The philosophical law of unity and conflict of opposites, equally, like the Chinese thesis “let a hundred flowers bloom”, specify to us the main path of development of both mankind in general, and each country separately. Only a society that does not suppress internal contradictions can move forward, develop, achieve new victories, and overcome crises.
Free discussion allows at an early stage, even prior to realisation, to reveal the weaknesses of any (including social, political, ideological) project, to improve it, and to avoid many mistakes. Nobody managed to avoid all mistakes, but for the success of any business it is desirable to prevent as many as possible from happening in advance.
Most people are designed so that having accepted a certain point of view, they not only can’t give it up, but they don’t want to see even the obvious flaws of a political model that is dear to their hearts. Such people form the basis of society. They provide its stability. But, if they also defined the rules of every day life, we would still be huddled in caves and hunting small rodents with sticks and stone flints. Even fire would be a taboo, because it is in this way it was established by the ancestors and it is not for us to judge them. We live as our fathers and grandfathers lived.
But in any society there is always the minimum layer of the people wanting change. Each of them considers that its social model is capable of sharply improving the lives of people. As a rule, all of them (each separately) are mistaken, and social experiments on the creation of a “new fair world” fail. Simply because everyone understands justice in their own way, and the more complex the society, the more disagreements about what “new world” will actually be fair. However, in cases when society manages to depart from the desire of uniformity and to ensure a free discussion and free competition of different models of development, each of them (models), following the results of a discussion and free political competition, is more appropriate to the needs of society, and the people and the country get an incentive to advance development without severe shocks.
Why so?
Because each certain individual (or group of like-minded people) see justice in their own way, from their own social, professional, and educational “bell tower”. Ask a professional football player (without whom society, in principle, will cope) why he has to receive an order of magnitude or two more than the Chief of the General Staff of the army protecting the country, and he will intelligibly and logically explain to you both the difficulties of the profession (injury risk, rather early termination of career, lack of pension), and the “fairness” of his remuneration – he also helps you relieve stress, and at the same time provides a great space for advertising, which is the engine of trade, and without trade it is impossible to develop the economy, and without a strong economy it is impossible to maintain an army. And not everyone will guess that football players, and also football, and even high-performance sports (not to be confused with physical education and amateur sports) don’t provide the sole opportunity for stress relief, and for advertising too. The most important thing is that the football player will be sure of his correctness, because nowhere else can he earn so well, and no person considers it fair to reduce the level of well-being that they have already achieved. A forced reduction of this level occurs within the framework of the whole society and only in the era of great shocks: war, revolution, global natural disaster, etc.
Respectively, when we choose some doctrine as the “only true” one and we introduce it as the standard for all of society, we drive the country and the people into the procrustean bed of the vital purposes and needs of one social group, even if it is the most numerous. The proletariat therefore did not start to defend the collapsing Soviet Union because by the time the latter had disappeared, the workers and collective farmers were there, but the proletariat had already gone – the majority of people consciously or unconsciously wanted more than the proletarian state could give them.
For the same reason, modern Russia, being weaker in terms of resources than the USSR was, has achieved much greater success and provides much greater social stability than in the late Union, where all (from the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the CPSU, to the watchman in the almshouse) were dissatisfied with something. In Russia, too, there is plenty of dissatisfied people, and we can say that everyone is at least dissatisfied with something (like in any state). But due to the attitude to search for a compromise, and not to suppress the opposing point of view, conditions have been created where any dissatisfied person sees an opportunity to implement their ideas within the current state structure, and not by destroying it. Therefore, the marginal opposition, which advocates the destruction of the Russian state, cannot understand why it is doing everything correctly, but cannot get the desired result. Its adherents regularly highlight and spread in the information space really problematic issues (and if non exist, then they create the problems), and the people do not support them. They do not rise to fight against the government, and they even call the opposition themselves the fifth column, demanding that the government jail them “in a proper way”, until the “kind Russian people” themselves have outweighed the opposition.
The Russian opposition does not even understand that it is alive only because the authorities, for the benefit of maintaining an ideological variety, protects them from the people’s wrath and ensures the presence of their point of view in the information space. If the Russian opposition, above all expectations, can overthrow the current government, it will be the first to fall victim to the people’s anger, without having time to understand why.
Exactly the same thing can be observed in the West. As long as the Soviet Union was strong and the ideas of socialism were attractive to a large part of the population of western states, the ruling strata of these countries had to provide space for broad public discussion. They tolerated the social democratic and communist parties. And even allowed their members not only in parliament, but also in the structure of ruling coalitions and even in ministerial posts, on the condition of abandoning the pursuit of a revolution.
Broad public discussion allowed western society to reveal problems at an early stage and to develop measures to neutralise them. Hence the myth of the inviolability of the Western political system, which any crisis only reinforces. But with the collapse of the USSR and the onset of a brief and inglorious era of American hegemony, some Western elites decided that they could no longer fool themselves with ideological diversity. Almost all systemic parties, regardless of their “taste, colour and size” (from right-wing conservatives to socialists and euro-communists) have adopted the left-liberal ideology of globalism and universal tolerance. Less than 30 years later, the West is forced to admit the failure of its geopolitical strategy. A growing number of its own experts and even top politicians predict its imminent collapse, and the biggest pessimists claim that we are already standing on the ruins of Western civilisation. This is not quite true, there are healthy forces on both the right and left flanks, but there were healthy forces in the USSR as well. Maybe the Western reformers will be more lucky, but so far they are very much not, but at least there is a chance.
By the way, even the ideologically monolithic Bolsheviks understood the need for a discussion for development. That is why the principle of “democratic centralism”was invented. The idea was quite good – in the beginning all (within the party) freely discuss priorities and paths of development, and after the discussion is over and the majority makes a decision, they implement this decision in good faith. The authors of the idea did not take into account one thing: if democracy is at the bottom, and centralism is at the top, then centralism will crush democracy one or two times, which happened in the USSR as a first approximation towards 1925, and finally towards 1935. After this the “internal party democracy” turned into total approval.
Nothing is given just like that. The poly-ideological system is extremely strict in its management, while a mono-ideological system is able to demonstrate huge mobilisation capabilities that provide an impressive leap in a short period of time, even if it is not very well managed. The problem is that society cannot exist for too long in a mode of extreme tension of all forces and permanent mobilisation. Already during the lifetime of the first “mobilisation” generation, failures start, and the second and third refuse to build a “happy future” at the expense of the normal present. The system goes out of control and starts to imitate mobilisation, running idle at 70% or more.
I will repeat, the poly-ideological system requires highly qualified management personnel. That is precisely why almost all post-revolutionary systems (whether they be established as a result of the bourgeois or proletarian revolution) are mono-ideologic. Revolutionaries disperse old qualified cadres, but they themselves cannot manage a system that is too complex, being drawn towards simplicity. And only after a while (usually in a generation, or even in two or three) when new personnel gain experience and qualifications, the system starts to drift towards poly-ideology. If it manages to complete it, it survives, but if for some reason there is a delay or rollback, the system collapses.
The mono-ideological system has also one more inherent shortcoming. In order to ensure the unity of opinion in society, the state tries to regulate all spheres of life: science, culture, private life, family. Moreover, not only a socialist mono-ideological state has this property. We can see exactly the same approach in the West in recent decades of the dominance of left-liberal, globalist ideology. The only difference is that the familiar socialist state (the USSR) first establishes control over the economy and distribution, and then goes further, but liberal-globalist capitalism first puts personal and social life under control, and then tries to ensure control over all economic processes. But this difference is not significant – whether you put the chicken fillet in the pan before or break the egg first, you will still get chicken with fried eggs.
The systems surrounding Russia today are mono-ideological. And we are not talking about China, which under the leadership of the Communist Party is building as pure a good, old fashioned capitalism we could see. There, the tendency to mono-ideology has only appeared under Xi Jinping, and only so far as a justification of his right to extend his authority in a global crisis, not suffering from excessive fuss. Otherwise, Deng Xiaoping’s precept that it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice sacredly holds true.
Mono-ideologicalness in our time has become the fate of the West, which has a lot of pride in its tolerance. And it has reached such an absurd degree that in the United States, the entire term of office of a legally elected President whose views do not fit into the ideological dogmas accepted by the elite has been hounded.
However, the classic West – the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – still retains (even in a rudimentary form) the tradition of political tolerance for ideological opponents. Trump still became President, and in Western Europe non-systemic traditionalist parties and politicians are gradually becoming systemic, making their way to power and cheerfully pushing liberal globalists.
The main adherents of mono-ideological systems are the limitrophic belt that separates the classical West from Russia. When these states tried (with varying degrees of success) to exist as a part of the general western system, they could not offer the classical West anything but the absolutisation of the mono-ideological left-liberal globalist system (which they worshipped with the zeal of neophytes), as well as caveman Russophobia. Limitrophic regimes are based on these two whales from the Oder to the Seversky Donets, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic. These regimes exist due to the political, military, diplomatic, and financial support of the West. But with the exhaustion of the West’s capabilities in the era of global systemic crisis, they start to experience a state of acute resource scarcity. Ukraine is only the most obvious example of this. Having missed the last carriage of the train leaving for the EU and NATO, Kiev found itself on the platform without money, a ticket, or prospects. Unless, of course, you consider the prospect of queuing for free soup. But exactly the same fate awaits other limitrophes, some a little earlier, some a little later, but all eventually.
The fact is that mono-ideological states cannot be rich in principle – too many resources are spent on maintaining ideological unity. This is, in principle, the main goal of a mono-ideological state – the rest is secondary. We have seen more than once how the mono-ideological West sacrificed economic interests for the sake of ideological chastity, and it was the Eastern European limitrophes who were the choir leaders of this process, and Ukraine completely renounced its sovereignty and voluntarily destroyed its own statehood just to be the most ideologically sterile.
What happens when the limitrophes run out of resources to maintain mono-ideological regimes.
There will be another “revolution”. In most cases, “velvet”, and in some of the most neglected situations – bloody. After that, the “new and honest” governments will turn their eyes to whom? That’s right, to Russia as a source of the resources they need to survive. I repeat, the process is just beginning with today’s Ukraine, which is still trying to bargain with Russia (but it won’t be for long, it will soon be ready for anything). In a few years, the entire limitrophic fraternity, “which has realised and condemned the mistakes and crimes of the previous government”, will be standing in line behind Russia.
Moscow will have an extremely difficult choice, where abandoning limotrophes and leaving them without supervision is not possible, and taking them for maintenance is also not possible. We have already discussed some of the possibilities of a third solution, and they are far from being limited to a single option. The limitrophic mono-ideological band is collapsing too quickly. It takes about a 100 years to calmly, confidently, and profitably digest it in parts, but it will be necessary to solve the problem over the next decade.
In most countries of the region (if not all), Russia at the first stage can only help with good advice or via setting an example. Only the re-creation of blooming political diversity will allow them to start their own reconstruction on their own. And only in this case will they be able, eventually, after reaching a certain level of economic development, after a series of difficult years of independent recovery, to join the eurasian integration mechanisms that allow to accelerate development through a cumulative effect.
If they mechanically change the mono-ideological Russophobia to the same mono-ideological Russophilia, they will continue to try to thrive by selling their political position, only the cheques to pay for their mobilisation along the new “correct” ideological line will be sent not to Brussels or Washington, but to Moscow.
Some will say that if we don’t help them, they will get upset and go to the West. For God’s sake, if the West has the money to buy corrupt love, then let them. But we can only help them by explaining the structure of the political mechanism for achieving national wealth and well-being, and not by paying for all-limitrophic approval. There’s not enough money for that. Even the United States ran out of dollars, and the prosperity of the limitrophes never came.
By the way, in the period between the world wars, the only democracy in Eastern Europe and, at the same time, the richest and most industrially developed country in the region was Czechoslovakia, which also pursued the most adequate foreign policy, and mono-ideological dictatorships, from Poland to Romania, were no more than agricultural and raw materials appendages of the real West.
It is difficult to be independent partners in the international arena. It is also difficult to balance social contradictions within the country. But with the proper qualification of management structures, this can give an amazing result. Like the Su-35, which turned out to be a super-manoeuvrable fighter jet because it is statically unstable, and therefore stable when under strict control.
The limitrophes have little choice: either to adopt a statically unstable poly-ideological system, educate the appropriate managerial personnel, and build a sovereign policy, within the framework of opportunities dictated by weight, size, and geographical location, or queue for admission to the empire (no matter what) and wait (maybe several decades) for a decision on their fate, bearing in mind that in the end they may get a refusal and be left alone with their unsold, useless love.
Rostislav Ishchenko
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