We Lose by Winning
Less than one year ago, the United States exited Afghanistan. Despite being longer than the Vietnam War, the war in Afghanistan remained largely out of the public discourse for the majority of its duration. Thus, it is easy to forget how many suffered and how great the cost for a war that achieved little but making the United States legendarily unpopular in a region where she was never beloved. The sister conflict to the war in Afghanistan—the Iraq War—nominally ended in 2011, yet American troops remained in the country in combat roles until December of 2021. Granted, the two major goals of these wars—the killing of Osama bin Laden and the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein—were achieved (in 2011 and 2006, respectively). But one would be hard-pressed to argue that either Afghanistan or Iraq is a more stable or reliable nation than it was before the American invasions.
The common thread: When the United States decides to track or eliminate anyone, anywhere on earth, she usually gets her man. But these are pyrrhic victories, benefitting few outside the defense industry and a subset of the elite, and actively harming many others.
“I believe what I believe is right.” —President George W. Bush, Rome, 2001
Looking back, one can usually find a moment in which rhetoric shifts, indicating that the elite have decided on—and invested in—a strategy to resolve the problems at hand. This is rarely subtle. In 2002, President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech outlined the worldview that was to dominate American foreign policy for more than a decade.
Viewing the speech through the lens of history, one can appreciate that which might have been easily missed at the time. First, notwithstanding the speech’s lack of nuance, it was neither badly written nor poorly delivered: Bush was a capable orator on his average days, and he occasionally rose to the level of being inspiring. On his worst days, he would utter a Bushism—They misunderestimated me—but such were probably no more serious mistakes than the average man or woman would be found to make were his or her every word recorded and parsed.
Second, this speech was not merely a speech. It was a statement of the elite’s all-encompassing policy and radical worldview: America must annihilate those who would do the same to her. She shall divide the world into camps—those with her or those with the terrorists. There can be no third option or middle path. The simplistic tone of Bush’s speech was understandable. The United States had been attacked. Thousands of Americans had died in the most unexpected of ways, leaving the population rattled and searching for a hero. In the end, the rhetoric was overheated and did little to encourage international friendship or facilitate the building of alliances—something Bush’s father acknowledged—but such was the product of the extraordinary times in which it arose. Just as importantly, it was honest and unencumbered by legalistic obfuscation or Ivy-League academese.
The Bush Doctrine, as laid out in that momentous soliloquy, was globalist, paternalistic, and probably less well-managed and executed than was El Presidente’s time as owner of the Texas Rangers. That it so explicitly allowed for preemptive war to protect the American people—and to a lesser extent, innocents everywhere—from terrorism is an inconvenient fact at present, given that Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine based on the same rationale.
Good Enemies, Bad Enemies, and Enemies Too Good at Being Bad
Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan—this is all old news. The neoconservative policies of the aughts left a legacy of destruction and violence that will hurt the peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia for generations to come and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of their truncated lives. They resulted in “righteous strikes” that caused the deaths of friends and allies. They radicalized a significant percentage of the population of these countries and turned millions more against Western thinking and values so much so that they may despise us until the end of this century. But we—meaning any American not a member of the warrior class—may choose to erase these boondoggles from memory. What we should not forget is that the designated enemies of President Bush and his brooding Darth Vader imitator, Vice President Dick Cheney, were carefully chosen and of little threat to anyone in the United States. The original Axis of Evil consisted of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The extended edition of the Axis of Evil (or Snyder Cut of Terror, if you will) included Cuba, Libya, and Syria. While greater in number, the latter cohort are no less underwhelming in practical strength. These are good enemies in the cartoon-villain sense. One can muster up fear of them the same way one can do so over killer bees and 5G—they may well be theoretical dangers, but about the most aggressively any of us (on an individual level) might be disposed to address them is by buying a pallet of insect spray, swearing off cells phones, and ordering a few more drums of dried beans for the survival bunker.
Russia is a different matter.
The members of the Axis of Evil (or Axes of Evil—as there are arguably several of them) were supposedly hellbent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Russia already has more than 6,000 nuclear weapons. The Axes of Evil consisted of technologically primitive nations, with none of them having credible aerospace or manufacturing capabilities. Russia manufactures supersonic fighter jets, long-range commercial aircraft, and rockets. And Russia exports billions of dollars of petroleum and natural gas, wheat, iron, and nickel. Ask an American of average education how the peoples of the demonic demi-nations sustain themselves and you will likely observe a few moments of head-scratching and a vague statement about hating the American way of life. This is fine as far as it goes, but hating the American way of life would seem to be a poor basis for a functional economy. And how one would monetize this is another matter: Death-to-America Instagram posts? Down-with-the-Great-Satan NFTs? I-Spit-on-the-Capitalist-Swine OnlyFans pages?
If all else fails, perhaps they could use the time-tested approach of selling t-shirts to fatten their wallets and irritate their enemies. We do.
No matter how ruthlessly we—the American people, the American military-industrial complex, the American elite, even American aid workers—might annoy these gnat-sized semi-countries and their minions of Satan-loving leaders and administrators, they simply cannot do much about it. And the Afghans—their nation never good enough to make Team Sinister or achieve so much as the more modest accomplishment of being formally recognized as a shithole country—would have been hard-pressed to launch an attack goat against us.
The reason that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) lasted as long as it did was that it could. We, the American citizenry, might not have won anything for our struggles, but we could subject our targets to GWOT largesse until we grew bored, which is to say until our leaders could no longer explain away the funneling of a surfeit of taxpayer dollars to the defense industry.
We have established that the warmongers of a generation ago were not (at the time) suicidal or insane. Bush might have been more hat than cattle and Cheney was a minor hazard when entrusted with a shotgun, but neither man was emptyheaded. What of our current elite? They may be older than they were in the GWOT era, but many of them are the same people. President (then Senator) Joseph R. Biden, Jr. had already been a member of congress for decades by 2001. And the major contractors and lobbying agencies remain largely as they were.
Yet today’s warmongers are now escalating a conflict with Russia, a bad enemy, which is to say that is so good at being formidably bad that it can give us all the fight we want, if not more. Assuming the American elite are at all concerned with their survival or the survival of the nation they so eagerly fleece, this would appear to be ill-advised.
One possible reason for the present emboldened strategy is that America’s leadership class may have grown senile. Its members are ancient. And COVID did tragically little to thin the herd, with the first congressional co-death not occurring until 2021. Another possible reason is that the already astounding profits made during the last two wars against shitholery might have whetted our fat cats’ appetites more than sated them. Greed, like lust, can overpower caution. Yet one more possibility is that the American elite and intelligence services were caught flatfooted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and are reacting to circumstances in the same disorderly manner one would if sucker punched.
The alphabet agencies (CIA, DIA, and FBI) have an atrocious track record of evaluating geopolitical circumstances and managing risks to the country. From a shocking ineptitude when appraising the extent of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program; to an inability to predict either the Capitol riots or the fall of Afghanistan; to appalling, avoidable errors going back to not long after the Second World War, there is ample evidence that the intelligence community is simply not all that . . . intelligent. If no one in Washington knew what was going to happen in Ukraine (or when it was going to happen), much of the heavy-handed sanctions and aggressive rhetoric of the last few weeks may well have been compensatory—an effort to make up for a lack of prescience with an overabundance of bluster and intensity.
The last matter is of concern to every living thing on the planet. It is easier to yammer oneself into trouble than out of it—this being why anyone versed in the law does not talk to the police. Given the untested fitness of America’s leaders for facing a resourceful (and well-resourced) opponent, there is the distinct possibility that they may prattle themselves into an unrestricted war—something that could approach to the fullest extent humanely possible Clausewitz’s theoretical absolute form of war (a concept to be examined in more detail later in this section)—thinking that they merely rallying their base and protecting their position.
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T: That is what it means to me.”
There is another, more disturbing explanation for the war footing on which we find ourselves: Our leaders know exactly what they are doing. They are gearing up for battle against another nuclear power, and they are willing to accept the possibility of the peoples of Europe, North America, and Russia being bombed into the stone age, simply because they consider this outcome better than the alternative. The alternative—the thing worse than nuclear conflagration—is loss of power. This would mean that the iron law of institutions—that those controlling our agencies and organizations are bound to be more concerned with retaining their personal and political power than they are with the wellbeing or continuity of the institutions they have been charged with preserving—is proving to be every bit as certain as its probable author, Jonathan Schwartz, claimed it to be.
Another way to describe this iron law would be as power greed—more dangerous than its comparatively rational material-wealth sibling. The truly power greedy are less concerned with maximizing the size of the pizza—in this case, the influence and wellbeing of the United States—than in getting the largest slice of pie they can, without regard for if their gluttony causes the world to starve, including (within a few generations or less) the spawn of said elite.
And this ties to the penultimate explanation for our rising belligerence: The American elite are feeling disrespected. This can be regarded as a discrete matter from the loss of power. Power and respect correlate, but that is not to say that one is no different from the other.
As their functional strength grows, the reputation of the elite diminishes. The technology to monitor every word and deed of every person in the United States (and a great many outside of its borders); the authority to inject themselves into every family, every home, and every debate; and the clout to redefine any word or concept as they see fit, whenever they deem appropriate—such are considerable tools for the elite. More dangerous than any of these are the bureaucratic hulk to reshape educational institutions into ideological training and proving grounds; and the air dominance and (questionable) legal right to declare anyone on the planet, including American citizens, to be enemy combatants and order them eliminated.
What else could even the most privileged desire than a license to kill, impoverish, or marginalize whoever crosses their path? By the measure of any previous age, our elite are the most fortunate of people. They can command wealth that rivals that of Mansa Musa, terrorize the globe in a way that would put Vlad the Impaler (with whom they share a love of blood) to shame, and run propaganda operations of such scope and sophistication that Joseph Goebbels would be in awe. They have everything unlimited guns and money can afford one. But amongst the few things money cannot buy: Respect. And respect matters. It is the highest currency. And those who believe they are not being given enough of it may respond with anything from moderate aggression to extraordinary violence. It might seem counterintuitive for the most powerful people on earth to perceive themselves as vulnerable and besieged, but only if one forgets that respect is vital to maintaining one’s sense of self.
Just as President Bill Clinton predicted it would, the internet democratized access to information. What he (and most of his strategists) failed to predict was how extensively this would challenge the American elite’s preeminence in narrative creation and how comparatively little effect it would have in other countries. Knowledge is cheaper and more widely available than at any previous time in human history, with Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy both serving as examples of excellent (and free) online educational resources. There are an even greater number of for-profit instructional sites that offer not just content, but structured, human-graded courses. The existence of these free and fee-charging platforms challenges the purported role of colleges and universities as indispensable providers of edification, but as college graduates learn almost nothing (aside from how to comply with the rules of a gatekeeping system), the relevance of this may be minimal.
Of greater concern to the elite are outsiders who do not toe the party line and yet gain large audiences. Joe Rogan, a comedian and fight announcer with no professional training in journalism, helms a show considerably more popular than any news program produced by the mainstream media. This must hurt. The free market is unencumbered by sentiment or mercy, particularly in the era of globalization—a truth the members of the working class know both practically and intimately, but that their nominal betters have been able to ignore until recently, except when considering the ramifications it has on the lives of lesser—and in the minds of the elite, expendable—mortals. It would be shocking were our infotainment/cultural gatekeeping royalty to not react with at least a bit of negativity to the prospect of being dethroned.
Given how fundamental a shift has occurred in less a baker’s dozen years, the defensiveness of the talking-head and policymaking class has been surprisingly temperate. They retain many forms of power, but the loss of the information monopoly is a challenge to their respect, authority, and reputation. These factors, combined with the competence with which non-Western governments have come to monitor and control their corners of the internet and subsequently turn the technologies underlying it into systems for micromanaging the behaviors of their people, must be a source of consternation for our think-tank wonders. Their dismay and frustration are understandable. Lesser elite—meaning any produced outside of the Anglo-American system of power consolidation—are besting our best and brightest at their own (rigged) game, played on what was an American home field until recently. All this proves Clinton right (to a point), but in exactly the wrong way. Controlling the internet is, as Clinton noted, like nailing Jell-O to a wall. It just so happens that Jell-O—or ballistic gelatin, as the case may be—is surprisingly tough stuff, far less inclined to sheer or disintegrate than one might assume. And to the extent the internet has proven to be a weapon, it has been used against our elite at least as effectively (far more, if the news reports are to be believed) as it has been used by them.
Insecure, Insatiable, and Desiring of Destruction
Another possible explanation for the seemingly irrational conduct of the elite is that they actively desire their destruction—of their civilization, of their power, and (most of all) the legacy of their forebears. The end (of the world) is not the means (to retain power), but the end in and of itself. The reasons for this are complex, but they can all be ascribed to some combination of boredom, envy, and insecurity.
It may be too much to say that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” but the statement is not far off the mark. A plethora of jobs in the United States are bullshit, and this worthless make-work is more often the domain of the elite than the ordinary man or woman. (Ask yourself this: If all the plumbers in America were vaporized by War of the Worlds-style heat rays, would we be the worse for it? Now, consider the same hypothetical, but with human resources experts in the plumbers’ stead.) Useless people often know they are useless. They may deny this reality, but they are rarely as unaware as they would wish themselves to be. Thus, boredom.
Then there is envy. The American elite of the 1940s and 1950s (and their Anglo peers) were a reasonably capable bunch. They made mistakes, but no one can know everything about every people and place. Had they done as their most hawkish associates wished (see Operation Unthinkable), they might well have come to rule the world, assuming they did not extirpate it. The children and grandchildren of these towering and brutal leaders have done what? They have won no major wars. Their economic policies have enriched the few—their friends included—but at the expense of the nation’s industrial significance and self-sufficiency. Their philosophies and intellectual movements—occasionally interesting, more bewildering than elucidating—are not their own. They are imported. The present elite subtract from that to which others have added and disassemble what others have built. This is getting rich by blasting and selling the bedrock upon which your house is built and then being surprised by your wobbling walls and tilting floors. The one thing between a boy genius of such industry and his fortune: physics.
So the elite envy their parents the accomplishments of old. But their envy is not so limited in scope or potential harm. They envy competence. They envy anyone who can do anything of value or significance, so they diminish the importance of honest work to the point of trivializing it. If one cannot raise himself to the level of honest ability, he can attempt to drag those who can down to the level of those who cannot.
At its worst, envy can turn murderous. Consider this: The most fanatical and bloodthirsty participants in the Cultural Revolution were not the children of the former peasantry, but those of the established elite. The first Red Guard unit was not organized in the rice paddies, but at a middle school attached to Tsinghua University—one of China’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. And the first person beaten to death by Red Guards—Bian Zhongyun—was a teacher at a middle school attached to Beijing Normal University, another highly respected center of education. That her attackers were a group of middle school girls is worth noting. The mania of the era was doubtless one reason for the abuse Bian suffered. The barbarity of middle school students—something to which I, having taught a few middle school classes over the years, can attest and to which I refer at several points in this essay—is another. But the power of envy should not be discounted. How many boys would envy the role of a female, middle-aged, middle school teacher? In all likelihood, very few. But to girls of a certain age and from a certain place, a woman in a position of power, even if that power was limited to campus, might have seemed an appropriate target at which to direct their frustrations.
From these select schools, the movement spread throughout Beijing, and considerably later to the less prosperous Chinese hinterlands. Mao Zedong may well have lit the match of his Revolution, but a flame without fuel is not of much effect. He, like all effective rulers, understood the tensions of the times. Youthful envy of the elders’ accomplishments in the storied age of revolution—The Long March, the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (the Second World War to everyone else)—and insecurity about future career prospects were not the creations of Mao. As much as anything else, they were the product of a simple longing—the desire for a war of one’s own. Those thus afflicted and who have no real enemies to fight—an invading army, an opposing clan or tribe—turn proselytizers, waging spiritual wars, which are more battles against the cold indifference of the universe and the futility of life than they are against disbelievers and crimethinkers. And if the elite cannot find enough enemies in their spiritual war, they create them by way of arbitrary selection, outright manufacture, or bombing and radicalizing friends and neutrals into enemies. The dynamics of enemy creation and improvement—how it occurs, how it is furthered by the paranoia of a predatorial and Manichean mind, why some cultures engage in this practice frequently and others do so rarely, and the extent to which this causes our enemies to adopt and adapt our thinking—are matters to be considered later.
That those who see their cravings sated are often destroyed in the process is not to be unexpected. Not getting what one wants can be disappointing. Getting what one wants in abundance can be fatal. As it was for a great many cultural revolutionaries, so it may be more the case for the unproven heirs of the American empire.
Comparing the actions of the American elite to a revolution of the young—many who had not reached the age of majority at the time of their most notorious acts—may seem irrational. The present-day United States is a gerontocracy, no less than was the Soviet Union in its decline. This talk of resentment of one’s parents, of youthful self-doubt, is incongruous with the reality of our undead masters and commanders. The catacombs of power should have few who harbor the insecurities of their salad days, assuming (however unlikely) they can remember what salad, days, salad days, or insecurities mean.
This is befuddling to the extent one is preposterously oblivious to a critical aspect of the prune-juice-and-Ovaltine set—no matter how overwhelming the evidence, our cabal of corpses rarely think of themselves as past their prime. One cannot entirely blame them for this. The sheer volume of 40-is-the-new-30, life-begins-at-50, and Eat, Pray, Love big-lie dupery pumped out by the eternal-youth/self-discovery complex is enough to overwhelm the graying gray matter of all but the most well-grounded of the chronically chthonic. As carry on the delusions of youthfulness, so march with them the resentments. The Who may have hoped to die before they got old, but they left themselves an out—the temporal specifics remain undefined—and we are mere fledglings compared to the most juvenile of stars to blaze across the sky.
Finally, we consider a non-cause for the aggressions of our declining empire. Excluding it would appear an oversight. And this non-reason is the exploitation of the natural resources of the nations the United States has invaded. If the wars of the last two decades were classic wars of profit and plunder—wars to gain mineral monopolies or extract tribute from vassal states—they (or the-rape-and-pillage afterparty) were executed with profound ineptitude. Iraq floats on a sea of oil. Despite this, the American oil industry was not particularly eager to see Iraq attacked nor confident that an invasion would benefit the corporate world.
Were securing oil the principal goal of the American elite, they could have far more easily invaded (or coerced and browbeaten into whatever agreements they desired) our northern neighbor—closer than Iraq, accessible by land, with a culture and language passably similar to ours, and with substantial petroleum reserves. The Great White North is surrounded by the United States on two sides, so Operation Cana-duh! could be concluded in a matter of weeks. And the Canadians, as polite as they are, might not honor us with a ticker-tape parade of shredded copies of the Globe and Mail and offer us bouquets of Molson and maple syrup—presumably for freeing them from the tyranny of socialized medicine and whatever it is that they try to pass off as bacon. But they would almost certainly be less inclined to wage a resistance of decades against us than were the Iraqis.
Were the thought of invading the artic too chilling, the elite could have launched a war against Venezuela—a bit further from the United States than Canada, in need of liberation from left-wing mismanagement, and where there is oil aplenty. Thus, it is with some confidence that a reasonable person can assert that the Iraq War was not about oil. If any wars have been fought over oil is subject to debate. But there is much more than oil of value beneath the dust and turf.
Afghanistan has at least a trillion dollars’ worth of mineral resources, including some of value to the American technology industry. Yet in almost 20 years of occupation, the United States did little to extract these, building no mines worthy of the name or roads to haul away their output. And in a country populated with those far too poor and poorly educated to object—to fully understand the value of what might have been taken from them—this would have been legally easy (if logistically challenging). Of the few international ventures that have made any real effort to develop Afghanistan’s mining industry, Metallurgical Corp of China and Jiangxi Copper stand out as being two of the more aggressive ones, but even they have done no more than signing a long-term lease. From the prospector’s perspective, America did something worse than failing to better her position: She actively hindered herself, getting in her own way more effectively than could have any tin-pot warlord or Kalashnikov-wielding band of zealots, handing contracts to her competitors in the process.
Outcomes of the War in Ukraine: Mediocre, Bad, and Worse
Now that we have determined the likely (and unlikely) forces driving the American elite towards an increasingly disputatious response to Russia’s actions in Europe, we consider the next question: What will happen if they have their wish and America enters a war of scale?
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. But we shall try and consider three possible scenarios. Let us jump to the worst first.
The worst-case scenario is that the United States’ involvement in Ukraine follows the trajectory of that in Vietnam and then flies past its intended target, with the United States initially offering weapons (or lethal aid, as it is now euphemized) and training to the Ukrainians and gradually being sucked into a quagmire it incorrectly assumes will stick to Russian boots alone. The Vietnam War evolved and expanded slowly, taking years to go from semi-commitment to the technological monster of perfect war. There is no reason to believe the present conflict would not lead to a worse end.
That era’s corporate-sponsored jingoism was comparatively crude. John Wayne might have stumped for war, but propaganda was propaganda, possibly more elegant than that of a few decades prior, but not by much. Our propaganda is wraparound, comprehensive, and growing more sophisticated with every well-crafted TikTok.
The problem is not that Americans will be frog-marched into war, but that they will end up supporting it with more enthusiasm than the elite could hope to muster. Propaganda in the modern era does not radiate into free space. It interacts with the highly resonant structure of social media, allowing it to propagate in a manner heretofore unfeasible. The harmonic properties of our collective digital id allow rage—the most transmissible of emotions—to spread further and faster than more benign sentiments. And there are more effective few ways to induce rage than to offer a tale of an innocent and heroic people being attacked, raped, and slaughtered by a satanic behemoth and its Untermensch sex fiends. War is rarely as simple as that, with one side employing baby-killing monsters and the other having ranks of none but saints. Yet the propagandists would have us think in monochrome, with our enemies as being cruel beyond reason.
The specter of nuclear war looms over this scenario, but there is no guarantee that a hot war between Russia and the United States would cause either nation to let loose its entire atomic arsenal, with a subsequent loss of up to 500 million lives. A low-level conflict could continue for years, particularly if the United States heavily funds the battle with the intent to turn the current catastrophe into a Russian version of America’s or the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan (not that Britain did much better in any of her three wars in that unconquerable country). Such patience may not befit the considerable number of Americans who are so trigger-happy and ill-informed that they support establishing a no-fly zone in Ukraine, right until they are told what a no-fly zone is and what establishing one entails. But then, the low-information segment of the population can be manipulated easily enough to do (and support) whatever they are sold and told.
And there is the possibility of a limited nuclear conflict—involving a few tactical devices—that would do little more than irradiate the pre-irradiated wheat fields of Chornobyl. Eastern Europe might well be transmogrified into a land of Hjaðningavíg perma-war (bankrupting Russia, Europe, and the United States in the process), but the pristine GMO corn and soybean fields of Indiana could remain singularly untouched.
The second scenario is that Russia achieves something close enough to victory in Ukraine that it can reduce its presence in the country to a minimum, sign a peace treaty with the government of Kyiv, and preempt Western plans to collapse either country.
This is the best of cases. Ascertaining why and what Russia initially intended when beginning operations in Ukraine is difficult. And nations change strategic objectives over time. The American objectives in Iraq changed more than once, moving from detecting non-existent weapons of mass destruction to regime change to nation-building to war against the Islamic State. If a nation desires to prolong her military involvement in a foreign land (as the United States often does), she expands her list of objectives. Conversely, a nation can easily shorten her wartime involvement by narrowing her aims and mission parameters. Russia may redefine victory to make said victory more readily achievable.
At a minimum, this will entail extracting certain concessions from NATO and Ukraine and resolving the matters of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea in a way that is satisfactory to the ethnic Russian population of these areas and Russian national perceptions of sovereignty and dignity. If Russia comes to the negotiation table with a sincere desire for peace, how much, if at all, America or her proxies will be willing to compromise—regardless of how small the cost to the West or how significant the facing-saving value to the East—is uncertain.
The last serious possibility (if not probability) is that the United States will achieve that which it has so desperately wanted since the rise of Putin and his gradual taming of Russia’s oligarchs—regime subjugation, regime change, or the more ambitious goal of regime collapse. With at least 80 military or intelligence interventions in foreign countries since the Second World War—many geared towards replacing or manipulating their leadership—the United States is highly practiced, if not always highly competent, in subverting electoral and power-transfer processes. Aside from one significant (possible) blunder, the desire to replace Putin with someone more compliant has not been articulated. But circumstantial evidence of intent abounds. At least some of the color revolutions of the last two decades—Rose, Orange, Tulip—were encouraged by the United States. Many of these occurred within a stone’s toss of Russia and resulted in the installation of governments inclined to accommodate Western powers and look askance at their adversaries. The 2014 Maidan Uprising (considered one of the color revolutions, although never assigned a hue) in Ukraine was supported by American interests. The nominal reason for the Revolution was to depose a corrupt and illegitimate government, yet this claim is dubious. The 2010 election in which the then-president Viktor Yanukovych was elected is widely recognized as free and fair by international observers.
The least interventionistic interpretation of American actions is that supporting these anti-democratic political upheavals is intended to pressure and isolate Russia—to subjugate the nation—rather than lead to her collapse. An intimidated Russia might not be as useful as one under proxy control, but she is still superior—from an American perspective—to one that is autonomous and fearless in the pursuit of the rational self-interest of her people.
The most interventionistic interpretation of American actions is that the destabilizing efforts undertaken thus far are practice for a larger effort—that of imploding and balkanizing Russia. The logic behind this should be evident to anyone who has considered the matter: A Russia in pieces is easier to control and less of a threat to the Western world order, if only because multiple small states competing with each other will be vulnerable to market and political pressures a unified Russia could easily endure. The evidence that the West would strive for this most radical outcome is limited, which does not place such strivings beyond the pale. Some texts present the collapse of Russia as inevitable, if not necessarily as desirable.
The argument for this inevitability is based on five assumptions:
- Russia has weak mechanisms for the transition of power.
- Russia has poorly developed government institutions and services.
- Russia’s economy is weak and her the educational system is poor.
- Russia is founded upon a “frail ideology.”
- Russians lack a unified national identity.
Conceding the first two points, the last three can be contested. Economic weakness is a poorly defined term. Average per capita income in Russia was about $10,000 as of 2020—placing it in the upper-middle-income range—with the average lifespan being slightly more than 73 years, and average lifespan being a good indicator of the overall wellbeing of the nation’s people. These numbers are below those of the United States, but they are far from the world’s worst.
In terms of the two aforesaid metrics—income and lifespan—Russia fares about as well as Mexico and considerably better than the most recent beneficiary (or target, if you will) of America’s nation-building munificence, Afghanistan. And Russia has massive amounts of oil, placing eighth in the world. Mineral resources are a mixed blessing—Norway has benefitted tremendously from her petroleum reserves. South Africa has considerable reserves of gold, diamonds, and uranium. She also has one of the highest homicide rates on the planet. Both nations have democratically elected governments. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—a theocratic absolute monarchy with tremendous oil wealth of its own—scores in the middle of both countries on measures of development, demonstrating that no single political system guarantees wealth or poverty, and complicating assessments of what power structure is best-suited to distributing money derived from non-renewable resources.
As for the argument that sanctions against Russia will collapse her economy (and render all comparisons made in this section irrelevant), there is the distinct possibility that whatever oil sales lost to Europe will be made up for by increased sales to India. And while the Russian elite might resent the loss of access to Western luxury goods, the country seriously wants for nothing. Stated another way: Aggressive sanctions may well exasperate the Russian people. They will not leave them starving, in the dark, or much worse for the wear, particularly if Russians can continue to buy consumer goods from East and Southeast Asian suppliers.
Determining the quality of a nation’s educational system may not be quite as difficult as determining economic weakness, but it still requires a subjective selection of data. Comparing mean years of schooling from one country to the next would seem a suspect method of evaluation. Given the aforementioned fact that the typical American college student learns less during his days of drunkenly stumbling across the quad than would an inbred beagle in remedial obedience school, there is no reason to believe that more schooling and better education are synonymous. The closest to an objective assessment of national student performance would appear to be the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). By this measure, Russian and American students score differently, but with similar averages. As of 2018—the most recent year for which information was available—Russian students scored lower than Americans on measures of reading and science knowledge, but higher than Americans on measures of mathematical proficiency. In the last category, American students scored below the international norm, suggesting that the citizens of a high-income country need not be able to count their money after they make it.
While neither nation has a best-in-class educational system, they are too nearly matched in their mediocrity to support the assertion that Russia is any more likely than the United States to collapse under the weight of her ignorance. For the sake of simplicity, we may fairly declare this a tie.
The problem with efforts at regime change, regime collapse, and regime isolation/subjugation is that they can produce idiosyncratic effects no less readily than intended ones. Nationalism is antifragile. The more besieged a people perceive themselves to be, the more likely they are to rally round the flag. As the Russian people come to see their nation as under threat, approval for the Ukrainian assault (and Putin) has increased, with 83% of citizens surveyed indicating they support their president. For comparison, President Biden’s approval rating on 30 March 2022 (within a few days of the Russian survey) was 42%. If the attempts of the United States to sow discord in Russia and attack Putin’s power and credibility have any effect at all, they will be to gift that people with a common enemy—the United States and the Western ideals she espouses—and to make even mildly pro-Western sentiment and arguments untenable and inexpressible for anyone not willing to face vitriol, ostracism, and persecution.
Mirror, Mirror: America and Her Enemies
And this brings us to a point briefly considered in a previous section—the tendency of American belligerence to create mirror enemies. This is becoming the monster. To understand the enemies of American manufacture, we must understand America as an enemy, which is to say how America behaves and appears to anyone with the poor fortune of obstructing the will of her elite, her industry, or her military might.
America is first and foremost a nation of ideas. There is no American ethnicity, and within a generation, there will be no racial group in the majority. There are American Indians, but those who were not slaughtered or killed by imported disease were displaced and marginalized to the point of cultural and ethnic discontinuity, making them strangers in their own land. And there is no sense of place in America. We, the American people, have accumulated considerable acreage over the years, but we make all terrain and community fungible, imposing the geography of nowhere on plains, mountains, and valleys alike. We have little in the way of family or social capital, with political tribes gradually replacing them.
Nor are Americans a people attached to things. This last assertion may seem contradicted by the incandescence of consumerism. But to seem is not (always) to be. Consumer culture is anti-materialistic by virtue of its excess. Generous and temperate showers are a prerequisite to a good harvest. The diluvial volleys of a furious god are another matter. As it goes with maize and soybeans, so it does with attachment to belongings.
The consumed good is not sacred. It is not a katana made by craftsmen prayerfully upholding a tradition. It is stamped, shipped, rattled, and broken in less time than that. And the consumer does not so much own things—things to be passed down or sold and resold—as have his hand in a stream of novelties and necessities that are but briefly in his possession on their journey from factory to landfill. He has an embodied design temporarily under his control, and that embodiment is replaceable with anything else made to the same specifications. With every iteration of production technology—computer-aided manufacturing, 3D printing—moving us closer to the Star Trek replicator, the distinction between idea and thing is diminished.
The enemies of America have more in common with the American people and elite (and share more of their values) than any of these groups would be eager to admit. Consider the radical Islamist. Violence and religion are not strangers. Dying for one’s faith is not new. Yet the initiation and continuation of the Global War on Terror coincided with an increase in acts of terrorism. Support for Osama bin Laden—the most visible of extremists—grew for years after the commencement of the GWOT, despite most Muslims opposing extremism more generally. And the Islamic State (ISIL) might well have never come into being without the American invasion of Iraq.
Muslim extremists may not be the creation of the United States, but they have benefitted from the destruction bestowed upon the peoples of the Middle East. Consider how much this enemy is like us:
- The Islamists are a people of ideas. They are not of one ethnic group. They have no common tribe or clan. French-Tunisians, Saudis, Syrians, Yemenis—these and many other peoples share an idealistic goal of creating a nation, if not a world, free of deviancy and spiritual decay.
- Likewise, they have no particular connection to place or land. Islam does have holy cities—Mecca and Medina—and Islamists desire territory, but such does not make the faith one connected to place in the animistic sense, and the existence of these cities does little to restrict radical Islam’s growth. With agents and belligerents scattered from Europe to East Africa to Southeast Asia, the Islamists’ home is everywhere and nowhere. Ideals trump geography. Although not all the aforementioned regions have been subject to armed intrusion by the United States, American foreign policies that rain death from above on innocent Muslims at least as often as upon genuine threats inevitably contribute to a collective sense of persecution that is uncontained by international borders.
- They have little connection to family. Extremists make for poor dinner guests. They talk at others, rather than with them. They have no sense of humor. And they tend to blow up (either literally or figuratively) at the drop of a hat. Their families are understandably wary of them. The more they dedicate themselves to their cause, the less time and mental bandwidth they have for anything else.
- They are not materialists. The radical clerics of Iran—who, although having risen to power before the GWOT, sit in the catbird seat by our efforts—are not a self-indulgent bunch. For lack of a better term, they are generally pure of heart, being more concerned with their ideals than with either material wealth or comfort. And there are few greater rejections of the material world than to commit a suicide bombing—an act by which one explosively declares that his most intimate possession—his body—is less important to him than the propagation and preservation of what he believes.
These observations are all well and good. They provide us with a superficial what—what America and some of the peoples and cultures influenced by her share—but not a why—why these traits have spread—or a how—how American culture came to its present state or how she propagates certain parts of herself, but not others. Next, we address these and stare into the hollow that is America’s heart. In the section after that, we will finally consider how exposure to American instincts, applied operational principles, and metaphysics (as examined herein) has and will continue to fortify and transform Russian ideology into something formidable—just as it did to radical Islam—no matter how weak it initially was.
Omnipredators: Culture, Characteristics, Conversion, and the Metaphor of War
What is this, this mindset of America and her mirrors? It is the instinctive thinking of a ravenous omnipredator (that which consumes anything and everything, without discrimination or limitation—and a nonce word, but a necessary one). For the killer of killers and the hunter of hunters, there is not the luxury of sentimentality, of connection to place or tribe. The omnipredator must roam because his strength is his weakness. He targets his prey with such marvelous mechanical efficiency that its population is either blotted out or sent running scared. And this mobility makes attaching to anything equally improbable. All the world falls into simple categories for the omnipredator—that which can be incorporated into its body, that which must be destroyed, or that which can be safely ignored.
A civilization of ideas, one which has summitted both the consumption chain and the logical evolutionary path of a species with a brain greatly disproportionate to its muscle mass, is all-consuming. It must be. As ungrounded as it is, it is at constant risk of collapse, either from internal stresses or the weakening of its shared delusions of possibility—that of a unified world corresponding perfectly to a platonic ideal—or from another civilization of ideas, which can destroy its opponent without so much as a bloody claw or a fired shot. All the opponent need do is convert enough of its enemy’s members and the enemy will cease to exist. Thus, the civilization of ideas is forever riddled with anxiety—that it could be consumed by a better eater.
Few activities are more imitative than war. One should expect the enemies of the United States—organic or manufactured—to learn her tactics and strategies. Likewise, the United States should be expected to learn (and adopt whenever advantageous) the tactics of small wars. Both the United States and her enemies have done as expected. American special forces, which make aggressive use of unconventional (guerrilla) warfare tactics, were deployed frequently in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And insurgents in those countries have developed and refined Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) as a way to counter the American reliance on mechanized transport. This practical education by combat is nothing particular to the United States or her opponents, nor is it the most salient issue.
However difficult to measure, the extent to which the United States and her values have been the object of spiritual imitation over the last few decades may well be unparalleled. It is certainly worthy of study, and it reflects something of the infectiousness of the toxoplasmosis-like American mind parasite—a result of the prosperity and plenty associated with it, its intrinsic hedonistic appeal, and the deliberateness of its design.
In the seven short years the United States occupied Japan, the culture of that nation was transformed. Some of these transformations were predictable and legalistic, such as those stemming from the adoption of a constitution written by the United States that massively reformed and restructured the legal system and parliament and eliminated the Japanese nobility.
Other changes were slower acting, resulting from an affinity for American culture developed during the occupation and extending far beyond then. Consider Japanese biker gangs (bōsōzoku). One need not know much about motorcycles, the Japanese, or the culture of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s to see the overwhelming aesthetic overlap. Essential to understanding this is recognizing that the Japanese gangs were likely more influenced by classic media representations of American outlaw culture (The Wild Ones, Rebel Without a Cause) than by interaction with American criminal organizations. This is how a culture of media and ideas best thrives—it imparts the target culture with a desire to be more like the winners—with limited time and expense dedicated to direct engagement.
American culture of the 1950s was different than that of today—both more and less severe, more and less consumeristic, and probably more optimistic—complicating efforts to determine how accurately the Japanese imitated what they saw. What is worth noting is the crystallization of the cultural elements America exports. Bōsōzoku, to the extent they still exist, are inspired by lore and narratives from generations past, much of which is unlikely to resonate with any American not approaching his golden years.
This suggests something—that the Middle East and Afghanistan will remain under the influence of the GWOT milieu for decades, if not longer. The paranoia of the era, the emphasis on surveillance, and the chest-thumping, wraparound-sunglasses militarism of the last 20 years may remain in vogue in Western Asia long after the last proud American has turned in his AR-15 and Oakleys and resigned himself to eating insects, embracing his pansexuality, and apologizing for the mistakes of his forebears.
If the United States escalates her war with Russia, there will likely be an accelerated cultural transfer. Without so much as a single set of American boots hitting Ukrainian or Russian Federation soil, our nation’s ethos-beat will steadily earworm its way deeper into the Slavic psyche than it already has. Escalates is a key word in this evaluation. The Cold War never ended. America has been undermining non-Western cultures for generations. The entire propaganda (marketing/public relations) industry—something already mentioned in this text—is dedicated to just that.
Now, a critical question: What parts of American culture will make the leap?
America is no longer a nation of leather-clad bikers, bouncy breasts, or simpleton smiles (the last having been replaced with the manic grin of air rage). Rather, the most contagious strains of American thought—at least judging from how they are spreading within the United States—are likely to be (1) expeditious Manicheanism, (2) fractal Manicheanism, (3) the presumption and culture of victimhood, (4) safetyism, (5) the long-established and expanding tendency to shoehorn every problem and conflict into the metaphor and mindset of war, (6) and the rationalization of proactive belligerence (a carryover from the GWOT).
We shall consider the last two of these before hopping back to the beginning of the list. Without them, all else listed would amount to little more than annoyances. We will then afford the subordinate elements whatever attention they deserve, and in the appropriate context.
Elements 5 and 6 are the most dangerous. That the appetite of the omnipredator (as is the United States) compels it to see every interaction as an existential crisis—a war for survival—has already been considered. What has not been considered is that this perspective replicates with extreme speed. The omnipredatorial culture does not simply impart its superficial elements—fashion, views on sexuality, perspectives on technology and aging—to whatever it touches, it rebalances the ecosystem of minds, economies, and ideas in such a way that other cultures must become equally predatorial if they are to survive. This is part of a larger feedback loop. The more predatorial any one culture becomes, the more aggressive the others must become in their predation.
Proactive belligerence is predation writ large. Metaphors are tremendously powerful, with a capacity to shape thinking and behavior that is not often recognized by the unobservant. If every interaction is a life-and-death struggle, if everyone has knives out for everyone else, to not proactively attacking one’s potential enemies is suicidally reckless. Do unto others before they do unto you. The preventive war and preemptive strike considerably predate the United States. From the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) to the 1967 Israeli strike against the Egyptian Air Force, the get-them-first strategy has been applied with varying degrees of success throughout human history. This approach can make sense, particularly if the belligerents foresee being obliged to fight for contested territory or critical resources as their populations expand. Yet the moderating force of foreseeability is eliminated when a culture becomes omnipredatorial. Just as there are no limits to the hunger of such a culture, there are no limits to its range of potential prey and competitors. Without disciplining of the omnipredator’s impulses, it will spread its insatiable hunger and vampiric thirst in extremis. All so afflicted are thus bound to return to a state of nature—bellum omnium contra omnes—until Hobbes’s Leviathan arises from the depths or every civilization is reduced to its meanest state (if any can survive at all).
Expeditious Manicheanism (Element 1) cynically parasitizes and synergizes both proactive belligerence and the overextension of war metaphors and mindset. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists is not an illogical position for the omnipredator, which is not to say that it is an immediately inevitable one. The omnipredator’s famishment may demand a banquet of all that is edible in the universe, but there is ample room to rearrange the order of the courses. This is where expediency becomes paramount. War is a racket. This applies as much to metaphorical wars—the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs—as it does to traditional ones. Whoever can channel the existential panic of the omnipredatorial nation, particularly one as wealthy as the United States, stands to profit greatly.
Closely related to the above is fractal Manicheanism—the recursive application of the Manichean mindset to every level of society. This both develops organically as the members of society apply their conditioning and values system to the world around them, and deliberately. Trained in adversarialism and paranoia, a people become adept at finding enemies. And if they cannot find an enemy, they will make one, with no less determination than would the most driven of elephant-riding Carthaginians when searching for a way to Rome. The deliberate application of fractal Manicheanism is as likely to be done by those on one side of the political aisle as it by those on the other. From Satanic ritual abuse to the moral panic of #MeToo to the horror of rapacious border jumpers and creepy men (meaning unattractive men who dare make eye contact with women), our periodic witch and wizard hunts allow for no circumspection. One is either on the side of goodness/innocence, women, children, and purity or a predator or a predator apologist. This constant fear of predators in the omnipredatorial society is not ironic: It is a continuation of the system’s foundational logic—one that allows for the construction of a narrative in which the civilization is forever besieged and warranted in its aggression while aggressing against and besieging everything and everyone with which it comes into contact. Predators are everywhere—making every fear reasonable—around every corner, and under any given predator, there are more predators still. Predators are the new turtles: It’s predators all the way down.
The presumption and culture of victimhood are themselves recursions of the omnipredatorial society’s Manichean embrace of disproportionate aggression. Safetyism is a mere extension of the anxiety and paranoia of the larger culture. If one is completely alone, he had better guard his health and wellbeing with extreme care, for if he falls, there is no one to help him stand up again.
Christianity as Proto-Omnipredatorial Tradition
Before Communism, before imperialism, before modernity, there was religion. The world is steadily growing less religious, with belief declining in nations as they become more prosperous. This is not a recent trend, and there is no evidence that it will reverse. Yet the influence of a faith, much like the effects of a war, may continue for generations after the last combatant is called to stand muster before the all-commanding void and the last of the devout have been spirited up to heaven, dragged down to hell, or left biding their time in purgatory/bardo/wherever Amazon stores its returned orders, according to their conduct or the whims of whatever deities adjudicate such matters.
The United States is not a Christian nation, nor is Russia, but without an understanding of the role of Christianity in the development of their cultures, one cannot recognize how they are uniquely vulnerable to each other’s manipulations.
Christianity, at least since the time of Paul, has been an evangelizing faith. Islam has been likewise for the entirety of its history. (Although the Quran forbids forced conversion, there is debate as to the extent early Muslims adhered to this stricture). Yet evangelism is the exception for faiths, not the rule. Judaism accepts (but does not seek) converts. Zoroastrianism does not proselytize and may or may not accept those who wish to join, depending upon the authority asked. Daoism appears to tolerate the active promotion of its tenants, although the one known text on the topic, “The Supreme Numinous Treasure’s Sublime Classic on Laozi’s Conversion of the Barbarians,” might well be a forgery. And there is little evidence that Laozi or Zhuangzi, the founders of that philosophy/faith, made any concerted efforts to spread their beliefs. Other religions—the animistic amongst them—often lack a procedure for determining if one can be counted as a member. At least as often as not, beliefs determine what one does, not what one is.
And Christian efforts to evangelize, if not outright proselytize, have shaped the behavior of both its adherents and of members of any society strongly influenced by the Christian tradition. The evangelist must possess a certain confidence that his beliefs are superior to all others, that his way of life (at least those parts of his life dictated by religion) is the standard by which all others should be measured, and that imposing his traditions on others is a kindness and a favor.
When our government and military-industrial complex strive to protect and spread the American way by strategic intervention, they are proselytizing with the barrel of a gun serving in place of a cross and Bible. In theory, many of these interventions were intended to take power from an entrenched and corrupt elite and allow the populous to choose how it wishes to be governed—a values-laden imposition, but only insofar that it is radically anti-elitist. In practice, the right people and the right kind of democracy are allowed, with all other forms and people dismissed. Other political perspectives—those of Islamists or anyone opposed to American domination (such as was the previously mentioned President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine)—are deemed fundamentally invalid, regardless of the will of the people. You can worship as you choose, but only to the extent your faith aligns with ours (a few aesthetic and dietary rules excepted). And you can vote as you wish, but any votes not in line with America’s vision for your country must be the result of ignorance, error, or trickery.
As is the case for the religious evangelist, the evangelist of the ethos of individualism; consumerism; and impractical, theatrical, heroic protection of the vulnerable is never able to accept the rejection of his exceptional beliefs. Anyone and everyone will see it—everything—as I do. They just need a bit more time and persuasion. This can be a pretense for profit and power-seeking—but feigning piety for personal gain is not uniquely American or modern—and there is good evidence that a great many American efforts to spread the good word during the Cold War (if not afterward) were more sincere than not.
And then there is the matter of fear. The Abrahamic religions are eschatological. They foretell awesome things—the end of one world, the creation of another—but no matter how much one might long for liberation from an era of imperfection, none but the most despairing or pious can regard such tales without trepidation, both about how one would arrive at such a future or how one would not arrive at such a future. There is something to be feared either way.
America is unique amongst nations strongly influenced by Christianity in that is one of the few to have developed a narrative in which it is the embodiment of the Christian ideal—a “city on a hill,” as John Winthrop proclaimed in 1630 that his Massachusetts Bay Colony was to become. And this messaging and brand have increased in power over time, even as America has freed itself from the better portion of Christian doctrine.
Before Harvard’s Perry Miller unearthed and popularized Winthrop’s now-famous speech in the mid-20th century, Winthrop’s vivid and messianic imagery was little used. But by the 1970s, Ronald Reagan was building a political movement and identity around the notion of the shining city on a hill (with shining being Reagan’s rhetorical flourish—a drab but holy city being not quite good enough).
The religious imperative of Winthrop to build a Christian colony has matured into a secular one to build a world in America’s sacred image. And this makes for a people who are both overconfident and anxious. The duty to bring about heaven on earth wears heavy on any head. The duty to bring about heaven on earth without the succor of a higher power is leaden.
None of this is to say that the current modern omnipredatorial drive of the United States is a direct product or descendent of Christianity. The centuries between Winthrop’s austerity and modern our guns-and-cheeseburger bulimia of excess are a difference of inestimable consequence. Yet there is an inheritance. Our pearl-clutching, nagging moralism and peculiar insecurity-arrogance—that of a people who have ordained themselves the elect, despite this being theologically impossible—these birthrights, however incongruous with today’s culture of hedonism and reflexive debasement, were handed down from Winthrop and his dour ilk. And a portion of our militarism—that which necessitates a warrior’s aggression in every physical, spiritual, economic, or cultural battle—is a gift from Winthrop as well. Any competent general knows that in war one must sometimes destroy to save. The horrors of modern war may not be quite as severe as those in the Book of Revelation, but they are terrible enough. And in every major conflict, there are rationalizations for brutality. Yet without Winthrop’s veil of compassion and charity and his dream of a colony perfected—free of moral fault compared to its decadent English peers—the we-are-burning-down-your-house-for-your-own-good cruel interventionism of busybodies, closeted misanthropes, and killjoys would be marginally more difficult to rebrand as Christian love.
And this leads to the last confounding inheritance of Christianity in general and Winthrop in particular: that of the imperative to love. The problem with this—developing love for your fellow man—is that it is so profoundly contrary to human nature to it requires a nearly total denial of everything that we are. One can sublimate his dislike of mankind into productive endeavors. He can develop a sense of understanding and non-attachment to lessen his ire towards his fellow insufferable, misbegotten beasts. But to understand is not to love. Controlling one’s antipathy for his family and associates is difficult enough. Anything beyond that requires mental gymnastics worthy of a clanging cache of medals. Universal love and brotherhood are natural impossibilities unless said love is of the most abstract and non-committal sort and the brothers are distant indeed.
For a Christian, the solution to this apparently insurmountable problem is divine intervention—an acknowledgment that what his faith requires is not naturally possible, so the supernatural must be brought to bear. And even heavenly assistance knows its limits. The greatest manifestation of love the most obnoxiously devout can muster for the more burdensome (read: druggie) of his neighbors would appear to be an assignment of 60-hours of grueling work a week at an Oklahoma chicken farm and a Sunday Bible lesson. But then worthless cluckers should get what is coming to them, God’s love notwithstanding.
For the non-Christian, the imperative is almost certainly beyond the realm of prudence or practicality. Yet we, the heirs of Winthrop’s tradition of joyless goodwill and charity, are impelled by our culture to feign concern for others, even when we wish them ill. This is dastardly, not bastardly, with the former being more ignoble than the latter. And hatred denied is hatred well-fed. Thus, the peculiar crypto-sadism of the advocate, the social worker, and the professional do-gooder.
Or there may be a subtlety and sophistication lost on the better part of humanity when taking to heart the command to love your neighbor as yourself. The self-contented and unintrospective interpretation would be that one should love others much, as he must surely love himself (and presumably fancy himself worthy thereof). This appeal to the believer’s narcissism asks/orders not that it be diminished, but extended outward to all and sundry. The more thoughtful interpretation—that of the man who truly knows himself and his innumerable limitations: Your neighbors are as unworthy of affection as you are. Scorn would do the lot of you good.
The confusion and complexity of the Christian tradition run deep through the West and Russia alike. (They do not, however, run as more than the thinnest and shallowest stream through China, which will prove consequential in Part II of this series.) And the complexities and contradictions of maintaining a pretense of Christian (or Christian-inspired) values in a secularized world are not unique to the United States, yet in a culture defined by choice—by joining and willful identification, not blood or soil—faith and crises of faith in the nation or in the beliefs and values of the nation take on a special urgency. A paucity of common ideas and ideals can become an existential emergency in short order.
The panic of the proselytizers is not unfounded.
Moscow on the Hudson/Washington on the Moskva
Likely as much to their vexation as ours, Russians are growing more American by the hour. And this is an incremental process, one guided by the inclinations and traditions of the people of both nations and evolutionary pressures not entirely within anyone’s control. Were the Russian government (or protestors or saboteurs) to burn down every McDonald’s from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok the omnipredatorial mindset would not slow its march across all 11 time zones of the world’s largest country.
We consider how Russia has been changed by its American exposure and how it will continue to change.
First, the elephant in the room: Proactive belligerence. The invasion of Ukraine was morally permissible as a defensive measure—both to protect the people of Donbas from extermination and to denazify Ukraine—according to the rules of proactive belligerence. How much this argument is based on beliefs firmly held by the Kremlin versus being a cynical excuse for military action is presently unknowable. Tens of thousands were killed in that region from 2014 to 2018, although determining who killed whom is difficult (as is often the case in a war zone). Millions more were displaced. Regardless of the perspective from which one views the war in Donbas, that the people of the region have been harmed by the instability of the last eight years is effectively undeniable.
Either way, it does not take much imagination to see parallels between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the American invasion of Iraq. Neither Iraq nor Ukraine had engaged in unambiguous aggression against their would-be conquerors. Neither had the size or military resources to pose an existential threat to the nations that invaded them, and neither had resources essential to the survival of the invader’s economy. And in both cases, the attacking nations relied upon dubious claims of nefarious activity—American-backed biolabs in Ukraine and nuclear and chemical weapons production and warehousing in Iraq—to defend their actions.
Russia’s explanation for her present pugnaciousness could be sincere. It could be a case of simple copycatting, or it could be the tweaking of overweight American noses by Putin and his associates. There is another possibility—that the Russian leadership is using carefully scripted propaganda for the same reason the American leadership did: It is effective. As late as 2015, a survey found that a significant number (42%) of Americans thought WMDs had been found in Iraq: This lie outlived both its utility and the official claims of its legitimacy. There is no reason to believe Russians are inherently less vulnerable to manipulation.
Whether the Russians find ample evidence of biowarfare labs, questionable or marginal evidence, or no evidence at all is unlikely to matter. A 50-gallon drum of Patriotic Super Eagle Megadeath Airborne Hemorrhagic Fever (and Organic Drain Cleaner/Penis Enlarger), complete with Hunter Biden’s cocaine-speckled fingerprints and a stack of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) forms, could be located by a Swiss news crew and authenticated by the United Nations, and a considerable percentage of the American public would forever be in disbelief. Likewise, a team of weapons experts, journalists, accountants, rabbis, and celebrity chefs could establish beyond Alex-Jones caliber unreasonable doubts that Ukraine’s alleged death factories are bakeries functioning solely to provide cookies to homeless Igbo Jewish children suffering from Stage IV lymphoma, and claims of globalist Nazi intervention and American-supported efforts to ethnically cleanse the world of borscht lovers would be but slightly deflated.
Propaganda works not because it is always credible, but because it introduces doubt and allows the propagandized to support and sustain beliefs that are consistent with his worldview. It does not need to be good. As is the case with almost every engineered product, it merely needs to be good enough.
Evolution of the Omnipredator: Germanic Thinking, Soviet and American Post-war Values
Warfare brings out the Manichean in all of us. It must. We need to accentuate, exaggerate, and occasionally fabricate differences between one group and another. We must put distance between us and them. If we are to convince the average and conventional man of average and conventional morals to slaughter those against whom he has no reason to feel animosity, we must offer him at least three justifications for behavior he would normally regard—or be expected to regard—as abhorrent. These are designed to allow him to kill the enemy one day and return to society as a (more or less) functional person, unencumbered by potentially crippling cognitive dissonance the next.
The first balm we offer his conscience is they—the enemy—are either less human than us or less than human. The second is that they will annihilate or horrifically abuse us if we do not annihilate them. The third is that you (the propagandized person) are not doing the destruction, the system is. You are just following orders. There are other foundational messages, such as that the enemy’s side is morally wrong, and our side is morally right, but this goes back to the wisdom of Sun Tzu.
America’s incremental innovation is her capacity to apply wartime Manicheanism and its rationalizations to everything and everyone in a way less technologically advanced people would have found unfathomable outside the context of a moment of religious fervor. The omnipredator is paranoid first and foremost. A people at war should be distrustful. Spies are a legitimate concern. But when the war never ends, the suspicion cannot either. The longer the Americans and Russians fight, by a war of proxy war or direct conflict, the more schizophrenic and Manichean the Russian leaders will become, as hostile to their people as to ours. As for Americans, we have been at war against our own since the 1970s. Our levels of trust—in each other, in society—have been dropping for decades, and the Great COVID Sky-is-falling Panic Bonanza likely fixed Americans’ cynical view of key institutions.
The culture of paranoid perma-war may be less the product of American ingenuity than it initially appears. The Soviets were secretive, often to their detriment. And if Churchill is to be believed, “Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But he wrote this not long after the Second World War—when a significant portion of humanity was still awash in the passion and horrors of that conflict—not the best time for objective analyses.
The inscrutability of the Russians might have been a product of fighting against the capitalist West since the beginning of the Communist era and a desire to defensively paper over the Soviet Union’s failings. It was at least somewhat a byproduct of the psychological burden of trying to impose an expansive ideology that relies upon the wholehearted unity of the world’s workers: This is a similar problem to that facing Christianity and its matter of universal love. Forming a cohesive team without opposition or external threat is impractical, so an enemy must be found, fabricated, or imagined (as America has done time and again as well).
It might have been the product of some (possibly Asiatic) aspect of Russian culture that predates the modern world by centuries, or it might have been, at least in part, a product of interaction with, and eventual war against, the ever-secretive/occult-obsessed Nazis. It is possible that all of these factors played a role, both individually and synergistically, but some elements are more relevant to the arguments herein than others.
We should consider the Germanic component in more depth. First, there is the matter of warfare of the broad and more limited flavors. Carl von Clausewitz—already briefly mentioned—never advocated total war, which is to say that he did not suggest that one nation should work to liquidate the other, regarding the entirety of the nation’s citizens and industry as legitimate targets. Nevertheless, the Prussian military theorist’s dense writings were subject to widespread misinterpretation, and theory in practice, more than theory in theory, is what matters outside of an academic context. And complete demolishment of the enemy as the goal of warfare goes back at least to biblical times, in which “both man and woman, infant and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” were to be utterly destroyed.
As brutal as this predecessor to the modern implementation of total war must have been, it was mostly limited to war, not in the metaphorical sense, but the most literal sense of vicious tribal conflict. No one grounded in reality would advocate taking the most violent misreading of a military theorist or the most bloodthirsty passages of the Old Testament and applying such conduct to everything, transmogrifying every effort, every attempt at social or cultural change into a Battle Royale of Japanese junior high intensity. Moral concerns aside, such is an impractical approach to conflict in that it leaves one’s opponents no escape route and no alternative but to fight to the death, and exhausts and impoverishes the practitioner, who spares no expense or energy as he struggles for absolute victory.
Second, there is the matter of paranoia. What the strategist grounded in reality might dismiss out of hand, the lunatic will consider at length. Those who (must) see the entire world as being against them may make—may manifest—a reality in which they are not far off the mark. Treat all people and ideas different from your own as enemies, and enemies you will have. Finally, there is the matter of secretiveness. Keeping secrets is hard work. It introduces another layer of combat—that of the keeper of secrets against the blabbering nature of his fellow man, against the tendency of information to either spread or die, and against his impulse to share or barter what he knows.
Hitler was a paranoid man, possibly due to his heavy drug use, and Heinrich Himmler placed stock in esoteric knowledge—that which is, by definition, is not meant for the many—to the point that he integrated it into the SS officer training program. A teetotalling, hypochondriacal tweaker and the death’s-head loving leader of an infamous secret police service walk into a bar. What do they say to each other? Nothing, there are Jewish spies everywhere!
It is not a great leap of logic to argue that the beleaguered and bellicose mentality of the Nazis might have permeated both the Americans and the Soviets alike. Skill in the art of war—like most arts—is refined by studying the masters. The United States built much of its early rocketry program with the help of Nazi scientists. The Soviets did as well. The extent to which these scientists influenced American or Soviet thinking is difficult to determine, which is not to say that they were necessarily uninfluential. At a minimum, these actions demonstrated the willingness of both governments to adopt useful Nazi technologies and adapt them to their own ends. Propaganda is a technology as much as it is an art—something worth remembering when commenting on an article engineered with manipulative language, retweeting a post precisely crafted to maximize outrage, or watching the films of Leni Riefenstahl or Frank Capra’s productions, the latter of which were both inspired by and made in response to the former.
Victimhood as Justification/Victimhood as Shield
Next, there is the matter of the presumption and culture of victimhood. What makes claims to victimhood a powerful weapon in the American culture war is a false dichotomy now deeply embedded into American thinking: One is a victim or a perpetrator. One cannot be both, at least in regards to a specific incident or violation. This is a break from older English (and, by extension, American) common law traditions of jurisprudence and morality. Earlier reasoning relied upon the concept of proportional force and proportional punishment. Consider the common law distinction between breaking and entering and trespass.
Burglary—a serious common law offense—had three elements to it: (1) that one must unlawfully enter the building of another, (2) that the entry must occur at night, and (3) that the person entering must have the intent to commit a felony therein. Without all three of these elements being met, the offender is merely guilty of the lesser crime of trespass. Biblical law applied the same distinction, with the difference being that it includes specific references to self-help to address the violation. Thus:
If the thief be found breaking in [at night], and be smitten so that he dieth, there shall be no bloodguiltiness for him. If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be bloodguiltiness for him [meaning the person who beat the thief is presumed guilty of murder]; he [the thief] shall make restitution: if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.
Exodus 22:2-3
It is interesting to note that the permissible use of force within this context is narrower than that afforded under certain (recent) state laws. Consider Texas Penal Code 9.42–Deadly Force to Protect Property:
- A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
- (1) if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41; and
- (2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
- (A) to prevent the other’s imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or
- (B) to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property; and
- (3) he reasonably believes that:
- (A) the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means; or
- (B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.
What makes this noteworthy is the list of crimes in section (2)(A), against which one may use deadly force. This includes criminal mischief during the nighttime. Given how broadly Texas Penal Code defines criminal mischief, one could conceivably kill an unarmed person graffitiing his property at night and be within the letter of the law.
A caveat: How any legal argument would be treated by the courts is unlikely to be as simple as a naïve reading of the pertinent statutes suggests. Texas is a common law jurisdiction. Legal precedent and the sometimes-counterintuitive interpretations and textual contortions of judges, as well as the whims of a jury (assuming a matter of fact goes to trial), would determine if one who aggressively defended his property went free or to the state penitentiary. One would be well-advised to speak to a qualified attorney before developing any plans to defend himself or his property.
Nevertheless, we can consider Kyle Carruth‘s killing of Chad Read to get a sense (however imperfect) of how the state and people of Texas interpret the above code.
The known facts of the case are this: Read appeared at his ex-wife’s home—where Carruth was living at the time—to collect one of his sons per the terms of a custody agreement and became irate when he discovered the boy was not there. Displeased with Read’s increasingly combative demeanor, Carruth went into the dwelling and retrieved a firearm. From there, the situation quickly deteriorated and resulted in Carruth fatally shooting Read. Carruth’s case was brought before a grand jury, but he was not charged with a crime. The circumstances of this case suggest that one may be able to escalate a situation to the point of self-defense being necessary—in effect creating a need to use deadly force—and then avoid penalty under Texas law.
At least in theory (and in the case of Carruth’s case, practice), this modern statute appears more forgiving of defensive violence when there is no imminent threat of serious bodily harm than were the laws of the Old Testament, which were unlikely to have been authored by men overcome with bleeding-heart liberalism. Men killing men over women is nothing new. Although often done in groups, such violence at the individual level is not much more remarkable. Carruth’s shooting of Read was not over sexual access per se, but it was over Read’s children—a proximal issue.
There was little noteworthy about either of these men nor was there anything shocking about their behavior. What does stand out is the legal tolerance of Carruth’s conduct—meaning that he was allowed to act without consequence—something novel within the framework of most modern societies, which tend to penalize unbalanced applications of force.
In other circumstances, legal defenses for disproportionality in violence are carried further.
The 2006 case of Mary Winkler is one of the more illuminating examples. Mary Winkler, the wife of a Tennessee pastor, shot and killed her husband after an argument over money. The exact content of the disagreement remains unknown, but according to Winkler, she had fallen prey to a variation of the Nigerian scam, also known as Nigerian Letter or “419” Fraud. In this con, one is offered the chance of remuneration in exchange for facilitating an illegal transfer of money from Nigeria to the United States.
Before one jumps to Winkler’s defense as a helpless and kindhearted sap, he should consider how FBI Deputy Assistant Director Joseph S. Campbell described those who participate in such schemes. He said that the scam “relies on convincing a willing victim, who has demonstrated a ‘propensity for larceny’ by responding to the invitation, to send money to the author of the letter in Nigeria in several installments of increasing amounts for a variety of reasons.”
Her possible propensity (or non-propensity) for larceny notwithstanding, Winkler alleged abuse, claiming, amongst other things, that her husband had requested she wear high-heel shoes and a wig immediately before or during sex and that he sometimes made critical comments to her. And this—with the wig and high heels submitted to and discussed before the court—was enough to convince the jury that she was guilty of voluntary manslaughter, rather than murder. Winkler served a total of seven months in a correctional facility—a sentence so short that even she thought it was insufficient—and thereafter regained custody of her children.
One might attribute this extraordinary leniency to Southern chivalry. One might attribute it to a tendency to interpret women’s actions in a more positive light than the actions of men. One might attribute it to the extreme gender imbalance of the jury (10 of the 12 jurors were women) and women’s in-group bias. One might also point out that Winkler was not acquitted—she did face some punishment, however trivial—thus negating the argument that Winkler was seen as a pure victim.
These points are valid. But to credit the near non-punishment of Winkler entirely to nature or primeval custom is simplistic. In several countries, both men and women are stoned for adultery, suggesting that whatever protective instincts humans have for women are not so overwhelmingly strong that they cannot be mitigated. And the argument that non-imminent threats or past emotional abuse are partial or complete defenses for mariticide was novel as late as the 1970s. Yet the general thesis still stands. Victimhood was Winkler’s cover. Her claims of mistreatment may have stretched the definition of the term, but they were strong enough to shield her from serious consequences. Such a tactic would not have worked in all cultures or legal systems (or even the America of 60 years ago).
As our society grows more predatorial, the acceptability of lethal violence for what are essentially attacks on one’s character or dignity—probably the best description for what Carruth and Winkler suffered—is likely to grow. Superficially, this is a return to the norms of an honor culture, in which insults are treated with extreme gravity. More substantially, the omnipredatorial culture and the honor culture are different. An honor culture tolerates (and sometimes encourages) aggressive protection of one’s reputation and standing. What it does not do is frame assaults on personal dignity as an absolute wrong. In an omnipredatorial culture, the victim is always right. There is no trial by combat. There is no uncertainty as to guilt. Rather, victimhood necessitates wrath and retribution, with the rules of fair play—critical to a proper duel—being eliminated.
This theory of the pure/blameless (or very nearly blameless) victim—meaning that victimhood renders someone above criticism, however slight—has been applied outside the framework of the law. Consider Taylor Lorenz. During her years reporting for the Daily Beast and the New York Times, she covered online issues, with a considerable amount of her work dedicated to uncovering the identities, controversial relatives, and private lives of social media stars. To the shock of no one who has used social media or worked with young people for more than five minutes, she received considerable backlash, belittlement, and hate after using her position as a journalist to insert herself into the habitat of fame-obsessed middle and high school students.
Kids, the profoundly narcissistic and extremely online most of all, can be mean! That this would surprise a woman in her mid-30s is more surprising than anything a punk with a smartphone and sense of self-importance did, would, or could say, message, or Tweet. Some of Lorenz’s most bloodthirsty detractors were likely adults, but mean girls (and boys) who lurk in the endless high school hallway that is the world of Instagram, Twitter, & Co. do not get any nicer as they shuffle towards oblivion—they just grow to look as terrible as their pictures, despite their desperate use of filters.
Lorenz, an extraordinarily privileged, highly credentialed woman—someone who has worked for some of the most influential and well-funded media organizations on the planet—is now a victim. As such, she is in the right, where she shall remain in perpetuity. Her online attackers are the primary aggressors, and any actions she takes are reactive or defensive and never beyond the pale. She has a full and unrestricted license to do as she chooses, and any who dare protest are apologists for abusers and predators—a concept previously addressed, if but in passing.
Perhaps Lorenz is troubled by what she has read online and the negative feedback she has received. Having attended a prestigious boarding school in Switzerland, she may have been spared the Gehenna that is a typical adolescence for those with sensibilities as delicate as hers appear to be. And her skin may be correspondingly parchment-thin.
Or perhaps Lorenz is full of East Coast, gluten-free, garden-compostable, certified organic hot air. The questionable authenticity of her psychical injuries is not germane. She has a somewhat credible claim to having been traumatized, and the claim is defense enough.
And from this—an examination of our collective overprotectiveness of this porcelain-doll-delicate damsel from the super-meanies and mega-trolls of the iSnipe set—we hormonally transition to our next topic.
Reasonably Safe, Unreasonably Terrified: The Art and Message of Disproportionality
To the student of human nature, Carruth’s and Winkler’s actions are easily understood. Lorenz’s desire to have her ego protected at all costs is no more baffling. All are illustrative of the omnipredatorial society’s tendency towards escalation. An eye for an eye—reciprocity and proportionality of violence—is generally self-limiting. There are exceptions to this, particularly when hostile families enter the fray.
Consider the prolonged back-and-forth retribution of the Hatfield-McCoy feud and how it could have been resolved with less loss of life. Islamic law, which has considerable overlap with biblical law, allows for the resolution of such cases through the payment of diyah—the traditional restitution for bloodshed. A foundational principle of diyah is that the victim and the family of the victim (when the victim does not survive) are the injured parties. A second principle—implied, if not stated directly—is that this status of being a victim can be extinguished by way of appropriate measures. A negotiation takes place within the framework of predetermined compensation rules. A payment is made. The matter is settled. And a wrong has been righted.
So how did we go backward? How did our society become more accepting of vengeance as our need for it diminished, as our society become safer? How is it that we moved from the primal violence of man to an eye for an eye (with the possibility of a buyout) to rehabilitation over punishment to two eyes for an eye?
To point at a single source and declare That! That is what has made us what we are! is reductionistic in the extreme. Violent entertainment is sometimes blamed: The research supporting this theory is controversial and contradictory. Korea has an entire revenge film genre, which has turned cinematic score-settling into high art that Americans can but crudely imitate, yet there is little evidence that Seoul’s streets run red with the blood of the guilty. One might argue that this is due to the Korean people knowing or at least fearing that any one of their wronged compatriots will dedicate years to getting even, causing all to err on side of good manners and avoid high-conflict or abusive behavior. Call this the armed (with a claw hammer) society is a polite society hypothesis. However intrinsically appealing this speculation may be, the evidence to support it is scant.
It is more likely than not that these films play to the organic desires of the Korean people (and the many non-Koreans who also watch said films) but have a negligible impact on the lives of ordinary men and women beyond serving as catharsis. Similar creative works may inspire a very few to act on their violent impulses, but such unambiguously linked instances are so rare as to be statistically and socially meaningless. Without a complex system of message-buttressing and repetition, film, television, games, and music can do but little to change the psyche of a people.
When actions portrayed in fiction are clearly labeled as such, they may be relegated to the realm of fantasy, impossibility, or absurdity. Sure, that would be fun! But movies are movies. Killing my childhood bully, rival, ex-spouse, or a corrupt official would be insane in real life thinks the viewer. Horror films, which often present the viewer with threats so unrealistic that only the most unhinged would consider them anything other than darkly amusing, may serve a similar purpose: There is some evidence that watching them may aid those who have been traumatized in the process of recovery by way of controlled exposure.
The reinforcement of a message (by which the line between obvious fiction and accepted notions of reality is blurred) is often much cruder than its artistic portrayals. And this is where our least-loved D-list celebrities—our politicians—have their place on the stage. They have been banging on about an epidemic of crime since the 1980s. And as late as the 1990s, they pushed the notion of the superpredator—a young person who has “no conscience, no empathy.”
There is an irony to this. The same people promoting fear of monsters lurking in every alley, behind every dumpster, and outside every gate are more violent, equally brazen, and not much more endearing than their boogeymen. But to call this willful hypocrisy is to give our elite too much credit. A sufficiently overwhelming sense of moral superiority can render one oblivious to almost anything.
And regardless of the hypocrisy (or lack thereof), malice, or delusion of those who use it as a tool, fear works, and most effectively when based on arguments that are at least somewhat true. So long as we—the American people—continue to accept the false dichotomy of choosing between many small brutes and psychopaths or one particularly large and ferocious one, we will see ourselves as having no choice but order, charged to us at the expense of freedom (with gun-clutching anxiety as a tip for the waiter), or Escape From New York chaos.
The previously cited, broad (to the point of being historically anomalous) self-defense statutes would seem to undermine this reliance upon the state for law and order. To an extent, they may, but they also function as part of a larger message, promoted by media, manufacturers, and politicians alike—that danger is ubiquitous, extraordinary, and unmanageable without the most aggressive of measures.
This is not a complete lie. There are threats everywhere. There are bad and dangerous people wandering our streets. The probability that those threats will affect you may be greatly exaggerated, but such does not make them untrue. And there was a rise in crime from the 1960s to the 1980s; however, this was a temporary bump within the framework of a planetary, multigenerational decrease in non-state-sanctioned violence, with homicide rates in Europe presently no more than 1/10th of what they were in the Middle Ages.
The solutions offered by the state are what one expects—emotionally appealing but as likely to add to the quantity and severity of problems as to eliminate them. In the short term, they may be of some benefit, much as American foreign policy may temporarily reduce risks of attacks on the nation while multiplying them over time. The exorbitantly expensive lock-em-up policies of the 1990s were responsible for about 15% of the reduction in crime over the last 20 years, with the other 85% being due to other social, economic, demographic, and policy changes. As has been the case with America’s wars of adventure and corporate enrichment, so it is proving to be the case with her war on crime. At least in the most aggressive application of confinement—solitary—the punishment may make the punished more dangerous than he would otherwise be.
Disproportionality begets disproportionality. Extremism promotes extremism. Disconnect from family and community tends to as well. Communities have grown weak in the United States and extended families have collapsed around the world under the pressure of increased mobility and the desire for greater privacy and personal autonomy. We have neither clan nor gang nor common cause. All that remains is the pseudo-community of politics and the ersatz tribes of team sports as replacements. Every man is a stranger, and strange men are terrifying (for reasons that are sensible from an evolutionary perspective). We had best be proactive and merciless in our aggression. Isolation both encourages and demands hypervigilance.
This brings us to a final, critical flaw of our societal progression, implied throughout this text and worth reiterating—the destruction of the middle. The human exists in micro—the individual level, the lone man. The society exists in macro—at a scale that is abstract, impersonal, and economic. There is not much in between.
A completely atomized society will have a few radically independent individuals who thrive without the pressure of the tribe and a great many more who are singularly lost. The customs the latter would follow are without place or utility. The traditions they would hold dear are archaic, irrelevant, or set their followers up to be despised. And this ripens them for the propagandists, who are inhumanely keen to cry havoc over something. If the one common cause we have is war, in either the physical or metaphorical sense—we have no other occasion to distinguish us from them—war will look more appealing to us by the day. This is the long-overdue charge of modernity, and it will be paid, sooner rather than later.
As tremendous as has been the progress of the last centuries, in everything from reducing premature death to creating material abundance to providing the average man or woman with labor-saving technologies that can do the work of dozens (or more) of humans, it can be reversed, at least partially, in minutes. So if we are to step away from this precarious position, we must find some alternative to constant belligerence and either extinguish the human need for close association, find some synthetic substitute, or facilitate and allow for the formation of strong social groups of intermediate size (meaning probably within the range described by anthropologist Robin Dunbar) that are compatible with our society.
Now that we have considered the Western world and Russia—the problems they face and how such problems came into being—we turn our attention east, to China. Industrial technocracy has supplanted the old order there as well. How have the Chinese effectively adapted to the pressures of development and increased geographical and social mobility, how have they failed, and what can we learn from their experiences?
(Continue to Part II)
The Rules
The Rules is a philosophy and self-inquiry text designed to help readers develop mental discipline and set life goals. It does this by way of guided readings and open-ended questions that facilitate the rational and systematic application of each Rule.
Put another way: The Rules is a book designed to help men survive and thrive in the West.
Foresight (And Other Stories)
Four tales across time and distance. Always satirical and frequently dark, this collection considers the breadth of isolation and the depth of connection.
Brant von Goble is a writer, editor, publisher, researcher, teacher, musician, juggler, and amateur radio operator.
He is the author of several books and articles of both the academic and non-academic variety. He owns and operates the book publishing company Loosey Goosey Press.
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Thank you for an incredibly useful (if too long) essay.
The beginning drove home a simple, useful connection that had eluded me. Absolutely nothing adds up about the 30 year win to further destabilize what we’d already conquered, namely, Russia.
Now it finally makes sense.
Elite Ignorance always plays their latest version of Game of Thrones, to the death. By definition, it can’t cross their minds that they’re obsolete, only that someone wishes to replace them as “elite”
In the Game of Elites, you either win, or you lose
Yet in the game of evolution, we organize on a bigger scale …. eventually. After transient elites die off & get out of the way.
oops; meant 30 year drive to destablize what we’d already (briefly) conquered
ps: What is the best way to GRACEFULLY usher out those who are over-adapted to transient context (i.e., elites)?
Show them nominal respect, yet politely ignore their mal-adaptive rants about protecting aggregates from competing elites.
The route to minimizing the cost-of-coordination is to damp, not escalate frictions.
Works every time … and buys you time to select options worthy of aggregate-wide teamwork.
Minimizing the cost-of-coordination is the investment necessary to harvest the return-on-coordination.
Hello Robert,
I will respond to several of your comments in one go.
First, I am glad that you gained something from the piece. I would add that the elite—really anyone with authority—tend to forget the most important rule of power: It has no loyalty, and loss of power happens little by little, then all at once.
Confucianism generally discourages rebellion. The people should follow their emperor, who is entitled to the Mandate of Heaven by virtue of his position. Interesting caveat: When an emperor was deposed/poisoned/stabbed to death, well, he just lost the Mandate of Heaven, and whoever replaced him must have gained it.
The Mandate is fickle. Forgetting that is an easy, deadly mistake. And such is a theme I will explore more in Part II.
As for your second comment, you make an excellent point. In business, I have seen exactly what you advocate. I heard this called the “promote-the-idiot-out-of-the-way” technique, but I am certain it goes by many other names. In academia (where I also worked for some time), I saw something similar, but it involved assigning the professor seminar classes and a minder.
The idea: Give someone a nice title and a good salary, and find competent subordinates to manage/persuade their boss as necessary (and make all of the important decisions for him/her).
I hope you will check in later for the rest of the series.