The Russian Mission Statement

Recently, Sergei Lavrov contacted me and asked me to draft a mission statement for Russia that should last the country through the rest of the 21st century.

I took a lazy puff on a fat cigar and told him, “what took you so long, hombre?” We had a chuckle, he promised to send over some nice, homemade nastoika that he brewed up in the bathtub of his dacha and I immediately hung up and jumped to work. Here is what I came up with:

The last century saw the birth, implementation and failure of every single political civic religion under the sun. The Liberals insisted that we were all enlightened, rational individuals who were born (or evolved) to maximize market efficiency and personal liberty. They succeeded in atomizing society to the point that individuals in Liberal countries now are forced to seek out meaning and community in various social justice cults and an identity based on sexual fetishes. The Socialists and Communists insisted on creating and then empowering a mythical international worker’s class to maximize factory efficiency and implement the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide. They ended up destroying everything in society that made life worth living. Fascism had some promise early on, but we’ll never really know what they would have done had they won the war. State-monopolies on essential industries and a generous social welfare policy, most likely. Also, they didn’t like the Slavs very much, and we can’t have that. Can’t have it.

Anyways, the time has come to return to epistemological first principles and challenge established modernist political dogma. This sounds more complicated than it really is. Most political voodoo ideologies have a core concept or value as their goal or guiding start. With Liberalism, that idea is Liberty. That is, Liberty as defined by having freedom from things. Not having the duties and responsibilities that come with belonging to a race or an ethnic group for one. Eventually, this began to be applied to one’s local community and so those disappeared soon after. Then, politics became so extreme that they overcame the ties within the extended and immediate family as well. Man became reduced to an atom, totally reliant on laws and the state to keep him from bumping into other atoms and to keep him safe. Liberty also came to mean freedom from common sense or standards of behavior that were considered too restrictive of the individual’s right to self-expression. Drug use, sexual fetishism, hedonism of all kinds and anti-social behavior became the norm instead of the exception as it used to be in better times. All of this was the result of a bad idea or a bad ideal that underpinned the entire political system that grew up around it. We see the results of pursuing Liberty as the end goal and the end all and be all of human efforts at creating civilization. We don’t like what we see. We have to find a better principle going forward.

Russia is intimately familiar with the Socialist/Communist experiment. The defining ideal of this political project was doubtlessly Equality. As a result, the population was herded into grey Khrushevkas and giant sprawling industrial factories to produce widgets for very low pay. The quality of the products left much to be desired and we all came to learn that equality is the exact opposite of quality in this world. More than that though, a stifling culture of totalitarian state-enforced equalness became the sacred cow to which we all knelt and worshipped. Rare talents were stifled and overlooked if not outright killed or exiled. Everything that was of a higher quality came to be viewed with suspicion for being too bourgeoise and so was done away with. Now, we look around at the yawning crater that is our culture and we can’t help but shake our heads at the folly of it all. Yes, we reduced and standardized everything to the lowest common denominator. No, this did not lead to a world free of want, worry and a life worth living.

Perhaps we should look towards a different guiding principle going forward. If need be, we can build a political system around it as well, although it would be preferable to not do so and so avoid the pitfalls of blindly following a set political dogma. What principle then does Russia need to see her through the turbulent times ahead?

We humbly propose that we make Strength our primary concern from this day forward. All political consideration should be made with the principle and goal of acquiring Strength in mind. In other words, instead of asking ourselves whether or not a proposed measure or project is compatible with the values of individual liberty, the principle of class interests, the dogma of free markets, the credo of tolerance and so on, we should instead simply consider whether or not it makes Russia and the Russians stronger or not.

Consider the following proposal: should we take drastic measures to boost the reproductive rate of Russians or not? Well, if we defer to the ecological cultists’ opinion on the matter, then this is an immoral act that will put more strain on the planet’s resources and therefore to be eschewed. This is because their guiding principle is not Strength, but Sustainability or perhaps Extinction, if we are to be less diplomatic in our characterizations. Banning birth control and penalizing divorce would be a blow against individual liberty. Putting the welfare of Russians ahead of Africans would be a crime against tolerance and multiculturalism. Marxists would have to weigh in on whether or not this was a mere bourgeois concern and therefore not worth considering. If we started nationalizing homes and apartments and handing them out to young families, the Capitalists would be quite cross and declare that we had violated property rights and committed a sin against the free market. But boosting the demographic rate would undoubtedly make Russia stronger. And if we, as a society, find the courage to stand by this new political principle, we can simply ignore these various political sects and simply continue pushing ahead on the path of Strength as individual Russians and as a nation.

There will, of course, be spirited disagreements and debates over policy measures and projects that the nation should undertake to achieve greater levels of strength. Some people will say that we need to bolster the navy, others that the army should be the key priority. Pundits will tear each other to shreds debating whether or not we should focus on internal development - Siberia perhaps, or whether the time has come to return stolen lands, like South Siberia aka North Kazakhstan into the fold of the Russian Federation. So long as we orient our politics and our culture around Strength however, these discussions and debates will only work to our favor. No other political principle, such as Liberty or Equality, however, can be tolerated in our politics and culture going forward.

We have decided to leave the mistakes and dogmas of the last century behind us. A better and brighter future awaits us. We will emerge from the crisis of the 21st century stronger than we have ever been before.