endure hardship, give up their best years, ruin their health, perhaps even give their lives, slaving away designing and building things, fighting and doing all the dirty work. Motivating the needed quantities of people with money is out of the question, because that would not leave enough for the ruling elites to siphon off. The upper classes tend to already be highly motivated by both money and status, but they also tend to be allergic to dirty work, and they can never be numerous enough to satisfy a superpower’s appetite for flesh. The only thing that can possibly provide the necessary motivating force is an idea: a communal myth powerful enough to cause people to commit their insignificant yet essential selves to the righteousness and glory of the great whole. A superpower’s vitality is critically dependent on the sustaining power of this myth. Shortly after it fails, so does the superpower.
Both the Soviet and the American models featured an inclusiveness myth as their centerpiece. In the Soviet case, it was the myth of the classless society. The great revolutionary upheaval was said to have erased class and ethnic distinctions, creating an egalitarian society that provided for everybody’s basic needs, curbed excesses of wealth and allowed people from humble origins to become educated and rise to positions of respect and authority. This myth proved to be so powerful that it propelled a poor, industrializing but still mainly agrarian nation on a trajectory to becoming a leading military and industrial power. As the decades wore on, the myth gradually lost most of its luster. The satisfaction of basic needs gave rise to an insatiable appetite for imported consumer goods, which were either inaccessible or in short supply, except to the elite, and this, in turn, ruined the appearance of egalitarianism. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” went the saying, and morale plummeted. This led to a situation where no new common effort could be organized. As everyone started thinking for themselves, a slow rot set in, and the superpower gradually became enfeebled.
America’s belated and half-hearted answer to the classless society of the Soviets is the middle class society. After wallowing through the Great Depression and grasping at straws during the New Deal, the United States reaped a gigantic windfall following World War II, as the only large industrial player left standing. Much of the rest of the world’s industrial infrastructure had been bombed to rubble, giving the United States an opening. They used it to put every American within striking distance of achieving a cheap simulacrum of landed gentry, symbolized by a detached house surrounded by a patch of land big enough to accommodate private parking, a patch of grass and some shrubbery, and adorned, as an absolute necessity, by one’s own private automobile. American society is classless, at least in theory, since no one wants to admit to being either upper or lower class. There is, supposedly, one large and homogeneous middle class; in fact, though, it has a small upper portion and a large and rapidly expanding lower portion.
The wonderful thing about the American middle class concept is its malleability, because it is almost entirely symbolic. You could be middle class, own an ancestral mansion in an old brick and fieldstone suburb, drive a Mercedes and send your children to an Ivy League school. Or you could be middle class, live in a dolled-up trailer home, drive a souped-up pickup truck and send your children to a community college that teaches them how to milk hogs. The least common denominator is that you have to drive a motor vehicle, otherwise you can no longer perform this charade.
This is why there is so much denial about it being necessary to give up the car and all the current talk about resorting to biofuels to continue feeding the car addiction. Biofuels amount to burning one’s food and destroying what is left of the topsoil in order to continue driving. This is also why so many Americans would forgo a healthy diet, a reasonable work schedule, education for their children, needed medical treatment and even give up their house, rather than give up their car. Not having a car makes one, within the American suburban landscape, a non-person.
The universal right to drive a car is the linchpin of the American communal myth. Once a significant portion of the population finds that cars have become inaccessible to them, the effect on the national psyche may be so profound as to make the country ungovernable. Solving the underlying transportation problem, through the reintroduction of public transportation or other means, is beside the point: the image of the automobile is indelibly imprinted on the national psyche and it will not be easily dislodged. For many, their car is a public extension of their persona, a status symbol and even a symbol of sexual potency, and this makes the automobile, along with the gun, a sacred national fetish. Like the gun, the car is also a potent weapon that can be used for murder or for suicide. It is propelling the American communal myth toward a flaming crash with the reality of permanent fuel shortage, compared to which the gradual fading away of the Soviet communal myth will have been gentle and benign.
Better Living through Science
Both the United States and the Soviet Union aspired to achieving better living through science, staking their very existence on the ability to deliver technological fixes to all manner of existing problems, as well as to all the unforeseen new problems that were created in the course of applying technological fixes to existing problems. The inability to either prevent or successfully mitigate catastrophes, which, in a technology-based civilization, shows up as the inability to deal with a set of technical challenges, eventually destroys the population’s faith in the system. In a society where every kind of prestige and status emanates from the exercise of technical prowess, such failure destroys trust and undermines respect for every kind of authority.
Each of the two superpowers strove to position itself at the forefront of science and technology. It is no surprise, therefore, that science and technology were arenas of serious competition and relentless copying between the superpowers. Americans led in product design; many Soviet research institutes were busy secretly reverse-engineering American-designed products. The Soviets held an advantage in basic science; numerous American PhD candidates laboriously deciphered the Cyrillic of obscure Soviet scientific articles, then scurried back to the lab to reproduce their results. Both superpowers produced impressive results in areas such as energy, power generation, weaponry, shipbuilding and aerospace. Soviet-built capital equipment has proven to be extremely hardwearing and relatively easy to maintain, and Soviet-built motor vehicles, aircraft and plenty of other machinery are still in use throughout Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. In an ironic twist, Soviet-built planes have been pressed into service to resupply American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are uniquely able to handle rutted and cratered runways.
One area of superpower technology competition that was particularly bound up with national prestige was the space race. The two early Russian wins — the first unmanned success of the Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin’s first manned orbital flight — struck fear into the hearts of Americans, causing them to get slightly more serious about learning math and Russian and in due course to counter with the Apollo missions to the moon and other impressive exploits. The Soviet manned space program is alive and well under Russian management and now offers first-ever space charters. (As I write this, a former Microsoft executive is on his way to the International Space Station, accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts, having paid $20 million for the privilege. Once there, he will try making some of Dr. Martha Stewart’s cookie recipes in zero gravity — important scientific work, to be sure!) Americans from the official space program have been hitching rides on the Soyuz as well, while most of their remaining spaceships sat in the shop, plagued by loose heat tiles and cracks in the foam insulation, before finally being retired with nothing to replace them. To be fair, the Americans have been quite successful with their unmanned missions to Mars, fly-by missions to the outer planets and other robotic spacecraft.
The Soviet Union failed to remain technologically competitive in three important technological categories: food production, consumer goods and information technology. None of these factors was lethal on its own, but the combination was quite damaging, to the prestige as well as the pocketbook. It is uncanny that the United States now appears poised to fail in these same categories as well — which is why I chose to include them here.
Industrial Food Production
There is no reason why food production should be relegated to the area
