Superpower Syndrome

Having for 12 years lived in the former Soviet Union - and for 18 years in America - I have seen a malignancy shared by many citizens of both countries. I refer to it as the Superpower Syndrome.

The affliction manifests in slightly different forms in the two countries, but its essence is similar. The afflicted believes that, because his country is great, he is great just by virtue of having been born in that country and needs to do nothing whatsoever in order to make himself great. The possessor of Superpower Syndrome claims unconditional greatness as derived from his country and believes he does not need to develop intelligence, wisdom, goodness, or personal cultivation, and indeed that such things are against his country. Instead he derives his concept of greatness from his concept of patriotism - manifest in tunnel vision, barbarism, cruelty, ignorance and hatred of everything existing outside his home.

The afflicted might believe different things and mouth different dogmas. The American may say "Money talks, bullsh*t walks"; the Soviet may have said "he fears me, that means he respects me." The American may tell his children to say "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all"; the Soviet taught his children to say "proletariats of all countries unite." What both societies had in common, was the belief that they catered to the lowest common denominator - and as such were arbiters of reality, humanity and life itself. And both, in pursuit to the aforementioned beliefs, trivialized, demonized or destroyed everything that is more subtle, or less easily quantifiable, or requiring an attention span greater than that of an average TV commercial to understand.

This of course has been the very worst feature of both superpowers. An American may believe that people who rightly appreciate - and draw into their lives - the appealing ideas and customs of other civilization is a poser. A Soviet may have said that the same person was the enemy of the proletariat. An American may believe that personal cultivation (as pursued in cultures such as France and Japan) is wussy or weakening. A Soviet may have said that such things were bourgeois. Having both received their political systems from erudite, finely cultivated intellectuals (Jefferson and Franklin in America; Marx and Lenin in USSR), they both turned viciously and barbarically anti-intellectual and anti-artistic, claiming the same to be artifacts of aristocracy rather than a natural human right - a pursuit that develops the people into the best they can be and enriches, invigorates, and gives wisdom, color and bounty to the countries and the citizens of the countries, whatever their income level and profession.

Both, in the process, have seen quite hideous demagoguery. As the Soviets referred to luxury, sexuality and prosperity as vices of capitalism, so have American demagogues sought to portray intellectual, philosophical and artistic perspectives as being elitist or un-American. Whether or not they are elitist, or "vices of capitalism," is beside the point. All that the Soviets attacked in their demagoguery - and all that Americans have attacked in the same vein - enriches human existence and elevates it to a level above the "bottom line," however that is defined in each country. Furthermore, it gives expression to the most magnificent in the human being and allows it to do what it naturally seeks to do: Add color and beauty and elegance to human existence and make our world an improvement on nature and not a degradation.

The truly obnoxious feature of Superpower Syndrome - afflicted individual is his equation of swinishness, cruelty, barbarism and sheer idiocy with morality. Believing himself to speak for human nature, he attacks, destroys and demonizes all aspects of human nature other than ones his country espouses as human nature while grotesquely indulging the aspects of human nature his country believes to be bottom line. An American who wants something other than acquisition of property, and a Soviet who wanted something other than to serve the state, comes under hideous and vicious attack - not because they are in any objective sense wrong (they are not), but rather because they violate the respective nation's ideological concept of what is human - and, by violating the nation's dogma of what is human (and consequently its pretense of being the unchallenged provider for fulfillment of human nature) constitute a blow to the very ideological precepts on which the country's claim to legitimacy is based.

In pursuing the Superpower Syndrome, the afflicted of course harms his country far more than he helps it. To keep out of one's country the good ideas of other countries, is to fail to incorporate wisdom, insight and genius that exists elsewhere and lead one's country to fall behind. To keep people from developing the beautiful, the thoughtful, and the artistic, is to impoverish the experience of the people and to turn one's country into something hideous and grotesque while failing to incorporate ideas that form spontaneously in the culture. To keep people from developing cultivation, is likewise to impoverish human experience. And to say that one thing is human nature or bottom line, while everything else is not, is to do grave violence and grave disservice to humanity and especially to one's own country.

When the Soviet Union fell, many possessors of the Soviet version of Superpower Syndrome were left in a pretty bad place - a place that of course they had richly merited. America has so far been able to avoid similar fate due to a more intelligently designed system, but it has had a number of close calls. I still encounter Superpower Syndrome among American people, and that is something that I believe intelligent Americans ought to combat. The Superpower Syndrome is a drain and a blight, not a benefit, for the country, and in destroying the best that appears in the culture it leads to its long-term ruin.