Is Putin Determined to Start World War III?

For several days now, MANY people in the West have been wondering how best to react to a major speech by Putin which seemed to say: "I have told you exactly what my detailed demands are from you. You must concede IMMEDIATELY, visibly, and at massive scale, or else something is coming which you will regret deeply, and not be able to ignore. Ukraine is my target now." 

 This statement, plus some discussions we had yesterday, stimulated my "early morning self" to think a bit more deeply. In the discussions yesterday, I heard two theories about the Ukraine situation: =======================================================================

One theory: he will try an anschluss, just two provinces. "After all, if it worked for Hitler.." [Comment those words in quotes were not what anyone said. Just an inner reaction which came to me then. Call it "the voice of Loki," which is useful but which needs to be kept leashed.] 

 Another: he will show he can hack into the Turkish drones which Ukraine plans to use to restore national control. One argument in favor: after all, even WE could. (If USGOV knows the more basic things even I know.) One argument against: if Russia could, why didn't they save Armenia? ======================================================= 

 But in truth, I did hear a lot of Putin's speech (on France24 and DW and maybe FT especially), and had a sense of what was behind it. In truth... it is ever more clear this morning... that I can even empathize with what lies behind that speech and that expression of frustration and desperation. Some even say that empathy is a crucial starting point in addressing these kinds of problems (once one is prepared enough to really empathize and not fake it.) 

 As usual, my early morning meditation got into complexities 'way beyond what I could write down even in days of typing on a laptop. Two bits of some relevance: ACRONYMS (important to how my higher self encodes memories to my mundane daily self): in this case EHUB (Endless Halls of Unthinking Bureaucracy), what drives Putin nuts, and GGC (Give God Choices, an aspect of how I think about synchronicity in guiding behavior). 

 A major part of Putin's message felt like: "You guys said you wanted to join with us in a new global alliance right after the end of the Cold War, circa Yeltsin time. You raised all these promises. But then we tried and tried, and nothing worked, it got worse and worse and worse. I am sick and tired of that. I won't take it any more. If I have to kick the walls, well, what choice did you give me?" 

In fact... EHUB. I too have had lots of experience trying to figure out how to get constructive results, intelligence and sanity out of the US government, which I have interacted with in many many ways at many different levels. In addition to the EHUB experience, I have seen more and more in the past few decades of a syndrome I think of as " bait and switch." That and EHUB are not conscious policies of anyone, but a kind of reflex response syndrome which has evolved through time, in part because of the effects of greater concentration of power. "Power corrupts..". 

 The promises made to Putin were probably MOST astronomical under Donald Trump. Whatever his self image and beliefs about himself, Trump certainly was the most extreme practitioner of bait and switch I have ever seen in the White House in my life. What hit ME directly was when Trump promised to strengthen the US economy, including the energy economy, and live up to the US Constitution (interstate Commerce) by getting rid of irrational regulations and barriers to competition which hold us back. That was exciting. Then he hired ... alligators from Maro Lago?... who created NEW regulations, forcing more use of coal in regions which do not want to use it, so severe that Illinois almost seceded from the US national grid system. Bait and switch. One policy announced to the public, and the diametric opposite in actual operation. 

 So did Putin also encounter the EHUB -- not only mindless bureaucracy but hired trolls and alligators, thinking only of THEIR receipts from government funding, or ideological faction? And is he basically at his wits end now, seeing little hope that the people on top will be able to get rid of the alligators and tame the system to make it live up to what the people on the top SAY they want?

 There ARE some parallels between the dynamics at work now in the world and the dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s. People did write serious books about frustration-aggression. Frustration can lead to a kind of gotterdammerung feeling, where the status quo is so intolerable they are willing to risk war. But are any of us intelligent, broad and focused enough to find a third way, not just the empty BS we see in a lot of internet policy discussions today, but a more operational kind of dialogue? Again, I think of John Von Neumann's BALANCED way of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, step by step.

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An important friend responded: I think that to interpret these geopolitical movements and threats, such as that of Putin's Russia, or the Middle East conflict, or the China-United States dispute, it is useful the analysis of the French professor Dominique Moisi, in his book “Geopolitics of emotions " https://www.amazon.com/Geopolitics-Emotion-Cultures-Humiliation-Reshaping-ebook/dp/B0027MJU32/ "It is not possible to understand the world in which we live without examining the emotions that contribute to shaping it. The world first moves around basic emotions: fear, humiliation and hope."

 So please forgive -- I have good reason to believe I now know more about how brains work as intelligent minds than anyone else on earth. That may sound crazy, but there is a paper by Werbos and Davis (open access, easy to find on scholar.google.com) which reviews our theory of how brains work, and shows how real-time deep recording data from the best lab in the US strongly favors our theory over the behaviorist style of model more common now in computational neuroscience. In a way, our strong mathematical model describes the mammal brain as a "machine to produce and act on hopes and fears," positive and negative values of J and lambda. And so, two of the three points in this sentence are 100% consistent with and directly reflect how the brain really does work, to the best of our knowledge. 

Hopes are basically the positive sign of J or lambda, and fears the negative side. The mathematics (the ultimate goals of any RLADP optimization machine) demand that both be present, and both be learned, reflecting the actual circumstances of the organism. SOME folks do live in a world where objective reality justifies more fear, and some more hope. 

 But what of HUMILIATION??? (Certainly a theme we cannot overlook in considering Putin, or in considering experiences I had in graduate school which make it easier for me to empathize with Putin.) This is one of those phenomena extensive and fuzzy enough that I cannot be truly brief and accurate both. Crudely... how others think about us and respond to us is PART OF our image of reality, and like all other dimensions of that image a venue for hopes and fears to develop. FEAR of being misunderstood, disrespected and humiliated is undoubtedly part of the very complicated set of thoughts in Putin's mind right now. Maybe a little HOPE of actually being understood and respected, not just pandered to as one would pander to a certain kind of dog, might be a thread that could help the world escape from the serious risk of WWW3 coming... 

My friend went on to say:  HE SAID IN 2019; "Ten years ago I published the book entitled The Geopolitics of Emotion: How the Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are reshaping the world, which was based on a double conviction. First: it is not possible to fully understand the world in which we live without trying to understand and integrate their emotions. And second: emotions are like cholesterol, there are good and bad. The question is to find the correct balance between the two. Fear versus hope, hope versus humiliation ; the humiliation that leads to mere irrationality, and sometimes even violence. " 

 I would NOT say that feeling hope is good and feeling fear is bad. Hope and fear are there in the machinery of the brain (and the soul as well, I would add) for a good reason. At best it is like the duality of what we optimize and what the constraints are which we need to honor as we perform that optimization. (I could write a book on just that duality, which cuts across so many dimensions of life and thought!!). Fear and hope can both be more rational or less rational. FREUD... a great and fundamental source, which fits well with our new mathematics... talked about traumatic memories in the "id" (an example-based prediction system, in great part, prediction by association rather than by global model or dynamics). They are often traumatic, or negative, biasing expectations relative to what a true causal understanding would predict. But whatever we may say about scientologists, they are quite right that irrational hope, "euphoric memories," can be biasing and destructive just as much as traumatic memories can. 

If you are interested, I could even forward to you a message I sent to Yeshua's list on the neuroscience of the cells which actually implement these things, which some of us now know how to copy in AGI. Irrationality can of course lead to bad behaviors in a huge number of ways. That is such a huge subject, maybe too huge for an email which is already long enough. 

 One final thought: OUR EFFORTS TO LEARN AND GROW PAST the most common pitfalls which limit us, and lead to dangerous crazy behavior (like what Putin is very close to now, and like what already hit Trump in 2020 and last January) is a central part of the HUMAN POTENTIAL focus, the final chapter of Part VI of the IEEE book. I am still looking for better venues and institutional structures to do more justice to it. Best of luck, Paul