Supersocieties

In a sense, our basic context and our frame of analysis for international affairs is the Cold War. And what the Cold War has done is centralize power into two distinct and resolute “centers of significance” as Stalin argued. To borrow from C. Wright Mills: “The history of modern society may most readily be understood as the story of the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power.” 

Corporations and militaries have replaced artisans and nobles, as Mills noted. But modernization is most significant in the two “centers of significance” which Stalin had highlighted, namely, the United States and Russia. To borrow from Mills yet again:

“Before World War II several nations made international history; when that was the case, war was easier to explain as the blind result of their fatal interplay. But now when there are only two – and everything between them is practically a political vacuum – the making of history is more centralized and more open to the politics of explicit decision.” 

The power of both the United States and Russia “have now become international in scope and similar in form.” In other words, we are dealing with two “supersocieties” who exceed all others in reach and scale and scope. Basic order and organization in both supersocieties “becomes less political and more bureaucratic” to borrow from Mills. Both are “less the locale of a struggle than an object to be managed.” But as a result of all of this, the fact of the matter is that “something has gone wrong.” And the reason for why something has gone wrong is the intellectual climate in both supersocieties, or the lack thereof. To borrow from Mills:

“There is no set of free and influential intellectuals in either country – in or out of the universities – that carries on the big discourse of the Western world. There are no truly independent minds that are directly relevant to powerful decisions.” 

In short, it is all about bureaucracy in these two supersocieties, not democracy. Academia and media are in the business of turning everything into a market that “trivializes” everything. In turn, these bureaucratic machines are “geared for war” to borrow from Mills. Both view total war and their gearing for it as “hardheaded, practical, inevitable, and realistic conceptions.” As a result, and as we have mentioned in the past, both supersocieties are a “mirror image” of one another, given that both are essentially bureaucratic machines which have nothing in mind except for gearing for total war. To borrow from Mills yet again:

“In surface ideology they apparently differ; in structural trend and in official action they become increasingly alike. Not ideology but industrial and military technology, geared to total war, may well determine that the dreams of each will in due course be found in the realities of the other.” 

The very real cultural differences between America and Russia are diminished by their huge bureaucratic machines. For instance, freedom – the ideal which is central to American culture – is reduced to nothing as a result of the bureaucratization of American society. To borrow from Mills: “Certainly, in America today, there is much more celebration and defense of civil liberties than insurgent and effective use of them.” The epoch of democratic liberalism in the West has long ended. In sum, and to borrow from Mills yet again, the conditions for freedom “do not flourish in the West.”