When people talk about Vladimir Putin these days, the focus is on his strong emotionality, his anger, his vengefulness. A man who can’t control his passions and is consumed by them. A man, who, when his war strategies in Ukraine don’t go as planned, simply bombs cities indiscriminately, bombing civilian areas and military targets alike. He has no compunctions about leveling civilian neighborhoods, turning them into rubble.
The real question is whether or not strong explosive emotions are his base emotional state, and whether or not his actions in Ukraine constitute what could be considered in their broadest sense crimes of passion. Because there are other aspects of his behavior that could not be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be passionate. Remember his meeting with Emmanuel Macron where he sat at one end of a very long table, while Macron was consigned, as it were, to the other end. That certainly constituted a very unusual diplomatic arrangement. It is indicative of a man who is very suspicious of everyone who is not a part of his inner circle. A man who lives in a self-imposed experiential vacuum in addition to the larger experiential vacuum of modern technological society.
Putin is definitely a product of modern technological society, a man who is very proud of the modern weapons he is producing, weapons like hypersonic missiles. As his ground forces have been a failure in achieving the quick victory that he thought was his for the asking, Putin has resorted to bombing campaigns that have turned many cities in Ukraine into rubble. Which perhaps, in the long run, satisfies a deeper more primal need of Putin’s: that of using the destruction created by his new weapon toys as a means to create vicarious abrasive stimulation and pull himself out of his base numbness. The abrasive stimulation created is the result of the destruction and suffering of the Ukrainian people that is generated by his bombs. The only problem is that the actual kicks don’t last long. The missiles and bombs work pretty quickly. And once they finish doing their work, all that remains is the emptiness of the vacuum spaces filled with rubble.
And these vacuum spaces of Ukrainian rubble in the external world then mirror the vacuum spaces in Putin’s base state of mind. And the more vacuum spaces of Ukrainian rubble that he creates, the deeper is the numbness that he sinks into at the end of each bombing. Because the bombing is a form of kicks and not the organic stimulation that he really would need in order to feel vibrantly alive. So, Putin relies more and more on these kicks that aregenerated by his bombing campaigns in order to feel alive. And when people feel a compulsive need to continually search out a certain form of abrasive stimulation in order to feel alive, we call that an addiction. Just like some people become addicted to drugs, or alcohol, or excessive eating, or sex or gambling, Putin has developed an addiction to bombing and particularly in Ukraine. It is like he has lost control of himself.
And not only does the bombing help him to feel alive, it also is a vehicle for him to prepare for death, again in a perverse way. The negative imprints he is making in his gratuitous destruction of so many areas of Ukraine are imprints that will be preserved in the minds and in the history books of the peoples of the world. This destruction will not be forgotten. And for most people, Putin will be remembered as an evil monster. Unfortunately, there are still right-wing populists in the world who will remember Putin as a great and mighty leader. These right-wing populists are as super numb as Putin is. And many of them are now living through Putin much as right-wing populists in the United States live through Trump. Imagine what would have happened in the United States if the January 6th insurrection had succeeded. The violence and destruction that would have resulted as Trump and his followers worked to reclaim the American presidency through non-democratic means. And worked to leave their own anti-American imprints on American society. And they certainly would have been major imprints as they would have carried the United States in a political direction that went totally against everything that it has ever stood for.
And any addictions to abrasive stimulation would probably have not involved bombing of American cities and turning them into rubble. Unlike Putin, Trump and his followers did not have access to planes which would have dropped bombs on their enemies. Furthermore, Putin is fighting his war in another country, so mass physical destruction of his enemy’s land It would have been a lower-tech uprising. But the rushes from the violence in the revolution would have been similar, as they intermittently would have pulled people out of their numbness. This is the kind of people that is coming out of two of the biggest and most important countries in the world today, countries that are immersed in the numbing effects of modern technological society.
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