From Psychopathy to Psychosis

Miniature from the 15th-century Radziwiłł Chronicle history of Kievan Rus', showing Vladimir I of Kiyiv threatening to kill his consort Rogneda of Polotsk, while their son Prince Izyaslav defends her. Via Wikimedia Commons.

We all know about Lord Acton and that thing that power does and absolute power does absolutely, which certainly applies to President Putin, but there's something even more dangerous than that: power gives you a false sense, overconfidence bias, that you know what's going on, absolute power makes you delusional. 

the sheer criminality aside, this practically guarantees all the things putin supposedly wanted to avoid: a stronger NATO, a vehemently anti-russian ukraine, and an isolated russia

— Seva (@SevaUT) February 24, 2022

Seva Gunitsky is one of the authors, with Adam Casey, of a piece that appeared three weeks ago in Foreign Affairs that I wish I'd seen before I started making predictions about Ukraine, "The Bully in the Bubble: Putin and the Perils of Information Isolation", the burden of which is that Putin, like Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, Recep Tayyib Erdoğan, and a scarily increasing host of others, practices what the authors call a "personalist" rule, in which government proceeds not from an ideological framework or a particular power/interest structure but simply from one person, not just an autocrat, but one focused on acting out his own needs and desires, whatever they may be. Trump is inclined to be a personalist too, which is what his authoritarian party hired him for, but he's too personally incompetent to actually carry the thing out; Putin has seemed to us to be the super-competent opposite, a kind of Lord Vetinari, the skilled and efficient Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, trained assassin and polymath, master of detail, only much nastier of course. But on Earth, as opposed to Discworld, even the most able personalist ruler faces pitfalls that are nearly impossible to escape:

Authoritarian states are bedeviled by an inherent contradiction. To stay in power, autocrats desperately seek reliable information on the attitudes of their citizens, elite rivals, and foreign threats. But to avoid opposition, they establish political systems that make quality data exceptionally hard to obtain. Leaders suppress dissent, punish free expression, encourage personal loyalty, and divide their security agencies. They therefore struggle to understand both how their people feel and what other states are planning.

In a personalist autocracy, these problems are even worse. Government officials not only struggle to obtain factual information; they also face strong personal incentives to censor what they find.... 

Perhaps no leader of a major power illustrates these patterns better than Putin. His advisers once held a range of perspectives, especially early during the first decade of this century, when he attempted to position the Kremlin as a partner to the United States and Europe. But over time, his security agencies came to dominate Putin’s attention, especially as he grew disappointed with the West. Now, Putin’s inner circle is almost entirely made up of the siloviki—members of his loyalist, hawkish security services. The FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, is playing an increasingly visible role in foreign relations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by contrast, is now sometimes left out of decisions altogether.

The result is a dangerous feedback loop

in which everything that's wrong with his world view is continually reinforced, and his opinions, and his little hypotheses that he'd rather like to be true, become unshakable, passionately held certainties. He has built himself into a system that is designed to make him insane.

Another extraordinary televised Kremlin meeting, this one with oligarchs. The head of the industrialists' lobby group tells Putin to avoid wrecking the Russian economy further in responding to Western sanctions; Putin responds describing today's invasion as a "necessary measure." pic.twitter.com/4jwQG1fmJM

— Anton Troianovski (@antontroian) February 24, 2022

Putin: “To be clear, what is happening is a necessary measure. They just gave us no chance to act otherwise. … The risks were such that it was unclear how our country would even continue to exist.”

— Anton Troianovski (@antontroian) February 24, 2022

Quoted in DeLong's substack. Troianovski goes on to say, "Shokhin was very visibly nervous as he made that appeal." Putin is nuts now. He is the mad tsar, like Boris Godunov hallucinating while the appalled courtiers look on. It's a new recklessness, in which he will save Russia even if that means destroying it.