Putin And Mental Health

It’s problematic to look at recent events simply in terms of mental health, at least as far as Putin is concerned. There’s a thing out there called the Great Man Theory Of History, which sees historical events as caused by individual agency. I’ve brought this up on here before of course. Freedom in the sense of political leaders being able to do as they will does, in one sense, exist, but historical circumstances lead to them getting into those positions in the first place. Thatcher, for example, may have been able to exercise her power in the sense that her political philosophy dictated the policies she enacted, but Foot would not have been able to do this because the electorate was so much against him, and whereas it’s possible to say that the electorate had been manipulated, the possibility of that manipulation also arose without individuals being important.

So: we say Putin might be mentally ill. There are a couple of issues arising from that claim, so before you turn against me and say, for example, that I’m stigmatising mental illness, please bear with me for a bit. In the Great Man Theory of History, we ostensibly have a leader who is mentally ill and this is what’s caused the war. But maybe it’s closer to the truth to say that Russian history reached the point where there would be a “mad” leader in power by now.

Unlike Sarada, I can’t claim to be an expert on Russian history. She knows a lot more than I do about it, although I’m sure she’d never assert that she was an expert either. She’s not currently following the news because she finds it too depressing, so I can’t benefit from her wisdom here. Being a former Stalinist, however, I have spent some time in my life following Soviet history rather closely, although after the breakup of the Soviet Union I lost interest as it seemed to merge into the general doings of mature capitalism. My chief impression was that the Russian Revolution took place in a substantially agrarian society which wasn’t fully capitalist but more feudal, and therefore that the phase of history where communist revolution was possible had not yet been reached. Consequently, some of the Marxist language used by the Politburo and the like was just rhetoric, but not all. Part of the problem which arose in the 1980s CE was that there were no leaders left who had clear experience of the Soviet Union during or shortly after the Revolution, and consequently they were unable to continue in the same vein. This is a different process than can be easily explained specifically through Marxist theory because it seems to be connected to the rise of “modernisers” in the Politburo leading to перестройка and гласность, obviously primarily Горбачёв. By the time that happened, I was no longer Stalinist and wasn’t as focussed on events in the USSR. I do remember that it was seen as a positive development on the New Left at the time. My perception of what has happened since is that it’s primarily due to the influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the coöption of nationalism and organised religion to manipulate a poorly-educated populace.

Given the limited and biassed information available to me, Putin seems similar in some ways to Robert Mugabe and to a lesser extent Papa Doc. It feels like he has been in a certain elevated position for so long that it has influenced his judgement, and that the ability to get into that position in the first place involves certain personality traits which amount to the seeds of mental illness. A few things have been said about him in this respect, but before I come to them I want to deal with the mammoth in the room here: the stigmatisation of mental illness. If one accepts that mental illness is a manifestation of brain pathology in the same way as heart disease is a manifestation of cardiac pathology, and so forth, and that this is a central issue in mental health paradigms, then Putin’s behaviour can indeed be interpreted, validly or otherwise, as at least a functional disorder. I would equate this with the dysfunctional behaviour of a whole range of leaders found in all sorts of circumstances, and also connect it with the issue of our own monarchy and its potentially harmful influence on our own royal family’s mental health. The problem is, though, that it’s easy to be facile about this and have a monolithic black box we just call “mental health”, end up othering people with mental health problems and seeing them as dangerous in some way. It would be a rather crass take on that to see his behaviour in that way.

A number of claims are being made regarding the Russian leader. One is that he has been influenced by two years of isolation due to the pandemic. He entered self-isolation in September 2021 when people close to him tested positive for the disease. Another is that he is exhibiting a condition common among leaders referred to as “hubris syndrome”. This has been attributed to Thatcher, Blair, George W Bush and others, and clearly this can, if it makes sense as a disease entity, exist outside the context of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. My impression of Bush in particular was that he behaved in a manner one might hope children would have grown out of by the time they were about eight at the latest.

Dr David Owen, of the “Shrinking David Party”, yes, that Dr David Owen, wrote a paper on Hubris Syndrome which is of considerable interest. Before I get into this, it’s worth looking at David Owen himself. He was a medical doctor and psychiatric registrar before he saw success in politics and was of course able to observe Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair first hand, perhaps giving him superior perspective on the alleged syndrome. At the same time, his trajectory from the Labour Party to the SDP suggests that he would tend to focus less on the social context of a syndrome and see it as seated more in the personality and organic tendencies of the individual than on the influences around them. That said, he does set it in a social environment.

It should be noted first of all that there is no such disorder category in any version of the ICD or DSM, the two most significant widely recognised manuals for mental disorders. That said, Owen does come up with a list of criteria, of which at least four need to be satisfied in order to qualify for such a diagnosis:

• Perceiving the world as an arena where one exercises power and seeks glory.
• Taking actions perceived to show oneself in a positive light and enhance one’s image.
• Excessive concern for image and presentation.
• A messianic way of talking.
• Identifying oneself with the state (or organisation – this is not just about political leaders).
• Use of the “Royal ‘We'”.
• Too much confidence in one’s own judgement compared to the judgement of others.
• Excess self-belief.
• Regarding judgement by history or God as more important than that of one’s peers or courts.
• Recklessness and impulsiveness.
• A broad vision, particularly concerning moral rectitude of a proposed course of action which obviates the need to consider practivality, cost and unwanted consequences.
• A particular kind of incompetence, distinct from the usual form, which follows from the above features and involves overconfidence leading to disregard for the detailed practicalities of implementing a decision.

The problem is more likely to occur the longer someone is in power, but of course I have a few questions here. One is about power. I think the way I left it was that one can exercise power if the situation in the world at the time is such that the thing one does was going to happen anyway, perhaps through someone else. If you want to be able to do particular things which are not in accordance with that, you won’t get to do them, either because you’re not in power or because there are other things which are doable that you can do, but not those things. In other words, power is more or less an illusion. A leader capable of becomng hubristic in this way needs to be convinced that they actually can have power rather than just being placed there by luck or an accident of history. Is it possible that any leader who recognises power as an illusion is immune from this syndrome?

I don’t honestly believe things could have gone significantly differently for Russia and the Ukraine. Maybe someone else than Putin could have come to “power”, but if so, I would expect things to go the same way for them. It isn’t the first time this has happened either. Хрущёв was deposed for similar reasons in 1964, so it’s possible that this will happen again. The political system is in some ways very different and in others quite similar. I don’t know enough about how Russian government works nowadays to say whether it’s likely that Putin could be deposed.

There is a condition called Fronto-Temporal dementia which is somewhat similar, and involves loss of moral judgement. There are reports, for example, of people looking on dating websites with a view to hooking up with people, in front of their partners and not realising this was problematic, or making inappropriate jokes, sexually harassing people, and all this turning out to be the start of organic brain deterioration initially involving poor communication between the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. The onset is much earlier than most Alzheimer cases, being between 45 and 65. It’s been suggested that there’s a link between these two conditions, and I can certainly see that a political leader might get further in her career if she had impaired empathy already as a character trait. Moreover, I can see a situation where a leader is not contradicted or resisted by their colleagues or underlings because of having surrounded themselves with sycophants, and therefore lose the ability to judge wisely.

The underlying question here, though, is whether this siting of a mental problem within Putin’s psyche is actually the most sensible way of looking at the situation. It’s certainly informative regarding behaviour in other situations, such as with absolutist monarchies in the historical past, and it probably applies to Tsarist Russia as well as post-Revolutionary, but another way of looking at it is as a pathological condition exacerbated by the political régime, which might have preferred a leader with the roots of this condition in the first place.

And there’s another question: is he evil? I have a strong bias against perceiving someone as intrinsically evil. When I hear about someone mistreating or murdering their own children, for example, I usually see it as fundamentally a psychiatric issue, although certain organic environmental factors might be involved such as head trauma from being abused as a child, lead in petrol in their formative years, perhaps fetal alcohol syndrome and the developmental neurological response to witnessing domestic violence and abuse as a child. The point rarely if ever comes when I conceive of a human being as actually evil, and I also think that evil is a relatively minor factor in causing the world to be a terrible place. Indifference and ignorance seem more important to me than cruelty. I can never decide if this bias is linked to my work and it’s notable that people who work in the probation service and law enforcement often do ascribe responsibility to negative behaviour. If evil is defined as deliberate cruelty, which is how I understand the word, it would suggest that Putin has empathy to a sufficient degree as to recognise when his actions cause harm.

However, I’m not terribly interested in the question as I believe it’s beside the point. Putin is just a symptom of a wider malaise. Portraying him as either some kind of evil mastermind or a “mad” dictator ignores the more general issue of why there are still people in such positions at all and what it is about the world situation which leads them to be able to act in such a way. There are other issues too. There wasn’t really any reason at all to keep NATO going after the end of the Cold War, and if it had been disbanded the provocative act of suggesting that the Ukraine join the organisation couldn’t have happened. Nor could it have happened if Russia had joined NATO. There are plenty of other atrocities going on around the world which don’t involve such a White population. In a way, I shouldn’t even be talking about Putin because that plays into his cult of personality and focusses the problem on him rather than the state of the world.

I probably will be returning to this kind of subject many times in the near future, but for now I’m done, and tomorrow I’ll be talking about Tethys. I don’t think any excuse needs to be made for putting our little blue dot into perspective in these circumstances.

Stripy Horses Or Plain Zebras?

Yes, I know what’s happening in the Ukraine. This is what’s stopped me from blogging. Before I get going on this subject, I want to explain why I haven’t said much about it. The truth is that my limited knowledge of the matter leads me to fear saying anything which might turn out to be ill-judged or crass. We all know it’s happening. My response to it, like many other issues, is to engage in what I hope is a helpful manner but also to recognise that there is a lot else going on in the world at all times, and there’s a rôle for escape. For what it’s worth, I’m thinking about Putin’s odd association between a country with a Jewish leader and Nazism, and the psychological influence being a long-term leader has on the person in that position. Even so, I am going to talk about zebras.

There’s a saying in medicine that if you hear the sound of hooves, you should conclude it’s horses and not zebras, which obviously makes more sense in Europe than in certain parts of Afrika. One of the shortcomings of my cognitive style is that I will tend to think of zebras more than horses and then wonder why everyone else hasn’t thought of that. In the context of medical diagnosis, this might mean I’m more likely to think someone has Lewy Body Dementia than Alzheimers or Paget’s Disease of Bone than arthritis. This is, however, self-correcting and doesn’t constitute a huge problem, because in herbalism one can address more than one possible diagnosis at once without necessarily doing harm. Also, it isn’t my job to diagnose, which is a responsibility legally enshrined in particular offices, none of which are mine. That said, I do need to have a firm grasp of disease processes to address them.

But this is not the other blog, so I’ll broaden that to something which is in fact relevant to the current Eurasian situation. If a first-language reader of a language with a Latin script such as English sees a page of Cyrillic text and is mindful of the adage that if you hear hooves, expect horses, they’re quite likely to presume that the passage is Russian rather than, say, Ossetian. However, Cyrillic has been used to write a wide variety of languages and it may not be Russian. This, of course, would arise in the case of the Ukrainian language, since a cursory glance from someone unfamiliar with the details of the differences might think the text was Russian. This is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian:

Всі люди народжуються вільними і рівними у своїй гідності та правах. Вони наділені розумом і совістю і повинні діяти у відношенні один до одного в дусі братерства.

And this is the same in Russian:

Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. Они наделены разумом и совестью и должны поступать в отношении друг друга в духе братства.

For the record, in English this reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Since I’m much more familiar with Russian than Ukrainian, having abortively attempted to learn it in the late 1970s and early ’80s CE, the first text looks foreign to me, and in particular its use of the letter “i” seems very incongruous. The two languages are quite similar, and I wonder if the differences would be perceived as a little like those between Scots and English. That is, is there a tendency for Russian speakers to regard Ukrainian as merely a dialect of Russian? Historically there has been. This might sound quite abstruse in the setting of the conflict, and I’m aware too that many Russians won’t consider this war as done in their name, but it does impinge on English media in one particular aspect: the name of the capital city.

I’ve long considered the name of the capital of the Ukraine to be «Киев», but in fact that is the Russian version. The Ukrainian, and therefore correct, name of the city is «Київ», and at this point I’m also wondering about Ukrainian punctuation – do they use guillemets like Russian or something more like inverted commas? The Romanisation of the name is now “Kyiv” in English, whereas it has formerly been written “Kiev”, the Russian pronunciation. Is it important to focus on this with all the other stuff going on? Well, probably. The spelling and pronunciation of placenames in the Ukraine has remained stubbornly Russian in the international news media even though the country became independent from Russia in 1991 and the name of the capital was officially changed in 1995. This politicises the name. It once again reminds me of Scottish placenames, which in that case is further complicated by the presence of the Gàidhlig language and its nationwide promotion by the Scottish government. Speaking of which, when I laboriously ploughed through a Russian tweet yesterday (not “labourious” – there’s another one), I found myself, as I often am, reminded of Q-Celtic languages in the dual pronunciation of many of the consonants, leading me to feel very much, once again, that they could really benefit from being written in Cyrillic script. But it ain’t gonna happen is it? Another illustration of the politics of scripts.

But this post wasn’t supposed to be about the Ukraine but horses, asses and zebras. Note that I put horses first in that list. Conceptually, we often have a tendency to separate marked from unmarked concepts in our language and thought, so I clearly regard horses as the unmarked concept in that list. Also, asses are apparently less exotic than zebras to me. There is some justification for that because a zebra, visually speaking, is literally marked, but there are other aspects to this. For instance, in Western Eurasia, where I live, horses are more familiar and widespread than zebras, and this is basically down to human exploitation of them. Historically, the exploitation of horses is vastly important and the domestication of the horse is a necessary pre-requisite to that. I feel unqualified to comment on the issue of veganism and horses because I’m aware of disparate views and my own encounters with them are somewhat limited, though also a lot more extensive than the average contemporary Western urbanite because I grew up in the country, used to hunt sab and have been on a lot of demos with mounted police present. It’s odd to think that up until a little over a century ago, these animals would’ve been an everyday part of life for most people in these isles regardless of where they lived.

I’m aware also that I’m thinking rather in terms of a binary opposition between zebras and horses rather than a ternary one between horses, asses and zebras. I can’t help thinking, though, that zebras and asses have a lot in common compared to zebras and horses, such as their tails and manes being more similar. I don’t have a firm impression of how large zebras are either, and I’m aware that there are three species of them and just talking about “zebras” generically is fairly vague.

But the question I’m working up to is this (actually there are two): Is a horse a plain zebra, or a zebra a stripy horse? It could equally well be, is a donkey a plain zebra or a zebra a stripy donkey? I should probably also explain why I’ve been calling them asses. The reason for this is that donkeys to me seems to refer to the domesticated species, but there are two other species of ass who are wild. I’m not being frivolous here, incidentally. My question is, are the extinct ancestors of today’s equines primitively stripy or primitively plain? Or did they have a different appearance than either of these? It seems to me that we assume in many pictures of prehistoric equines that they were primarily plain, although some have stripy portions of their coats. When we do this, are we being “horse-centric” or is it based in science? Are zebras the unusual ones? How could we find out?

The other question also sounds nonsensical but isn’t: is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes? This doesn’t seem to make sense until you see one of the unusual individual zebras who are the other way round than usual, and at that point you realise that it is in fact normally a particular way round. Right now, I can’t remember which. But this is a secondary point.

Equines are members of a declining clade, that of odd-toed ungulates or perissodactyls. This order’s heyday was back in the earlier part of the Cenozoic and includes the largest land mammal ever, the Indricotherium, which shows convergent evolution with the giant sauropod dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Nowadays there are the relatively widespread equines, the rhinos and the tapirs, and so we’re in the peculiar position of having a small order with one or two extremely populous species, namely the donkey and horse, a couple in the middle and a relatively large number of species who are largely recently extinct because of us, or severely endangered for the same reason. However bad the domestication of the horse and donkey may have been for individual members of those species, it’s turned out to be good for their survival as species.

Domestic zebras don’t happen. This is because they don’t meet six criteria making a species suitable for this, which incidentally humans may have done themselves – we may ourselves be domesticated. These criteria are that they must:

• Eat food that’s easily available where humans live.
• Reach maturity quickly.
• Don’t panic easily when startled.
• Be docile.
• Breed easily in captivity.
• Have a social hierarchy.

Zebras only conform to some of these. For instance, they do graze like horses but they’re quite aggressive. They’re unpredictable and have been known to attack humans. The same is true of horses but to a much lesser degree. This seems like a good adaptation for resisting being dominated by other species, such as ourselves, but ironically it seems to have led to them becoming much rarer than horses, or perhaps staying at a similar level of population for longer. Remarkably, one of the effects of domestication is often that the animals resulting have black and/or white patches, so the fact that zebras aren’t but are still black and white is interesting.

One problem with working out whether they were primitively striped or not is that fossil horses are of course just bones and teeth on the whole. I’m not aware of either frozen or tar pit equines, although they may exist, so the problem is they tend to be fossilised in such a way as not to preserve skin or hair. There’s another issue too. It may not be a question of stripes versus plain so much as the distribution of the stripes or the presence of other patterns. There are melanistic zebra foals with white spots on a black background, as it were. It seems there could be several ways of working out what happened when.

Zebras are stripy for a reason and the question arises of what selective factors might have led to this. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be connected to protection from large predators. They can be smelt by lions and other carnivores from further off than the stripes would make a noticeable difference to their appearance. It’s thought that the real reason is to confuse biting insects, which is also the cause of their tail anatomy, which acts as a fly swatter. Asses have the same kind of tails. Therefore, is it possible that the stripiness or otherwise of an equine could be related to their tail anatomy? Not entirely, since asses are not striped, but horses are the ones with divergent tails and zebras and asses both have the original in that respect. However, these are only two of a dozen and a half theories about this.

Just to answer the question of whether zebras are black with white stripes or the other way round, zebra skin is black and it’s an adaptation for some of their coat to appear white, so they are black with white stripes rather than the other way round. This becomes evident when you see a zebra who is striped as a “negative” of the common type, because they actually look like white animals with black stripes. There are also three living species of zebras with slightly different skin patterns: Grévy’s, Mountain and the Plains Zebra. They’re in a subgenus referred to as Hippotigris, and there are two others, the asses in the unsurprisingly named Asinus – these have three living species, two of whom are Eurasian and one Afrikan. Finally, there’s the horse itself, presumably in a subgenus called Equus, and although there are two subspecies of these, namely the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse, the latter has a different number of chromosomes, so I don’t understand why it’s considered the same species. European horses, now extinct, were also a separate species, and some of these were piebald, as can be seen in cave paintings. Przewalski’s horse and the ancestors of modern domesticated horses diverged during the last Ice Age, roughly in Crô-Magnon times. It may be that the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse are the same species and horses a separate one.

There used to be a fourth subgenus: Amerihippus. Unsurprisingly, these are American, and in fact horses originally evolved in North America although they died out before Columbus. Once again, the presence of horses and their possible domestication in America might have made a huge difference to the course of history, but of course nobody knows if their temperament was more like zebras or horses and asses, and of course whether they were striped, plain or something else. There are Pre-Columbian native figurines of horses. It used to be thought that American horses were wiped out during the last Ice Age, but in fact they seem to have survived it. Genetic studies have shown that there were horses unrelated to those introduced by Spanish settlers in North America, and only two years after Cortez arrived, there were people on horseback in the Carolinas, even though meticulous paperwork recorded that none of the horses brought by the Conquistadores had escaped or been otherwise lost. There is a political element in the idea that American horses died out in the Ice Age, because it makes it seem that anything worthwhile was introduced by the Europeans. However, this does still raise the question of why horses seem to be so much more important in Eurasian cultures than Native American, and also makes me wonder if their ancestors had always been in America. Native American dog breeds are remarkable in that although they are still of the same appearance and behaviour as the breeds present before the Europeans, they are actually now entirely descended from Old World dogs. How this happened is a mystery. Native American horses today can have curly or very long manes compared to Old World horses. They are also sometimes piebald. More remarkably, some of them have slightly stripy legs! This, I think, is a clue.

The other hypotheses regarding zebra stripes include the idea that they create cooling convection currents by forming alternating hot and cold strips of air, that they help zebras recognise each other and that they’re warning colouration for what are apparently quite aggressive animals. If these situations apply to North America at the time the ancestors of today’s Afrikan zebras left, it’s feasible that they were already striped.

It’s said that the reason for the long manes and hairy tails of horses is connected to the North American climate. If this is so, it would be expected that their ancestors wouldn’t have had these before it became quite so harsh. It seems that the cold of the Ice Ages led to horses evolving these features, and in fact Przewalski’s horses have spikier manes than the more familiar horses, although their tails are still similar. As mentioned previously, the Palæarctic and Nearctic zoögeographical realms are sometimes united into a single Holarctic realm, consisting of North America and Eurasia, and the mammalian and other fauna of this vast region, comprising fifteen percent of the planet’s land surface excluding Antarctica, is shared between the two continents, such as wolves, bears, formerly woolly mammoths, beavers and so forth. However, of course there are differences – coyotes spring to mind very close to being wolves but not quite – and the question arises of whether the North American horses are the same species as Eurasian horses. I presume that if they couldn’t breed true, this would’ve been noticed by now, so the alternatives seem to be that native North American horses are either hybrids with Eurasian horses with some North American horse DNA, just as some Homo sapiens have Denisovan and/or Neanderthal DNA, or that the horses in question have always been two subspecies. The former possibility is particularly interesting because of the presence of faintly striped legs among them. If this is from a separate species of native North American horse hybridised with Eurasian horses, maybe that species was more obviously striped.

I’ve largely ignored asses in all this, which is probably a mistake. I do have the impression, and it’s just a hunch, that asses and zebras are closer to each other than zebras and horses. One reason I think this is that there are native Afrikan asses but no native Afrikan horses. Zebras are smaller than horses at around a dozen hands and weigh from 250 to 450 kilos. Adult plains zebras can be as little as ten hands and Afrikan wild asses actually slightly larger. It’s easy to get hypnotised by the apparently central, “standard” equines we’re familiar with in Europe and ignore a possible alternate route of zebra ancestry.

So, to conclude, this is what I think, and this isn’t based on genetics. It’s scientifically established that equines are essentially American animals. Incidentally, there also used to be native South American horses which I’ve ignored for the purposes of this post. The original members of Equus had coats of various colours and patterns, including piebald, black and different shades of brown. Some of these had faint stripes, and these traits were widely distributed through the first species of the genus, Equus simplicidens, also known as the American zebra and found in Idaho, Texas and presumably other places. They’re supposed to have looked like this (the one on the left):

I don’t know what the reasoning behind the idea that the American zebra was striped is. I do know that the apparently most basal population of humans, the San, has considerable genetic variation in skin tone so my conclusion is that the American zebra was probably quite variable but had a brown and fawn striped variety. I also wonder if the South American horses were a lot more like zebras due to living in similar climates to today’s Afrika south of the Sahara.