On the post-Soviet vibe in the United States

Growing up in Russia in the 1990s, I used to put America on a pedestal. It was not so much a conscious decision, as the admission of an objective fact of reality. America was a shining city on the hill, a solid rock beacon of stability and prosperity. It was the country of future, the country thinking about the future, and marching into the future.

And nothing reflected this better than the seething hatred it got from Russia, a country stuck in the past. Russia did not look particularly interested in the future, nor excited about the opportunities it offered. Instead, its public imagination was fully preoccupied with the injuries of yesterday, and the phantasies of terrible revenge, usually in a form of the nuclear strike.

That is supposed to represent an intercontinental ballistic missile targeted at Washington DC. Although this specific photo is recent, the whole vibe has been pretty much established by the late 1990s.

Which, of course, projected weakness rather than strength

We will make a huuuuuuge bomb, and drop it onto your heads, and turn you into the radioactive dust, and you will know, and you will wish you treated us better, but it will be too late, and you will die in agony, and we will be laughing and clapping our hands

An old man yelling at clouds

So, imagine my astonishment upon stumbling into the Three Gorges lore. As a post-Soviet man, I immediately recognise this kind of discourse as a sore loser talk. Which is a shocking reversal to me. Americans are talking about China in a similar manner to how Russians have been talking about America, all the time since 1991

Bitter, angry, bitchy talk.

Old man yelling at clouds

Which turned out to be a moment of realisation. I have long had a feeling that I could not quite verbalise, but now I think I can. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, America started turning away from its old optimistic, future-oriented vibe and adopting another vibe that feels oddly… post Soviet.

Again, I cannot explain this, and the causes of this phenomenon remain a complete mystery to myself. And yet, I see clear marks of the post-Soviet style of thinking taking over the United States, and - increasingly - shaping the American politics.

What would be some examples of that?

Let’s start with the most obvious one:

Zero-sum thinking

The post-Soviet man is a firm believer in a zero sum game. There is the fixed amount of, well, everything. Whatever I gained, I must have taken from someone¹. Whatever this someone gained, they must have taken from me. Someone else’s win, someone else’s gain scares me, that means I am getting robbed.

This mode of thinking, of course, excludes pretty much any possibility of mutually beneficial collaboration with others.

And it is this mode of thinking that makes the post-Soviet man to look at the world from under defensive crouch.

A post-Soviet country thinks and acts as a besieged fortress. Everyone around is plotting to put their hands upon my treasure, that I guard carefully. And it is my job to guard it. If no one else managed to gain anything from me, that means - I did my job well.

If you think about it, all of that makes total sense. As there is only a limited amount of stuff in the world, if someone has more stuff, that means I have less stuff. And if someone else gained more stuff based on their collaboration with me, that means they have robbed me, and I will have less stuff now - all because of them.

This aspect of the post-Soviet thinking is easy to understand.

But now we are coming to a more tricky, and perhaps, more counterintuitive part.

It is not only that there is fixed amount of stuff in the world, generally speaking. It is also that there is the fixed amount of stuff I have, specifically. Fixed, or diminishing.

Let me give you an example