Soviet America: Two Left Hemispheric Cultures of Dystopian Unreality
Plus an assortment of jokes from the old Soviet Union
Saint Paul might’ve had a low tolerance for fools, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wouldn’t even let ‘em in the room. You can’t fault the guy. After the fools of the Soviet world worked him over like a piñata at a cartel wedding, he could sniff their rancid souls a mile off.
Solzhenitsyn saw the Soviet Union for what it was: America’s bloated, juiced-up alter-ego, a left-brain fever dream on a vodka bender. Both nations, drunk on materialism, obsessed with chopping reality into tidy cubes, strutted around, ready to bulldoze anything that didn’t salute their blueprints of How Things Oughta Be.
So in ’78, he schlepped to Harvard, that citadel of self-congratulation, to drop a truth bomb on their commencement dais. His speech was a verbal Molotov cocktail—grim, heavy, the kind of wisdom that’d sing like a hymn in a world with a shred of right-hemispheric soul. Harvard didn’t qualify. Never has—then, now, or back when the Puritans were sanctimoniously starching their Cambridge collars. The crowd booed. The critics hissed.
He’d laid the groundwork years earlier, mind you. Fresh off the boat from Soviet exile in ’74, picking up his long-overdue Nobel from ’70, he stood there and growled: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” He was staring down the Soviet lie-machine—a contraption so flimsy it could only stand by breaking the knees of anyone who questioned it. In McGilchrist's words, the Soviet Union was "a system of lies, built on lies, lies that were so blatant that the only way to maintain them was to punish severely those who in any way challenged them or even demurred at them."
That was the USSR: a house of horrors built on a slab of crumbling concrete.
The result was two parallel cosmos: the Soviet Mirage and Reality. When the two conflicted, Reality had to be put down—forcefully—by the people in charge of the Soviet Mirage.
It's the left-hemisphere way.
That side of the brain’s a cocky little bastard, confident in its rationalism and knowledge. Trouble is, its “knowledge” is about as complete as a jigsaw puzzle from the dollar store, and its rationalism’s got all the depth of a kiddie pool. But does it care? Hell no. It just keeps plowing ahead, eventually puffing itself up like it did in Russia into a gnostic fantasy where everything slots into a Grand Structure—Marx’s base and superstructure, a cosmic Lego set for the terminally smug.
Disagree with the Soviet fantastical materialistic structure and tell your neighbor? You’re in trouble. Heck, you might not even be aware that you disagree with it and inadvertently say something that somehow conflicts with it. Either way, you’re off to the gulag.
Solzhenitsyn saw the same thing brewing in America. This place is left-hemisphere central. Only the First Amendment and a stubborn streak of liberty keep it from out-Sovieting the Soviets. Without those curbs, we’d be in the fast lane to complete suppression of the right hemisphere, like Canada and Great Britain but without their shitty food.
Today, two Americas duke it out. There’s the Establishment’s “reality”—a brittle, dogmatic house of cards and its endless activity, smug as a TV anchor reading the teleprompter.
Then there’s real reality, a messy tangle of tradition and intuition, shifting like sand underfoot, humble and slow and circumspect, like those Carthusian monks who took 17 years to reply to Philip Gröning's request to film Into Great Silence.
Exhibit A of this cage match fight between the Establishment’s reality and real reality? It’s the guy whipping it out in the girls’ bathroom. That thwap of it landing on the bathroom sink is Exhibit A of the clash. But it’s only Exhibit A. Parallel realities today buzz through our land like drones stalking the Jersey Shore. I could try to list ‘em all, but no one wants to read a 30-minute Substack post.
Just like the Soviet playbook, anything in America that impugns the Establishment’s reality gets silenced. We’ve got more taboos than a Zulu witch doctor. Step out of line, and you’re ignored, canceled, or mocked into the dirt. If that fails, the gulag’s waiting. Okay, maybe not the gulag yet: American freedom still has a heartbeat, but it's too irregular.
We need to make it regular and strong. America is the last holdout in the West against suppression of the right hemisphere. Everywhere else, the left hemisphere is using government to throttle free speech and inquiry. America had started down that road. It has hopefully now reversed course.
But we’ll never be out of danger. Freedom will always be jeopardized when the left hemisphere makes all the rules.
And in our culture, it makes tons of rules.
Bonus Material
Jokes from the Soviet Union days. Each joke is funny because each juxtaposes Soviet Reality against Real Reality. If you want to watch a hilarious movie that pivots off the whole problem of two “realities,” check out The Death of Stalin.
The Jokes
An old lady sees a camel for the first time in her life and starts to cry.
‘Oh, poor horsey, what did Soviet power do to you…’
__________
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon are watching (as ghosts) the parade in Red Square in the 1940s.
“If I had Soviet tanks, I would have been invincible!” says Alexander.
“If I had Soviet airplanes, I would have conquered the whole world!” says Caesar.
“If I had Pravda [the main Soviet newspaper], the world would have never known about Waterloo!” says Napoleon.
__________
A veteran zek (Gulag inmate) asked a new zek how long his sentence is.
“Ten years,” the new zek said.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” replied the new zek.
“That’s impossible,” said the veteran. “For nothing, you only get eight years.”
__________
Two rabbits on a road during the Stalinist terror of 1937.
First rabbit: “Where are you going in such a hurry?”
Second rabbit: “Haven’t you heard? There’s a rumor going round that all camels are to be castrated.”
First rabbit: “But you’re not a camel.”
Second rabbit: “After they catch you and castrate you, try proving you’re not a camel.”
__________
A man goes into a shop and asks “You don’t have any meat?” “No,” replies the sales lady. “We don’t have any fish. It’s the store across the street that doesn’t have any meat.”
__________
Little Boy: What will Communism be like when perfected?
His Father: Everyone will have what he needs.
Little Boy: But what if there is a shortage of meat?
His Father: There will be a sign in the butcher shop saying, "No one needs meat today."