PUTIN, ZELENSKYY AND THE DANGEROUS STORIES WE TELL
People tell stories like dogs wag their tails. Like language itself, narratives are rooted in our genes, and undoubtedly played a role in our evolution into the world’s dominant species. When we talk to each other, we do so mostly in stories, ranging from the quotidian — how was your day? — to the vast: Christ died on the cross for our sins, Muhammad is the messenger, Shiva’s rage must be appeased with butter.
Though many people think my chosen field of medicine is objective and scientific, it’s based in storytelling. Every illness is a story, and I’ve listened to thousands of them over the years. Good stories and bad stories, the coherent and the incoherent, the irrelevant and the profound: in English, in Spanish, in Navajo, and a dozen languages in between, often through interpreters on the phone.
One of the first lessons doctors learn is to take every story with a grain of salt. Conflicting narratives are everywhere, but they are unified in their illustration of the human mind’s inherent compulsion to fill the gaps in our understanding with the reassurance of order, even if it’s made up. Another way of saying this is that storytelling has always been a biased shorthand for truth. But stories are also the natural library of humanity, where all our prehistoric records were kept, and the emotional power they hold over all of us is impossible to escape.
It’s this power that makes them unreliable and dangerous, often in ways that we are ill-prepared to resist. Humanity, most fundamentally, is lost, and thus it’s clarity and strength that we crave, a light in the dark to follow. Questioning our own narratives is not something that human beings have ever done well, and in a world where the assertion of certainty is a prerequisite for success in public life, the voices we hear are predictably far too confident, and far too loud.
If all this sounds too theoretical and abstract, let’s review our collective response to Vladimir Putin’s horrible war in Ukraine. In this and this alone, the United States is largely, if imperfectly, united. Americans of all stripes seem to agree more than they disagree on this particular subject according to opinion polls.
But this consensus, in the nuclear age, now poses risks of the most seductive kind. If a million deaths from COVID-19 showed us the dangers of narrative division, the savage assault on Ukraine is showing us the perils of narrative unity.
One of the greatest dangers of this war is how closely the facts mirror our collectively celebrated mythology of conflict. Our favorite stories are the ones we want to be true, and the Ukrainians have given us this in spades.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, has now become the Che Guevara of neoliberal capitalism: Everyman handsome, human in his accessible courage, fighting for democracy and freedom, a patriot and a hero leading his unified people against impossible odds. Meanwhile, the enemy murders and rapes in service of a tyrant, a man whose expressionless face and dead blue eyes endlessly suggest monstrosity, even as he speaks like a banker reading a spreadsheet aloud.
After a series of impure wars of our own, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has given us the chance to claim the moral high ground once again. At the beginning of the war, the Western response was tentative and careful. But now our enthusiasm has grown to the point where the U.S. secretary of defense has foolishly announced that U.S. intentions are to weaken Russia as a military power, thereby confirming longstanding Russian rhetoric. NATO is pouring large quantities of heavy weapons into the conflict even as the Ukrainian military launches strikes into Russia itself. The U.S. has publicly and unwisely admitted its direct role in targeting Russian commanders on the battlefield as well as Russian ships in the Black Sea. Knowing a good photo op when they see one, a parade of politically vulnerable Western leaders such as Boris Johnson and Nancy Pelosi are lining up to perform their Churchillian dances in the streets of Kyiv, talking tough for the crowd back home. Noted, but somehow incompletely heeded, is the fact that the Russian foreign ministry has stated that Russia is in a proxy war with NATO, and has implicitly threatened to use nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, in another society, one which we know very little about, other stories are being told. We hear them only in fragments, in sound bites filtered through the prism of Western media: Russia is fighting for its survival against a hostile and hypocritical Western world encouraged by its success in the Cold War, and determined to press its advantage through the expansion of NATO into former Soviet Republics.
In this story, Russia is defending its own in Ukraine, who have been brutalized by a Ukrainian government controlled by the decadent Western enemy. In this story, which has grains of truth, Ukraine has welcomed neo-Nazis into its armed forces, and allowed them their own battalion, command structure, and flags. In a region of the world where memories are long, the widespread collaboration of Ukrainians with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union during the Second World War remains ambient.
East versus west, Russia versus the United
States: the stories clash entirely, but ferocity and passion is present in both. This, to put it mildly, is a dangerous combination.
Zelenskyy, an accomplished comedian, producer and actor, literally rose to lead Ukraine through storytelling. The story that propelled Zelenskyy into office was a sitcom, “Servant of the People,” that ran for three seasons in Ukraine and galvanized public opinion against the predatory corruption rampant in the country. Mildly amusing, sweet, heavy-handed, but well-acted and professionally filmed, the show celebrates Zelenskyy as a modest, decent, dedicated history teacher whose rant against the kleptocracy is secretly filmed by his worst student and put online, then promptly becomes a viral phenomenon. The resulting groundswell of popular opinion propels the unlikely Zelenskyy into the presidency as a cathartic act of protest against the status quo. Along the way, the celebration of democratic values, as illustrated by the comic appearance in dreams of both Plutarch and Abraham Lincoln, as well as a series of one-liners aimed specifically at Vladimir Putin, makes the point with abundant, if crude, clarity.
“Servant of the People” may have been conceived as popular entertainment, but it functioned as an unexpectedly resonant political advertisement. To say that it makes for surreal watching given recent events is an understatement; regardless, the Russian regime could not help but recognize the political threat inherent in the show, and more importantly, in its remarkable impact in their own backyard. For a man who apparently conflates his own identity with that of Russia itself, and thus equates threats to his own fate with threats to the nation he rules, it’s not difficult to understand why Putin would see Zelenskyy as a mortal enemy, and Ukraine as a problem that must be solved.
As tempting as it is to believe, Zelenskyy is not the man in the sitcom. A closer look reveals a few facts that nobody wants to hear: His villa in Tuscany, for example, or the appearance of his name in documents associated with offshore shell companies, or his relationship with Ukrainian oligarchs who apparently assisted him in his political ascent.
But the Ukrainians apparently believed that he was the man in the sitcom, just as American viewers of “The Apprentice” believed that Donald Trump was a disciplined, competent, hard-nosed businessman who would solve our economic woes with a few overly thick black strokes of a sharpie.
Zelenskyy and his astute advisors are now peddling another narrative. It goes like this: The war in Ukraine is a war between freedom and tyranny, and thus a line in the sand must be drawn. The future of democracy itself is at stake, with authoritarianism, represented by Putin in Europe and Xi Jinping in Asia, poised to overcome free peoples everywhere unless it is stopped cold, right here, and right now. Zelenskyy is thus a figure of great international significance, holding the torch of all we hold dear high in the air.
It’s both an effective and a dangerous message because it appeals to what the Western world wants to be. It’s a story that flatters the teller, a form of virtue signaling on a grand scale. More ominously still, the Russian army’s apparent failures in the field are blood in the water for the Western military-industrial complex, some of whom watch the same videos we see on YouTube, and think: If NATO went into Ukraine, this war would be over in a week.
The problem — and it’s a deep one — is that this narrative is not true. Russia is not a major global power. Putin’s tyranny will not triumph over the prosperity of Western democracies; at most, he is a dangerous nuisance in political terms. Both sides have already lost this war: Putin, now an international pariah as a result of his catastrophic and evil miscalculation, and the Ukrainians, whose country is being ravaged before our eyes as the innocent die.
In the real world, distinct from the fictions we embrace, it is possible to be both corrupt and a hero, as Zelenskyy quite possibly is. And in the real world, it is also possible that a desperate Putin, on the brink of a personally unacceptable defeat, will use nuclear weapons in an attempt to save his own skin, justifying the act on the grounds of national salvation. Every reckless Western escalation in support of the enormously compelling Ukrainian narrative makes this possibility more likely.
Events care nothing whatever for the stories we tell. Human concepts like good and evil and the dignity of moral struggle are utterly irrelevant to creation. And the unpalatable truth is that a Russian defeat, especially a humiliating one, is the most dangerous outcome of all.
The human race cannot afford too many situations like this. The chance of the conflict in Ukraine escalating into a nuclear war may be low, but it’s not zero. History is long. The risk is not worth taking — not for Zelenskyy, not for Ukraine, and certainly not for our own self-image as enlightened defenders of the free world. Putin should be defused strategically, over time, with ruthless calculation and as little rhetorical drama as possible. Cooler heads have rarely been more important than they are right now. And if it is freedom and democracy that we wish to defend, the place to start is right here at home, against the many enemies within. They are telling stories too.