Anatoly Protopopov. Cherchez la femme!

A short text brought to readers' attention by Anatoly Ilyich Protopopov, the author of the widely known "Treatise on Love...". Published in the "Batrachos Parlour". The source is on Anatoly Ilyich's website. In my view, the article makes no claim to universal scope, but is of interest for discussion (if only for its clear distinction between the concepts of "rank" and "status", and its hypothesis about the consequences that a mismatch between rank and status may produce). Cherchez la femme! Where a woman is involved, the devil is not needed. Firdausi, "Shahnameh" Look for the woman! Somehow in Russia this phrase came to be understood as a romantic call to "seek in an unremarkable woman the special quality that makes her worth loving," but its original meaning is different and far less charitable. In the original source, the phrase was uttered by a police official who proposed explaining any unusual and incomprehensible behavior in a man — especially if that behavior was also unlawful — by the influence of a woman who held a specific feminine power over him. By the force of that power, a woman, even without saying anything explicitly, can impel a man to fulfill her unreasonable whim, to perform eccentric stunts in order to impress her, to win her favor, and so forth. And who is the most enigmatic man among us today? Putin, V.V., of course. The motivation behind his actions for the greater part of 2014 is so difficult to explain that many people believed — and still believe — him to be mentally ill. Paranoia is effectively an occupational disease of dictators and counterintelligence officers, and that diagnosis in the case of our subject would not have caused great surprise. The author himself long adhered to this view. However, professional psychiatrists — even foreign ones, and therefore free from the punishing hand of the Organs — somehow fail to confirm this diagnosis. I have no reason to distrust professionals, yet the peculiarities genuinely do require explanation. The fact of his "existence in a parallel world" is acknowledged by many, including Angela Merkel, a trained psychologist — but the "physical meaning" of this phenomenon continues to elude us. Let us try to look for the woman. That Putin might have some kind of difficulty with women may seem surprising to many: his popularity among the population — including the female population — is very great; sexual intimacy with him, and bearing his child, are things many Russian women openly dream of. Nearly all "tsars" attract this kind of feminine attention, but matters are not so simple: satisfying a sexual need and receiving a specific form of recognition from the opposite sex are two very different things. In principle, the phenomenon of "exploits performed for a lady" has been known since time immemorial and has been described countless times in folklore and other fiction — but fiction is too subjective and idealistic, and the heroes are, as a rule, invented. However, there are also historically documented analogues who have been studied in exhaustive detail. For example, Napoleon Bonaparte. At the zenith of his glory and power, Napoleon had not the slightest difficulty with his sexual needs: he had women in the conquered countries "by the armful," and this is a historically attested fact. But that was at his zenith. In his youth the situation may have been — and most likely was — quite different. But that is not even the main point. An abundance of sexual partners by no means excludes the existence of one exclusive beloved who may be capricious, demanding, and even a hard-to-reach "princess." Such a woman in Napoleon's life was Josephine de Beauharnais — his first wife. Yes, she was six years his senior, already had two children, was not a great beauty in any particular sense, and was not distinguished by any exceptional intellect or spiritual depth, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, she managed to captivate him — and not merely captivate him, but make her husband understand that it was she who had done him the favor, not the other way around; that it was he who had to fight for her, not she for him. The very fact that she routinely cuckolded him — already an emperor! — spoke eloquently enough to this point. And despite that, he retained strong feelings for her: he insisted on her keeping the title of Empress after the divorce (a divorce, I would note, motivated not by any cooling of his feelings toward her but by reasons more nearly protocolar), and, reportedly, the name "Josephine" was his last word as he lay dying on Saint Helena. Why this might have been the case we shall examine a little further on. What do Napoleon and Putin have in common? First and foremost — ambition: an intense thirst for glory and power. Ambitious people are plentiful on this earth, so ambition alone is not particularly remarkable. Another important similarity between them is a low biological rank potential. That is, in terms of their original constitution — determined by genes, conditions of prenatal development, and conditions of early childhood development and upbringing — they could with difficulty lay claim to the position of alpha male. At the same time, as noted above, they harbored an enormous desire to become exactly that. Ambition is part of rank potential, but even so, in a troop of apes such ambitions could scarcely be realized: in that setting, rank potential and actual status in the troop are very strongly correlated — nearly identical. But modern civilization offers quite a number of opportunities for career advancement to individuals with low rank potential — and, conversely, opportunities for non-advancement to those with high rank potential, who typically realize that potential in the criminal sphere. This leads to a situation in which social status and biological rank diverge from one another and begin to follow their own separate trajectories; a high-ranking office may come to be occupied by an individual whose biological rank is wholly unsuited to that position. Rank potential still "matters," but not nearly as much as it does among apes. I therefore propose using the term "rank" to denote biological predispositions, and "status" to denote a position of one height or another within some social or governmental structure. How do all these things affect relationships with women? Women are attracted to high-status men — this fact is confirmed by a great many studies, and simple everyday observation does not, at the very least, contradict it. And there are compelling evolutionary reasons for this: a high-status man is more likely to carry healthy genes and to possess resources that can in principle be used to raise offspring to independence. And for humans, with their prolonged period of infant helplessness, such support is very important. Of course, status is not the only thing women may find attractive in men. For instance, owing to a high need for what is called "male parental investment," a woman may be drawn to a man oriented toward long-term relationships — but even with status things are not entirely straightforward. The point is that the attractiveness of male high-status is instinctive: that is, the attraction to such a man is an ancient behavioral template embedded in the deep unconscious; its activation is subjectively experienced as certain feelings, moods, and an "irrational call," but not as words of an inner voice. What is the problem with behavioral templates? They involve very little input information in their analysis — meaning that by that very fact alone they are capable of producing only superficial judgments. Moreover, even that meager information is barely processed: if the sign matches the template, the emotion is triggered; if not, it is not. Templates are therefore highly susceptible to false positives, or even deliberate falsification. Very well — but what does any of this have to do with Putin and Napoleon? The connection is precisely this: they originally had low rank. And in their youth, before they had built their careers, they were unlikely to have been favored with much feminine attention. But might this not have been compensated later by their high status? Only in part. The point is that social status in isolation triggers female attractiveness templates only very weakly. Status is, after all, a cultural rather than a biological phenomenon — and is therefore poorly comprehensible to the deep unconscious. It is another matter that high status is almost never found entirely without high rank — since success in the struggle for status is substantially conditioned by natural aggressiveness and the other qualities characteristic of a high-ranking individual. Nevertheless, women favor rank considerably more than status. And it is precisely for this reason that the wives of millionaires and presidents sometimes cheat on them with bodyguards and even gardeners — if the latter appear more brutish and high-ranking. Or, as in our case, they make it understood that "there are more masculine men around." So it turns out that both Napoleon and Putin stirred up this whole business of conquering half the world — because of women? In Napoleon's case this is almost a fact; in Putin's case it is a fairly plausible but still speculative hypothesis. Putin, for many well-known reasons, keeps his affairs far more concealed than Napoleon ever did. Including, hypothetically, the name of his "lady of the heart." Alina Kabaeva is a strong candidate. Beautiful, intelligent (certainly more so than Josephine), she had already attained a self-made name in sport before her encounter with Putin, which raises self-esteem and independent-mindedness. In short, a perfectly plausible princess. However, other possibilities cannot be ruled out. But at the present moment it is pointless to appeal to the conscience and humanity of Alina Maratovna. She, even if she played some part in "stirring up the pot" (which is, again, speculative), bears no responsibility whatsoever for the fact that the pot is now on fire and blackening the entire planet with its smoke. Wars, beginning with utterly trivial pretexts, acquire their own self-sustaining logic of development in which the original pretexts are constantly forgotten. At that point it is no longer about women; at that point it is already "all or nothing." The same is true of Napoleon. Anatoly Protopopov 12 November 2014.