The Psychodynamics of Losing

I have started reading the Book of Lamentations in the mornings, having spent the last month or so reading the Book of Jeremiah.  The most obvious message of these books is the spiritual - namely that the kingdom of Judah was conquered and overthrown by Babylon because the Jews had chosen to deny the truth of God by worshiping other gods, and they had chosen to deny the truth that humankind is made in the image of God by oppressing each other - including the most powerless in their midst - the alien, the orphan, and the widow.  But my reading this time has opened up for me a fascinating glimpse into the psychology and psychodynamics of the ruling classes of nations that are in decline.

One can see these psychodymanics at work in the conflict between the ruling class (and their propagandists, the false prophets) versus the prophets of God who announced that God was about to destroy the kingdom of Judah.   One might call these rulers and their false prophets the revanchists, the "nationalists" and "patriots" of their day, because they represented the hope that Judah might remain as an independent kingdom subservient to no one, and that Judah might one day regain all the lost glory of the kingdom of Solomon.  Their desire for a return of lost glory could be viewed as an expression of national narcissism, because this desire for lost glory was not accompanied by a willingness to submit to their God. 

On the other hand were the true prophets who accurately prophesied that God was about to destroy Judah.  This sentence, "God is about to destroy Judah", had three implications:

• that the nation in which the rulers and the people had invested their identity was about to be destroyed;
• that God was the One who would do the destroying;
• and that this destruction was God's commentary, His verdict on the nation, its character and practices, as captured in the following quote: "Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say 'We are delivered!' - that you may do all these abominations?" (Jeremiah 7:9-10)

The true prophets did not have access to the political power and concentrated wealth of the ruling classes and their "prophets", so it was easy for the privileged members of society in Judah to label the true prophets as traitors who sought to incite sedition.  Therefore some of these true prophets wound up doing jail time, and a few got assassinated.  But what is so fascinating to me is the way the ruling class and their adherents reacted when the prophecies of the true prophets began to come true, during the twenty-two and a half years between the death of King Josiah and the fall of Jerusalem.  What we see is not just the rejection of true spirituality by the king and the people of Judah, but the refusal to submit to the king of Babylon, even as the military and political realities went increasingly against Judah and Jerusalem.  The darkening regional military and political realities are described well in some of the secular histories of this region during the final days of the kingdom of Judah.  But the Bible itself notes that during these last days, Judah was invaded and humbled three times by foreign powers, and that at the last, those who held Jerusalem resisted until "...the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.  Then the city was broken into..." (2 Kings 25:3-4).  In other words, there were people in Judah who were willing to fight the inevitable, even if it meant a fight to the death.  That means that there was something they valued so much that the loss of the thing valued was to them a fate worse than death, even though they must have known that they were going to lose.

And this willingness to fight to the death to maintain a cause that is both immoral and losing made me think of other instances in history in which humans have chosen to fight for such causes.  There is the obvious case of the second destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, a destruction which resulted from the rebellion of Jewish ethno-nationalists against the Roman Empire.  But there is also the case of Nazi Germany from 1942 to 1945, in which the Wehrmacht chose to fight to the death rather than lose an identity which had been carefully constructed for them by the rulers of their society and which made sense only within the context of that society.  (Side note: did you know that the motto of the Wehrmacht was "Gott mit uns" - that is, "God with us"?) And there is the example of the last days of both Rome and Byzantium.  The fall of the Byzantine empire is noteworthy, as the decline of Byzantium was a long time in the making.  The Byzantine emperors had focused for so long on infighting to maintain themselves as the top dogs in their empire that they had failed to notice that the world was changing around them while their empire was weakening.  Nearly a century before their final fall, one of their emperors was arrested in Venice for outstanding debts incurred by hiring Crusader mercenaries in an attempt to recapture lost territory.  (You might say that he nearly went broke trying to Make Byzantium Great Again.)  During its last years, the Byzantine empire could only watch helplessly as its enemies obtained the most advanced military technology of the day - namely, devices capable of shooting large projectiles by means of gunpowder.  These devices (cannons, to be precise) were the decisive factor in the fall of Constantinople, in which the last Byzantine emperor fought to the death.

Which brings me to the present day, in which those who cling to the hope of their own supremacy at the expense of everyone else on earth are beginning to fall on hard times.  I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and the regime he represents and of which he is a chief symptom.  Consider these facts:

• The United States has lost its place among the top ten most innovative countries in the world.  This is due to decades of underinvestment in education at all levels in this country.
• The United States has seriously begun to lose intellectual capital from this country, as smart foreign nationals (and some smart native-born Americans) are choosing either to stay away, or to relocate to other countries.  (See this and this.)  These are the results of a certain American brand of xenophobia/racism combined with longstanding cuts in funding for basic research.  Continued American racism and hostility toward anything Chinese is not helping this trend.
• Speaking of China, by most accounts, Donald Trump has lost the trade war he started.  (As an aside, for those members of the global Far Right who were hoping that Russia could return the world to where it was several decades ago, it appears that Russia has lost its recent oil price war with Saudi Arabia.  In losing that war, it has lost far more in the process.)
• Because of Trump's blunders and malignant stupidity in his response to the coronavirus threat, the office of the Presidency (and with it the entire Executive Branch of the Federal Government) is losing its relevance in shaping American national life, as governors of states team up with each other to provide leadership for the good of their citizens without consulting Trump.  (See this also.)
• Speaking again of coronavirus, the United States has decisively lost its former place as global leader and coordinator of global crisis response, as over twenty nations (including the most powerful nations of Europe) have publicly met via videoconference this past week to begin coordination of a global response to the coronavirus pandemic.  (So much, by the way, for Russian hopes of fracturing the world order for its own benefit!)  The United States was not invited to the call.  (See this also.)  Note also that these nations have thrown their full support behind the World Health Organization - counter to the wishes of Mr. Trump.  This makes it very likely that effective remedies to the coronavirus pandemic will not be produced by the United States.
• According to some reports, the U.S. Dollar is about to lose a significant portion of its value vis-a-vis other currencies over the next several months.  This is partly the result of government-mandated corporate bailouts (pushed by Trump and the Republican establishment) that have helped corporations prop up stock prices without creating any new actual value in the American economy.

Are we here in the "most powerful nation on earth" about to lose much of what we hold near and dear - especially the intangible psychic construct of ourselves?  And how do people react to the loss of an idealized grandiose self and of the belief system that props up that self?   In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan explores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance - the experience of having reality contradict deeply cherished beliefs - and the ways in which the brain of the person being contradicted tries to adapt.  One of the most perverse adaptations is to double down on the belief that has just been contradicted by reality.  Our President is succeeding in making himself and this nation irrelevant.  Will the members of Trump's base respond to the complete moral and intellectual failure of their champion by injecting themselves with bleach?

The Scapegoating of the Named Patient

Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").

As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.

The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.

Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.

Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.

Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."

So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.

The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction.  Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted.  And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?

These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility.  We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction.  But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him.  Blame yourself also.

Playing With Matches In A Paper House

Today, 28 March 2020, as I write this, the United States of America has for the last few days been the world leader in confirmed coronavirus cases.  What's worse is that even though the number of confirmed cases has climbed to over 116,000, the growth rate continues to be exponential, as seen here.  The site captured in the last link also shows that the COVID-19 death rate continues to climb exponentially.  In light of these events, I thought it might be helpful to provide a short list of things we now know about the course of coronavirus infection in humans.

• We now know that of all people who become infected with COVID-19, approximately 80 to 81 percent will develop mild illness and fully recover.  However, 19 to 20 percent will develop severe disease, with five percent developing "critical disease" according to this source.

• We also know that while early reports stated that young people were significantly less likely to develop severe disease than older people, later data has shown that young people are still at significant risk of developing severe disease.  This source reports that nearly 40 percent of those hospitalized in the United States for COVID-19 were under 55 years old.  The majority of hospitalizations in New York are for people under 50 years old.  And there are sources such as this which present the personal stories of strong, accomplished young athletes who have been seriously sickened by COVID-19.

• We know that the death rate as a percentage of total cases of COVID-19 has been climbing in the United States.  When the first outbreaks occurred, the U.S. death rate was from 1 to 1.5 percent.  However, the latest percentage for New York City is approximately 1.7 percent.  (Click this link and then do the math.)  What happens when the health care systems of the various states are overwhelmed is another matter.  Consider, for instance, what would happen to the 19-to-20 percent of an infected population who develop severe disease, yet who don't have access to health care because their health care systems have been overwhelmed.  Then the U.S. death rate might almost certainly exceed 5 percent, and might even go as high as 10 percent.

We also know a few things about Donald Trump, the terrible titular leader of the United States in these terrible times.  We know that Trump had access to an Obama-era disease management playbook written by the National Security Council as a sort of "lessons-learned" document describing how the Obama administration successfully managed the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015.  We also know that Trump disregarded it.  And we know that Trump was warned by intelligence analysts in January 2020 of the potential severity and impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  He chose to ignore and downplay those warnings.

As I look at the ways in which Trump and his cohort have tried to spin this crisis, I have found myself asking questions, such as, what drives Trump?  What are his strategic motivations?  What is his long-term thinking?  (Sometimes I ask these same questions about either one of my two cats as I see them staring off into space.  But they are cool and not sinister, whereas Trump is evil.)

To the extent that he thinks at all, Trump seeks to rebuild White "great power" autarky as it existed over 100 years ago.  However, it was never really "autarky", was it?  What really happened was that the great colonial powers, after they had exhausted their own resource base, sought to keep themselves great by stealing the bodies, lands, and stuff of all the other peoples on earth, laying claim that "this piece of land which we 'discovered', along with its people, now belongs to this particular Northern nation."  This has been the motivation behind American military and economic interventions under Trump, as well as his thwarted desire to build a wall to keep the nonwhite nations of the earth from coming to the United States in search of that which was stolen from them.  But it has also been the motivation behind the efforts of the United States and Russia to neutralize and destroy any independent power centers that are not European or Slavic.  Hence, Trump has sought to "weaponize" the coronavirus in a soft-power sense by calling it "the Wuhan virus" or "the Chinese virus" in his bid to demonize and other-ize people of Asian descent.  Unfortunately, there are knuckleheads in the United States who have followed his lead and perpetrated recent hate crimes against Asian-Americans.  But this response is typical of the narcissism which says, "If there's any imperfection among us, it can't possibly be with me!  It must belong to someone else!"  Such a response is not helpful, because it ignores the fact that white people can transmit the coronavirus just as easily as anyone else.  Consider Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, and the flocks of high school and college students who went to beaches in Florida on spring break, got infected by each other, and brought the COVID-19 infection back to their fellows at their home campuses.

But while we can acknowledge the possibility that Trump "thinks" in some sense, it is also true that he "feels" - that is, certain situations produce in him strong visceral reactions.  As a narcissist, therefore, he cannot handle having to deal with predicaments that are beyond his control, predicaments which require a collective response shaped by many diverse points of view, a response that patiently takes a long view, a response that acknowledges that there are no quick fixes, a response that is humble and open in the face of difficulty.  The current COVID-19 outbreak is just such a difficulty, and Trump has acted like a fish out of water in the face of it.  Thus he has tried desperately to spin this crisis into something where he can be seen as decisively in charge, the leader of the cavalry coming over the hill with a promised quick fix.  This is what is behind the gaggle of questionable "medical experts" seen on Fox News who have backed Trump's assertions that the coronavirus was no worse than the "seasonal flu" or who have pushed questionable remedies such as chloroquine as a cure.

(Trump's obsession with chloroquine deserves special mention.  The only reason he heard about the drug at all in connection with COVID-19 is because of a certain French microbiologist with sketchy credentials and practices, who contacted Fox News and told them that he had successfully treated COVID-19 infected patients with the drug.  Note that chloroquine has never been used as an antiviral drug.  Note also that the Chinese government ran a study of their own which showed that chloroquine had no effect on the course of COVID-19 in patients.  Lastly, it should be mentioned that at least one person has died from trying to self-medicate using a form of chloroquine found in fish tank cleaner.)

And now, Trump has already long since tired of trying to act "presidential" in the face of a crisis which does not offer quick fixes.  (He and his friends are also tired of losing money to a crisis which they let get out of hand.)  Hence, he wants the United States to return to being "open for business" by Easter, with no restrictions on travel or gatherings (or, most importantly, shopping!).  That brings up some interesting possibilities.  Right now, his approval rating is hovering around 50 percent.  Say that represents 150 million Americans.  Say that they also do what he says and return to "life as normal" starting on Easter.  This means abandoning social distancing and self-isolation.  Say also that 70 percent of these people wind up becoming infected with COVID-19.  That would equate to 105 million people.  To make the numbers easier to deal with, let's say 100 million.  Out of these 100 million, 20 million will get sick enough to require hospitalization.  But long before we reach the 20 million mark, the health care systems throughout much of the United States will be overwhelmed.  That means that between 5 and 10 million could die.

The COVID-19 outbreak will cause an inevitable contraction of the American economy.  If the people of the United States do the right thing and continue to aggressively self-quarantine and self-isolate, the only thing we will lose is money - and we will be taking the shortest route to recovery in the process.  If we try to push our re-opening too soon, our economy will contract for another reason - the economic and social disruption that results from millions of us dying.  In seeking to re-open the country for business by Easter, Trump is playing with matches in a paper house.

Of Houses, Storms, Sand and Bedrock

Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great.

- Matthew 7:24-27, World English Bible

The words of the Scripture quoted above came to me this week as I pondered the progress of recent events worldwide and nationally.  The quoted parable defines wisdom quite specifically - namely as the willingness to do the things commanded by Jesus.  But it also points out a couple of other facts, namely, that everyone is building something, and that storms come from time to time to test every person's work.  If a person's house gets knocked down by the storm, he can't blame it solely on the storm - he must also admit admit that he was a stupid builder.

Thus the coronavirus pandemic might be viewed as a storm of a certain kind, and the leaders of nations might be viewed as those whose house-building is being tested.  In particular, two kinds of leaders are being tested:

• those who understand as the Proverbs say, that a king's glory is his people, and that the king had therefore better provide for the common good of his people so that his kingdom can be strong;
• and those who cannibalize their people in order to enrich themselves.

In the latter group we can put all of the politicians of the global far right who have become heads of state within the last four years, as well as their chief enabler, a certain Vladimir Putin.  The interesting thing about these people is that they were able to raise a base of certain members of the common people to back them by convincing them that narcissism, greed and selfishness are good things and that by these things they would make their countries (and their base) great again.  This then has been the character of the metaphorical "houses" they have built.

The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses".  Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth.  Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis.  And lastly, consider the response of China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine.  As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China.  Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as one long, continuous fumble.  As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office.  And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.

Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons.  ("God save the Queen," you say?!  How about "God help Britain!"  With friends like these, who needs enemies?)  Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach.  According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths.  Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible.  They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly.  There also seems to be a sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases.  Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.

But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm.  It's individuals and families as well.  I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character.  Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds.  And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding.  It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on.  And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared.  The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow.  Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon.  Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding.  People can be such...people...sometimes...  Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices?  How is your house holding up in all this rain?

The Coming Shenanigans of November 2020

For many of us who live in the United States, the November 2016 election shows overwhelming evidence of election fraud and tampering by the Trump regime and the Russian government.  The nation was pacified into accepting the election results by the argument that it was really Trump's capture of a number of "battleground" or "swing" states, combined with the peculiarities of the Electoral College, that allowed Trump to "win".

Lest the same strategy is being revived to condition Americans to accept another fraudulent "victory" for Trump in 2020, I thought it would be good to re-post a 2017 interview I held with Rick Lass of the United States Green Party in which he described what happened when members of the Green Party asked for recounts of vote results in three of these "battleground" states.  The response from the governments of these three states is illuminating, but hardly surprising, as the leaders of these states value earthly power above truth-telling.  If you want to listen to the interview, there is a download link in the original post.

No Room At The Realtor's

I am increasingly trying to live a disconnected life - as, in, disconnected from digital media.  It's one of my ways of coping with a world ruled by very bad actors who want to make very bad news.  (Another coping mechanism of mine is to work to create collective expressions of good news via collective constructive organic work.  But I digress.)

This week, however, a bad actor managed to insert a bit of bad news into my consciousness.  It happened while I was driving in Southern California on one of my regular visits to family.  If you don't have streaming Internet because you don't want to be addicted to your smartphone, and yet you do want to know why you're stuck in traffic (and boy, was I stuck!), you have little choice but to listen to the radio for traffic updates.  Being exposed to alarming headlines is an unavoidable risk of getting your information this way.  So it was that I heard that Donald Trump is starting to attack Democratic leaders from states that have been experiencing a surge in homelessness.

This piqued my interest for a number of reasons.  First, almost the only claims to legitimacy which Trump has are the performance metrics of the visible, formal economy.  Those metrics paint a wildly optimistic picture of the American economy.  (NASDAQ sets new records!  Dow sets new records!  Unemployment below 4 percent!)  Yet the "boots-on-the-ground" reality which many of us see paints an entirely different picture,  One of the parts of that picture concerns the epidemic of homelessness whose rate of increase jumped drastically under the Trump regime.

Trump's tweets this week about the homeless crisis contain a note of outrage over the lack of help which the homeless are receiving, yet as noted in at least one of the articles linked in this post, Trump is proposing actions which would exacerbate the homeless crisis even further by reducing the availability of affordable housing.  His outrage is therefore hypocritical.

It might be good to examine the roots of homelessness in the United States, for I want to suggest that homelessness is a feature (and not a bug) of the very system of oligarchic capitalism and radical individualism that characterize American society.  I don't have time today to get into a rigorous defense of my hypothesis, but I think it good to list a few items of history:

• Homelessness has been a feature of American society since the 1870's, and has been closely linked to two phenomena: the enforcement of the cultural notion that the only respectable living arrangement is for people to own their own homes (thus eliminating shared housing, boarders, and other "non-standard" arrangements), combined with the increasing expense of achieving this ideal.  (Source: "Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities", A. R. Veness, 1991)
• Homelessness was a surprisingly strong feature of the "Roaring Twenties", which has been widely taught to children by historiographers as being a time of rising prosperity for the majority of Americans.  In reality, it was anything but.  (Source: "Poverty in the Prosperous Years: The Working Poor of the 1920's and Today," B. Payne, 2013)
• During the 1920's, more than 60 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.  (Source: BBC GSCE CCEA, Retrieved 27 December 2019)

I want to focus particularly on the first bullet point.  Home ownership in the United States has long been touted as a big step toward respectability, as it is a key component of being able to live a completely individualized life, un-beholden to any responsibility for the collective of which the individual is but a part.  But home ownership has become rapidly unaffordable because the rate of inflation of home prices has far outpaced the rate of increase of most workers' wages for at least two decades.  Housing is an obvious example of the damage that results when oligarchs blow aspirational bubbles.  Post-secondary education is another.

Two further observations.  First, it is useful to see Trump as, among other things, a symptom of a greater evil.  We know that Russia worked hard to insure that Trump would capture the White House, so we can see Trump in a very real sense as a manifestation of the will of the oligarchy (and its chief oligarch Putin) who now rule Russia.  If the symptoms of extreme wealth inequality are now ballooning in America under Trump, it is only logical that we should see them ballooning in Putin's Russia as well, as has been noted in journalism covering the Russian homelessness crisis.  See "St. Petersburg Tackles a Homelessness Crisis Moscow Won't Address," for instance, where you will read that Russia treats its homeless population the same way a narcissistic parent treats an imperfect child - as a limb to be amputated.  One other similarity between Russia and the United States is that even during Russia's 21st-century supposed "roaring decade" (or more, accurately, "roaring few years" of high oil revenues from 2008 to 2015-2016), there were between one and five million children living on the street in Russia.

Second, both Trump and the Russian leadership find it useful to maintain a narcissistic facade of perfection, and to project their actual imperfections onto scapegoats who can be demonized by being "otherized."  But on closer examination, the perfection which they seek to portray looks unsettlingly similar to the fragile bubble-film perfection of America in the Roaring Twenties.  Most of 1920's America was suffering, yet the nation was deluded by the media portrayals of the good fortune of the rich.  It required only a very small shift in consciousness to burst that delusion.  The shift occurred once the wealthy were confronted with a crisis they could not handle.  And then suddenly those who had been suffering all along began to become "activized."  A similar phase change may be in our not too distant future.

A Clarifying of Stance

As regular readers of this blog know well, from October 2017 until a few weeks ago, I took a break from writing posts in order to focus on things that very much need to be done in realspace with real people and not disembodied clouds of electrons.  Many of those things require ongoing work, so my posting will continue to be spotty for the next several months.

However, I do check my stats from time to time, and I noticed that this blog got several hundred hits during the last few days.  I also noticed that visitors to this blog have been reading the extensive back catalog of posts I have written.  There come times in the history of anyone who uses words when they have to eat a few of their own words, and I have lately realized that I need to eat some of mine.  So here goes...

I started blogging back in 2006-2007, when I was just beginning to awaken to the real nature of white American power.  I had been (and still am) a Christian, and a big part of the teaching I received from mainstream American evangelicalism was the notion that I should support American supremacy wherever and whenever possible because America was God's nation, and that the Republican Party was the party of true Godliness and Christian virtue.  My process of detoxing from that Kool-Aid began with my leaving an abusive church run by a family of petty criminals.  From that point I began to notice the patterns of abuse which not only appear in abusive churches whose leaders are not held accountable, but also extend to corporations, political parties, and nations whose leaders put themselves above accountability.

I had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and in 2004 while still under the influence of mainstream American evangelical Kool-Aid, but in 2006, the contradictions and injustices of the Bush administration proved to be too much for me to swallow.  As a person of color, what especially triggered my gag reflex was the appearance of overt anti-Latino racist campaign ads sponsored by the Republicans.

From 2007 onward, therefore, I began to search for and be drawn to writers whose perspective was not jingoist American patriotism.  That unfortunately was the time during which writers such as Dmitry Orlov were becoming popular.  He was a smooth talker, and his writing accurately captured many of the criticisms I had of America and of the historical and ongoing use of American power to oppress the vulnerable.

Over time (and especially as the police murders of unarmed African-Americans became much more obvious), the criticisms voiced by Orlov were joined by criticisms voiced by other Russian writers and media outlets like Russia Today.  What I did not know was that these voices were not being raised in order to call America to repentance or to provide a viable alternative to the things they were criticizing, but to divide America in order that Russia might take the place of global hegemon.  I also did not fully understand the extent to which national narcissism, exceptionalism, racism, white supremacy, and intolerance of other cultures had become part of the bedrock of Russian culture and society.

Thus it was that if you were reading my posts from 2007 up to 2016, you would have detected a strong pro-Russian bias.  But those days are over.  What ended them was the election of Donald Trump and the revelation of the part played by the Russian government in installing neo-fascist leaders and governments in many nations of the Global North.  What ended my pro-Russian bias was also the revelation of the role played by people like Aleksandr Dugin in the formulation of Putin's geopolitical strategy.  The words I must eat are the words I spoke in praise of Russia (and Putin) as some sort of viable alternative to the oppression which characterizes American power.  Russia is no alternative.  To steal a bit from Tolkien, Russia is to the United States what Boromir and Gollum were to the One Ring.

So...if you want to read my back catalog, please also read a few of these posts:

• The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
• No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
• The Resistance Heats Up In Russia
• Or, any of the posts that fall under the heading of "The Revanchism of the Third Rome."

You can also read blogger Olga Doroshenko's three-part series titled, "Russia as a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Ukraine as a Narcissistic Injury."

Fall-Winter 2019-2020: Please Drive Less

Why, you may ask.  Well, you may have noticed that gas prices have been on the rise here in the U.S.  However, my reasons for asking you to drive less extend a bit beyond trying to save you some change.  My reasons actually extend into the realm of geopolitics, as you might have guessed.  Here are some geopolitical reasons for you to chew on:

First, Russia is largely a petro-state whose economy depends to an excessive degree on exports of raw materials.  This means that the stability of the Putin regime depends on a high price of oil and other exported extractive resources.  The high price of oil between 2007 and 2012 allowed Putin to make a sort of bargain with the Russian people: allow Putin to be an autocrat in exchange for "stability", "order", and "prosperity."  Low oil prices and sanctions have undermined this bargain - hence Putin's attempt to deflect attention from Russian domestic woes by his invasion of the Ukraine and his military operations in Syria.  (Indeed, his intervention in Syria was meant to distract Russians from the failures of his operations in the Ukraine.)

Second, the unraveling of the Russian economy has provided the Russian opposition to Putin with a huge window of opportunity.  The economic stagnation (nay, even contraction!) which Russian society has experienced from 2014 onward has exposed the hollowness of the bargain which Russian citizens were enticed to make with Mr. Putin.  As a result, resistance against Putin has spread like wildfire - especially from 2017 until now.  Russians are increasingly experiencing "cognitive liberation", with the result that the attempts by the Russian government to use harsh punishment to quell public protests have instead made an increasing number of Russians even more determined to protest.  This is a prime example of the dynamic of "backfire" at work in a civil resistance struggle.  Once backfire starts to happen in a sustained way in an oppressed population, the oppressor or autocrat is in dire straits!

Third, it is quite possible that recent events related to the rise in oil prices may be an attempt by Putin to scrape together enough cash to re-instate his "bargain" with his own people.  Consider the drone attack against Saudi oil production facilities a few weeks ago.  Some blamed "Houthi rebels" while Trump blamed Iran.  I certainly do not claim to have the proof needed to tell you exactly who did it.  But I do know that Saudi oil production facilities experienced a cyberattack in 2018, and that that cyberattack originated from the Russian "Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics".  It is also known that Russia has initiated cyberattacks against Ukrainian power distribution infrastructure and other Western targets.  And it is known that Russia and Saudi Arabia are oil production rivals.  The 2018 cyberattack was not the first against Saudi oil facilities.  It seems that whoever wants to knock Saudi Arabia out of the oil exporting game has gone from throwing electronic signals at them to throwing bombs and bullets.  And this past week an Iranian oil tanker was attacked off the Saudi coast.  These are the reasons why oil and gasoline prices have been climbing lately.  High oil prices might prop up Putin's regime a little longer.

Fourth, whatever we on the outside can do to deny Putin what he wants helps to remove from the earth a threatening regime that wants to take over the world.  This reason should actually have been first on the list.  Don't like Putin (or his familiar spirit, Aleksandr Dugin)?  Then walk, bike or take public transit to the places you need to go.  Save a few bucks (and the world) in the process.  By the way, for every finger I point at you, there are three pointing back at me! If I get up early tomorrow (contingent on getting to bed early tonight), I can bike to work...

The On-Line Airing of National Dirty Laundry

To those who may have missed blog posts from me over the last several months, I offer my apologies.  There are things in realspace which have demanded my attention, and there are only 168 hours in any given week...

But I thought I'd post a few links to information that reveals the extent to which mainstream American culture has become blatantly evil.  First, the Fullerton Observer has kindly rendered a good public service in posting summaries of the key findings of the Mueller Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference In the 2016 Presidential Election.  At the end of their final summary, they have also kindly provided a link to audio recordings of a reading of the entire report.  This means that anyone who wants to know what the report says can get it all straight from the horse's mouth - even if they don't have time to read it all.

Secondly, there are a number of new reports exposing the hypocrisy of the white American evangelical/Protestant Church, which continues to staunchly support the presidency of Donald Trump.  Here's a small sample:

• New Study Exposes Hypocrisy of the Religious Right
• "Someone's Gotta Tell the Freakin' Truth": Jerry Falwell's Aides Break Their Silence
• Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World.  Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister.
• Haggard's Law  (Note: in posting this link, let me emphasize that I am a Bible-believing Christian.  However, I object to using "God-talk" to try to gain political leverage to elect candidates to office who use the power of the State to murder dark-skinned people - or to rip the children of these dark-skinned people out of the arms of their parents in order to throw the children into cages - er, I mean, "detention centers.") (A second note: Vladimir Putin may himself be a case of Haggard's Law in action.  Several years ago, during a photo op with Russian citizens, he lifted the t-shirt of a pre-adolescent boy and kissed the boy on his stomach.  You can watch it here.  Recently that boy, who is now a man, stated that he liked the kiss, but if you look at the linked photo, the boy seems to be surprised and slightly revolted.  Maybe he decided that he liked saying he liked it more than he liked the possibility that he would be forced to drink a polonium cocktail!  Putin as Катехон?  Ha, ha!)

Revelations such as these should arouse the kind of moral outrage that should sweep evildoers from power - except that the supporters of these evildoers no longer care about truth or justice or anything else except the naked exercise of power over their fellow human beings.  They have always been like this, but for a few decades between the 1960's and now, they were wolves in badly-done sheep disguise.  At least now they're being straight-up about being wolves.  And no, I don't expect them to listen to the Mueller Report.

One side note: remember all the supposed "terrorist" incidents involving so-called "Arab extremists" in Europe and the United States during the last decade?  These incidents had the convenient effect of turning public sentiment in Europe and the United States against immigrants - especially dark-skinned or non-Christian immigrants.  Many of us wondered at the time who could be behind these attacks, because we considered them to be false flags.  Having examined Russian propaganda over the last few years, I've come to a certain conclusion - a conclusion informed by the fact that Russia actively sought to build a network of regimes in the world's richest countries that worked to exclude the world's dark-skinned and/or non-Christian peoples from the wealth of these nations.  Russia has also become well-known for "hybrid warfare."  You draw your own conclusions...

Being Positively Disruptive

As many readers may have noticed, I haven't spent much time in writing essays for this blog over the last three or four months.  You might also have guessed from this that I've been very, very busy.  While many people I know have been glued to their TV's, computers, and smartphones, addicted to the torrent of toxic drama, crazy-making and bad news being generated by a certain doofus with orange hair who now claims to be the President of the United States, I've been occupied with making some good news of my own.  Let me fill you in on the details.

First, the tutoring initiative in which I am involved, which I mentioned in this post and this one, is now expanding from one location to three. Our roster of teachers has both changed and grown.  I believe there are now thirteen of us, and more may be joining in the next few months.  While two of our groups are continuing to focus on basic mathematics, one group is developing a science curriculum aimed at teaching appropriate technology and self-sufficiency/sustainability in the context of developing alternative institutions.  That group is being led by a woman from an African-American/Asian background and a Native American woman, and they are writing a series of science experiments and activity packets aimed at youth from 10 to 20 years of age.  

And we have a fourth group composed of writers, who are developing and editing a math curriculum to be used by all of our groups, complete with workbooks and worksheets.  (As soon as I am done with this post, I will be working on addition and subtraction worksheets.  If idleness is the devil's workshop, I won't have to worry about getting into trouble for a long time!)

On another front, a group of us at work are planning to launch a campaign to collect donations for the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Irma.  I am thinking we will present the campaign as an opportunity to spend money for a good cause instead of spending money on holiday shopping.  We will also promote news sources that are providing accurate coverage of the situation in Puerto Rico, as opposed to many American news sources and the White House.  My goal is to provide a positive disruption in three ways:

• By providing concrete relief to people whom our current regime would like to starve,
• By shunting money away from the usual recipients in our consumer economy during this holiday season,
• And by providing ongoing evidence that our current regime and its President are illegitimate.

There are a lot of people where I work.  Let's see where this takes us...

Lastly, it looks like I may have a few opportunities over the next couple of months to talk about resistance and related topics in front of a few audiences.  It looks like my part in the resistance being mounted by oppressed people is likely to get quite a bit larger.

Puerto Rico - A Humanitarian Disaster

The Federal response to the hurricane which recently devastated Puerto Rico is not unexpected.  Indeed, it is symptomatic of the disease of a large swath of American society - a swath who are full of empathy toward those victims of Hurricane Harvey who happened to be wealthy and white - yet full of sleepy neglect or overt hostility toward everyone else.  Now that sleepy neglect has hypnotized many Americans (but not a majority, thank God!), lost as they are in their individualism and addicted to their consumerism, while the overt hostility issues forth sporadically from the current President like projectile emesis from an infant who has been burped too vigorously.  Note, though, that the hostility is provoked only when someone manages to break through the President's own sleepy indifference and his perverted preoccupation with himself.  Then, if you are that someone, watch yourself, lest you get yourself spewed on.

Meanwhile, a lot of people in Puerto Rico are about to die.  This is not because there are no Federal resources available to help them, but because the Federal government is now run by a bunch of rich and incompetent pigs.  Decent people who have the means to find out the actual situation on the island (and not the sanitized FEMA version) should be appalled.  Those evangelicals who supported (and continue to support) the President should take a look at the last half of Luke 16 before they go to bed tonight.

But let's not stop with just being appalled.  Let us do what we can ourselves to contribute to disaster relief in Puerto Rico.   The President, like an alcoholic absentee father, has made himself unavailable to provide for the common good.  Here is a link to a page listing organizations to which you can make a donation for the relief of the suffering of the people of Puerto Rico.

Catch-Up - September 2017

Here's a quick update on things.  I still have a few posts I need to write to finish my series on "The Revanchism of the Third Rome," but other things have lately been keeping me too busy to write.  Here's what is occupying my time:

• Tutoring and teaching math and language arts to families from marginalized populations.  Our group of tutors has expanded greatly within the last two months, and we are planning to go to at least two, and possibly three apartment complexes this fall.  We may even get to teach in people's homes, which would give a nice retro, counter-cultural feel to what we are doing - rather like this.
• Nonviolent resistance.  There are now well over fifty people with whom I have been in frequent contact over the last two or three weeks, and we are discussing the start of a boycott of holiday shopping (both for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever else), along with a general push for frugality among those now targeted by the current regime.  We want to serve up a steaming, heaping helping of economic non-cooperation this holiday season.  Stay tuned...

Home Repairs, Part 2

This week, I must again bow out of writing a long post.  Yesterday I hauled several hundred pounds of scrap wood out of my backyard, and today I have a huge list of projects to finish (aside from going to church, where I will be in a couple of hours).  If idleness is the devil's workshop, then I won't have to worry about being in trouble for a very long time.

I should be able to continue my series on the revanchism of the Third Rome next weekend. I will also hopefully begin to show the role played by Russia in the rise of the global fascist far right.  (Although, if anyone wants to do his or her own research, there are plenty of smoking guns lying around where one could start.)  Stay tuned...

Home Repairs - August 2017

I have spent the last week fixing things in my house that badly needed fixing, as they were falling apart.  My backyard now contains a big pile of used lumber that I will be hauling to the dump sometime soon.  I'm afraid I'll have to wait until next weekend to have a post on my continuing series.  Until then, my prayer is that God's mercy and justice would shine on you all - especially on those who are among the oppressed.

The Revanchism Of The Third Rome, Part 4: Caesar's 21st Century

At the end of my last post, I promised to discuss how the concept of the Third Rome and Russian Orthodoxy have influenced and guided Russian policy since the fall of the Soviet Union.  I also promised to discuss the bearing these concepts have had on the presidency of Vladimir Putin.  In my discussion, I will be relying heavily on "Russia's 'Special Path' In the Relation Between State and Nation" (Geir Flikke, Russia and the Nordic Countries: State, Religion and Society, Fondet for Dansk-Norsk Samarbeid, 2016) as well as other sources.

At the outset, let me say that the essay by Flikke makes a distinction between the concept of a state and that of a nation, with the state being the creation of the power-holders at the pinnacle of a society, and the nation (polity - as in a people united by collective identity, or народ) being a grassroots creation by a people from the bottom up.  Accordingly, the French concept of a nation is "the political authority emanating from the people..."  In this conception of nationhood, the people of the nation have a major say in how they want their national identity to be defined.  The state as an expression of the government of that nation depends for its legitimacy on the political authority emanating from the people.

The Russian experience has, historically been diametrically opposite to this process.  Starting from the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Russian state has been an entity imposed by the most powerful on those without power.  "As Vera Tolz stated...'Russia became an Empire before ever contemplating becoming a nation'" (Flikke, ibid.)  The characteristic of such a state is that it is usually an autocracy and not a democracy.  This is to be expected, given the way that Ivan the Terrible achieved victory over his military rivals - namely by being more expert at the use of violence than his rivals - and given the way that the successful use of violence concentrates power in the hands of the wielder of successful violence.  The result in the Russian case was the creation of an extremely long-lasting system of despotism.  The majority of people who made the transition from non-Russian to Russian status over the last five or so centuries did not therefore do so willingly, but under compulsion, as newly-incorporated subjects of an empire.  (Chenoweth and Stephan would not characterize this as a "democratic transition"!)

Fast forward to the 1990's and the time of great difficulty for Russia as it struggled under societal disarray and widespread corruption under Yeltsin.  One of the analysts of that time, a man named Yegor Gaydar (Егор Гайдар), wrote a pamphlet titled, "State and Evolution" ("Государство И Эволюция"), in which he made some very interesting points, as noted by Fikke:

"...Gaydar...saw the greed of nomenklatura capitalism in his own country as inevitably linked to a specific “Russian” entity and cultural context – that of the state. If state and property have never been divided, historically, and in present times, Gaydar held, '(...) even the most powerful state would, in reality, be weak and degenerate (trukhlyavy). The state servicemen, the bureaucracy (chinovniki) will eat the state completely, and they will not halt the hunt for property. Everyday corruption will soon become the real state of affairs. The servicemen will intuitively try to stabilize the situation, by converting power into property.' (Gaydar, 1994)."

And this also:

“Gaydar clearly linked this to the paradox of the liberation from the Tatar Yoke, asserting that the dissolution of the Horde put Russia on a firm path towards despotic Asian rule, firmly expressed by Ivan Grozny. [This], he suggested started the thriving expansion of Russia, ending only in 1945. And, this is important, the steady expansion left Russia void of important processes of nation-building and it also tapped state resources; Russia became a '.... Civilization' (dogonyayushchaya tsivilizatsiya), dedicating most of its resources to “catch up” with its constituent other --- the West: 'Russia was captured, colonized by itself, ending up as a hostage of the militaristic-imperial system, which profiled itself in front of the kneeling people as its eternal benefactor and savior from external threats, as the guarantor of the existence of the nation.' (Gaydar, 1994, p. 46).”

Gaydar's thoughts here can best be summarized by saying that the historical despotism of the Russian state never allowed the Russian people to build the local and regional independent institutions that constitute a healthy nation.  This is why the 1990's (after the collapse of the Soviet Union) were such a time of government corruption and social instability.  The Russian national response to this time was not to look inward to become the sort of people who could manage themselves on local and regional levels, not to begin to develop the capacity for what Mohandas Gandhi called swaraj, but rather to look for another strongman.  In Vladimir Putin they found him.  (But when one strongman "rescues" a nation from being eaten by other strongmen, what guarantee is there that the rescuing strongman won't also be a cannibal?)

Now, what is needed to sell the idea of a strongman and his imposition of a strong unitary state on an unresisting people?  The political and cultural leadership have answered that question in a number of ways.  But one of the ways has been the transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church into a blatantly political instrument to support the regime of Vladimir Putin (Per-Arne Bodin, "The 'Symphony' in Contemporary Russia"; Kristian Gerner, "Clericalization, Militarization and Acquiescence," Russia and the Nordic Countries, 2016)  There is indeed an organic link between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian military: "...a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church took part in the meeting of the Marshal Staff of the armed forces," (Gerner); "...Russian fighter planes were consecrated and sprinkled with holy water by an Orthodox priest..." (Gerner); the State and the Church collaborate openly in the strengthening of a "civil religion" which is primarily cultural in nature, although its symbols are religious (Kahla, "Third Rome Today or State Church Collaboration in Contemporary Russia", 2016); and the Russian Orthodox Church has been involved over the last several years in a massive project of canonizing many military heroes as saints (Kahla, ibid.)

And as for the concept of Russia as the Third Rome, this idea has been elevated even further.  Russian propagandists now refer to Russia as the "Katechon," a concept arrogated by Russia from the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians from the New Testament.  The Katechon is defined as that restraining force or agent which keeps the Antichrist at bay and preserves the world order against lawless chaos.  (Now, to me, that's funny!  Have you seen some of the numerous YouTube videos of Russian road rage incidents?  And these propagandists claim that Russia stands alone to defend the world from lawlessness!  Must...stop...giggling...)

To shoulder such a burden for the preservation of the world most "obviously" requires a strongman.  And of the activities of this "strongman" and his minions I have much more to say - especially as they apply to those of us who are not Russian.  But tonight I am out of time.  To be continued...

The Revanchism of the Third Rome: Symphony's Chords

(Some readers may be wondering why my last two posts (as well as the next two or three) are taking a trip down the path of Russian and Byzantine history, especially the history of the Byzantine (Orthodox) church.  You may be asking, "What does that have to do with things happening in the world today?"  Hang in there; I'll try to have a satisfying answer for you at the end.)

Last week's post sketched out the role of the Russian Orthodox church in promoting the myth of Russia as the "Third Rome," the heir to the spiritual and political mantle of the Byzantine Empire.  To see the deeper significance of the "Rome" in the Byzantine empire, it is helpful to see how Church and State were related to each other in Byzantium, and how State and Church rang some changes in that relationship in Russia after the fall of Byzantium.  Let's begin by defining the word "symphony."  And here I will rely not only on Wikipedia definitions, but I will be drawing extensively on Russia and the Nordic Countries: State, Religion, and Society, published by Fondet for Dansk-Norsk Samarbeid in 2016.

In the Byzantine empire, symphony referred to the formal arrangement between Church and State, which was explicitly stated by the emperor Justinian in 535 A.D.  In this symphony, both Church and State were to be collaborators in the project of the "protection and spread of the Christian Church..."  This concept was refined by patriarch (supreme bishop) Photius in the ninth century A.D.  He explicitly stated that emperor and Church patriarch were not merely collaborators, but equal partners in a project which was fundamentally religious in nature.  Therefore, the State was not supposed to dominate the Church, nor vice versa - in other words, the patriarch was not to be head of state, nor the emperor head of the Church.  There is a further significance to the concept of symphony, namely, that under this arrangement, it was not possible "...that the emperor might profess any other religion than Orthodox Christianity...The idea expressed already by Christ Himself that there should be a distinction between what belongs to the emperor and what  belongs to God...seems quite difficult to realize in a construction like the Byzantine theocracy."  In other words, secularization was utterly incompatible with Byzantine symphony.  (Quotes taken from "The History and Theology of Russian Orthodoxy," Gottlieb, Russia and the Nordic Countries: State, Religion, and Society, 2016.)

It is important to note that the establishment of a State church in the original Roman empire did not follow the principle of symphony. According to some sources, when the first State church emerged under the emperor Constantine, he established himself as "Head of the Church," thus establishing himself as a caesaropapist. (Now there's a new word for ya!) It is also important to note that not all Byzantine emperors submitted to the doctrine of symphony; therefore, there were not a few caesaropapists in their number as well. The practice of caesaropapism was a convenient way for a Roman or Byzantine emperor to consolidate and amplify his power, especially when seeking to expand his territory through imperial conquest or to eliminate internal threats to his power.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia (especially Muscovy Russia) sought to lay claim on the title of "Third Rome" in two ways.  First, the Russian clergy established the Russian Orthodox church as autocephalous.  In other words, a Russian cleric became the head (the patriarch) of the Russian Church, independent from Orthodox patriarchs in Constantinople or Greece. This project began in 1448 according to Gottlieb, took over a century to complete, and wasn't formally fulfilled until 1589, according to Laats. (Laats, "The Concept of the Third Rome and Its Political Implications," retrieved on 30 July 2017.) And the Russian rulers first adopted the title of "Tsar" (Царь, literally, "Caesar,") in 1547 with the coronation of Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), thus establishing a Russian head of state as a continuation of the line of the Caesars of the first and second Rome.

How did symphony play out in Russia after 1453?  Well, first of all, we must note that it didn't always play out.  According to Laats, Tsar Ivan IV used the concept of theocracy to promote himself as defender of the Orthodox faith.  "His wars were against 'Muslim unbelievers' and 'the Catholic enemy of Christianity'.  The mission of the Russian church was directly grounded in [Ivan's] military victories...The state or the monarch was the real head of the church.  Ivan the Terrible 'sees the tsardom as a divine commission and himself as head of the church and representative of God on earth...'"

To be sure, the Russian Orthodox Church pushed back against the power of the tsars, with the Patriarch Nikon seeking in 1652 to establish the "preeminence of the patriarch over the tsar..." (Gottlieb).  However, Nikon lost that particular battle, and the attempts by the Russian Orthodox Church to continue the fight resulted in the breaking of Church power by Tsar Peter the Great in the 18th century.  Peter made the Church definitely subservient to the State and made it the "official state church of the Russian Empire."  This arrangement continued under Catherine the Great, and lasted, with some variations to this form, until the revolutions of 1917.

And as for the role of the concept of the Third Rome in Russian internal and foreign policy, Laats says that "The universality of Rome was connected to pax romana.  The goal of Rome was to establish a universal empire, which would supersede the disorderly competition between nations and establish world peace.  The monk Filofei, one of the masterminds of the doctrine of the Third Rome wrote that 'all Christian realms will comne to an end and will unite into the one single realm of our sovereign.'"  Moscow came also to possess an eschatological cultural dimension - not only as special and closer to God than any other city, but as the center of the last Rome, the fulfillment of all history.  The tsar therefore becomes an eschatological ruler, head of both Church and State.  And Russia itself became "holy", "elected by God and having a special task in the divine story within the world."  This is why the ability of the Russian tsardom to use Russian Orthodoxy as a tool for expansion of secular power is so significant.

According to Laats, this concept of Russia as the Third Rome was officially renounced by the Russian Church in 1667, and has not been explicitly stated by Church or State since then.  Yet it has remained the undercurrent and foundation of Russian state policy and identity from that time onward, under Tsar Nicholas I and Tsar Alexander III (and, as some would argue, under Russian communism).

How have Russian Orthodoxy and the concept of  the Third Rome influenced Russian leadership and policy since the fall of Soviet communism?  What bearing do these have on the regime of Vladimir Putin?  I hope to start answering those questions in my next post.  Stay tuned...

The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 2): The Role of Russian Orthodoxy

As noted in my last post, blogger Olga Doroshenko very nicely sketched out a description of national narcissism as applied to Russia.  She did an excellent job outlining the grandiose self created by the masters of Russian culture - namely, the tsar, the nobility, and the intellectuals - over the last several centuries.  A key pillar of that grandiose self is its assertion that it has a special, Messianic mission to the world, a mission that must be carried out by imperial conquest. Now, to claim that one has a special, Messianic mission, one requires some rather extraordinary proof.  What better proof than that the bearer of this mission should have received this mission from people who claim to speak on behalf of God?

So my attention was arrested by Olga's mention of Russian claims to be "the Third Rome" - a term which I had never heard of before.  As she says,

"There is an opinion that the Russians were spoilt and degraded by the Bolsheviks. Wrong. They were like that long before Lenin. Long before Peter the Great (who was a flamboyant narcissist himself). They adopted the myth of “the Third Rome” ("Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!") in the early 16th century, but they believed themselves to be the only “true Christian” nation long before that. This narcissistic claim has its roots deep in the times of the Tartar invasion, and I will not trace them. Let’s concentrate not on the reasons, but on the consequences."

As I say, my attention was arrested by this phrase, "the Third Rome," so I did a little bit of Googling, and discovered that "...in the first half of the sixteenth century, an obscure Russian monk from Pskov wrote a number of letters in which he spoke about Moscow as the Third Rome.  The name of the monk was Filofei...and his letters were sent to...Moscow grand prince Vassiliij III...and to Ivan IV the Terrible..." ("The Concept of the Third Rome and Its Political Implications", Alar Laats, 2015).  To understand how the concept of the Third Rome contributed both to the Russian grandiose self and to Russian imperialism, it is necessary to see how Church and State evolved in the West from the "conversion" of the emperor Constantine to the present.  And to see this evolution, we must begin with the birth and evolution of Rome as a historical fact and metaphysical reality.

For Rome managed to establish itself as both the center of an empire and as a paragon of "civilization" - indeed, as the center of the "civilized" world.  Therefore, Rome laid claim to universality - to the notion that Rome alone was the bearer of civilization, and that this legitimized Roman conquests and violent imperial expansion.  Those people who lived outside the orbit and influence of Rome were characterized as "barbarians" - as uncivilized savages living in chaos.  With the "conversion" of Constantine to Christianity, Rome added a new claim to its existing claims of imperial legitimacy: namely, that Rome was now the defender of the one true faith, and thus even more legitimized in its use of imperial violence to defend and expand its territories.  This claim was an integral part of the political and religious strategy and philosophy of state and ecclesiastical power called Constantinianism, which granted powers of state enforcement to those members of the Church who were recognized by the Emperor as the "official" spokesmen of Christianity, and which gave these spokesmen the ability to use violent state power to persecute those people who claimed to be Christian while disagreeing with these official spokesmen.

One of the things that Constantine did was to establish a second imperial capital, named, of course, after himself: the city of Constantinople (formerly known as Byzantium) in the eastern half of the Roman empire, as part of a scheme to facilitate administration of an empire which had grown too large to be effectively managed from one city.  However, the leaders of the Roman church sought to concentrate religious (ecclesiastical) power in the city of Rome, and this caused a fracture in the "official" State church which paralleled the fracture of the Roman empire into two parts, one ruled by Rome, and the other ruled by Constantinople.  After the fall of the western Roman empire, the eastern, Byzantine empire declared itself to be the only true, legitimate seat of civilization, the one true heir to the titles originally claimed by the united Roman empire and the only true bearer of the Christian faith.  According to Laats, this made the Byzantine empire also universalist in its claims and outlook, as stated below:

"Thus the eastern Roman Empire, known also as Byzantium considered itself to be an empire and as the only legitimate heir of its history and tradition. The theologians of Byzantium understood their history as the continuation of the history of the ancient Roman Empire. Indeed, they pretended to even more – the empire existed according to the plan of God. The aim of the Roman, respective Byzantine Empire was to grasp the whole world for the proclamation of Christ. But together with this the aim was to spread the [Byzantine] peace and culture. Thus their intentions were also universalist. The people of Byzantium tried to be in every respect like the Romans. Even the name they used in Greek for themselves was Rhomaioi – the Romans.

"One important factor that influenced the development of their consciousness as Romans was their opposition to the West. This opposition was both political and ecclesial. The rulers of the Western Europe and of the Byzantine Empire pretended to be the Roman emperors. And both churches pretended to be the leaders of the universal church."

The Byzantine empire laid claim to the title of a "second Rome," a claim which originated from Constantine himself.  Due to a number of factors (including foresight and political and administrative shrewdness on the part of its rulers), the Byzantine empire lasted a very long time, and the Byzantine church brought many Eastern peoples and nations under its influence, from Greece through North Africa to Central Europe - and Russia.  The Byzantine empire viewed itself as a utopia, a visible, earthly expression of the invisible Kingdom of God.  However, the Byzantine empire also fell, and Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman empire in 1453, and the only part of the Byzantine church (also known as "Orthodox") which was not under Ottoman control was the Russian orthodox communion.

Now what is essential to note is that from the 12th century to the late 15th century, there were several political power centers in Russia, and Moscow's pre-eminence as the chief power center was by no means assured.  (Indeed, even later in Russian history, the center of political power was moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and was not moved back permanently until 1917.)  Thus it was that after the fall of Constantinople, there were a number of Russian power centers (such as Tver and Novgorod) vying for the mantle of "the third Rome" to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the second Rome.  The ecclesiastical supporters of each of these power centers sought to bolster these claims by lending the weight of the support of the Russian Orthodox church to each power center's claim.

The victory of Ivan the Terrible over all other rivals (and over Tatar invaders) cemented Moscow's place as the center of an empire, and in the eyes of many Russian orthodox clerics, this cemented the place of Moscow (and eventually of Russia) as the heir to the mantle of the Third Rome.  However, to see how this conception of Russian identity influenced and guided Russian domestic and foreign policy from Ivan onward, you'll have to wait until next week (unless you want to do some research yourself).  Unfortunately, I am out of time today.