How did we end up in desperation?
This morning I woke up to a tweet saying: How desperate is the West? - I believe that is the question of the day. I will add: What comes, when desperation ends?
First of all, if you do not think the West is desperate, then you may already be in paralysis. I get to that point latter. Secondly, before we get to the how, let’s clear out the what: Desperation is a state where you see no way out hence you actions may rely on sudden impulse which could be fatal. From our definition, you can see how paralysis can be the preferred state, but it all depends on the situation, since being desperate, can also get you the optimal outcome, if you are lucky, while being paralyzed or apathetically unaware is the sure recipe for disaster.
When we are shaken by a new situation arising, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Hamas attack out of Gaza, we enter the de-factualization phase. This is the first phase leading towards desperation. It runs as follows: discarding facts to feed our narrative of good battling evil.
Eventually, we settle on a narrative and decide on, what we believe to be the facts about what is happening. We need that to appease out mind and sustain orientation. Some cut off and stop caring. Others hold on to their beliefs. Unless you are extremely lucky or skillful in being very meticulous about constructing your facts. With the Ukraine war, most people got the idea that Russians are evil and that they kill civilians, since everyday for many months, that is what was repeated on TV. When your mind is set, complexities are reduced and you can make sense of what you experience and start wondering: ‘Why do they kill children?’
On Danish radio the news each our said: ‘Russian unprovoked attack on a sovereign country. Today these civilians were killed, there.’ Lots of emotions and points of identification. War is horrible. Nothing about the conflict. Only that evil is to blame. What was said about why it had erupted and how it could be solved, was only repetition of old narratives about the innocent Ukrainians and the evil Putin, who wants to conquer the world. After half a year of that, my countrymen where under severe illusions.
When the illusions take hold, reason falls short. That is the second phase. I call it the delusional phase. People who hardly know anything about international politics, Ukraine, Russia or NATO, try frantically to convince me, that what I have said in my lectures on the topic since 2009 is Russian propaganda coming out of my mouth, because I am easily susceptible to strange beliefs and do not concur with the newspaperstory. They are delusional and would have gotten an F- on the topic of Ukrainian geopolitics. I say to them: ‘What does Moscow want? To grasp the conflict, you must understand the interests of the parties.’ ‘You are a Russian asset,’ they answer. Delusion is not only to be under an illusion, but as well to be so absorbed by it, that it becomes an identity issue for you to convince others of the same. It is borderline type behavior. A mild form, but if you ever encountered a person with severe personality disorder, you may know about the forces at play. They are quite strong.
We are talking about manipulation. Not that there are evil men sitting in a dark room making us all believe in the propaganda, but rather, that propaganda works by people making decisions at work, to formulate something in accordance with their own belief thus sorting the facts and strengthenening a narrative that makes sense to them. The delusional phase does not leave its grip on us unless dispelled, but keeps feeding on its own productions and the conflict encountered, when reality does not match with the narrative.
When the ability to discard facts that does not fit our narrative gets exhausted, frustration arrives. Anger becomes the consequence. Towards the Russians, yes, but also towards our inability to act functionally, changing the outcome that we fear; our anger is constantly fueled, since the world does not correspond to our ideas about it. My people wanted eskalation to teach the Russians a lesson, but the Russians already seemed unable to learn from us. Rather they were bucked down in reality, having to learn how to fight the war they had gotten themselves into and the better they got at it, the more frustrated we became, and the more frustration turned into anger. And that is where we entered the third phase.
I remember my prime minister advocating that now we should start shooting missiles into Russia. That was when I started my public campaign for reflexivity and debate. My countrymen thought it was a good idea to attack Russia. How that could influence the outcome on the battlefield was totally unclear, but we in Denmark believed it was the right thing to do: ‘The Russians are weak; they do not dare to shoot at us. Soon they will collapse!’ For a moment we forgot the propaganda line: ‘The Russians are strong and will soon come to take us all.’ Now we were secure and actionable.
The battlecry: ‘Russians are evil; evil must be slain,’ overshadowed the cognitive dissonance between the strong Russia all of a sudden being weak, and although a week later, we returned to the idea that the Russian will soon come to take us, we kept finding resolve in shooting at Russia. Experts on tv informed us that it was the Ukrainians that fired the missiles into Russia, not us, and therefore we had the moral high ground, if the Russians were to shoot back. It was a blunt lie; NATO operates missiles that shoot into Russia. Had the experts had competencies in their field, they would have known that. And the moral high ground is useless, if the enemy does not show restraint. ‘They are weak; they do not dare retaliate. We are strong. Long live Ukraine.’ Denmark has fought a hundred wars. Always the same. A good battlecry and then off to death and destruction.
As long as we are afraid, we can keep up the cognitive dissonance, but all our actions are impulsive and high risk. ‘Let’s fire Tomahawks at them; that will teach them a lesson!’ Again: What that should do to alter the situation is quite unclear, but it is high risk. In the desperation phase, the risk can itself be the source of temptation. It makes us feel able and alive. Defactualized, delusional, and desperate, we are groping for measures to sustain our illusions, postponing reality to enter our ray of vision, seeking to lash out in every action, shouting: ‘We must meet their escalation; we are strong!’
Lately, Kyiv is desperate for dragging NATO directly into the conflict by conducting psy-ops, flying drones into Poland, aided by their closest friends in Estonia, Denmark and Norway, searching for a way to tricker article 4 & 5 in the NATO pact.
Truth is that we would not be prepared for an escalation. If we really hit something inside Russia that hurt them, then the Kremlin would come under overwhelming pressure to retaliate, and if they send an advanced hypersonic missile like Oreshnik, to hit the command center, directing missiles at them, i.e., Wiesbaden in Germany, then we would have severe difficulties retaining our composure, and that could steer the situation straight south for this world.
But being delusional, we do not have a grasp on things, neither of reality, nor of ourselves: We believe that we are the ones against whom there cannot be retaliated. The exception in the history of civilization. When the rest refuse to obey, we are instantly in a state of shock. Like Washington, yesterday, when the Chinese informed them that they will cap rare earth exports, if their leader did not fall in line and acted rationally, during trade negotiations. It would take USA 5 - 10 years to restore supply from a different source. Rare earths may not be rare, but they are very difficult to sort into useful lumps. The Chinaman has got the know how on this one, mister. You gotta face up to this fact. We may imagine ourselves beyond the practicalities of the mundane, but before we dispel our illusions, we will remain dysfunctional.
The West still lives in a world of yesterday, where we just bombed the hell out of everybody if they did not comply to our rules. But even when we made the rules and changed them at will we lost. Remember? It is not the world, or the rules or the laws of physics that is the issue; it is us. We are dysfunctional. As long as we lash out without any objective, decreasing security, taking greater and greater risk, we remain dysfunctional, feeding our delusions, until we run out of options for digging ourselves deeper into the endless maze of actionability and delusion, ending up in paralysis, from where our demise is only a matter of time.