ПодкастиRobert Sapolsky on the nature of human evil and why Russians want to destroy Ukraine

Mark Livin: My name is Mark, I'm a journalist and writer and co-host of the Prostymy Slovamy podcast, one of the most popular projects about mental health in Ukraine. We have a lot of listeners, there are a lot of your fans among them. They've been looking forward to this conversation as much as we have, so thank you for joining us.

– Sure, thanks.

Sofia Terlez: My name is Sofia Terlez, I’m a clinical psychologist. I am also a big fan of your books, and I wanted to thank you so much for your humanity and for meeting people on their halfway. First of all, you agreed to this meeting, considering it's quite late for you now. Secondly, even when you write your books, I was so much impressed and touched by the fact that every time you have a difficult passage, you directly said things like: “Don't fall asleep, hold on, everything will be fine, you will be released soon”. You treat us with such an understanding that it may be overwhelming for us. And so I am very grateful to you for trying to understand us. My first question was, is this something you grew up with, this concern for others, or is it something you acquired? Maybe you learned it by observing monkeys, because you've been around them a lot and probably learned some caution as well.

– Well, my framing of that would be that I'm a very good performer. Rather than that being reality. But I certainly did not start off with much of an interest in humans. I was eight years old when I decided I wanted to go live in Africa with wild primates, and I sort of built my career based on that. So at age eight and for quite a few years after that, I was much more interested in baboons or mountain gorillas than I was in humans. Humans have just kind of snuck through the back door over the years and they they now seem like the species I most want to hang out with.

Mark: I'd like to ask you a quite traditional question for this season. We are working within the framework of How Are You?, a Ukrainian mental health awareness initiative launched by the World Health Organization. This is the first time since Ukraine's independence that the topic of mental health has been raised to such a national level in our country. When the first lady of Ukraine takes care of it, when we start adopting relevant laws. And the program, again, is called How Are You? This is a question that suggests different variations of answers. And I would like to ask you at the beginning: how are you? What did you do during the day today? What does your routine look like?

– First off, thanks for asking. My sense is I could come up with a long list of neurotic complaining, little irritants, and I will avoid doing that because anything in my world, compared to what you folks are putting up with is trivial other than us seeing our half of the planet warming up and starting to melt.

In terms of what I've been up to, I just finished a book that I've been working on for the last five years. In fact, I sent off the galleys two days ago or so. So unfortunately, it's not so much been five years of writing, as much as five years of not being able to write the book. So I'm very, very pleased to have it done. This has been a shadow over me for quite some time. So these days I'm mostly just sitting without a thought in my head, staring out the window.

Sofia: Is [that the book] you've been promising for so long? About free will and the fact that people don't really have it. Or it's something else?

– It is that book. It's very long promised. I missed my contract deadline by a year and a half because I could not figure out what to say. And because the philosophers I read, I could not understand what they were saying or or stay awake. But it's finally finished and it will actually be out in October in English. So I'm very relieved. I'm so glad not to be trying to write it anymore.

Mark: Robert, in our communication (in one of the first letters) you said that, – and this is not a quote, this is a rough paraphrase of your words, – you said that you were concerned about the situation with the mental health of Ukrainians at the moment and the situation that is happening. So I'd like to ask you what do you know about the mental health of Ukrainians and what did you mean when you expressed your concern?

– Well, it seems like if I did not mention that concern in the context of us talking, there's something very, very wrong with me. This is one of the most psychologically and physically stressful places on earth you could be in these days. You know what you folks are going to, maybe, it compares to South Sudan. Maybe it compares to, like the gangs that are running Haiti, maybe it compares.

It's a disaster that all of you have had to endure for a year and a half. And that takes a huge mental health toll. And the best evidence is those consequences will not only be lifelong, they will influence how your children grow up. It will influence how they raise their children. This is something whose consequences are going to be there for a long time, and thus it's incredibly important to try to do whatever can be done to recognize that this is another way in which there is a crisis there. Yes, it's a crisis when a dam blows up and floods like tens of hundreds of square kilometers of land. It's as much of a crisis when you have people who have spent a year and a half living under these conditions of psychological and physical stress. It takes an enormous toll. On everyone.

Sofia: You said it really well about the importance of recognizing it first, that is, saying that it is there and it is true. And I think it's really cool now that we have the opportunity to recognize it and we do. And when you say how we realized that the unhappiness of one person leads to the unhappiness of many others. Great tragedies in many people's lives. I'd like to ask you what can be done? How can we protect ourselves from a scientific point of view? What can we do now to make these consequences less severe for us, for our children? Perhaps you have some answer, even given your history. I know that your parents were immigrants. Maybe there are some examples you could share that really helps. Those that help to raise a generation that will have such a buffer of love between tragedy and their hearts.

– Well, if I was sitting here instead of talking to you, I was talking to a Silicon Valley computer programmer who was feeling terribly stressed because their startup may fail and they're working 80 hour weeks and they're so stressed. I would give them like a stupid introductory hand-holding lesson in what the psychology of stress is, and you would go through it.

What is it that makes an external event psychologically stressful? If you feel like you have no control over what is happening. If you feel like you have no predictive information as to when it's going to happen, how bad is it going to be? How long is it going to last? When you have no outlets for the frustration, for the fear, for the sadness caused by those stressors, when you interpret things as getting worse and when you lack social support. So you sit there and tell that person. So you need to, like, get some more control in your life and figure out who your friends are instead of just your acquaintances and recognize that psychological fact. Yeah, that's great. That person hopefully would like pay somebody a whole lot of money to tell them that. And the best evidence is it will make their life easier and healthier.

I'm sitting here, you guys are not looking at the dangers that your startup company will not make as much money as you were hoping for. You've just gone through a winter without heat and without electricity. You have missiles blowing up your pizzerias without any warning. You've got everything going on there. The notion of, oh, just try to get some control and predictability in your life is ludicrous. And for me to say that sitting here in California, you know, having a perfectly privileged, indulged life is ridiculous.

I think what has been seen from sort of studies of trauma and the predictors of who will do best with it, one finding that occurs to me all the time in this context is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. When you look at people who have gone through combat trauma, people who have gone through sexual trauma and such, it's usually in the range of 15 to 20% of people whose lives are psychiatrically destroyed forever afterward by the PTSD. Whoa. Who are they? And what a lot of science shows by now is those are the people who went into that crisis already four steps behind everyone else in terms of privilege and good psychiatric fortune and things like that. A history of neurological problems, a history of physical abuse at home as a child, a history of neurodevelopmental disorders. So the first important thing is going into traumas like this. What your history is that has brought you to this moment has a lot to do with what will come of it.

Another incredibly important finding in that field is: you look at someone who has suffered from a trauma and they are far more likely to be destroyed by PTSD if the trauma was caused by another human. Especially another human who did that intentionally. Especially another human who did that intentionally to you versus an earthquake, versus a hurricane. Things of that sort.

About 20 years ago, there was this massive hurricane in the southern part of the United States, Hurricane Katrina, that basically destroyed the city of New Orleans. And it did not destroy the city of New Orleans. It destroyed all the poor neighborhoods filled with black people because the government didn't send busses for them to get them out of there. And in the aftermath, there was incredibly high rates of PTSD, much higher than you see for an earthquake or a hurricane or a tornado, because that isn't what caused the PTSD. And then it was caused by the fact that nobody cared and they were left there. So the trouble that all of you guys face is, like, this is not an earthquake. And this is very intentional. And there's a sociopath sitting in the Kremlin. Making up crap about your country being filled with neo-nazis. This is very, very intentional. So in the face of that, maybe, all you can go is what

Sofia was saying in terms of Putin. It's not by chance that these people became who they are. It's not by chance that this person is a violent, sadistic Russian soldier. Who knows how they were brought up. It is not their fault that they believe in an ideology that they do, because they were never taught how to be critical thinkers or to question authority. It's not their fault. You know, obviously, that takes a lot of work when this is someone who is just, like, done an atrocity to you and your loved ones. But in a weird way, that's where the lack of free will comes in. It's not by chance that they became who they were. It's not by chance the Germans became who they were in 1940. And, like, it's not by chance.

We are all the end products. And the notion that any of us have chosen to be evil. The notion that the word evil even makes sense scientifically. Maybe there's some grounds for comfort on that. But that's kind of like idiotic philosophy. Oh, remember, genes and hormones and evolution when you're looking at these soldiers that have come in and massacred the civilians in this town sort of thing. That's not easy to do. Maybe that will come years down the line when all of you start the healing process. What I think is best understood with PTSD is social support. People who understand what you have gone through, people who've experienced the same, people who are not asking you to explain yourself because you have no words for it. And they don't need to hear the words because they know it already. People who are willing to do one of the most therapeutic things possible, which is to have them need you and need you to be well and functioning to help them.

One of the most important sort of things in the aftermath of a psychiatric crisis like PTSD is the knowledge that you can still make somebody else's life better. You are still essential for somebody. You still matter. The damn government didn't send any busses for you because you didn't matter to them. But you can still have this impact. It still matters that you were there. You were not just somebody who invisibly was inside a pizzeria when the missile came down and you managed to survive. You can reach out and help other people going through the same thing. And this easily sounds asinine.

Also, oh, go out and see if anybody needs help. You know, here's a primate example of this. Like one of the things every other primate does on earth is they do social grooming. They sit there with each other and they take the bugs out of each other's fur. And they something upsetting happens. A lion almost catches a baboon and everyone immediately sits down and spends the next hour grooming each other because it's socially very calming. And, you know, grooming lowers your stress hormone level. That some of the stuff that I did with my baboons, all of that. Oh, that's incredibly interesting. Have somebody groomed you? What studies have shown is if you want to lower your stress hormone levels and you were a baboon, it's very good for somebody to groom you.

It's even better for you to groom somebody else. Not to be forced by them because they're three times bigger than you. But, like, even in that other species, social reciprocity, social support, all of that are incredibly powerful things. And people get through catastrophic circumstances by knowing they're not alone. By knowing that they really were not the victims of evil intent. This is a world whose circumstances produce horrible things out of our control and the knowledge that no matter how broken you feel by that afterward, you still matter and you can still matter in the most essential kind of way.

Sofia: You know, I have a question and a reflection here. Because you're absolutely right, you can be manipulated, and we've seen how these manipulations have been happening not in the last year or in the last 10 years, but for a very long time. This country was without freedom of speech, there was no alternative opinion. And during the Soviet era, there was a complete suppression of expression. As Ukrainians, we had a very similar history. We were in the Soviet Union. We thought that the best of the best of our citizens would be exterminated by the Soviets. Our poets, our scientists, our teachers. I can also recall the Jewish people, who made up a tertiary part of the population of Ukraine, who were also killed or decided to leave. And we also have a complicated history related to this. That's why I'm probably pleased, and I was really touched, that there was so much help from Israel. That so many psychologists, therapists, and counselors from Israel were the first to respond, because they knew roughly how we lived.

Mark: Politically, Israel is neutral, so people who aren't aware of the inner workings of psychology be like: "Hey”.

Sofia: I just want to ask one more question, because we were also being persecuted, we were also under the Soviet Union, and we were surprised when ordinary people rose up. When ordinary people went to war. When we saw how many people have a desire to be with their country, and not to pretend that it's not their business. No, Ukrainians did it differently. How is it possible that geographically we are really close [to Russians], but mentally and morally we are so different? How can this be explained in terms of genetics and biology? How would you explain it?

– Well, I mean, anyone in Russia who would say, there's no such thing as a real Ukrainian culture that is separate from the larger Slavic culture, there's really no such thing legitimately. Look at the last year and a half and like your bakers and your plumbers and your schoolteachers going off to, like, fight Russian mercenaries. That alone should show the extent to which that is nonsense.

I mean, any time you have a country which, you know, in a previous century was trying to make people in your place not use their language anymore. You've got a pretty strong vote on their part that no matter what they say, you are a real culture. If you have a language and they're trying to get you to stop speaking it, that's a pretty good vote in the same way.

You know, I've got relatives in Israel, but I am not a fan of what their politics are at all. But anyone who sits there with the right wing Israeli crap of who are the Palestinians, they really exist as a people. They've spent 60 years getting shot by Israeli soldiers, throwing stones at them. If that doesn't show that they have a cultural identity that deserves as much recognition as your own...

But yeah, I know. Look what you guys are doing. I don't know if this was maybe this was a big news story there, but in The New York Times some months ago, a young couple who had gone off to the war to fight and they were fighting at the same unit and they happened to be in the same foxhole all together when a missile came down and killed them. It was the first case of a husband and wife who fighting alongside each other were killed. So this was a very moving story. I don't know if this was news at your end, but this was a big thing in the American newspapers. And at some point, they said what these people did. And he had been a computer programmer and she ran online courses teaching baking to people, how to make fancy gingerbread houses. When it's those people who were getting blown up in foxholes, you don't have a damn leg to stand on saying this is a Western construct after 1990 that there is this country called Ukraine.

Like, if nothing else, Ukrainians and Russians have been hating each other for half a millennium. That's a pretty good measure that this is for real. And it's also a pretty good measure that when you try to make sense of what Russians are up to, they may say it has something to do with NATO, or it may have something to do with selling oil to Germany, or it may have something to do with neo-nazi military units in eastern Ukraine. It has something to do with 500 years of cultural conflict. It's got nothing to do with those things they've talked about. In the same way you go to the United Kingdom and they are beyond awful to the Irish and they've been beyond awful to them for 500 years and tried to destroy their language and their religion and their culture and all of that.

And when somebody sits there and says, no, this has something to do with economic inequity. No, it has something to do with the battle of wherever in 1523 where the British troops slaughtered all the Irish civilians. And kids are still growing up in, like, Belfast, learning that. When you have something like that, like, economics doesn't tell you much, like, this month's geopolitics doesn't tell you much. You were looking at very, very, very old, like, anger and hatred.

You know, all my field work has been in Kenya. And when I first got there, it was only about 14 years after independence. And I'll tell you, I have hardly ever met a Kenyan who hated the British the way an Irish person does. You know, the Brits showed up in around 1890. They took over our country, they stole our land. We had to have a little bit of a war. Finally, they were broken by World War two. So they decided to clear out and tell us that we're now a country, whatever. We're not going to think about them again. You sit next to a country whose culture has been trying to destroy yours for centuries, and this is not like, oh, why did they hate us? Why? Why are we willing to die to preserve who we are? This is very, very deep and fundamental. And that's what European history is.

Mark: The ability to receive pleasure is one of the very important components of mental health and things that prevent a person from developing what you call major depression inside of them. In the context of war, Ukrainians often have a veto on enjoyment. And I'd like you to briefly explain how this works and why the ability to receive pleasure is so important.

– Well. I mean, that adds to the problem enormously. Your town has not been bombed. You don't know anyone who has died. Is it okay to take pleasure in life still, amid you being potentially so much luckier than so many other people there? You know, I've now talked with a number of mental health people working in Ukraine, and this keeps coming up. What's going to happen to our children? And is it okay for me to feel good about anything when people are going through this?

You know, the easiest way to convince yourself that it is okay is that being able to experience that, allowing yourself to experience that will make it possible for you to try to bring the same about in someone else. Like, you cannot give the social support. You could not be the person who can effectively be the shoulder for someone to lean on if you're in worse mental health than they are. So if nothing else like, Oh, I feel so guilty that I've survived, I have done well, how can I be happy that like the flowers are beautiful today?

Being happy in a moment like that is going to help you rebuild the economy of Ukraine. It's going to help people get back to work and function afterward. I mean, that's stupid, but it's on that level, if nothing else. The reason why it is okay to feel like there is purpose in life and that pleasure can be part of that is it makes it easier for you to do that for other people, and especially for the ones who didn't have your good luck. So I think that points of being the answer of like, Oh my God, am I allowed to enjoy a good meal? Am I allowed to, like, laugh? Am I allowed to all of that? I think that could be the only answer. But that sure as hell is not easy.

Sofia: I really liked what you said, that if people don't feel empathy for themselves, they can't show it later. People who don't feel joy cannot share that joy and approach those who are in trouble. And that this is not really an obligation, but something to work on. We need to work on feeling joy, on helping others, and not block it. Because the more we block it, the less we allow ourselves to come to others and bring them that joy. Am I understanding this correctly?

– Absolutely. Making understanding somebody else's troubles and the ways in which life is difficult for them, that may be totally foreign to you. It takes work. It takes a lot of psychological work. It takes thinking about their perspective. It takes thinking about why they are a different person than you are. It takes, like, people who are miserable don't have the energy for that.

People who are miserable, neurobiologically, are much more likely to decide: “They are not my problem. I'm just taking care of me and the people who matter to me most. It's their fault that they wound up in the first place”. All of that, you know, if nothing else, being mentally healthy is going to, like, allow people to try to spread it and care about it and think that that's important for people beyond their immediate loved ones.

So like, yeah, go out and be grateful for life and the small pleasures and the large pleasures of it. And that's very difficult in the context of what all of you folks are going through. But maybe that's the only way to frame it. That's like the prerequisite for spreading it.

Sofia: Love is an antidote to suffering. And it's something that will save us and our loved ones from the consequences of this war.

– Yeah.

Mark: I wanted to ask you a more personal question, and it is of interest to our audience as well. How do you take care of yourself and cope with yourself when you are extremely stressed and overwhelmed with worries? If it happens, of course.

Sofia: A Robert Sapolsky recipe.

– I'm terrible with this. Whenever [I write] a book about stress or I'm giving lectures about stress or whatever, they always have to sit me down and say, you have to put in a final chapter about what to do to make things better. And you can't, we're not going to let you do that, without, like, everyone is going to be so depressed by what you're writing here. I've spent like, like, 40 years working 80 hours a week thinking about stress and all of that. It's certainly not because it's something I am good at dealing with. I'm terrible at it, like, a neurotic academic, like, any other out there and sort of pour myself into that. So I am a terrible, terrible role model. No one should pay any attention to what I do, maybe what I say, but with the knowledge that I sure don't listen to myself.

Mark: Okay, that's a good answer as well.

Sofia: I just want to thank you so much, I have the impression that you really shared with us this warmth, the warmth that we described and you described today as an antidote to stress and its consequences. And I thank you so much for your attention and for showing us by your example what it's like to make other people feel that you care about them. By even agreeing to this interview, you told us: “I do care about what is happening to you, I do care about what you are going through". And it's extremely touching. I just feel a lot of gratitude right now.

Mark: As you can see, I'm hugging myself too. So I have the same emotions. Thank you for sharing this with us.

– Well, just remember, it's easier for me to talk about this. You guys have to live this. So, I am much more moved by the reality that you folks are dealing with, and I hope things will be better there as soon as possible. It is a horror. So I hope all of you and your loved ones are well, remain well and that this all ends soon.

Mark: Well, thank you for your time, and we wish you a good night's sleep so that you can continue to do your work tomorrow, full of energy.

Sofia: And we wish you a lot of new knowledge.

– I hope you guys have a rest in the morning there. Okay, be well.