To create more ample impression with the reader Z. Brzezinski ought to recall here both racial turmoils in America at the beginning of sixties and the Vietnam War, which raised condemnation of the USA by more or less reasonably-thinking public opinion in all countries of the world. To forget the «Vietnam syndrome» does not mean to get rid of it.
«In contrast, Russia was held in cultural contempt by most of its Central European vassals and even more so by its principal and increasingly assertive eastern ally, China. For the Central Europeans, Russian domination meant isolation from what the Central Europeans considered their philosophical and cultural home: Western Europe and its Christian[15] traditions. Worse than that, it meant domination by a people whom the Central Europeans, often unjustly, considered their cultural inferior.
The Chinese, for whom the word «Russia» means «the hungry land»[16], were even more openly contemptuous[17].» («The Grand Chessboard», p.19).
In the follow-up of this comparison Z. Brzezinski describes how the great empires of the past had emerged and disappeared, and defines American position in the present world:
«In brief, America stands supreme in the four decisive domains of global power: militarily, it has an unmatched global reach; economically, it remains the main locomotive of global growth, even if challenged in some aspects by Japan and Germany (neither of which enjoys the other attributes of global might); technologically, it retains the overall lead in the cutting-edge areas of innovation; and culturally, despite some crassness[18], it enjoys an appeal that is unrivalled, especially among the world’s youth-all of which gives the United States a political clout that no other state comes close to matching. It is the combination of all four that makes America the only comprehensive global superpower». (Ibid.,p.36).
Every society is managed in one way or another, and therefore the global historical process may be perceived as a global process of ruling which, at the first place, comprises many processes of regional ruling (policies of regional states and international policies, forces which are not institutionalised within state: mafias, Jewish diaspora); secondly, it proceeds within life processes of the Earth and Space, standing higher than it in the hierarchy.
The theoretical basis of the Conception of Social Security (COB[19]) is the Sufficiently Universal Theory of Ruling (DOTU) (one can generalize forever, but is there a reason for doing it? DOTU is sufficiently universal for describing any process of ruling or self-ruling with its terms). Accordingly to the Sufficiently Universal Theory of Ruling all means of ruling can be divided into general groups which are hierarchically displaced from the most effective to the less one. Such instruments of influence on society, whose reasonable use allows controlling its life and death, are:
1. Information of worldview nature, or methodology, which, once adopted, allows men to project – individually and socially – their "standard automations" of identification with regard to particular processes within the completeness and integrity of the World, and to define in their individual perception the hierarchic order of these processes in their mutual interconnection. This information lays foundation for the culture of thinking and for the completeness of ruling activities including also intra-social absolute power both on regional and global levels.
2. Information of annalistic, chronological nature, in all do-mains of Culture and all domains of Knowledge. It allows seeing, in which direction the processes are developing, and to correlate particular domains of Culture as a whole and of branches of Knowledge. To those, whose worldview is based on the sense of proportion and is conformable to the World, this information allows identifying particular processes while sieving the "chaotic" flow of facts and phenomena through the worldview "sieve" – subjective human measure of identification. (Within the present context the culture means all information, which is not transferred genetically in the succession of generations).
3. Information of fact-descriptive nature: description of particular processes and their interconnections constitutes the substance of information of the third priority, which includes the faith-teachings of religious cults, secular ideologies, technologies and facts of all domains of science.
4. Economic processes, as an instrument of influence subordinated to purely informational instruments of influence through finances (money), which embody a totally generalized type of information of economic nature.
5. Genocide practices, affecting not only those who live today but also the generations to come, eliminating the genetically determined potential for learning and for development by them of the cultural heredity of ancestors: nuclear blackmail-threat of use; alcohol, tobacco and other kinds of narcotic drugs genocide, food additives, all ecological pollutants, some medicines-real use; "gene engineering" and "biotechnologies" – potential danger.
6. Other instruments of influence mainly by force – weapons in traditional sense of this word; killing and crippling human beings; destructing and exterminating material and technical objects of civilization, cultural monuments and bearers of their spirit.
Although there are no evident distinctions between the instruments of influence because many of them, by their capacities, could be related to different priorities, their classification in hierarchical order, as presented above, allows nonetheless to identify the dominating factors of influence that may be used as instruments of ruling, and in particular, as instruments of suppression and elimination of those phenomena in the social life that are conceptually inadequate in the sense of ruling.
When used within one social system this set is tantamount to generalized means of ruling this system. But when applied by one social system (social group) to others, which have different internal concepts of ruling, it is tantamount to generalized weapons, i.e. means of warfare, in most general sense of this word, or – instruments of support for self-ruling within another social system, when there is no conceptual incompatibility of ruling in both systems.
This approach determines the priority order of the above classes of instruments of influence on the society because the changes in society's state under the impact of the instruments of supreme priorities, entail much more significant consequences than those incurred by the instruments of minor priorities, al-though such changes proceed more slowly, without "noisy effects". In other words, within the historically long intervals the level of effectiveness is increasing from the first point to the sixth, while the level of irreversible results of their application, which by and large determine how efficiently problems of the social life are solved in ‘now and forever’ terms, is falling.
Z. Brzezinski is either ignoring or maliciously disguising this from his students, and so their world outlook (first priority) is programmed – in one way or another – to make them lead the United States to collapse. If this was not so, then he should not start his description of American position after the end of the Cold War with the sixth priority (militarily, global reach) – what’s more, he even failed to come to so evident first priority-but after having clearly stressed the first priority (world outlook) he should gradually descend from it to the sixth priority. Then the origins of many problems affecting America itself would be clarified, and so the way would be laid to solve them.