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For all the striking similarities between Trump and Putin, there is a fundamental difference between them.
Trump is a product of a society of abundance, of excess — a lifestyle without limits. Do whatever you want, take everything from life. Step over every barrier, including moral ones. When external obstacles disappear (because all desired things are already accessible), an illusion arises that internal obstacles disappear as well. Other people turn into instruments and objects. They become things that feel nothing. There is no need to empathize with them. This is how excessive hedonism turns into cruelty.
Putin is a product of a society of scarcity, of deficit. His defining myth is “the blockade of Leningrad.” His key word is “privation” (lisheniya). In a society of privations are born Russia’s “superfluous people” (lishniye lyudi). In this psychology of suffering, the very idea of joy and pleasure disappears. “My only pleasure” is that someone else suffers more than I do. And so, when these “superfluous people of privations” gain power, they want others to suffer as well. “We suffered — now you must suffer too.” “You must be deprived of what is dearest to you; you must experience privation.” This is how an excessive cult of suffering turns into cruelty.
In the end, we have two types of cruelty, two systems of contempt for human dignity — both brutal, yet rooted in different sources. The “martyrdom-driven” cruelty is stronger than the “hedonistic” one. It has greater endurance and knows how to withstand pain. Its sadism is not spontaneous but carefully planned and sustained. It knows how to manipulate hedonistic cruelty, constantly feeding it new “pleasures,” including Epstein-style ones.
But the endurance of Ukrainians enrages this sado-Putinism. Because no matter how much we hurt, we do not intend to suffer more than they do. We preserve within ourselves the capacity for joy, even despite pain and loss. And this infuriates the Russian collective Putin. He does not know what to do with it.
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