Personal motives, psychology and what is happening in Russia
Can attempts at explanation through personal motives, "psychology" or "anthropology" really explain anything about what is happening at the country level? This is one of the central points of tension in the social sciences. In many ways, the social sciences, by their very nature, claim that psychological and anthropological stories are insufficient or even do not work directly. What is ultimately not so important is how facts and situations are presented in the minds of individuals - these representations are diverse, we do not have any intelligible access to them, and the main thing about them is not how they look, but what they work.
The owner of the company can present his mission in any way he wants, he can be driven by even religious motives, even specific considerations about self-development and behavior on schedule, on the advice of a popular YouTuber - all this is important only insofar as, ultimately, it allows his company to flourish in a market conjuncture. Therefore, we need to try to understand not his personal idiosyncratic attitudes, but the objective conjuncture to which these attitudes, each with their own, successfully respond.
The activity of the firm in the market is an understandable case of social discipline. Whoever the capitalist is personally, as a person, in the market he must behave like a capitalist, and a meaningful economic analysis of his activity consists precisely in the concept of how this activity is built into the market logic, and not by what personal factors it is produced. Sometimes this applies to statesmen as well. States are subject to some discipline, primarily in the form of competition with each other, and also in the form of the need to maintain internal stability - and whatever the leaders of the state are guided in their minds, it can be meaningful to consider their actions from the perspective of objective state logic.
Disciplining is never a given. A monopolist in the market, especially one who obtains and maintains his monopoly by non-market methods, will not be as disciplined by market conditions as a small firm competing with hundreds of others. There will be more freedom in his actions, and in order to understand them, he will have to turn to others, including subjective factors. Less discipline means more subjectivity. Statesmen, especially in the short term, have little discipline, even in the best case. There were times in Europe when a prince's mistake for tomorrow could lead to the loss of the entire principality and its annexation to a neighbor. Modern states are in a completely different situation. In the case of the Russian Federation, the state apparatus has been purposefully working for years to free its leaders from any internal discipline - suppressing both external organizations and the autonomy of its parts.
When the state is not objectively disciplined, it becomes pointless to try to view the actions of its leaders through the depersonalized logic of statehood itself. The statesman fades into the background, the person with his personal convictions, views and motives comes to the fore. The relevance of the "psychological", and more correctly "anthropological" or "ethnographic" perspective is increasing. So I would not be at all surprised if the best explanation for the actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine is an attempt to assert itself through the Raskolnikov case or something close. And this is precisely a rational explanation, and not a reference to inadequacy or insanity.
Artyom Seversky 2022-11-06
