From Russian independent journalist Arkady Babchenko:
If you asked me to characterise the “Russian World” (Russky mir) in one word, I would not hesitate to call it infantilism. This term best describes the current state of Russian society.
Infantilism is, first and foremost, the inability to take responsibility for one’s own actions; the inability to draw causal links and to understand that such-and-such actions lead to such-and-such consequences.
……The absolute lack of understanding of the value of life is just as infantile.
It is not acceptable for adults to inflate a frog with a straw, to decapitate a puppy, to pound residential neighbourhoods with weapons of indiscriminate destruction, or to shoot down passenger jets with surface-to-air missiles…..
……All I can say is that we can confirm that the experiment of dumbing down a whole nation has been brought to a successful completion.
Read more at Infantilism as Russia’s Official Ideology | Free Russia Foundation
Yes, Arkady Babchenko is right – that is the outcome. But don’t forget the whole exercise was and is simply about Putin hoping to keep his dick hard.
i think, the best term is NARCISSISM
On reflection, it appears that Western powers (particularly the US) also exhibit certain aspects of infantilism: an inability to connect actions with consequences. Their intentions may be good, they defeat the bad guy/evil dictator and then expect to ride off into the sunset — job done. Only to be surprised when a new dictator pops up or civil war breaks out as various factions compete for power. The assumption that democracy and rule of law will flourish when the bad guy is defeated is the stuff of fairy tales and John Wayne Westerns. People who have lived under authoritarian rule for generations have a different view of human nature — the concepts of fairness and openness are completely alien to them — and unlikely to take root without continual support. This is a recurring theme: Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya……even the former USSR.
Perhaps they have the wrong objective at the outset: defeating the bad guy rather than establishing a strong democracy. At present that appears to be an after-thought.