Repressed societies are well aware of their shortcomings, which of course are plenty, and in their everyday existence they exhibit a certain envy toward free societies, which expresses itself, most commonly, in their susceptibility to corruption. The latter is normally kept in check by surpluses of topical repression, but, on occasion, when the authorities are lax, it gets out of hand. A good example of this are the last three decades of the USSR. In my 1981 letter to Soviet Foreign Minister and family friend, Andrei Andreevich Gromyko, I emphasized the fact that although I was ready to accept some measure of repression as a logical feature of Soviet society, the tolerance of corruption in repressive societies deprives repression of its social legitimacy and thus leads to a degeneration of any such repressive state which condones it.
Here is a fine point about totalitarian society, that its internal (“ideally” repressed, but occasionally allowed to raise its head for practical “prophylactic” reasons) opposition behaves much more honorably under plain repression than when the safety valve is activated to let out the steam. The yearning for abstract “freedom,” if there is none, can be admirably heroic, but as soon as some of such freedom is allowed, it immediately and horribly degenerates, primarily into a will to make money, as much of it as the “freedom” allows. The ugly lesson of the 1990’s, in Yeltsin’s post-Soviet Russia, is still fresh, and, so far, deliberately perpetuated, and the currently still operational West-related Russian “freedom industry,” mostly located in Moscow, serves as a bogeyman for the general population, to remind the ordinary people what “freedom” really means for the country that suffers from it, and for the smart alecks who practice it and prosper.
But, as I mentioned earlier, this ugly type of “freedom” did not start with Yeltsin. Corruption started under Khrushchev already, and was on an ascending line through Brezhnev’s years, reaching obscene proportions in the late 1970’s -- early 1980’s, thus making the collapse of the USSR predictable a full decade before the fact...
So much for the “freedom envy,” let us now say a few words about its opposite, the “totalitarian envy.”
Ironically, “envy” is a two-way street, and free societies, too, are aware of their shortcomings; and in their existence they too exhibit a certain envy toward repressive societies, which expresses itself most commonly in their move toward repression. A highly instructive example of this was the United States under the Bush-Cheney Administration. In fact, the Cheney logic expressed by him on numerous occasions, reveals exactly the kind of repression-envy which has a solid logic in it, and can easily push a free society into the excesses of repression, disguised as a national security emergency state. Needless to say, the tragedy of 9/11/2001 did not help the cause of freedom. A decade down the road, with the ridiculous pat-downs of children and grandmothers in American airports, racial profiling out of control, security cameras and wiretaps invading free people’s privacy, freedom of speech curtailed in many ways, both subtle and not so subtle, the beast of repression is well satisfied with the sacrifice brought to its altar by the freedom-challenged West, defeating and humiliating the semi-clad maiden made invincible only through her defenselessness…
(Rest assured, each free state has its legitimate national security concerns, and has a perfect right to pursue them without becoming a “national security state” in the process. In my 1983 letter to President Reagan, I pointed out America’s main national security interest at the time, which was to be properly prepared for the imminent generational change in the Kremlin, and thus to be able to influence these events in a positive, as opposed to exploitative, way. [This letter, in my recollection, will be posted on my blog at a later date.] At the same time, however, both privately and publicly, in my lectures and published articles, I was repeatedly warning against allowing reasonable national security concerns to be pushed beyond their necessary limits, to result in the phenomenon of the “national security state.”)
Heroic totalitarianism and magnificent freedom... are they, just like iron, incapable of surviving in pure form? Apparently, such is the case, although by the same token as we can still talk of “iron,” we can still talk about “free society,” and also dream of a perfect social “totality” without having to use the “tainted word”!
It is useful to understand that each of these two types of social organization has its considerable advantages and no less significant shortcomings. It is just as easy in a free society to criticize yourself for exactly the same deficiencies, the absence of which constitutes the core advantage of the repressive societies, and vice versa. It is necessary, however, to remember the famous Churchillian dictum to the effect that democracy is the worst type of social organization, except that its alternative is unacceptable.
Just as a national security state within a free society defeats the messy yet precious purpose of freedom, the main and perhaps only rationale of a repressive society is defeated by its relaxation, to the extent that it will allow corruption and other vices of a free society to creep into it through the loophole of freedom-envy. To each their own (“suum quique”), and if we choose freedom, we must also take its downside together with the upside; and, by the same token, if we choose repression, we must forego the excesses of freedom.
Otherwise, we degenerate.
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