Reinventing Collapse

Like that of our metaphorical heavyweight champion, a super-power’s diet must contain plenty of red meat, in this case, human flesh. A superpower must continually ingest plenty of highly skilled and motivated personnel managers, scientists, engineers, and military officers, who must be willing to endure hardship, give up their best years, ruin their health, perhaps even give their lives, slaving away designing and building things, fighting and doing all the dirty work. Motivating the needed quantities of people with money is out of the question, because that would not leave enough for the ruling elites to siphon off. The upper classes tend to already be highly motivated by both money and status, but they also tend to be allergic to dirty work, and they can never be numerous enough to satisfy a superpower’s appetite for flesh. The only thing that can possibly provide the necessary motivating force is an idea: a communal myth powerful enough to cause people to commit their insignificant yet essential selves to the righteousness and glory of the great whole. A superpower’s vitality is critically dependent on the sustaining power of this myth. Shortly after it fails, so does the superpower.

Both the Soviet and the American models featured an inclusiveness myth as their centerpiece. In the Soviet case, it was the myth of the classless society. The great revolutionary upheaval was said to have erased class and ethnic distinctions, creating an egalitarian society that provided for everybody’s basic needs, curbed excesses of wealth and allowed people from humble origins to become educated and rise to positions of respect and authority. This myth proved to be so powerful that it propelled a poor, industrializing but still mainly agrarian nation on a trajectory to becoming a leading military and industrial power.

As the decades wore on, the myth gradually lost most of its luster. The satisfaction of basic needs gave rise to an insatiable appetite for imported consumer goods, which were either inaccessible or in short supply, except to the elite, and this, in turn, ruined the appearance of egalitarianism. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” went the saying, and morale plummeted. This led to a situation where no new common effort could be organized. As everyone started thinking for themselves, a slow rot set in, and the superpower gradually became enfeebled.

America’s belated and half-hearted answer to the classless society of the Soviets is the middle class society. After wallowing through the Great Depression and grasping at straws during the New Deal, the United States reaped a gigantic windfall following World War II, as the only large industrial player left standing. Much of the rest of the world’s industrial infrastructure had been bombed to rubble, giving the United States an opening. They used it to put every American within striking distance of achieving a cheap simulacrum of landed gentry, symbolized by a detached house surrounded by a patch of land big enough to accommodate private parking, a patch of grass and some shrubbery, and adorned, as an absolute necessity, by one’s own private automobile. American society is classless, at least in theory, since no one wants to admit to being either upper or lower class. There is, supposedly, one large and homogeneous middle class; in fact, though, there is a small upper portion and a large and rapidly expanding lower portion.

The wonderful thing about the American middle class concept is its malleability, because it is almost entirely symbolic. You could be middle class, own an ancestral mansion in an old brick and fieldstone suburb, drive a Mercedes and send your children to an Ivy League school. Or you could be middle class, live in a dolled-up trailer home, drive a souped-up pickup truck, and send your children to a community college that teaches them how to milk hogs.

The least common denominator is that you have to drive a motor vehicle, otherwise you can no longer perform this charade. This is why there is so much denial about it being necessary to give up the car and all the current talk about resorting to bio-fuels to continue feeding the car addiction. Biofuels amount to burning one’s food and destroying what is left of the topsoil in order to continue driving. This is also why so many Americans would forgo a healthy diet, a reasonable work schedule, education for their children, needed medical treatment and even give up their house, rather than give up their car. Not having a car makes one, within the American suburban landscape, a non-person.

The universal right to drive a car is the linchpin of the American communal myth. Once a significant portion of the population finds that cars have become inaccessible to them, the effect on the national psyche may be so profound as to make the country ungovernable. Solving the underlying transportation problem, through the reintroduction of public transportation or other means, is beside the point: the image of the automobile is indelibly imprinted on the national psyche and it will not be easily dislodged. For many, their car is a public extension of their persona, a status symbol and even a symbol of sexual potency, and this makes the automobile, along with the gun, a sacred national fetish. Like the gun, the car is also a potent weapon that can be used for murder or for suicide. It is propelling the American communal myth toward a flaming crash with the reality of permanent fuel shortage, compared to which the gradual fading away of the Soviet communal myth will have been gentle and benign.

Dmitry Orlov. Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. ^{Next Excerpt. © 2008 Dmitry Orlov.}