Topic: The American Soviet

[charlesoakwood]

Victor Davis Hanson

In the American Soviet, only two questions remain.

    Do these double lives of ours make a sort of sense: Is it that the official utopian rhetoric about love among the masses offers psychological compensation for our private self-interested skepticism about the nature of man?
    Or is the daily lie a modern Western rather than an enduring human phenomenon — our 21st-century leisure and affluence infecting us with intellectual and moral boredom, in which we long ago outsourced our collective morality to our bureaucratic overseers as we busied ourselves with far more enjoyable private indulgences?

HT: TheOtherMcCain[/url

]

[Pandora]

We?  There's no "we" in Hanson's piece, afaic, there's "they", but certainly no I.

[IronDioPriest]

We?  There's no "we" in Hanson's piece, afaic, there's "they", but certainly no I.

There is a collective "we" though, as in, the American people. Generalizations can be drawn about the ebb and flow of the culture over time. I thoroughly believe that America's strength has become her possible downfall. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs underpins and drives human behavior, and cultural trends are made of collective human behavior, (a multitude of individual exceptions notwithstanding).

Our strength has led to security and wealth, which have led us to be ever-increasingly occupied with dalliances, diverted from those values and behaviors which connected us to our greatness. "We" have allowed ourselves to be concerned with things that have no importance or connection to what made us great. When an entire culture is unconcerned with where the next meal is coming from, of from where the next horde will attack, it can occupy itself with XBox360, American Idol, MTV, and whether or not homosexuals deserve to be treated like heterosexuals. A culture that doesn't need to replace the dying due to illness and war can occupy itself with childless sex, and devaluing life. A culture that wants for nothing finds it easy to turn away from God.

You and I would turn the culture and country away from these grave errors if we could. But even so, I know I've participated somewhat in allowing the seduction of dalliance and distraction to overtake the nuts and bolts of life. I can't even say that it is wrong to do so. Obviously there's a point at which it becomes wrong. But we strive to make life better, more comfortable, safer, and more enjoyable. When we build that life, who can blame us for wanting to live in it? Yet we built it, and it took scant generations for us to forget what it took, what it cost, and how fleeting it is.

When I am fortunate enough to find myself in the presence of people from the WWII generation, or who were children during the Great Depression, I find myself in the presence of people who are touch with the great spirit of this country in more tangible ways than I am. Same thing when I am in the presence of people who were under the former Soviet Bloc. They know what it's like to live according to a hierarchy of needs that a very high percentage of Americans cannot relate to in any way.

That is the collective "we", and you and I are a part of it whether we like it or not.

ETA: This was a SoC riff in response to your comment Pan, not the article. I haven't read the article yet.

[Pandora]

Get back to me after you've read the piece.  I have never indulged in the double-life, two-speak which he describes and I will not assume responsibility, nor guilt, for it by way of the collective "we".

Just as "we" did not elect Obama - THEY DID.

[Alphabet Soup]

That rending sound you may be hearing is our social compact giving way. It's been tugged this way and that, fretted after, picked at, and inexorably reduced to shreds. And it's about to give way.

We no longer like each other in this country, and don't care that we don't care. The "givens" - that we would hew to the 'Golden Rule', that we would pay our taxes, that we would at least try to act with dignity and treat each other with respect would result in reciprocity by our fellow Americans have lost their warrant.

Increasingly 'treat others as you would be treated' has morphed itself into 'get your licks in first'. People that I have seen behave peerlessly for their entire lives are suddenly asking why they shouldn't cheat the government saying, "Why not - everybody else is going it?" And get it quick before it's all used up.

The last time I saw anything resembling our current surroundings I was living a stone's throw away from Cuba and it was 1962. My parents were stoic but us kids could tell they were scared. We did our drills and listened to the sober and somber faces reciting the news on TV. And prayed that things didn't go as so many predicted it would.

I wonder if there are any of our 'leaders' who seriously understand how close to total collapse we are? There are only two voices with national prominence - Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh - who ever speak of the coming disaster. Do any of these people that pretend to be our leaders realize how many of us have given up on them? Who distrust all of them and doubt their competence, much less their sincerity?

I bet a great number of them would be shocked at the number of American citizens who are actively preparing for the complete collapse of social order. People who no longer have faith in their leaders, in their government, or their country.

That son of a bytch flipped us all the bird again this week with his petulant demonstration of his alleged birth certificate. The smug bastard thinks he's looking down his beak at us and doesn't realize that, in truth most of us down GAS about his BC - it doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day he's still a feckless lying piece of sh!t.

I don't know if these were the sort of thoughts VDH wished to inspire, but they're are what he gets.

edit: altard proofed (I'm weary!)

[IronDioPriest]

Get back to me after you've read the piece.  I have never indulged in the double-life, two-speak which he describes and I will not assume responsibility, nor guilt, for it by way of the collective "we".

Just as "we" did not elect Obama - THEY DID.

OK, just read it. Am I misreading this VDH piece when I say it seems to me like his tongue is ever-so-slightly implanted in his cheek? It seems to me that the entire piece is a commentary on the double-life the Left must live in order to maintain the house of cards, while using the assumptive "we" meaning; "Soviet America" as a rhetorical tool. That's my take, although I found this to be one of VDH's more disjointed pieces.

I liked my take better.
 

[RickZ]

We?  There's no "we" in Hanson's piece, afaic, there's "they", but certainly no I.

VDH is correct on the doublethink point:

We are living in another Soviet, a 21st-century sort in which we nod to official pieties and mouth politically correct banalities while in our private lives, for our safety, well-being — and sanity — we conduct ourselves according to altogether different premises. In the Soviet Union, the anonymous masses turned out to hear boilerplate praise for socialist comradeship, while those of them who were lucky enough to have a car took off the windshield wipers when they parked it — accepting both that their utopian state could not supply affordable replacement auto parts and that their comrades would steal almost anything they could from other suffering subjects.

How many of among us truly say what we think anymore?  Political correctness, that creation of American soviets, is a verbal straitjacket into which we all conform to one degree or another, many to a ridiculous degree as in plugging their ears when it comes to acknowledging the voluminous numbers of deadly attacks perpetrated by the Religion of Peace.  Or thinking that the transgender making use of the female restroom at the Baltimore McDonald's pushed the social contract envelope and to complain about the results of her actions smacks of hubris to the nth degree.

Our brains have now been divided into two kinds of speech/talk:  That speech we say among friends not for public consumption, and that speech we censor for public consumption.  That self-censorship is disingenuously insidious and quite pervasive; heck, whole departments at corporations are devoted to such nonsense.

So that collective 'we' is, IMO, correct.  WE have allowed the politically correct self-censorship to happen, and WE are now its thought prisoners, subject to banishment to the Gulag for deviating from such party line dogma.

In the American Soviet, only two questions remain. Do these double lives of ours make a sort of sense: Is it that the official utopian rhetoric about love among the masses offers psychological compensation for our private self-interested skepticism about the nature of man? Or is the daily lie a modern Western rather than an enduring human phenomenon — our 21st-century leisure and affluence infecting us with intellectual and moral boredom, in which we long ago outsourced our collective morality to our bureaucratic overseers as we busied ourselves with far more enjoyable private indulgences?

I vote for the latter.

[ToddF]

'treat others as you would be treated' has morphed itself into 'get your licks in first'

Is that your own line?  Damn, that one is good.

[Libertas]

Let's resume this talk once leisure and affluence are referred to in the past tense...

...or maybe that won't be possible...

 

[Pandora]

How many of among us truly say what we think anymore?  Political correctness, that creation of American soviets, is a verbal straitjacket into which we all conform to one degree or another, many to a ridiculous degree as in plugging their ears when it comes to acknowledging the voluminous numbers of deadly attacks perpetrated by the Religion of Peace.  Or thinking that the transgender making use of the female restroom at the Baltimore McDonald's pushed the social contract envelope and to complain about the results of her actions smacks of hubris to the nth degree.

Our brains have now been divided into two kinds of speech/talk:  That speech we say among friends not for public consumption, and that speech we censor for public consumption.

That's a fair point and may be the reason why I'm considered rude, crude and socially unacceptable.  I refuse to do that.

That self-censorship is disingenuously insidious and quite pervasive; heck, whole departments at corporations are devoted to such nonsense.

I believe you've hit on the point with the vast majority here.

[charlesoakwood]

At the office or with clients or the Little League game what does one do?
One could not exist in those environments without acknowledging "the American Soviet" as fact.
How on deals with it in "free time" is another thing.

[Pandora]

At the office or with clients

I've already acknowledged the obvious difficulty there.  One does not pay lip service; one just has no comment.

... or the Little League game what does one do?
One could not exist in those environments without acknowledging "the American Soviet" as fact.
How on deals with it in "free time" is another thing.

As far as I'm concerned, at the Little League game IS one's "free time".

One has the choice of playing along, not saying anything, or speaking up to protect one's internal integrity.  I choose to speak out and damned them if they don't like it.

It's been well noted by Soviet dissidents and defectors the immense demoralizing effect on society as a whole, and the individual in particular, as a result of feigned public obeisance to the government's view of "reality".  Wills were broken through the forcing of denying the evidence of one's own eyes.

Star Trek:  "There are FOUR lights".

And we wonder why we, as a society and as a people, have no will to defend our history and culture.

[charlesoakwood]

And we wonder why we, as a society and as a people, have no will to defend our history and culture.

You exposed the problem.  Your we, I'm afraid, is our small group and other small communities.  The American "society" is fat, lazy, and ignorant.  They are all too something.  Too busy, too tired, they are everything but too patriotic; they do not understand patriotism requires study and work, not simply standing when the Flag passes.

[Pandora]

I have to disagree again, Charles.

The "Birther" movement is alive and well and are a visible sign that "we" are not "they", with the expected opprobrium, demonization, marginalization and name-calling in full view.

The Tea Parties are another sign that the push-back against the view presented in "The American Soviet" is more widespread than we're led to believe.  The "we" in "The American Soviet" inhabits are institutions, government and corporate, and many of the churches, but a good majority are unwilling to cooperate any longer.

Samizdat.

[charlesoakwood]

Samizdat.