President Ronald Reagan was known for his peculiar approach to the exercise of power. As the leader of the state, he naturally had advisors and could consult experts in the most diverse fields of human endeavor. Reports and calculations as well as statistics were laid on his desk. Having a practical approach to life, and therefore to governing a country, Ronald Reagan made it a requirement that reports should be no longer than one page, and about the condition of individual states he formed his view perhaps if not more on the basis of the content of jokes told by the people in those states, which he ordered to be collected, written down and reported to him, than on the basis of extensive research by specialists.
When he was told that the Soviet Union was doing quite well in terms of its economy, he asked briefly how many passenger cars there were per 1,000 inhabitants: the resulting figure, compared to the number of passenger cars in the United States, Germany or France, told him much more concisely about the state of the Soviet economy than the opinions of experts on the subject.
President Ronald Reagan knew virtually everything about Romania’s economy, having heard this Romanian joke from the time when the country was run by Nicolae Ceausescu:
There is an unusually long line for hours in front of a store where one can buy an everyday good. They wait for the goods to be brought in. One of the customers can’t stand it and says to another, I’m going to kill him (he actually means Nicolae Ceaușescu). In a while he returns to the queue. The man who was standing with him asks: How was it? Did you kill him? To which the man who returned replies: No. There is an even longer line there.
This method of Ronald Reagan could be applied to the evaluation of all political and economic events and states. Statistics and scientific studies can be impressive – especially to the untrained mind – but they remain very often deceptive or are simply deliberately selective. An example? According to many economists, Lithuania has gained a great deal economically since it ceased to be a Soviet republic. Numerous statistics, tables and charts are cited to confirm this. There is only one chart, one table, one set of data missing, and that is that which states that Lithuania has lost ONE THIRD of its population since independence. What do you think? Are these people of retirement age who, with their bulging wallets, have left to spend the rest of their lives in the Balearic Islands or the Riviera? Of course not. Those who have left Lithuania are young or middle-aged people: they are producers, workers, inventors, entrepreneurs. How have Lithuanians become better off when a third of them have left the country? Probably only in such a way that the value of all assets was divided into a much smaller population and it came out that each of them became richer by the mere fact that the same amount of good is distributed among a smaller number of citizens. That’s how – using the Ronald Reagan method – we showed that things are not as good with Lithuania’s economy as it is portrayed.
Let’s apply the Ronald Reagan method to assess how the United States is doing. As we know, the Ronald Reagan method doesn’t need comprehensive studies, hundreds of pages of expert reports, think-tanks and God knows what else to do it. The Ronald Reagan method will look for a few indicators – widely available, easy to understand, as clear as a litmus test – and soon an assessment will be made about the predicament of America, its society, its economy and its moral health.
For comparison: Isn’t such a litmus test the news that in Zimbabwe, for a good few years now, the national currency (with the term national being a mockery in this case) has been the U.S. dollar? Under the stewardship of Robert Mugabe, a black racist and an idol of Western elites and intellectuals, as a result of his reforms, the country’s own currency became sick with rampant inflation and gave up the ghost. What more does one need to know about the state of the country, its economy and the people who run it?
But let’s return to the United States. What will the litmus test show us when we apply it to the American moral, social and economic reality? This litmus paper will become very brightly colored, very quickly, if applied to the following events:
① A man who just yesterday was president has his account on one of the social communication platforms terminated. The man who just yesterday was regarded as the most powerful individual in the world, today becomes a non-person or… an enemy of the people. Isn’t this reminiscent of the practice of the Soviet communists, when people at the helm of power, as soon as they lost it, fell into political and social oblivion?
② Millions of foreigners are being deliberately and methodically brought into the country, while it is proclaimed to the native inhabitants of the United States that a demographic enrichment of America is taking place. It is difficult to say whether this claim is more preposterous or more criminal. Preposterous, because it is well known that mixtures of different anthropological types in one territory have always in history and everywhere in the world ended in massive bloodshed; criminal, because if America is enriching itself by accepting (abducting would probably be a better word) people from other countries, then by the same token this means that America is carrying out an audacious plunder and impoverishing those countries. Does anyone see it that way?
③ In the United States, the black minority is under special protection, their every whim is immediately fulfilled, whites are forced to kneel before blacks and apologize to them for wrongs that whites and blacks only know about from schools and movies; blacks are given positions not because they deserve them, but because they are… blacks. Isn’t that how it was in the Soviet Union and socialist countries, where leadership positions were given to workers and peasants, that is, on the basis of social background and not on merit?
④ An old man becomes the American president, an old man not only in the sense of the number of years of age, but primarily in the sense of loss of biological strength, an old man who commits gaffes every now and then. Wasn’t this the case with the Soviet Union, when the infirm Brezhnev was laughed at, and when geriatric Andropov and Chernenko became the heads of the party and therefore automatically of the state?
⑤ In the United States, a new morality is being imposed on society by promoting sexual deviance as a social norm, by encouraging young people to change biological sex, by killing tens of millions of conceived children under the perverse slogans of planned parenthood or reproductive health. Isn’t that what happened towards the end of the Roman Empire?
⑥ The United States was stripped of its industry as greedy and rapacious capitalists moved almost all production overseas, especially to China. The country is left with millions of people who have virtually nothing to do, to whom computer games are created to occupy them with something and divert their thoughts from their own sad predicament. An obesity epidemic and millions of people addicted to psychotropic drugs complete the picture. Is this what a healthy society with prospects for the future looks like?
⑦ Hordes of ill-mannered youth are systematically encouraged to topple monuments to national heroes. After all, monuments to national heroes are usually toppled by a victorious army when it enters and occupies a conquered country. What can one think of a society or nation that destroys its own past? If it does not relate to this past, hates it or cuts itself off from it, if it hates itself, that is, if it is effectively on the way to committing suicide? It was in the Soviet Union that monuments to the past, to all that Russia lived before the revolution, were being toppled. So what period is the United States entering in the 21st century?
⑧ Just as in the Soviet Union there were demands for equality of opportunity for all, so now in the United States there are demands for equality of achievement! This is the easiest way to self-destruction! What was the end of the socialist states based on similar ideas?
⑨ And what shall we say about the proliferation of worthless “academic” subjects such as gender studies? Aren’t they reminiscent of studying the brilliant thoughts of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union? Why study to become a doctor or engineer when you can dissect 19th-century novels for the genderism and feminism they contain? It is analogous to what we had in the Soviet Union: Why design bridges or cure people when you can discuss the unfathomable thought of Stalin and Lenin again and again?
Only the blind can’t see the bright colors on the litmus papers we have dipped into the liquid called the United States. Statistics tell us that the U.S. economy is the most powerful in the world, that the U.S. armed forces are the most powerful in the world, that, that, that…. I wonder how long before the collapse the citizens of the USSR were told similar things. I wonder how long before the collapse and even after the collapse such things were told to the citizens of the Roman Empire….
By way of comparison. What if the proverbial John Smith has several houses, a fleet of cars, yachts and his own airplane, is the CEO of a large corporation and earns so much that the average person doesn’t even dream of earning, what if this same John Smith suffers from obesity, has drug-addicted children, has already divorced his fourth wife and stimulates himself every morning with more and more dope? Do we really envy him? Do we really want to be like him, even if we still work for him in his corporation?
If you want to, then listen to renowned economists and political scientists, and drawing on their opinions formulate for yourself a picture of the United States and its future. I prefer President Ronald Reagan’s method of making a quick and unerring assessments of reality.
