone in the Artists’ Association may have believed that with these small financial moves Estonian art would be taken along extraordinary paths into the world, or something like that.

Certainly the details are extremely complicated and even contradict my thoughts, but I believe the general lines of force followed this kind of logic.