An Authoritarian's Worldview

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An authoritarian, take for example Vladimir Putin, lives in a world ... pictured by him as a sort of jungle, in which the whole world is conceived of as dangerous, threatening, or at least challenging, and in which human beings are conceived of as primarily selfish or evil or stupid, says Edward Hoffman, Ph.D., who teaches psychology at Yeshiva University.

“Once granted this worldview," Maslow [Abraham Maslow was the son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants] crucially argued, “everything that the authoritarian person does is logical and sensible… We can easily see for ourselves if we can only imagine ourselves in an actual jungle.” To speak of love, kindness, and cooperation in such a situation, Maslow noted, would be absurd. “If the world is jungle-like for an individual, then the authoritarian is perfectly justified in all his suspicions (and) hostilities.”

To Vladimir Putin, life is sort of a jungle.