“I heard a journalist say,” N tells me, “that Soviet people were used to think one thing, say something completely different and do something even more different. And this explains why Putin and everybody around him are acting so crazy.”
“That makes sense,” I say, starting to think of the many examples of this phenomenon.
“So I started to wonder,” N continues, “am I also like that? Do I have this problem?”
If N hears that somebody somewhere on the planet has a character flaw, he immediately finds that flaw in himself. I’m glad he hasn’t heard about the Nashville shooter and hasn’t started looking for echoes of her dysfunction inside himself.
Clarissa's Blog 
Born to be a monk.
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I might understand that trait of N’s, as I have it to a certain degree, too. It comes from a fear that, deep down, one is terrible and degenerate and broken beyond repair, plus so self-deluded and/or evil that they can successfully hide all this awfulness from themselves. Then if one is committed to becoming good, like I assume N is, they constantly feel they’re failing to extinguish the myriad inborn horrors, because new ones always seem to come to their attention, and they, believing they’re fundamentally broken, then also believe they may have this awful trait, too. It’s crappy families that instill this poison deep in a kid’s psyche, and it’s extremely hard to get rid of it. It’s a daily struggle. Big sympathies for N.
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