Good Morning Friends,

Can countries go insane? By this I mean can the basic governing structure of a country, as a whole, go insane?

Many people point to the fall of the Soviet Union as the point where we begin to find a real decline in democracy in America. As I mentioned, many people point to the period of 1945-1989 as a kind of golden age in many areas: freedom and diversity of the press; culture (even television was better); education to a certain extent (we remember we talked about the reactionary character of it with the launch of the Soviet Sputnick in 1959, before the United States); workers were better off; and so on.

Left activists like Tariq Ali and Michael Parenti for example advance the argument - and I agree with it - that the existence of the Soviet Union provided a way for activists to kind of shame, if that is the word, the United States into at least curbing its rougher edges in terms of international affairs and public repression. A freer press was something the United States could hold up, in its cultural propaganda war against the Soviet Union, to prove that the American way was superior to the Soviet way, and in doing so, inspire unaligned nations to come over to our side, and so forth.

This is what lead me to pose the question: To what extent is culture itself, by definition, defensive and reactionary in character? Let me put it another way.

Remember, long ago, we talked about the nature of individual identity. We talked about the dynamic, accretive, accumulative, life-long process of identity. Identity, in other words, is not a thing, but rather a process. On Star Trek the Borg say, "You will be assimilated." They can only survive by "assimilating" alien species. They have to reproduce themselves in this way.

You may remember, this is what I proposed is the case with people in actuality. In this connection I asked why it should be that when an individual is isolated somewhere with no human contact for an extended period of time, he should become unraveled (by the way, see the Twilight Zone episode "Where is Everybody starring Earl Holliman, which gives a really good illustration of what I'm talking about).

A person in such a situation may do things like put a sock on his hand and try to engage in conversation with it. Why does he do this and why does this behavior seem to lead to his unraveling? I proposed:

• There is no Self without others, and because this is so, the Self needs nourishment of other people just as regularly as the body needs food and water to survive and thrive
• Whe the Self, like the body, is starved of the nourishment of others, the Self tries desperately to survive by attempting to split itself into two parts: one acting as the "original" Self and the other as the "separate" interacting other; what is happening is that the Self is trying to survive by simulating person to person interaction.
• But ultimately the performance is eventually given up as futile, because a bisected Self cannot produce the spontaneity needed to stimulate spontaneous, natural development in the originating Self. You are you, so therefore you talking to yourself - to put this crudely - can never keep yourself "alive," at least not indefinitely.
• This process is similar, in my view, to what happens to a starving body. The metabolism forces the body to eat itself in a desperate attempt to survive until access to nourishment becomes available.
• In the late stages of his isolation (again see the Twilight Zone episode I mentioned) the person will collapse in exhaustion - it is at this point when the person has become "insane," not when he's talking to the sock on his fist. It is at the point of collapse that this happens, because he has given up hope of identity.

The various aspects of personality become decontextualized. There is no reaction to our words, gestures, mannerisms, and the like. To put it more crudely, there is no "pushback." Therefore you don't know what you're doing anymore, or if it matters - to anybody.

Throughout the history of the world there have been great empires, but they always had rivals and competitors. This is the first time in human history when one global superpower has ever existed by itself. We all know the statistics: the United States spends at least four hundred million a year, maybe a solid half billion, a year on the military apparatus, and that's not counting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is more than the rest of the world combined spends on their militaries.

We have no "pushback" and therefore it is not pejorative to say that America is "isolated" in international affairs. We don't have to review the data about how most of the world sees American involvement in the Middle East, in the Israeli-Palestinian question, the pressure tactics against Iran over its nuclear development, its failure to adopt the Kyoto global climate change protocols, it position with respect to the International Criminal Court, and so forth, its ongoing war of attrition against Cuba, and so on and so forth. Example after example after example can be cited, chapter and verse, as to how severely out of phase with the rest of the world, the United States is.

And let's not forget the Patriot Act, The War on Terror (though I understand it's not officially called that anymore), torture (the quibbling about what is torture as opposed to "enhanced interogation" techniques is revealing).

In a sense the War on Terror seems to be indicative of the folding over of the Self, that we see in individuals who are kept in isolation for an extended period of time (again, see Twilight Zone episode "Where is Everybody?"). So I am not particularly criticising the United States, I am proposing that this shows the dangers of empires, and all states on the imperial path behave this way, and if, by chance, they become the Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion of the world, there foreign policy is likely to become decontextualized in their isolation from the rest of the world.

Let me also reccommend an excellent documentary film (available for viewing online) called The Power of Nightmares - a BBC film by Adam Curtis. The U.S. obsession with Al Quaeda (which the film explains was a name given to the collection of Islamic jihadists, with only national aspirations, assembled and trained by the CIA, for use against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) served a very similar purpose ideologically, that obsession with the Soviet Union [a "threat" we now believe to have been exaggerated] did for U.S. policy makers. I think it is quibbling to attribute this solely to the so-called "neoconservatives," though the film identifies them as catalysts in the American policy of nightmares, deployed both at home and abroad.

The obsession with Al Quaeda and the Taliban is a reflection of a government that doesn't seem to be sure it exists without an enemy to fight.