Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:There seems to be two meta-narratives that run through the Russian and American strains of crisis management:
1) It's somebody else's fault. Someone duped us or somebody cheated. Conspiracy mitigates personal responsibility......
2) A grand heroic 'stand' counters all liabilities and remedies complicated and ambivalent situations. It's always Stalingrad..... or it's the Alamo. Square your jaw and show your naked manhood (err.... maybe not) and the threat will fall and the enemy defeated.....'>.........
When our political, economic, and civil institutions repeatedly fail to address challenges, a full accounting of our failures, errors, misjudgments, and crimes is necessary before those challenges can be capably addressed. This requires a measure of humility and repentance, and a sober wisdom of the sinfulness and mixed-up-ness of us human creatures and our collective constructions.
But since we modern, "liberated," individuals style ourselves as autonomous agents with no need for any spiritual depth or accountability, we are unable to accomplish such a reckoning, As Alasdair MacIntyre put it in
After Virtue, our moral life has become the use of “a rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire...”
So faith and ethical depth are supplanted by our personal narcissism and, ultimately, collective idolatry. This leads us to annihilate factual history by creating shared meta-narratives - satisfying myths and fictions to cling to that provide us with the comforting illusions of our power, righteousness, and innocence in our insecure and confusing world born of our own failures.
Our illusions are fragile though, so we need to defend them vigorously against anyone or any situation that may challenge them. Our insecurities also compel us to seek allies and validation for our conceits. This makes us vulnerable to authoritarians and tyrants who ascend to power by embodying our own collective fictions of power, understanding, and innocence. They cater to our vanities, they tell us that we are winners, not losers, that we know the real deal not like those "other" people, and that our troubles come from the transgression of others rather than our own.
America still has a long way to go, but is becoming more like Russia as time goes on. If this continues, and l don’t see what will stop it, we will be playing a negative sum game with Russia and the rest of the world. Whoever loses the least, wins. Nations with less to lose than us, like Russia, have the advantage.