Deceptive Dichotomies - Cold War Myth
The solar perspective requires a
step backwards. To paraphrase, we often
cannot see the forest, for we are the trees.
Taking a step back from our immersion in everyday events allows us to
see the world's evolution as a seamless montage. A great barrier to tackling modern problems is our failure to see
through many a false dichotomy. These
false dichotomies are sets of ideas in artificial opposition jointly dominating
the way we look at things. The seeming
intractability of many problems can be traced to false dichotomies.
These mental traps are multiply
deceiving. They entice us at once to
believe there are exactly two sides to every question, that the two sides are
mutually exclusive, and that if there is no fully satisfactory answer on either
side, none is possible. We are forced
to choose a side in every controversy, fight for points as if in a sporting
event, ignore any validity on the other side, and win or lose in the forum of
human events. Our vision of life thus
becomes a distorted, upside down version of the outlook of those who devote
themselves to some sport or another.
For them, sports is life. For
the rest of us, life becomes sport.
Winning and losing become more important than being right or doing what
is right.
A major false dichotomy of the 20th
Century has been the contest between capitalism and communism. The myth of their opposition served both as
excuse to resist reform. The reality of
these false foes has been far more similar than believers in either could ever
admit. Under each system, wealth and
economic power are centralized in a very few hands. In each, those who play the game, go along with the charade,
applaud the righteousness of their system, and ignore its shortcomings, tend to
get ahead. Those with opposing
viewpoints are at best ignored. At
worst, people with opposing points of view have lost jobs, freedom, even their lives.
The Cold War is widely seen as a
contest between these two economic systems, with victory for capitalism. Marvelous.
A generation of the world risked armageddon to prove it is better for
Disney's president to pay himself a hundred million a year than for Brezhnev's
successor to enjoy the fruits of a "communist" system which resembled
nothing so much as an enormous, inept, monopolistic corporation.
The great victory of the Cold War
was democracy over totalitarianism. The
people of Russia, after their millennial sleep, finally cast off the tyranny of
tsars and politburos for the democratic right to choose their own leaders and,
at least indirectly, their own fate. This
is a victory worth celebrating. If
Europe, East and West, could only create a unity with the legal authority and
power to protect their freedoms and stop the civil wars, victory would be
complete.
A lesser victory has emerged
unexpectedly in the West. The end of
the Cold War brought down the paranoia levels.
They had already dropped from the 50's highs through the relative lows
of the 60's and 70's and were up again some in the 80's, but have now reached a
dramatic new low in the 90's. The first
U.S. Administration elected after the Cold War was, naturally enough, the first
that had any real chance of passing national health insurance. Every U.S. president since FDR gave
lip-service to some form of national health insurance. Only now, with the International safely
buried, do we feel free to seriously discuss what we wanted to do for a
generation.
Elements of the false dichotomy
linger. The communal aspects of
national health insurance remain suspect.
We will only have fully cast off our blinders when we can see and
acknowledge not only the flaws in our system, but the one great truth among the
many falsehoods of communism, a truth as American as any. It is a truth we deny whenever we avert our
gaze from the notion of any kind of national industrial policy.
The building of America, from land
grants to railroads to rural electrification and beyond, always involved
some form of national industrial policy.
Government, business and the general public planned and worked together
to build the future. The one great
truth that communism twisted into a horrible lie is that a people can choose
their future, plan their destiny, and then build it.
Free of the narrow thinking of the
false dichotomy, we can come to see the Cold War for what it was: two great nations, whose histories and
geographies placed them at opposite ends of a liberal/progressive-conservative/
authoritarian spectrum which stretched from Europe's American branches to the
deepest, darkest roots in central Eurasia.
Evolved as their historical natures dictated, they contested for the
heart of the world. It brought out the
best and the worst in each. Russia's
worst was finally defeated, not by America's best, but by Russia's best. The Russian people finally realized, and
forced their government to realize, that democracy is not an American plot or a
Western monopoly. Democracy belongs to
the world. Likewise freed of the myths
of the dichotomy, American democracy has wiped away some of its worst, opening
to new ideas.
Victory in the Cold War was a
victory for America and Russia, a victory of truth over darkness,
ultimately, a victory for all humankind.
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