Putin using Pavlov to break Zelensky, Kyiv

Pavlov: Most humans fall apart within 30 days of war.

Most soldiers can withstand 30 days of continuous attack. But Pavlov discovered that when days 40–45 roll around, all of them suffer from mental breakdown. They also reach a point where under questioning/torture victims will write confessions to crimes they did not commit, and even reprogram their loyalties to the aggressor. (Photo of Ivan Pavlov by unknown author and available in the public domain from Creative Commons.)

Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov discovered that when laboratory animals are “subjected to prolonged physical and psychic stress,” they mentally fall apart.

When humans can no longer handle stress-causing stimulus over time, they have what we now call “mental breakdowns.”

In 1958, Aldous Huxley wrote in a Newsday magazine article entitled, “The Tyranny of the Mind,” human beings, like dogs, have their own individual limit of endurance.

“Most men reach their limit after about 30 days or more or less continuous stress under the conditions of modern combat,” Huxley wrote. Some can only make it 15 days; others might last for 45 or even 50 days.

“But in the long run,” per Huxley, “all of them break down.”

Here’s an interesting twist.

These are the numbers associated with people who start out sane.

“The only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity,” Huxley learned from Pavlov.

Putin’s deadly siege on Kyiv nears Day 40