The Dunce Who Never Learns

The character of Duncey Putin in Russian Disinfolklore does not evolve, as in, say, a bildungsroman — a tale in which the dunce goes forth on heaps of episodic adventures before coming into a state of at least a modicum of wisdom.

Instead of this kind of character development, in Russian Disinfolklore, we have a stubborn commitment to trying the same failed strategy again and again.

Starvation, genocide, freezing, madcap plans, and at the end of each episode Russia has lost. It’s more miserable than it was at the beginning.

Yet, Duncey Putin stubbornly invests all its hope in the next episode in the same failed strategies. Like a folkloric dunce or Parzival in the first Graal tale, Pancloss in Candide, Sancho Panza in Don Quixote…

Source: Our Disinfolklore Universe

We’ve watched in real time while, say, the German president has suddenly realised Ukraine exists and “Russia” has nothing apart from a Potemkin mythos. Now we discover many writers upon whom we’ve depended for communicating new ways of seeing the world are still stuck in a pre-24th Feb 2022 reality.

Source: On Criticism By Writers

Wisdom’s absence is diagnostic. Duncey Putin is a folkloric dunce — the character who never learns, who repeats the same catastrophic strategies expecting different results. This is not merely an insult but a structural observation: Russian Disinfolklore cannot evolve because its premises are data-resistant archetypes (see Tool 9). Meanwhile, those who should know better remain “stuck in a pre-24th Feb 2022 reality.” Tool 12 demands that we, at least, evolve.

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