The previous post stumbled on something interesting. We already knew it, but sort of, it is just that we have to complete the thought so to speak. Which is that we always contrast the USA and Russia. It was a titanic struggle of two alternate universes, and as of 1989, it seemed a contest in which the US hence capitalism won. Fast forward a generation, and what do we find: the very symmetry of two ‘opposites’, but now we see that the issue wasn’t the success of capitalism against socialism, but two failures symmetric in a different way. The US is coming to the kind of gross failure that defeated Russia and its ‘communism’: the symmetry now we can see is the equal failure of the US and its capitalism. The lesson of history is that symmetry of failure. The US seemed triumphant for long, but in the last few years, and especially during this pandemic, we suddenly see the failure of the American way and the symmetry comes full circle in more than a dialectical conflict of opposites: a double failure of two false opposites. It is suddenly transparent to see this double failure. To be sure, Trump is a passing phantom, but the overall constellation of effects shows how disastrously off the American system is, or has become. It is a puzzling situation to see such a sudden and gross finale complete with mass death, latent fascism coming to the fore, incompetent or wilfully malevolent government, the apotheosis of Ayn Rand, and a crash mental or otherwise of conceptual stock in the fading away of the American pretense.
The symmetric failure of Russian and the US tells us something: that we must find something, socialism so-called or not, that reconciles two opposites in their failures…
Darwiniana 