Relevance Through Destruction
A modest attempt to analyze how Russia descended into belligerent degeneracy.
It was, of all people, Lindsey Graham, a ductile Senator from South Carolina, who rather matter-of-factly let us in on the key rationale underlying the type of public conduct that I call ‘performative degeneracy.’ When the reporter Mark Leibovich asked Graham why and how he went from the most merciless Trump critic to his most pliant sycophant, Graham responded, quite candidly, that “he was trying to stay relevant.” Of course! Relevance. The critical variable that makes a man debase himself in its pursuit. Lindsey’s quest for relevance, however, is of the most benign kind. He is a vain, florid, aging Southern gentleman, a Norma Desmond of American politics, vying for that last ‘close-up.’ He’s willing to trade his integrity not for the sake of world domination, but merely to be photographed at parties looking good and to golf with important people.
For the less genteel, the dogged pursuit of relevance can take bizarre forms. Following the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, many have discovered that ‘crazy’ could be profitable, and rushed to stake a claim there. But the ‘crazy’ trade became overcrowded quickly. To keep oneself one step ahead of the rest of the motley pack one must continually shock, and that process, with each new step losing punch and utility, soon becomes pure exhibitionism, a public epatage – shock for its own sake, not in the service of any other goal. At a recent CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) – a rather profitless but infinitely festive sideshow – a giant stage screen welcomed the attendees with a catchy “We’re all domestic terrorists” prompt. It’s a daring tease, no doubt intended to spite the libs and delight conservatives, but not entirely unexpected. We, libs, can extrapolate, and we got the drift of where this was going way back when MAGAs embraced the ‘deplorable’ designation and wore it with pride. It’s not news that today’s conservatives’ entire raison-d’etre is to troll normies, and the act is becoming boring.
Whatever you think about the CPAC attendees’ motives, I think most of them are just LARPing and building a brand. The quest for relevance takes a darker turn when the striver had already been on top of the world, but then lost it, and is now driven by old grudges and revanchism. “No mercy to the Ukrainian population,” tweeted a Russian diplomat in Vienna, a few weeks ago. Note that it is not to the ‘Ukrainian army’ that he extends no mercy, but to the ‘Ukrainian population,’ the civilians – an oddly bloodthirsty sentiment from someone claiming to come to liberate that very population from the *Nazis*. There is something clownishly histrionic about the tweet, in a Joker-like “Aw! Did I get your attention?” kind of way. But unlike the CPAC attendees’ pretend-terrorism, this guy is not joking. There’s no tongue-in-cheek in that message, no cosplaying levity. His bid for our attention is infused with an apocalyptic message: “Behold us, world, and despair!” He compels us all to contemplate the possibility of death.
Death, today, is the unspoken but ever-present part of the modern Russian identity and national character. There were times, not too long ago, when Russians could brandish their heroic victory in WWII, and being the first nation to send a man to space. More recently, they could impress the world with their lavish Davos parties and the phallic yachts of their oligarchs. And what can the Russians impress the world with now? The country’s recent scenario follows that of an old Russian fairy tale about the old fisherman and his greedy wife who got a hold of a magic goldfish who grants them wishes. Naturally, with each wish their demands grow more obscene and grandiose, until the annoyed goldfish knocks them back to their original destitute state.
Putin’s affliction, like that of the fairy tale fisherman, can’t be cured by wealth and fame. He’s already been deemed the richest man in the world. The palaces that he had built for himself rival Versailles. He could’ve retired and watched birds and painted portraits, and spent the rest of his life with his gymnast girlfriend somewhere in Switzerland. But doing so, in the context of what he and thugs like him consider worthy of respect, would be a pathetic, inglorious finale, an almost criminal dereliction of the platform and the levers he had so painstakingly secured. Only a weak fool abandons the game voluntarily.
At this point, Putin’s pursuit of relevance is eschatological. Chronically dour-faced, a jaded nihilist with a comportment of a school shooter, scoffing at other people’s naïve aspirations, Putin has run out of ways to impress and to be impressed, and now can only be moved by destruction. What rocks his boat is the ability (at least before the Russian Army was exposed as a corrupt, dysfunctional carcass of its former self) to show the collective West how wrong it, the West, is, and how right he, Putin, is. He would show us how Europe and the US are decadent and decaying, and Russia is pure and vigorous. And, this late in the game, the only remaining avenue to demonstrate it to us is total annihilation. Of Ukraine, US, EU, Russia – no matter. Putin shrugs with indifference at the possibility. Yes, the Russians will die but they will drag the rest of the world with them. And to him this is a glorious, virtuous end.
There’s a certain ‘look what you made me do’ abdication of agency in Putin’s nihilism. To excavate, to untangle all the sources of his depravity would take a literary novel. I think a good writer would detect a faint cry for help from underneath that destructive impulse, a cry coming from some inherent helplessness, and there’s almost something childlike – not childish, but childlike – about that cry. Children in distress are not interested in a rational argument. Putin adopted the language of destruction, because, like a child, he can’t adequately express what gnaws him, because he can’t engage in a conversation like an adult, because he confuses belligerent antics with agency. He is like the drunken man in the enclosed video, rattling a saber at passersby while screaming ‘I’ll show you, you hear me! Russia will show you!”
A Russian-American philosopher Mikhail Epstein once singled out the innate infantilism of Russian ethos, stemming from the fact that the Russians never matured as a nation into either fully Western or fully Eastern people, oscillating for centuries between nomadic and settled lifestyles and values, and disdaining both. It is this unsettledness, this confusion, this fluid identity that finally manifested itself in the current atrocities. They tried, twice, to become like the West, failed, and now they want to destroy those who’re trying (and succeeding!). Epstein sees no plausible way out of this other than an utter, bitter defeat for Russia, and her subsequent breakdown into a multitude of independent principalities: Moscovia, Smolensk, Novgorod, etc. Here’s to it happening in my lifetime.