Reason And Anti-Reason In Moscow: Psychiatric Determinants Of “Cold War II”

Prof. Louis Rene Beres

Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine has obviously critical implications for United States foreign policy. Among other things, this expanding Russian “crime against peace” has undermined once residual hopes for superpower reconciliation or “détente.” In essence, whatever the variable particulars, we are now embroiled in “Cold War II.”

Are there any discernible psychiatric elements to this “war?” As a key player in world politics, is the Russian president fundamentally rational or irrational? And how should a meaningful answer be determined?

There are some additional questions. Is it plausible that Mr. Putin might sometime pretend irrationality as a calculated step toward “escalation dominance?”  How could American analysts reliably distinguish between authentic enemy irrationality and pretended enemy irrationality? How credible are Putin’s periodic threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine? To be sure, assessing an adversarial head of state is not “normally” a psychiatric task.

Still such informed queries need not imply “abnormality.” Inter alia, such an implication could mean dispensing with variously tangible distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal.” This dispensation need not suggest that findings of “abnormality” would be insignificant, but only that Putin’s most injurious traits could present in obscure or unforeseeable ways.

In some cases, owing to the higher likelihood of decisional miscalculations during crises, these qualities could prove more portentous than “normalcy.” Here, though counter-intuitive, a perfectly rational Vladimir Putin could pose greater global perils than an irrational Putin. As to a Russian president who would become genuinely “mad,” prediction would become all but impossible. Then, using a poplar gaming metaphor, all bets would  be off.

What then?

Credo quia absurdum, warned the ancient philosophers. “I believe because it is absurd.”

There is more. It will be important for US decision-makers to differentiate between a Vladimir Putin who is “merely” evil from one who is abnormal, irrational or “mad.” Though there exist no intrinsic or “essential” meanings to such potentially overlapping descriptions, current strategic theory centers most conspicuously on judgments of “irrationality.” More precisely, an irrational national decision-maker is one who does not value national survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences.

               Such matters would always be multifaceted and bewildering.  Nuance would be critical. Accordingly, specific designations of “normal” and “abnormal” could appear sharply delineating or mutually exclusive.  But US foreign policy decision makers could also discover that any true qualities of abnormality, irrationality and madness are more correctly thought of as isolable points along a common continuum than as sharply distinct analytic alternatives.

                There is much more to understanding Vladimir Putin and his belligerent threats than first meets the eye. Sigmund Freud wrote about the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914) while tracing assorted connections between “abnormal” and “normal.” He was surprised to learn just how faint the supposed lines of any tangible conceptual demarcation could actually be. Exploring parapraxes, or slips of the tongue, a phenomenon that we now popularly call “Freudian slips,” Freud concluded that certain specific psychopathologic traits could sometimes be discovered even in “normal” persons.

               What then?

               What would this mean?

               How might it impact US foreign policymaking in “Cold War II?”

               After the Holocaust, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed Nazi (SS) doctors. Perplexed, as a physician, that such monstrous crimes could have been justified as “hygiene,” Dr. Lifton was determined to answer some basic and necessary questions. Most elementary was the altogether reasonable query:  How could Nazi doctors have managed to conform large-scale medicalized killing of innocent and defenseless human beings with their otherwise normal private lives?

 In similar fashion, US decision makers and other world leaders ought now to inquire about Vladimir Putin and his all-too-many underlings, separatist enablers and otherwise witting allies.

 How can these people witness the daily aggression and genocide now being inflicted in Ukraine by thousands of Russian soldiers and continue “per normal” with their day-to-day lives?

               In response, history could be instructive. It was not unusual for Nazi doctors to remain good fathers and husbands while murdering Jewish children. These defiling physicians (doctors sworn by Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”) were capable of supervising genocidal mass murders six days a week (on Sundays they “normally” went to church). Now we must ask along very similar lines of questioning: 

Are Russian soldiers and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators murderers who are also able to remain good fathers and good husbands?

               Robert Lifton carried on his examinations of the Nazi “biomedical vision” as a Yale Professor and Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Research in Psychopathology and Psychotherapy. For this American-Jewish physician, such examination was not just some random undertaking of narrowly intellectual curiosity. Rather, adhering to widely-accepted and reason-based protocols, Dr. Lifton embarked upon a series of carefully rigorous scientific studies.

               To the physician, the Oath of Hippocrates pledges that “I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.” When asked about this unwavering duty, most interviewed SS doctors experienced no personal contradictions. In Nazi pseudo-biology, “The Jew” was “a source of infection.” Ridding society of Jews, it followed, was a properly “anti-infective” medical goal. The Nazi doctors saw such murderously irrational “excisions” as a proper “obligation” of “healing,” “compassion” and (above all) “hygiene.”

               Do Vladimir Putin and his compliant subordinates have similarly “cleansing” views of Russia’s Ukrainian genocide? Based on readily available evidence, this is hardly a difficult question.

               Resembling their Nazi forbears, perpetrators of the ongoing Russian genocide in Ukraine must prepare to consider Putin-ordered mass murders as a crime justifiable by metaphor. Literally millions of Holocaust murders offer irrefutable evidence of just how easy it is to subordinate science and reason to the most preposterous forms of comparison. With any such willful subordination,otherwise normal military behavior is giving way again to once unimaginable levels of inter-state and intra-state predation.

 There is more. The duality of good and evil within each individual person is a very old idea in western thought, most notably in German literature, from Johan Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche to Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. Always, in studying this clarifying literature, we may learn that the most critical boundaries of caring and compassion are not between “normal” and “abnormal” persons, but within each individual person.  As Putin-ordered Nuremberg-category crimes continue to escalate, it is high time to recognize that the porous walls of human normalcy and abnormality can allow a single individual to navigate effortlessly between polar extremes.

Pertinent oscillations would take place between cruelty and altruism, violence and calm, right and wrong, or reason and anti-reason.

 In the best of all possible worlds, truth could never be manipulated as political contrivance. It is, after all, an exculpatory trait, both in specific psychiatric assessments and in serious judgments of international relations. Still, at any identifiable moment of human history, the veneer of human civilization has remained razor thin. It has remained brittle, fragile, tenuous, ever- ready to crack along multiple and mutually-dependent interstices.

               After attending the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, political philosopher Hannah Arendt advanced the controversial hypothesis that even extreme evil can be ordinary or “banal,” that it can be generated by the seemingly benign absence of authentic thought. This novel interpretation was widely challenged and disputed following the trial, but it remained identifiably rooted in certain classical views of individual human dualism, particularly Goethe’s Faust. Hannah Arendt’s troubling idea of evil as mundane was further reinforced by various-earlier studies of nefarious human behavior in the crowd, the herd, or the mass, especially in overlapping works of Soren Kierkegaard, Max Stirner, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gustave Le Bon, Carl G. Jung, Elias Canetti and Sigmund Freud.

               In all these thematic writings, a common focus is placed upon the potentially corrosive impact of group membership and identity on individual human behavior. Freud’s own best contribution remains his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). Here, the psychologist-philosopher already understood that Reason is at perpetual war with Anti-Reason and that political dictatorships will inevitably favor the latter.

               Robert Lifton likely knew all this. Still, he sought something more, some other isolable mechanism by which the ordinary or “normal” evildoer could render himself or herself “abnormal.” Ultimately, he discovered this esoteric mechanism in an intra-psychic process Lifton labeled as “doubling.”

               Different from the traditional psychoanalytic concept of “splitting,” or what Freud preferred to call “dissociation,” doubling is the means whereby an “opposing self” begins to replace portions of the “original self,” in effect usurping and overwhelming that original self from within. When this happens, we may learn further, the opposing self is able to embrace evil-doing without restraint and while the original self still seeks to remain “good.”

                Significantly, for optimum understanding of Putin’s grave crimes against Ukraine, doubling may permit Russian evil doers to avoid personal guilt and thus live simultaneously within two coinciding but adversarial levels of human consciousness.

               As a “maneuver,” however unwitting, doublingallowed Nazi doctors to be murderers and decent family men at the same time. In similar fashion, doubling is likely the way that shameless Putin-functionaries are able to reconcile the blatant ordinariness of their public lives with derivative displays of personal cruelty. As with Nazi doctors and the Jews, it is plausible that “know nothing” Putin-followers regard the harms being inflicted upon “sub-human” Ukrainians as not merely pleasing, but also as a welcome form of “healing.”

Sometimes, truth may emerge through paradox. To wit, there can be an abnormal side to normalcy. For the future, in thinking about how best to protect human beings from yet another genocidal national leader, all states and peoples would be well-advised not to think of such leaders in starkly polar terms – that is, as “normal/abnormal” or “good/evil.”

               In the Third Reich, doublingwas not the only reason that “normal” individuals were able to be complicit in crimes against humanity. Elements of “groupthink,” especially an overwhelming need to belong, have always expressed a dominant decisional influence on human behavior. Clinically, at least, whatever sorts of explanation might ultimately emerge as most persuasive, we humans may finally have to accept that the most odious and contemptible national leaders have sometimes been clinically “normal.”

               Such conclusions ought to be kept in mind as US national security officials prepare to better understand the “psychopathology of normalcy.” In support of such necessary preparations, these officials should focus more diligently on fact-based explanations than on narrowly simplistic or conspiratorial ones. Analyzing Vladimir Putin has already become an urgent task for America’s scholars and national policy makers, but it is also a task wherein US assessments of adversarial normalcy need not imply any diminishing dangers. Even a completely “normal” Vladimir Putin could underestimate American military reactions and/or overestimate his own forces’ capacity to fend off American nuclear reprisals.

 At some still-indeterminable point, one when violence-stoking hatreds are channeled by the Russian President into the crudely belligerent nationalism of  “Mother Russia,” they could  precipitate a catastrophic international war. And this prospect could include a nuclear war.

               In the final analysis, truth will be exculpatory: “Happy are those who still know that behind all speeches are the unspeakable lies.” This cryptic observation by Rainer Maria Rilke, the Dionysian poet (a poet generally associated with dense philosophical issues of “being”) laments the lies of individual leaders like Vladimir Putin. Though the virulent particulars of such lies are ever-changing around the world, their overall generality of meaning remains constant. Such welcome generality also represents an inherently gainful trait of science, medicine and law.

 Why does the famous Edward Munch “scream” (see image above) resonate so tellingly? It is because so many “normal” human beings are able to grasp thatin a self-defiling world that is presumptively normal, not to be abnormal represents a special form of madness. Now, amid the ongoing horrors of Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, it is this unique form of madness that is most worrisome.

 Even if Vladimir Putin could be judged more-or-less normal, there would remain multiple perils for a US President to consider, some of them unprecedented or sui generis. Though both abnormality and irrationality could render Putin increasingly dangerous to world order, even national leaders who would remain normal and rational amid such evident global absurdity could bring this long-suffering planet to irremediable misfortune. After experiencing or witnessing Putin-inflicted horrors of anti-Ukraine violence, humankind’s only plausible hopes lie latent in certain complicated fusions of truth, intellect, justice and prudence.

This means, among other things, that the core task before a beleaguered humankind is intellectual; it is not narrowly political.

As always, in Moscow and elsewhere, Reason and Anti-Reason can coincide. More particularly, as 20^th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers observes in Reason and Existenz (1955): “The rational is not thinkable without its other, the non-rational, and it never appears in reality without it. The only real question is in what form the other appears, how it remains in spite of all, and how it should be grasped.” Until we can prepare to answer this many-sided question with refined thinking and accumulated expertise, Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will glow ever more menacing.

In this brutal new reality of Cold War II, Edvard Munch’s The Scream could seem anything but absurd.

Louis Rene Beres  was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published in 2016. His other writings have been published in Harvard National Security Journal; Yale Global Online; World Politics (Princeton); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Israel Defense; Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College; Special Warfare; Oxford University Press; The Jerusalem Post; Infinity Journal; BESA Perspectives; US News & World Report; The Hill; and The Atlantic.

This article was first published in Modern Diplomacy