Cogito Big Ego Sum

There are major actors in the Ukraine-Russia imbroglio: Vladimir Putin Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, Xi Jinping, to name a few.

The thing all these people have in common is simple: they’re powerful people, and they have the psychological makeup, and colossal ego, of the powerful. Consequently, they certainly share many psychological characteristics in common. After all, it requires a certain kind of person to arrive at the pinnacle of power in his nation.

Hence, these people, these men, will share the characteristics that drive anyone to achieve positions of power and influence. We can speculate as to what those traits might be, but there are some things we know.

For instance, if you’re Vladimir Putin, or Joe Biden, or Xi Jin Ping, you know a very simple thing:

There are eight billion people on the planet, and more than half of them spend some portion of each day contemplating… you.

Contemplating what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, wondering whether they can predict what you’re going to do next. They love you, hate you, admire you, fear you… they ponder you at some length each day.

And, what’s the next level in that thinking?  Well, if you’re Vladimir Putin at least, you’re also aware of the scenes that transpired before and shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. Scenes in the streets of Moscow in which Muscovites approached old Bolsheviks screaming, “Murderer!” at them. Old Bolsheviks like Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev. These four were instrumental in the founding of the Soviet Union, and all but Khrushchev saw the end of that terrible exercise in soulless brutality. After the violent deaths of tens of millions. Deaths they all helped to bring about.

Kaganovich, Malenkov, et al were pitiless, seemingly remorseless men who existed in the deepest, darkest bowels of Josif Stalin’s inner circle; men with oceans of blood on their hands. Men of incomprehensibly vast power, who manipulated the levers of their power ruthlessly and mercilessly.

Then, these four inexplicably fell from power and somehow survived that tumble, only to live out their lives in obscurity as pensioners in the moribund Soviet Union, and occasionally accosted by the wrathful victims of their depredations on the streets of Moscow. How such scenes must have chilled the blood of a much younger, highly ambitious Vladimir Putin!

When people like Putin saw such scenes as they mounted the ladder to vast power, they each imagined themselves in the very same scene, while the very same little person, representing the very same millions upon millions of little people, berated them, correctly, for the unthinkable crimes they’d committed.

In their minds' eyes, they all saw such scenes in which they were the reluctant stars, suffering from the scorn and derision of potentially billions of people on earth. I remember observing those scenes, and I remember thinking of how richly deserving the targets of the scorn were!

They knew it too. How galling must have been the realization that such as you and I were heaping scorn, from afar, on their life’s work, and on them.

There’s an expression: It’s lonely at the top. It means, among other things, that there are very few people at the top, and when we arrive there, it might be only to discover that the few people we do find there, are distasteful people indeed. People with whom we’d rather not spend a lot of time, and largely because they’re so much like us.

Oh, there are little people up there too… serving the high and mighty, preparing their meals, disrobing at their whim, cleaning their vast apartments, removing the castoff detritus of their extravagant lives.

But the massively powerful realize their own limitations too. They can’t know for sure whether these little people are serving their every need because of love and devotion. Those at the top wonder why the little people are there, and can’t prevent themselves from speculating on whether these wee ones might be harboring fantasies of supplanting the mighty, and using their proximity as a shortcut to achieving that ambition.

It is lonely at the top. And the always looming judgment of the entire world full of little people awaits the results of all the lever-pulling you do when you’re at the top. Soon enough, the world will give a collective thumbs up or thumbs down as it pertains to your stint at the peak of power. In that judgement will be assessments of your entire character. Your entire self. If it’s thumbs up, then you will see only positive characteristics assigned to your entry in the history books: strong, decisive, wise, clever, mature, benevolent. But if the judgement is a thumbs down…

There’s very little nuance in such judgments. We humans, we little people, the ones of whose verdict the high and mighty live in such terror, we prefer black and white. Gray makes us exercise our brains to determine whether we put the subject of our scrutiny on the plus or minus side of the ledger. And when you’re at the top, you crave the adulation of the little ones.

The threat that such adulation might not be there causes you terror indeed. So you want your actions to be very plainly on the positive side of history’s ledger. At the top you’ll always be tempted to grand acts. Great Society initiatives; New Deals; Great Leaps Forward; Final Solutions; Wars on Drugs, Poverty, Terror; Sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth before the decade is out. 

And: Invading Ukraine.

We watch the events unfold in Ukraine, and elsewhere – in the South China Sea, in China’s threat to Taiwan, in SouthEast Asia, on the Korean Peninsula – and we think to ourselves, it’s all such theater. Theater meant to feed the towering, ravenous egos of the rich and powerful. Complicated acts in grand plays, and all with the intent to convince you and me, the little people, that the ones at the top are Great Men.

Dictators, Presidents and Rulers-for-Life intone about the need to liberate the people, to cleanse the world of evil-doers, to make the world safe for democracy, to bring about peace for our time, and so on. And we all know it’s just theater. Even: the whole master race codswallop was just theater. Oh, Hitler, in the fever swamps of his mind, certainly hated the Jews, but he likely didn’t fear them. He may not even have thought that they all needed to die; we’ll never know. But, once these mighty powerful, ego-driven men unleash the machines they intend to serve them, those machines can quickly run amok, gathering their own power and momentum, and spreading misery, poverty, death and destruction across the land. Millions upon millions slaughtered and billions impoverished, and all for the grand show.  

But still Putin does it. Still he does the theater. Still he makes his claims that he’s “de-Nazifying” and “de-militarizing” Ukraine, doing the great deeds on your behalf and mine, while everyone knows, and Putin knows that everyone knows, that there is no threat to Russia whatsoever emanating from Ukraine. Still we watch the theater.

And worse! We participate in the tawdry, dishonest production! Over here in America, Putin’s defenders take up the hogwash and repeat it at the top of their lungs in their defense of the bastard. All while they know, and they know that we know, that they’re lying. But they still do it.

Putin, Biden, Xi, Macron, Johnson, et al don’t need our love. But they crave it. And we the little people, and the little people in Ukraine, the little people the world over, still give it to them. All while we know, and they know we know, and we know they know we know… it’s all theater. Meaningless theater that gets vast slatherings of unintentional meaning by virtue of the countless lives it upends and destroys.

Ten thousand years from now... ten thousand years that would pass, if we could observe them, in the blink of a historical eye, none of this will matter beyond the future version of the dry, dusty tomes of history, mouldering away in the future version of today’s internet repositories. Viewed and pored over by… dozens.

But bastards like Putin can still make our lives miserable now… all to feed their own warped, narcissistic, megalomaniacal ego. Peter Venetoklis said it well, in a recent snippet that actually triggered this thought piece:

Pride and ego, coupled with a Bond villain's sociopathy, appear to be what Putin is all about.

Yep. That seems to sum it up nicely. Peter’s entire essay is well worth the read.