An ongoing annotated reading project of ‘Between two eras’ by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Born in Warsaw in 1928 to an aristocratic Roman Catholic family. His father was a Polish diplomat who worked in Germany from 1931 to 1935, during the rise of Nazism. From 1936 to 1938 he was assigned to work in the Soviet Union, during the time of Stalin’s Great Purge.
“The extraordinary violence that was perpetrated against Poland did affect my perception of the world, and made me much more sensitive to the fact that a great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski
In 1938 his father was posted to Montreal as a consul general. Zbigniew started his higher education studies at Loyola in Montreal and transferred to McGill University in 1945. He then attended Harvard University to pursue a doctorate. The focus of his studies were on the Soviet Union and the relationship between the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin’s state, and the actions of Joseph Stalin.
Brzezinski worked as a member of faculty at Harvard University from 1953 to 1960, and of Columbia University from 1960 to 1972 where he headed the Institute on Communist Affairs. He became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and joined the Bilderberg Group.
He served in advisory positions for JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. He was one of the main organizers of the Trilateral Commission which aimed to cultivate economic and geopolitical cooperation between North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
Major foreign policy events during his term of office included the normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China (and the severing of ties with the Republic of China), the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), the brokering of the Camp David Accords, the transition of Iran to an anti-Western Islamic state, encouraging reform in Eastern Europe, emphasizing human rights in U.S. foreign policy, the arming of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet-friendly Afghan government, increasing the probability of Soviet invasion and later entanglement in a Vietnam-style war, and later to counter the Soviet invasion, and the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties relinquishing U.S. control of the Panama Canal after 1999.
“The emergence of a large dominant party, alongside the more narrowly focused and more intensely doctrinaire groupings on the right and the left could accelerate the trend toward such technological managerialism. The inclination of the doctrinaire left to legitimize means by ends could lead them to justify more social control on the ground that it serves progress. The conservatives, preoccupied with public order and fascinated by modern gadgetry, would be tempted to use the new techniques as a response to unrest, since they would fail to recognize that social control is not the only way to deal with rapid social change. The American transition also contains the potential for an American redemption.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Brzezinski was married to Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes (grand-niece of the second Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš), with whom he had three children. His younger son, Mark (b. 1965), is a lawyer who served on President Clinton’s National Security Council as an expert on Russia and Southeastern Europe, and has served as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden (2011–2015) and Poland (from 2022). His daughter, Mika (b. 1967), is a television news presenter and co-host of MSNBC’s weekday morning program, Morning Joe, where she provides regular commentary and reads the news headlines for the program. His elder son, Ian (b. 1963), is a Senior Fellow in the International Security Program and is on the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group. Ian also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO (2001–2005).
The book of concern is Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. A physical copy can be found for $50 at the low end and $250 at the higher. Brzezinski’s philosophical analysis revolves around the idea of technology being the pivotal resource of libertine equalization freeing man from social incongruity and forming a global political cohesion of sovereign states. The third revolution in the American society or as Brzezinski preferred to label it – the technetronic age; is a post-industrial phenomenon where scientific aptitude becomes the deciding factor in societal progression. Knowledge is the new “think tank” of social innovations and political stabilizations.
The Technetronic era :‘a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially and economically by the impact of technology and electronics – particularly in the arena of computers and electronics.’
The comprehensive assessment of the industrial and the post-industrial eras brings a constructive outlook on Brzezenski’s ideology of humanity requiring structure and communal equilibrium to thrive in the burgeoning international political atmosphere. The written text elucidates the onset of an electronically enhanced era that undervalues the archaic industrial age. Knowledge becomes the ultimate power and the mass media its weapon. Brzezinski specifies the onset of world-politics and the crucial task of technology in acquiring information of global realities. The 19th century represents the quest for liberty, the 20th century strived on the quest of equality, but what the political analysts fail to foresee was the thirst for identity politics that emerged at the start of the 21st century.
“More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve it sends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control”
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Old versus new; modern versus tradition; urban versus rural; and sacred versus secular are examples of dynamic processes accompanying the history of human evolution. Each involved a more controlled society. Zbig’s technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society underscored by a belief that such a society, dominated by a (well-intentioned) elite and unrestrained by traditional values will assert continuous surveillance over every citizen.
This book was published the year after the moon landing and the sending of the first ARPANET message that planted the seeds that grew into the Internet, 1970. With tech like that, it’s hard not to believe that technology could one day reach beyond the heavens. Opinion on this book is scant where it’s found yet strongly worded every time. There are those that believe it an accurate prediction of the future. Others who say that it’s not a prediction of the future, it’s an outline of Brzezinski’s designs for the future. Others still dismiss it; the author was too traumatized by his experiences with socialism, or the author was too infatuated with east European socialism.
For what reading I’ve done of it, the theories and predictions made are apt in enough places to make a review quite fun. Over the course of however long this takes I’ll release annotated copy of the book’s chapters. At the same time I’ll be putting together a copy of the full text since it was a mild hassle to find.
The Normal Times 
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