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- Embed this noticeMegalomania is not narcissistic lust for power, control, and adoration. It's the identification of one's (former) personal deprivation with a perceived or alleged suffering and destitution of something bigger, e.g., a state or nation. Hitler is an example, Putin too.
By this identification the megalomaniac doesn't act because of his individual needs and wishes but because he see the state, the nation, suffer for the very same reasons he *once* did. Take Putin's crucial experiences:
His family endured hunger after the war; as a slight boy he was beaten up in the backyards of St. Petersburg; his encounter with the rat in the staircase of the appartment building his family once lived in.
He learnt that in order not to suffer you need to be cunning, brutal, and always to fight back. Respect is deserved, is needed, and can be earned. Substitute the nation of Russia in the 20th century for Putin's life story and it becomes apparent what makes him tick:
It's not him that (!) is conquering the world, it is him that (!) *in the name and for the benefit of Russia* excercises the lessons he once learnt.
Because Russia must be free of starvation (cf. his preposterous economic news in his end of the year speeches), free of indignity (respected by the U.S., that is), and "great again". Similiar lines can be found in the fusion of Hitler's life story with his perception of Germany after WW I.
In fusing both (!) stories of destitution, "fate" becomes the main category and driver: the fate of the man becomes the fate of the nation, and vice versa. It is not the man but the higher power that acts through him to right the wrongs and reinstate the place both (!) deserve.
This acting as a puppet through a larger puppeteer *who himself is in need* explains why people like Hitler or Putin don't feel remorse or pity towards their compartiots who suffer endlessly by their actions and orders. It explains why those men not only put aside any consideration of the consequences of their actions but why they keep acting until the very end – either the destruction of the higher "person" (puppeteer, state, nation) or the man. It explains why they don't fear death and why they won't stop.
It also explains why in the case of Putin there is no contradiction between running an imperialist country (Russia) and acting as (not "like"!) Capo dei capi of a mafia organisation which the state has become. And this not in the sense of a "mafia state" in which criminal activities infiltrate and increasingly undermine a still functiong state (like Hungary under Orbán).
Russia is not such an infiltrated state but a mafia organisation *posing* as a nation state, using the economic and legal means of a nation state in the service of the mafia enterprises. Which is why in Russia of today there are mafia-style hierarchies and infightings, power struggles, a sense of permanent insecurity and inability to gain safer grounds.
It is because man and nation identify in the "fate" that a person like Putin can act as if he were a statesman struggling with obstacles while at the same time being heavily invested in criminal activities of personal enrichment and lawish rewards for his dependants and underlings. You can have both side by side. (One probably doesn't need to, as examples of Stalin, Ceaușescu, Mao Zedong seem to show.)
In fact, personal enrichment due to a sense of earlier deprivation and the conviction that material means will prevent such situations from appearing again, can act as motivation to try to achieve something similiar for the state or the nation.
But most important: In the understanding of "fate" as a non-coincidental coming-together of personal and supra-personal "needs", a man like Putin may think of himself as acting out of responsibility and care, and that his sacrifice consists eactly in becoming the tool for the higher power, the puppet of an invisible, timeless, and real puppeteer: the nation, Mother Russia, the boundless Russian civilisation, the Russkiy Mir.
For these reasons this war will most probably not end with negotiations nor with Russia's defeat on the battlefield. It will end at the earliest with the death of Putin *and* with no-one to step in to continue the "task": To be and to act like a willful and decisive puppet of a wounded puppeteer seeking reprieve and salvation.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #Putin