SOLZHENITSYN'S ANTS     by Jack Wheeler

Strategic Investment Magazine, April 1998

In his master work, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells a story about a zek, a prisoner in the Gulag, who finds an ant in the bottom of his teacup. The zek notices that the ant is trying to crawl out, so the zek gently pushes the ant back down to the bottom. The ant tries to crawl out again, and again the zek pushes him down. After the third try, the zek begins to count. One hundred and eighty two times the ant tries to crawl out, and one hundred and eighty two times the zek carefully pushes him back down. There is no Try #183. The ant simply huddles at the bottom, occasionally wandering around, but never again does it try to escape. The zek can go away for a while and come back to find the ant still there. It has given up any attempt to be free.

Solzhenitsyn saw the ant as a metaphor for the Russian people. Many of them had tried to liberate themselves from Communist tyranny, only to find themselves pushed down into gulags and mass slaughters so many times that they, like the ant, had given up. The Soviet Union was like a giant teacup, where its inhabitants huddled at the bottom and passively accepted the rule of their Marxist overlords.

Today, with the Soviet Union gone for over six years, millions of Solzhenitsyn's ants are still huddling at the bottom of the teacup. So many Russians freely vote for the Communist Party that it dominates the Russian Parliament, or Duma. The same is true in Ukraine. In neither country has land been privatized. In both, elected Communist legislators have prevented economic liberalization and any hope for widespread prosperity. Earlier this month, Ukrainians voted to return the Communists to power. Once renowned as "the bread basket of Europe" in pre-Soviet days, Ukraine is sinking – of its own free will – into an economic black hole.

To call these Communist voters "ants" is not to be insultingly metaphorical. It is to say that they are suffering from the same psychological condition known as "learned helplessness," which can be induced in experimental animals. Whether it is an insect, like an ant, or mammal like a mouse or dog, if it is in a trap and tries to escape, at some point if all efforts prove fruitless it will give up. It has learned to be helpless and will no longer try to escape, even if the trap is clearly opened. Scientists have discovered that the brains of all animals in which learned helplessness has been induced no longer produce a specific brain chemical called noradrenaline. Very early on, hundreds of millions of years ago, evolution selected for a basic set of chemicals to transmit messages from neuron to neuron in a central nervous system. Everything any animal with a central nervous system does, every movement, every reaction to a perception, is performed with these "neurochemicals." Without them, messages don't get sent from one brain cell to another and things don't work right. This applies to an ant, an elephant, or a human being.

One of these neurochemicals is noradrenaline, the brain's version of adrenaline. It's any animal's "go-juice," enabling it to be alert for danger, have the drive to hunt for food, or fight to defend itself. If, for some reason, an animal's brain lacks noradrenaline, it can't adequately perform these survival activities. The phenomenon of learned helplessness occurs in human beings just as it does in animals, and it has the same neurochemical cause: the lack of noradrenaline production.

So what is actually going on in the brain of the zek's ant and in the brains of Russians and Ukrainians who have given up their desire to be free is neurochemically identical. Solzhenitsyn's metaphor is literally true. This is not a difficulty confined to former Soviet societies. It forms the psychological foundation of all welfare states. Either through dictatorial force, or through a warm cocoon of state care which destroys personal resourcefulness, any welfare state will induce learned helplessness in its citizens – particularly (and here's where I leap into deep political incorrectness) – among women.

It is an unfortunate fact that the majority of Russians and Ukrainians who vote for Communists, just as a majority of Americans who vote Democratic and support Bill Clinton, are women. It is also a simple fact that, on average, the female brain produces significantly less noradrenaline than the male brain. It's part of the evolutionary pact made between male and female hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago. Today, this ancient pact has become a very modern problem in any democracy. As a whole, women in general tend to vote for people who promise to take care of them. They have an assumption of helplessness that lies in a genetic tendency to produce less or be less sensitive to noradrenaline.

There are great benefits to this, since it enables women to be more caring, nurturing, and less prone to violence than men. We are only talking tendencies here – just as there are lots of women who stand up for themselves and are not helpless in any way, there are lots of men who can't stand up for themselves and are quite helpless. The point is that a vicious circle develops in any political system with government programs that take away personal responsibility, and this vicious circle has a biochemical basis.

The result is a never-ending tension between those groups of citizens who want more freedom and those who want more government largesse, between those who resist authority and those who wish to impose it.

Over time, one can hope that freedom aided by information technology will win out. But right now, the only solution is individual. You, an individual man or woman, must seek to be free and sovereign, politically, financially, and psychologically, from the State. Our job at Strategic Investment is to help you with the financial part. The rest is up to you.