What explains the submission of so many good people to Putin's cunning rhetoric

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The reader who ventures through the lines and paragraphs below doesn’t even suspect how hard it was to write this text. I started, stopped, worked on other things, resumed, erased, resumed, erased, resumed, erased. All because I don’t want this text to sound like an invitation to conflict, although I’m sure a lot of people will read it that way by the title. Nor do I want to sound condescending, as if approaching the reader from the top down.

) My idea here is to try to understand why, in recent days, so many good and well-meaning people, people who defend freedom and Christian values, have repeated some beyond questionable arguments to justify a defense of Vladimir Putin and his bloody incursion into Ukraine.

From these people I heard that it is a war against globalism – and that, if I am in favor of the attacked country, it is obvious that I am writing in the pay of George Soros. Others tell me about the importance of ensuring the sovereignty of the Amazon. Yes, from the Amazon! Sovereignty that, ironically, would only be respected by Putin – the same Putin who does not recognize Ukrainian sovereignty to join NATO. Finally, there is the most exalted speech of the “crusader” who believes that Putin will destroy the West to rebuild it on a pile of “conservative” rubble.

I was amazed at first. Then I gave in to anger and war broke out in me. Gradually, however, the thermobaric bombs of my indignation stopped exploding, giving way to the search for understanding. Which by no means means agreement. I speak of the understanding of someone who often also shares that feeling of impotence and intellectual and spiritual orphanhood that mark our time. From someone who sees with melancholy naturalness the fact that many are desperately seeking some kind of subservient agreement with political leaders, artists and even social media influencers.

Subjection to the intellect

This subservient agreement to the will of others is, for many, a consolation. A sign that they are not alone in this confusing and hostile world. And it is necessary to understand that a person who lives in this solitude full of political, intellectual, emotional and spiritual nuances will use all the contortions he deems necessary in order not to find himself alone again or, even worse, in the group wrong. This is why good and well-meaning people so easily abandon Natural Law or prosaic common sense to follow any one that sounds remotely (and heretically, I might add) like a savior.

)In “Pure and Simple Christianity”, CS Lewis talks about this sin that is looking in the labyrinth of the intellect for rational explanations (and almost always very plausible) for a previous sin. Naturally, anyone who sees the scenes of the war between Russia and Ukraine knows that the conflict is morally wrong and that, as much as the bases of the conflict may be millenary, we are facing an aggressor country and an attacked country. Common sense screams for us to resort to the values ​​of the much-maligned Judeo-Christian civilization to choose sides. If, however, for some reason we are led to go against common sense and all the values ​​engraved in our soul, we soon invent the biggest and most creative excuses to justify our submission to something other than Natural Law.

This is why the narratives of sovereignty in the Amazon, “restoration of Western values”, anti-Americanism and “NATO expansionism” to justify submission. It has its own logic, I recognize. An intimate and often inaccessible logic.

This logic, by the way, was explored by Jordan Peterson. I don’t think anyone here says the Canadian psychologist is on George Soros’ payroll, do they? For he speaks precisely of the need to abandon the diabolic and Machiavellian tricks of the intellect and to cling to something difficult to define: maybe it’s instinct, maybe it’s common sense, maybe it’s even faith. Whatever it is, it doesn’t support perversely creative arguments and conspiracy theories. By the way, Jordan Peterson points out that it is this subjection to the intellect that explains the morally corrupt environment of universities, where common sense has long been replaced by ideological loyalties or fashionable quotes and slogans.

The truth and something else

And look what a cool thing. I was having difficulties developing this text, for the reasons I explained above, in the first paragraph. I was reminded of CS Lewis and the sin of finding justifications for sin. I was reminded of Jordan Peterson and the intellect that tends to enslave our spirit. I remembered Machiavelli and the unacceptable pride that is to act amorally

, according to the foreseen consequences. And I was going to leave the text in the air, perhaps suggesting that readers seek common sense in that mysterious place where the soul resides (“What do you mean you didn’t find it? If I go there and find it, I’ll rub it in your face!”).

But then, in one of the many breaks throughout the day, I went for a walk around my memories on a social network and I came across a snippet of Simone Weil that comes in handy. Weil was an enemy of “group political thought” because she always saw in it a master-slave relationship. More than that, she saw in group political thought a distortion of the search for truth. Yes, the same one that, in knowing her, will set us free, according to a verse often quoted by the president. “Truth are thoughts that seize the mind of the thinking being whose only desire is to reach the Truth”, she writes.

For Weil, however, those who want the “truth and something more”, such as acceptance on social networks or conformity to a certain ideological orientation, will only find “lie and error” ”.

And it is so, assuming that we are all in the search for this Truth and remembering that I never, ever, under any circumstances (not even after three or four caipirinhas!) I underestimate those who read me, that I close this text. But not without first reiterating that I don’t receive anything from George Soros, I’m not a communist and I don’t even have my opponents as enemies. Now yes. We have reached the deceptive end point. (Because, as far as it depends on me, the conversation continues).