It is hazardous to ascribe actions that we do not like to madness.
When I watched Vladimir Putin, with what the Russians so graphically call his “tin eyes,” justify his invasion of Ukraine, I thought, as did many others, that he looked a little deranged. Denazification, indeed! Had he failed to appreciate that Ukraine, not noted throughout its history for its philo-Semitism, had elected a Jewish president, and that by a large majority, thereby suggesting a major cultural shift in the country?
It then occurred to me that Putin looked rather puffy in the face, and I wondered whether he could be taking steroids. . . . It is hazardous, however, to ascribe actions that we do not like to madness. This is for two reasons: first, the diagnosis may be wrong—the apparently mad may in fact be sane—and second, madness can have its own rationality. Indeed, the mad of strong character can often take others along with them: they can persuade others that their paranoid view of the world is correct. This is especially so when they possess levers of power over people of lesser character that themselves.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Adapted from City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal