Joe Bennett: What Putin thinks about all day is Putin

Vladimir Putin knows the hole he's driven his country into and the moral depths to which he's sunk. Photo / AP

Who said, 'a man is what he thinks about all day'? I thought it was me, having used the phrase in several columns, but I've just learned that Ralph Waldo Emerson said it 170 years ago.

As I have never knowingly read anything by Ralph Waldo Emerson, there are two possibilities. One is that Emerson and I arrived at the same phrase independently. The other is that I found it quoted somewhere, admired it, stashed it away in the lumber room of my skull and then conveniently forgot that it belonged to someone else. You choose.

Anyway, the idea comes to mind because of Putin. What Putin thinks about all day is Putin. He thinks about Putin's status, Putin's prospects, Putin's crimes, Putin's likely fate. My evidence is his own words. This is going to get a bit psychological.

Putin said he sent his army into Ukraine to topple a neo-Nazi government that had robbed its people for the benefit of a greedy few. Those are, with due allowance for translation, his exact words.

Now, even as biased a judge as Putin could not believe that. Nor could he realistically expect his words to work as propaganda. It is hard to imagine a less Nazi character than President Zelensky of Ukraine. He is that rare and splendid thing, an honest head of state.

But what Putin described, with an accuracy that it is hard to see as coincidental, is his own regime. It has become classically fascist, repressing opposition, maintaining a secret police, fostering belligerent nationalism and exuding an air of violence. And it has done it all for the benefit of a few, the kleptocratic billionaires, Putin's cronies.

Putin is not stupid. He knows the hole he's driven his country into and the moral depths to which he's sunk. His crimes preoccupy him and so up they pop in his speeches.

It's known as projection, but to me it's a form of confession. Trump does the same thing. He is forever ranting about rigged elections when he is the one striving to rig them. He is forever ranting about the Biden crime family when his own family is endlessly criminal. His son follows suit. Donald Trump Junior - as vile a bag of bones as exists on this earth, but then what chance did he have? - accuses Hunter Biden of hanging on to his father's coat tails and using his influence to suck up drugs and dollars. It's laughable. But it's also psychologically telling.

It is commonly believed that Goebbels advocated accusing the enemy of the crimes of which you're guilty, but he never did. Rather it just seems to be an instinct of the guilty, suggesting that beneath the exterior of even such self-adoring bastards as Trump and Putin, there's an unacknowledged conscience that grinds away and eats them raw. They are not happy men.

Once, a thousand years ago, in the company of a friend and late at night, I stole half a box of choc-ices from a circus tent.

I was eaten by guilt. I couldn't sleep. I threw the choc-ices away. Then I got out of bed again to take them to a more distant rubbish bin. The following day I was drawn to the scene of the crime, expecting to see police there, taking fingerprints, beginning the chase that would lead eventually to me. There was no one there, of course, but I had become my guilt.

Forty years later I put the story, half-digested, into a novel I wrote. It was a form of confession. We are powerless against our own thoughts. We are what we think about all day.

And Putin thinks about Putin's fate. He has urged the Ukrainian army to throw down their arms and stop fighting on behalf of a corrupt government. It is precisely what he fears his own army will do. And he knows they'd be right to do so.

I suspect he is beginning to long for the end. He is like Macbeth who can see little point in going on. He is isolated, scared and miserable. His future is desperate.

… and that which should accompany old age
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends
I must not look to have, but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep.

He fears the day may come when his people turn on him, and haul him from his fancy palace and tear him limb from limb. It's what he thinks about all day.