We here have discussed the ties and similarities between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both are societies that sprang out of the Enlightenment. Both have taken up industrialization and technological development as the keys to human progress, replacing God with the Machine. In their development and competition, the two societies have been closely linked. To the USSR, the USA served as a negative model of capitalist exploitation and imperialism (while it did its own “good” exploitation and destructive modernization across territories of the USSR). At the same time, the USA also provided a positive model for development and the picture of the good life for the USSR to follow — everyone wanted what the USA had! To the USA, the USSR provided a negative model of authoritarianism and centralized society (while the USA also pursued authoritarian policies and waged terrible wars of “freedom” around the world). At the same time, the USSR provided a kind of positive fear factor of what could happen if capitalism ran without some kind of socialistic/collectivistic softening, thus helping prop up socialistic aspects of American life and allowing “individualism” to keep functioning. On this part, you could say that a toiling worker in a factory in Magnitogorsk did as much (or more) for the American baby boomer than he did for his own society. There is more to say on this… but to put it simply, the USA and the USSR functioned as a single meta-national unit, linked and coevolving — which is why America entered terminal decline once its USSR ceased to exist and has had to in essence resurrect it again.
I write all this because I’ve been getting a bit into Carl Jung and was surprised to see that he sees the “Cold War” much the same way as I do. But he sees it through his theory of the Shadow — the shadow self projected onto the cultural/political space.
Here is what he wrote in the early 1960s:1
If, for a moment, we regard mankind as one individual, we see that the human race is like a person carried away by unconscious powers; and the human race also likes to keep certain problems tucked away in separate drawers. But this is why we should give a great deal of consideration to what we are doing, for mankind is now threatened by self-created and deadly dangers that are growing beyond our control. Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic, with the Iron Curtain marking the symbolic line of division. Western man, becoming aware of the aggressive will to power of the East, sees himself forced to take extraordinary measures of defense, at the same time as he prides himself on his virtue and good intentions.
