Filenews 1 June 2022
By Andreas Kluth
One way to enter the "warped" mind of a despotic leader like Russian President Vladimir Putin is first to explore the "dark" recesses of one's own psyche and then understand what is different to that of that person. The list is long, however a state of cognitive confusion which is both common and relevant to our subject is called in French "deformation professionelle" (professional distortion or perversion).
We use the French term not only because this language often captures things better, but also because the phrase has an embedded pun that doesn't translate simply as "professional distortion." Formation professionelle means vocational training. Therefore, the term Deformation Professionelle refers to the "enclosed" perspective, prejudices and distortions that we acquire as we become experts in something we are dealing with.
Many prosecutors, for example, walk on a random street and, looking right and left, "see" people who are guilty of something, they just haven't been caught yet. Defence lawyers walking down the same street look around them and see human beings unjustly accused of something or even possibly harassed by an authoritarian "Inquisition."
Usually, deformation professionelle is all around us, but it is nothing more than an occasional annoyance. It applies to the teacher who returns home at night and stays annoyingly attached to a "lecture" function to his wife and children. Or for the technician in your company who - isolated in the maze of his machines and in the name of cybersecurity - makes connecting to your computer so difficult that you think you will never be able to do your job again.
For life
In the context of geopolitics in general and the Russian attack on Ukraine in particular, the stakes are, of course, infinitely higher. Putin suffered the deformation of the professional in the KGB, the espionage service of the former Soviet Union.
He worked there from 1975, when he was in the third decade of his life, until just before the collapse of the USSR. To this day, he likes to point out that there is no "former agent" of the KGB - people may have left the service, but the service has never left them, or rather never left them.
Therefore, long before he became the leader of a nuclear power, he built an identity and personality as a spy. Consider this. He did not come to power after submitting a candidacy, with all the classic handshakes and kissing babies, as political leaders in the West do, nor after running a business or treating patients, from an investigation into mRNA or from a successful career in widget selling.
Putin entered pole position to become the "alpha male" of the Kremlin by spying on people, as well as watching, manipulating and often exterminating them.
It's all a conspiracy
What process did all this experience do in the mind of Putin that we are facing today? Rudiger von Fritz, Germany's former ambassador to Russia, describes the psychological consequences as he observed them over time. Putin classifies everything in life - private or public, Russian or global - into categories of real or potential hostilities, conspiracies or threats.
Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist, agrees, saying of Russia's president: "He constantly talks about treason and deceit." As Putin sees history and current events, Krastev notes: "Things never happen spontaneously. If people are demonstrating, he doesn't ask: Why are they out on the streets? He asks: Who put them in?"
Through this route, many of Putin's hallucinations are understood. The Soviet Union did not collapse, but was forced into decline (by a hostile West). The "colour revolutions" in the former Soviet Republics were not deep cries for freedom from people who felt oppressed.
These protesters were recruited or manipulated by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. Ukrainians do not want to join the European Union because of the promise it makes of prosperity, progress and freedom. They do so because they are run by Nazis, whose real goal is to encircle and betray Russia and Putin.
Another aspect of this particular professional deformity concerns the truth - or rather, the complete absence and the elimination of its very meaning. For years, people like Peter Pomeranchev, a Soviet-born British writer, have been pointing out that Putin has been demonstrating his power by defining "reality" as arbitrarily as much as he arbitrarily cheers him up.
The once-and-always KGB agent knows that "if nothing is true, then anything is possible," Pomeranchev believes. "We have the feeling that we do not know what Putin will do next – that he is unpredictable and therefore dangerous. We are surprised, confused and upset by the Kremlin's instrumentalization of irrationality and non-reality."
Structural feature
While serving as a German ambassador to the Kremlin, von Fritz experienced first-hand the cognitive dissonance that this condition causes to other people. "In some talks in Moscow after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, I had the feeling that we had invaded the peninsula and not Russia." If there is no truth, it no longer matters whether you distort reality or reverse it, to the extent that you can. In Putin's system, lying is not an instantaneous error, but a structural feature.
So what makes Putin different from the rest of us? A lot. First, while we may all suffer from some professional deformity or perversion (journalists have hardly any immunity to it), most of us are not spies.
Second, no matter how one-sided our worldviews may be, most of us are forced to meet and interact occasionally with other people who have different perspectives of the world. Putin, by contrast, seems to be completely isolated in his alternative reality.
And third, even when we get to the "deep", most of us do not have enough strength to hurt millions of innocents (although the sad people of Uvalde, Texas, know that a person who acts alone can destroy the lives of many other people). Putin has this absolute power, which is accompanied by the codes for launching nuclear weapons.
His years of formation in the KGB caused a professional distortion in Vladimir Putin, which turned him into a cynical, paranoid, vindictive, ruthless and relentless man. And above all, disingenuous.
Ukraine, the West and the world must keep all this in mind when formulating a strategy against it.
Source: BloombergOpinion
