America, Europe and the management of danger | A hazardous comparison | Economist.com

re: "...Few Americans or west Europeans would trade their relatively risk-free existence for the tingling dice with death that can go with daily life in Russia. But many would endorse the insistence of the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on the sanctity of the right to incur danger: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” Being reckless from time to time preserves what is “most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality.”..."...