Russia Must Break the Status Quo
Think or Disappear
Alexander Dugin on why mere preservation leads to defeat.
At times, one may get the impression that we are fighting merely to preserve the status quo, or simply fending off the challenges piling up against us. This is partly true, yet even reactive resistance requires will. Had Russia been led by a different leadership, it would long ago have gone for compromises and would not have resisted or fought, even for the sake of the status quo. That is how we lost the USSR (the Empire), then the post-Soviet space, and began to lose the Russian Federation itself.
On the other side, there is a plan concerning us, and it is deadly. In the eyes of the collective West, abandoning our status quo means the dismemberment of Russia (officially called “decolonization”), regime change, and the collapse of sovereignty. We are actively resisting this. The goal is the preservation of the status quo, so that what our enemies intend to do to us does not come to pass.
That is already half the battle. Yet it is becoming obvious that this is not enough.
We must have our own plan—the route of great change.
Here, preserving the status quo is only a starting point; if one insists too strongly on keeping everything as it is and blocking all processes and transformations, it can itself become an obstacle.
There is no point clinging to the old world, to international law, to maintaining the established order. All of this has collapsed. The time of radical change is coming—change in everything. So far, we see only the dark, destructive side of these changes. That is indeed the case, because the plan of our enemies still dominates entirely. They want to change everything, while we resist them and want to keep things as they were, as they are now.
But we must look at this differently. We need our own plan for global transformations, our own vectors and directives, our own reference points, and loudly and confidently affirmed values and priorities.
At present, we effectively have neither ideology, nor culture, nor a vision of the future. We are living off fragments of the old—Soviet attitudes and the inertia of the grim 1990s. The ruling elite is like this, and, alas, so is the population. We are finishing off Soviet Olivier salad, rewatching Soviet films, or series about the lawlessness of the 1990s.
What is needed is something entirely different. The people must turn their faces away from the past and the present towards the future, and become engaged in its creation.
“Social architecture” is a good term. The construction of society and the state, the awakening of the people to participation in their own destiny—this is what we must undertake.
It is a completely false goal to study society. Society must be created, built, shaped, educated, awakened, elevated, and enlightened.
Society does not form itself; it is instituted. Not necessarily by power—rather by prophets, visionaries, heralds, thinkers, poets, those who give voice to its identity and its destiny.
All of this is not about technologies, but about ontologies. Technologies are important, but they are not the essence. They can serve as instruments of both good and evil, of awakening and sleep, of ascent and decline. Salvation is certainly not in them. Salvation is not in technology and not in technologists. Salvation is in spirit, in thought, in faith.
Our ruling elite and our leadership critically lack a philosophical dimension—deep and thorough reflection, unhurried conversations, contemplation, and intuitive revelations. All forces are spent on day-to-day management and on maintaining the status quo. This is no way to create or anticipate the future.
Sometimes the authorities look to the youth, but the youth are what society has made them—that is, what the same authorities have made them. By themselves, without upbringing and education, young people cannot express or build anything. They need an Idea. Yet they certainly will not formulate it on their own. In short, the issue is not the youth. By inertia, they too will defend the status quo at best, and at worst will passively drift in a liberal-Western direction. This does not work. If the youth are educated by people of the status quo, they will be status-quo youth. One must approach the matter from the other side—from the future. What matters is not what the youth are like, but what they must be like. And this is not decided by them.
In a single year of his presidency, Trump shattered the American status quo. Whether this is good or bad, the old world no longer exists. In the new world, no place has been reserved for us. To exist, we must win. What it means “to exist” is decided not by an official or a technologist, not by the youth and not by a bearer of pure inertia, but by a thinker.
Russia needs sovereign thought.
Instead of a status quo where, alas, there is not even a crushed approximation of anything like it. This is not a reason to give up; it is an invitation to finally begin thinking seriously.
(Translated from the Russian)
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I {from USA) don't understand why you show such a bleak mindset about Russia in your essay. I look at Russia from the outside and wish the US could have a President like Putin. It's astonishing that one can have a subway system which is safe & clean with no drug addicts, criminals, and trash. In all the photos I have seen of modern Russia, I've seen no litter, no drug addicts, no porn, etc. When Tucker Carlson went to Russia to interview Putin, he also marveled at how clean & safe Moscow is. Russia may be the last remaining Christian Country on Earth. Russia is RISING! The US is collapsing (such is the inevitable consequence of the belief system of modern day Americans). I'd emigrate to Russia if I weren't so old.
The Globalists hate Russia BECAUSE of her Virtues. They love perversion and stealing. That's why they (especially that brain dead Estonian woman who is No. 2 at the EU) want to dismantle Russia.
On compromises and the loss of the USSR: indeed, the USSR was lost out of the desire to compromise in the face of the old adversaries and join them. It was clear that the Soviet system could not continue its life, even if it tried to transform itself like the Chinese system did earlier, so successfully, I might add. Furthermore, the USSR failed dramatically to create a cohesive union out of her satellites that could have been helpful in a common transformation endeavor. An external policy based on domination can only allow an internal order based on like principles. The Bolshevik system, based on class battles, had in itself the gene of self-destruction. This is a risk that any search for a future self entails. The elites eager to invent a new sociopolitical system should be aware of this risk.
On “Trump shattered the American status quo”: I happen to believe that he only managed to scratch a little of its façade, and this only in full agreement with the Anglo-American “Deep State.” His arrival to power is a requirement of the same Deep State to give the feeling that “things have changed and we start a new era.” Most telling in this respect is the now famous Alaska meeting, followed by a myriad of twists and turns in the Ukrainian peace seeking process. Trump has done nothing to fundamentally change the Anglo-American system. If he were able to create the conditions for a like-follower to take over, he should consider this as his top achievement. I fear that, should this be so, his follower will be met with difficulties of the same kind as in Trump's first term. The City of London Deep State has roots stretching beyond the American Independence, after which it extended itself into the new American states, thus becoming the invigorated Anglo-American Deep State that we are seeing right now at work. Nothing has changed in its realm since Magna Charta, when the English earls decided to accept the king on the condition that he do what he is told to do. We are forced to admit this is a long and successful existence with hardly any end in sight.