When You're in Hate Revenge Gets In Your Heart, Mind and Actions
A psychology of Putin and all other tyrants
There’s not a shortage of tyrants that spew hate in the news and you can fill in their names. For the purpose of this article I will use Vladimir Putin as an example:
There is often a pattern that most of them follow psychologically that leads to hate and then violence:
Step 1: Humiliation - there is something about humiliation that cuts through nearly all reason because it goes directly into their amygdala which hijacks them away from being able to think rationally. It’s possible that the only thing Putin hates more than the West is Mikhail Gorbachev who he may believe capitulated and sold out the Soviet Union to the West, especially the United States. It’s also possible when Putin first came to power and was even charming towards the West that he couldn’t get the humiliation of that defeat out of his system. It’s as if wherever he went the world was laughing at him saying, “Ha, ha. We won, you lost.”
Step 2: Grievance - there is usually a history of events in which they felt humiliated and were powerless to effectively deal with it. That caused them to vow to themselves to never allow it to happen again when they became older and empowered and which may remain as a lifelong grievance looking for opportunities to avenge by revenge. Over time the grievance that Putin felt over the Soviet Union’s defeat increasingly ate away at him. This may have been especially so when he ran into other leaders who were much less smart than him who he might have felt were secretly delighting in the Soviet Union’s defeat.
Step 3: Projection - knowing how much they hate other parties, they project what they would feel and would want to do if they were those parties being hated. This can sparks paranoia and a justification to preemptively attack those others. Putin’s despising the West may have fueled his increasingly thinking of what he would do if he was them being so reviled. For instance, regardless of NATO proclaiming that it is not an aggressive body, Putin may believe of course they want to hurt us (Russia) because of how much we (Putin) hate them.
Step 4: Denial of projection - they deny that they are projecting such feelings onto others which further increases and justifies their paranoia and a call to action. The greater their Projection becomes the more their paranoia builds to their being convinced that others wish them harm. The more convinced they are that they are under attack or about to be under attack, the more they justify their preemptive actions. In Putin’s case he may have been right to believe that Ukraine was becoming more Westernized and it was just a matter of time before they joined NATO. Once that happened, NATO would be at Russia’s doorstep.
Step 5: Trigger event (Rate Limiting Step) - it’s not clear what trigger event from Ukraine may have pushed Putin to act. Whatever it was, it needed to have reached a tipping point in Putin’s mind of Ukraine joining or at least aligning with the West that to him would be a point of no return. Or the tipping point may have been viewing the West as weak, confused, disjointed and vulnerable especially in the wake of how Trump alienated and demeaned long time allies and NATO. In chemistry there is something called the Rate Limiting Step which upon being reached the remainder of a chemical reaction spontaneously occurs. It’s kind of like a Domino effect. For Putin it may have again been seeing Ukraine becoming too westernized and about to join NATO coupled with NATO being weakened by Trump’s negative view of it.
What can be done?
I’m not sure that anything can be done to change the above “runaway train” in the mind of Putin or other tyrants like him. However, we can begin having conversations across the political divide - and other divides - where instead of out of control escalation, we follow the wise counsel from Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey’s wonderful recent book, What Happened to You? , and ask each other that question and then listen with an empathic open mind to find out the steps that happened in each other’s minds to be so rigid in that beliefs that drive our actions.
In essence, it’s the process of replacing projecting our beliefs and feelings onto others and then denying with instead empathizing with them and non-judgmentally inviting them to express where they are truly coming from.