Putin’s Pastoralist Personality

Evans-Pritchard described pastoralists as ‘‘They strut about like lords of the earth’’. Putin on horseback like the aggressive Yamnaya pastoralists who roamed the Russian and Ukrainian Steppe.

By now it should be clear that Putin has miscalculated the war endeavour in Ukraine, which he basically admitted when he fired several of his generals. It’s been a costly war on all sides with no winners in sight and the most rational thing would have been to seek a quick diplomatic solution. While Putin is indeed not averse to diplomatic talks he intensifies the attacks at the same time. Something that doesn’t make much sense from a diplomatic point of view. Putin is not a psychopath, but he has a distinct herder mentality that includes not losing face (honour) and retaliatory justice (something many of us would not find part of our sense of justice).

In order to understand Putin’s continued aggression, we have to look at pastoralist psychology. Pastoralists are like a football team, great team players when it comes to team members, hostile towards the enemy. Above all, pastoralists often shift alliances (change teams), which is how segmentary lineages can scale up (think of how the Mongols came to conquer almost an entire continent).

Pastoralist aggression is a survival strategy. The evolutionary reason for this lies most likely in the ecological instability of pastoralism, which was much higher than for farmers and foragers.

A final salient feature of most pastoralist groups is the susceptibility of their households to catastrophic loss from disease, drought, and raids (Barth 1964; Bradburd 1982; Dahl and Hjort 1976; Sandford 1983). The impact of such events

can be huge, causing at least a temporary shuffling in wealth differences among households, and is commented on by most ethnographers. Although comparative figures are unavailable, the magnitude of such shocks is probably larger for pastoralists than for agriculturists because of the vulnerability of their “wealth on the hoof” to epidemics and theft. (from “Pastoralism and Wealth Inequality”)

This passage describes very well pastoralist egalitarianism, i.e. egalitarianism only works for the in-group and not for out-groups. In political theory this position has been termed “social dominance orientation”.

Showing toughness and male chauvinism are part of the pastoralist ethos:

As classified in the SCCS, pastoralists are either egalitarian (19%) or have

one (50%), two (25%), or three (6%) social strata (which include forms of hereditary slavery where specific castes or ethnicities live and work in pastoral households without owning livestock). Famously, pastoralists often exhibit a strong cultural ethos of valor and physical prowess (91% of the SCCS populations have an ideology of “male toughness”), in some groups exemplified by special institutions for warriorhood, often embodied in age-set systems and associated gerontocratic institutions.

Valor and physical prowess, voilà, there is president Putin. Oligarchy and gerontocracy have plagued Russia for decades now.

I wish this war could end diplomatically soon. However, I don’t think it will happen unless there is a way of Putin coming out of this as a hero and not a villain, a winner and not a loser.