Have We Become What We Fought?

 Nietzsche warned us against becoming what we fought.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 

Reading Gary Shteyngart's ‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’ (The Guardian), I am left thinking we have become what we fought in the Soviet Union. I have read a little of Shteyngart (Lake Success; which I liked), but learned more of him and his ideas from reading his Guardian essay. It left me much bothered this morning, cutting through the blurriness I feel this morning from a malfunctioning body.

I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel, Vera, or Faith, is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future with fairly good aim in novels such as Super Sad True Love Story, where social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and change.

Born in America, my ancestors long-established here (the Haslers came last, in 1849), I feel myself completely unprepared for the Trumpist Era. I find the pejorative "woke" a meaningless term; DEI strikes me as not an evil but a fulfillment of America's dedication to equality and to Christian morality, but its opponents strike me a people with bad consciences; and the sheer bad manners and stupid ideas have left me wondering if I ever understood my fellow Americans. 

But before I wrote that book, there was a period of some optimism where, I confess, I got things terribly wrong. I imagined, in my least cynical moments, that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently Afrikaner. Politicians in all countries lie, but the Russian and American floods of lies are not just harbingers of a malevolent ideology, they are the ideology.

And here is where looking at things from a different perspective, even looking for that perspective, is important for our mental health, for our education. Reading Shteyngart's comparison of America with Russia makes sense when it was shoved into my ace.

Of course, there are large, some would say crucial differences between the Soviet Union of the 1970s and the Trumpistan that America has become today. Much as the comparisons of the contemporary United States with Hitler’s Germany are incomplete (though getting more complete by the day), Russia and America are hardly twins either. And yet, their increasing similarities raise the question of how the similarities that seemed nonexistent at the end of the cold war are becoming unavoidable now.

To start with, these are vast lands that stretch from sea to sea. Their size alone is enough to fuel messianic complexes, manifest destinies, divine rights. And religion, which can easily morph into ideology and then violence, drives the stupidity of both nations. In both societies, religion helped normalise the bondage of other human beings: slavery in America and the institution of serfdom in Russia. Inequality is baked into the national psyche of both, despite Russia’s experiments with state socialism: the idea that human beings must be parsed into a multitude of categories. Obviously, other countries have caste systems, but none has the capacity to impose its worldview on the rest of the globe with such stubborn resilience. The Soviet Union loudly professed the brotherhood of nations, but Russian racism remained thick and outlandish on the ground (ask almost any African exchange student), and was converted with great ease into a hatred of Ukrainians, with Russian television using animated images of Ukrainians rolling in the mud with pigs and references to a racial slur that can be compared with the worst used in the States.

Trumpistan dives right into this morass with the falsehood that some commonplace tattoos found on Venezuelan bodies supposedly signify gang orientation, but really emphasising that some people – brown or black or non-Christian or non-straight – can never fully claim the mantle of Americanness. There are, indeed, “exceptional” Americans, those that look like Trump and much of his coterie, and then there are those who semi-belong, or who may stay as long as they are useful, and then there are those who don’t belong at all and can be deported at will.

I cling to the belief that we, the people, will prevent us from fully rebuking our creed contained in the Declaration of Independence. Unlike Russia, unlike Weimar Germany, unlike the Italy welcoming Mussolini, ours is not a country ruled from above, we set in motion our changes. The Tsar freed the serfs; the people of the North freed the slaves. That a plurality of the country wants to be ruled from on high is sad, even if part of human nature. That they will let themselves be buggered for the privilege of being ruled is pathetic.

Aphorism 146. “Whoever fights monsters should see to…  by Nathan Barrett (Medium)

In this sense, as we search and fight for good, we might ultimately find ourselves using the “tools” of the monsters we had set out to fight, and thus becoming a monster to a new hero. For, it is also the case that the enantiodromia presides not only over the psyche but in the interactions of the collective of psyches in our world. Furthermore, when a hero looks long into an abyss, the abyss also looks back into him, and, perhaps, that abyss in each of us learns how to undo the hero’s “hero-ness”, because even the worst tyrant believes himself to be a hero in disguise, if not an outright performer of good altogether.³

Can we rise to meet our better angels?

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (The Avalon Project)

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