2017 Personality 20: Biology & Traits: Orderliness/Disgust/Conscientiousness

[Music] so we're going to discuss some very rough things today um maybe you're somewhat accustomed to that already but this is particularly brutal I think um I'm going to tell talk to you about a body of research that's been produced over about the last 10 years and I think it it's per perhaps it's it's a body of research that might outline some of the most important things that psychologists Have ever discovered it's really changed my view for example on what happened in Nazi Germany which we're going to talk about a lot today and you know

we've already talked a fair bit about the temperamental determinance of political belief right and I've made a case for you that people who are liberal or lean to the left tend to be high in trade openness and low in trait conscientiousness especially orderliness And people on the right tend to be low in openness and high in conscientiousness especially orderliness and the effect is not trivial if you look at just voting behavior then you get the typical sort of effect sizes that are characteristic of Personality research. 2 to point4 something like that correlations but if you

start to analyze people's political beliefs in detail so so you get your measurement up to the point where it's nice and Reliable and nice and valid then temperament uh accounts for a substantial a substantially higher proportion of the the variance and so a lot of what people seem to do is one thing you could think of is that they they they they politicize their temperament by constructing post Hawk arguments about the way the world is but it's deeper than that you see because we already know that you have to use filtering mechanisms in order to

orient Yourself in the world right because the world is just too complicated for you to orient yourself without using filtering mechanisms and the question is well what are the filtering mechanisms and to a large degree they're your temperamental proclivities because they set up your value structure for example and that sets up your perceptual frame and so what that means is that you screen the world at the level of the facts that display themselves to you because you Know you could say well you're a dispassionate Observer of the universe of facts and that you extract out

the conclusions that a reasonable person would extract out from that body of facts but unfortunately that's not the case because your perceptions are biased by your temperament and they have to be because well because you have to screen things and so you screen things in accordance with your temperament you know you're oriented towards certain Things in the world certain values for example and that's a perfectly that's perfectly reasonable because you can't do everything at once anyways so there's no reason for you not to be directional the question is what are the pathologies associated with directionality

now conscientiousness is a very interesting um uh trait in relationship to that because there are obvious benefits to being conscientious right I mean it's the best long-term predictor Of job uh performance for example and and I'll outline some other data that might be more associated with industriousness than orderliness but there's utility to orderliness as well um and and we'll cover that in detail today the question is no the issue is that you never get a benefit without a price and so you can see that with agreeableness if you're agreeable high in agreeableness then you're compassionate

and poite and you're Empathic and you can work well in teams but the price you pay for that is that you don't negotiate very well on your own behalf and that you can be easily taken advantage of and then if you're very low in agreeableness well then you're more competitive and more out to win I would say but the price you pay for that is that if you become too disagreeable then you're likely to be sufficiently antisocial let's say so that you might end up in prison so you Don't get a cost without a benefit

you don't get a benefit without a cost so then the question might be well what's up with conscientiousness because it seems all things considered that it would be a good thing to be conscientious now I can think of some exceptions to that so conscientious people are dutiful industrious orderly that sort of thing and they tend to sacrifice the present for the future and that's a good Thing so you you you save up let's say you save up wealth you save up labor and effort for the future you know uh don't live for today don't be

impulsive work hard and all that that'll acrew you success over the long run the downside of that is the long run has to be stable in order for that to be a reasonable strategy and so conscientiousness is not a good strategy at least under some conditions in situations that are Radically unstable because in situations that are radically unstable you might as well get where you can now or that's one way of looking at it anyways the other thing about being conscientious if you store up wealth say as a consequence of hard work then that can

make you targets for people who would like to come and take your wealth and so um it it's also one of the things that happened to many people in the 20th century most recently in in Venezuela is that let's say you're Conscientious and you save money well what happens in a period of hyperinflation well your money's wiped out and so you know this happened to Germany say in the 1920s and you got to understand what hyperinflation does to a society because what hyperinflation does is destroy the people who worked hardest to construct the society because

they're the people who' have been prudent and careful and sacrificed and so forth and Then when a period of high inflation comes along poof everything they have disappears and that happened in Germany during the 1920s now there was a bunch of reasons for that but so Germany was very unstable in the 1920s right because of the war had just ended they they had um been subjected to the Versa treaty which was a very punitive treaty aimed against Germany that it's not like the Allies had lacked reasons to impose a punitive Treaty but nonetheless they did

Germany lost a lot of territory including their industrial uh including their industrial areas Germany was flooded by men who were brutalized in the trenches in World War I I mean you could hardly imagine how terrible trench warfare is and you can't imagine what you'd be like after a month of that a day of that let alone a couple of years of that and then Germany underwent a period of hyperinflation at the same time in the Soviet Union the Comm Comm revolution had had been successful and so there was tremendous political upheaval in Germany during the

1920s as well I I want to just set the stage for that and so but the hyperinflation wiped out all the people that were prudent and saved and left them with a terrible sense that the entire system had betrayed them which is of course exactly what had happened so all right so anyways conscientiousness is a Bit of a mystery you know we've looked at plasticity right already um that's a combination of extroversion and openness I just want to walk you through again where conscientiousness is located in the big five space so plasticity is a combination

of extroversion and openness and then stability is a combination of conscientiousness emotional stability and agreeableness and conscientiousness is made out of industriousness and Orderliness now here's here's some markers for for conscientiousness so here's what you're like if you're orderly or if you're industrious you carry out your plans you don't waste time you don't find it difficult ult to get down to work you don't mess things up you finish what you start you put your mind on the task at hand you get things done quickly you know what you're doing you don't postpone decisions and you're

not easily distracted that's what An industrious person is like we don't know anything about industrious people we cannot figure out why they're industrious if you read the neuropsychological literature you might assume that people who have highly functioning prefrontal cortexes might be more conscientious because people associate the prefrontal cortex with such things has the capacity to plan the problem with that is that we've for example tested now thousands of people Using tests of dorsal lateral prefrontal cognitive ability which are basically cognitive tests and as you know from being in this class if you take a battery

of cognitive tests and you subject them to a factor analysis you can extract out a first factor and that's fluid intelligence and the correlation between fluid intelligence and conscientiousness is zero right so so that's that's very very strange because you would tend to think that People who were smarter might be better at planning and maybe they are but they're not necessarily better at implementing and that that's a and we don't understand the difference between planning and implementation we we don't know what that is um you got to think about it this way too though just

because you're better at planning wouldn't necessarily imply that you're better at implementing because actually one of the prerequisites for thinking Abstractly is that you can detach your plans from your action right because otherwise you just automatically Ally act out everything you planned but that isn't what people do they separate out their thinking so that they can work in an abstract space that's divorced from their action and so they can lay out multiple plans without necessarily acting them out but then that introduces the additional complication of having to implement and industrious people seem to Be good

at implementation but we don't know why we've done all sorts of laboratory studies trying to see if we could get some sort of laboratory task that industrious people would do better in the lab the non- industrious people God you'd think that would be a a snap we we've probably tested 50 things and have never got anything differences in language use is as close as we've got you can extract out estimates of people's conscientiousness or their Industriousness from the way they use language but that's not a lot different than using self-report personality scills it's different but

it's not a lot different so we've done things for example like imagine we present people with a row of uh H's n's M's and U's row after row of letters small type you say go through and circle all the U's well obviously you would think that that would be a task that would require diligence and industriousness you could Time how long it took people to do it you could see how accurate they were correlation with conscientiousness nothing zero it's an IQ task as it turns out and so the best we've been able to do so

far maybe with industriousness is and this is so vague it's embarrassing um is that we think that maybe industrious people find inactivity aversive so because they're not motivated by enthusiasm right for the Task that would be an extrovert and they're not motivated by intrinsic interest in the task that would be someone who was open and they're not motivated by the desire to decrease anxiety or emotional pain because that would be someone who's high in neuroticism right and they're not motivated by the desire to Foster affiliative relationships or to compete because that looks like it loads

on agreeableness it's something else it Does a good job of predicting military prowess for example we we we tested a number of people who worked in the US military in a number of different places conscientiousness was a deadly predictor of of of ranking in military performance in schools like the US Naval Academy for example and also on on military bases themselves and that kind of makes sense I mean the military is a conservative place you'd expect people who were conscientious and dutiful to do better In a place like that but so they're good at they're

good at implementation they're good at following orders they're good at at doing their Duty now we're starting to understand a little bit about the value concerns that conscientious people would have too and so let's go through orderliness so you can decide whether you're orderly or disorderly leave your belongings around that you're disorderly obviously if you do that like order well that's a that's A no-brainer keep things tidy follow a schedule is bothered is is bothered by messy people once everything to be just right is bothered by disorder likes routine sees that rules are observed and

wants every detail taken care of you can imagine all sorts of occupations where that would be useful accounting for example or there are people who go around and check uh you know natural gas fittings and that s sort of thing by a checklist and you know you want someone Like that every in any any position where careful attention to detail is absolutely vital um the question is as we said before what what's the potential downside so with industriousness we don't know anything about it here's the problem with conscientiousness okay broadly speaking there's no theoretical model

nobody has any idea why people are conscientious except for the few things that I've told you there's no neuros pychological model Because the prediction would be something like people who are higher in prefrontal cortical ability because that's associated with planning would be more conscientious that's not true there's no psychological model and that's partly because conscientiousness as a trait was extracted out of the linguistic pools that we described by Factor analytic processes nobody predicted that that would emerge as a fundamental trait it Just came out of the statistics so there was no there's no model surrounding

it really and there's no pharmacological model we don't know how to make people more conscientious with the possible exception of drugs like rlin amphetamines you know that that seem to be able to make people focus in more and so maybe there's an association to some degree between conscientiousness and the ability to pay attention but when we've Used attentional tasks in the lab first of all they load on fluid intelligence and second they don't correlate with conscientiousness there's another dead end very very difficult to for it's a real mystery to me because we don't have that

many good predictors of Life outcome IQ that's a good one conscientiousness that's a good one well what's conscientiousness well we don't know we don't know anything about it with the Exception of the things I told you and I'm going to describe some of the other things that we found out more recently so okay so what else is useful about conscientiousness well it's strongly related to life satisfaction and happiness actually if you look at the big five if you look at the traits that are most correlated within the big five conscientiousness and neuroticism are negatively correlated

make sure I got that right the more conscientious you Are the less likely you are to suffer from anxiety and emotional pain and I think the reason for that but I don't know but I think the reason for that is that by being conscientious you stabilize your environment right because everything becomes more predictable more scheduled more routine you're more likely to be successful so if things aren't going wrong around you all the time then you're going to be less anxious and in less emotional pain so I Don't think that there's a direct relationship between being

more conscientious and less neurotic but I think there's one that's mediated by the environment and this is very interesting you see because you'll hear all sorts of social psychologists tell you and that conservatives are more likely to be high in negative emotion they're more threat sensitive say than liberals but the weird thing about that is is that the conservatives are not higher in Neuroticism than liberals actually the contrary happens to be true the Liberals are slightly more neurotic than the conservatives and so if conservatives are threat sensitive because that's supposed to be the theory then

why the hell don't they show up as being higher in trait neuroticism and you could say Well they're so effective at their conservatism that they've reduced their neuroticism by organizing their environment and to some degree that's True but Jesus if your theory predicts one thing and the opposite happens to be true you can't just post hawk say well there's some other reasons we didn't pay any attention to to account for that like it's really bothered me because it does seem to be the case that the political landscape is shaped to some degree by some sort

of negative emotion that's broadcast at the people who are on the other side of the political Spectrum but the evidence that it's Anxiety related seems to be very very thin so the question is well what else might there be so well conscientiousness is related to depression uh and guilt there's a a researcher named fard who looked to show used a meta analys to show that conscientiousness was associated with specific emotions an overall negative emotion but was most strongly associated with guilt it was most it was negatively related to guilt experience but positively related to Guilt

proness and so maybe guilt is the emotion that you feel when you don't do your duty something like that and that's partly why we were thinking as well it's part of it's not exactly why we were thinking that conscientiousness is motivated by uh inability to tolerate inactivity but it's it's a finding that's along the the same sort of theoretical lays out the same sort of theoretical territory so you must know people maybe the maybe the person is Your mother or perhaps it's your father they come over to your place or you go over there and

they're just working all the time they can't sit down and relax they just work all the time and they say they'll tell you if you ask them well I can't stand sitting around I have to be doing something and you can imagine too how that might have been selected for Across The evolutionary time span I mean if if you're living in a situation where resources are somewhat Limited like we pretty much all do you're going to want you're going to demand of the people around you that they at least pull their fair share of the

weight right and so you could imagine that the people who were likely to feel a negative emotion of some sort for not chipping in and doing their share or more than their share which would be an way of indicating their value to the community we more likely to be well less likely to be less likely to Be selected as mates and also perhaps more likely to be severely punished from time to time now you might say well how do people get away with not being conscientious then well the answer to that would be there are

other things that you can offer the community that are of value that aren't associated with dud beautifulness and I think comedians are a good example of that I I don't believe that comedians are particularly conscientious because it's not the kind Of Lifestyle you would pick if you were a conscientious person or people who go out on the road and play music for example because that's such an erratic lifestyle and so unlikely to be stable across any reasonable amount of time so maybe you could be valuable to the community by being amusing an extrovert would do

that or or by uh by helping ensure security and safety and maybe someone h neuroticism would do that or maybe you would be useful because you're Really good at developing affiliative relationships that would be someone who is agreeable or you're creative but the conscientious person demonstrates their value by working hard and being dutiful and contributing to the broader community and and following rules and all that sort of thing and there may be other things they do as well so now here's a downside to being conscientious if you're working in a big company say and There's

Mass layoffs and you happen to be affected independently of your work history the probability that you'll become depressed is quite a lot higher if you're conscientious and some of you maybe conscientious people and you know that if you fail at something or even if you think you might be failing at something you're going to tear yourself apart you're going to find it you're going to blame yourself for it because conscientious people especially orderly People are also judgmental right and so which is something the Liberals always accuse the conservatives of doing is being judgmental and and

laying down their value structure on everything but if you're conscientious you're going to tend to assume that if things aren't going well for you that it's your fault and that's you can understand why that might be a useful supposition when it is the case that there's something you could have done that would have Stabilized you or or improved your your chances and you can often think of something even if it's trivial but it's not so good when you happen to be caught up in you know waves of mass movement for example when you're laid off

by a big company that where the relationship between that happening and your own work ethic is very very tenuous nonetheless you'll still pull yourself apart so all right so let's take a look at orderliness because we don't have much To say about industriousness because we don't know anything about industriousness but we're starting to understand a lot about orderliness and it's extremely interesting so we we'd only managed to parse out orderliness roughly speaking only managed to parse out conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness over about the last 10 years I mean people have had placed orderliness under

conscientiousness before that but psychometrically it's Become with the big five aspect scale it's become more straightforward to measure and so here's what we know about orderliness so far it predicts conservatism along with low openness low openness is a better predictor of conservatism and high openness of liberalism than conscientiousness is but conscientiousness is a pretty good predictor and that's almost all orderliness it's it's also associated with disgusted sensitivity now that's a Very cool thing so um Jonathan height has done a lot of work on discussed sensitivity and so has a guy named Paul Rosen and I

knew their research from really almost I guess it's almost 30 years ago now and I thought they were really on to something back in the 990s I really thought that investigating disgust would be useful because no one had ever really talked about it hadn't conceptualized it as a separate emotion system and we we found that that Discussed sensitivity is associated with orderliness with the preference for order and tradition and not with egalitarianism it's also associated orderliness with harsh judgments of moral transgression and and this is the kicker here I think it's associated with the function

of something that psychologists have started to describe as the behavioral immune system and so we're going to talk about the behavioral immune system and then we're going to Talk more speculatively I would say about the role that the behavioral immune system might play in political choice and also in political pathology and I find this overwhelmingly shocking this this body of data because it's opened up a view for me of why people are prejudice that I had no idea existed and it's it's make it actually makes Prejudice a more terrifying thing I was terrified about Prejudice

before I knew any of the stuff I'm going to tell you About today but this makes it more terrifying because it it locks it so deeply into people you can't believe it and the worse than that if you understand why it's locked so deeply into people you also understand why it emerged as a necessity and that's the terrifying thing now so we're stuck with that now and no one really knows what to do about it and so well we'll walk through this and you can tell me what you think so what's the behavioral Immune system

all right according to the parasite stress hypothesis levels of parasitic infection within a region may drive variability at both individual and societal levels okay so they're talking about individual variability in political attitudes in personality traits both among individuals and both in the social world and so we'll outline that in some great detail the avoidance of death or disability through avoidance Of infection is a major evolutionary driving force for example until times that are recent in evolutionary terms almost 50% of children failed to survive to reproductive age with the majority of deaths being due to infectious

diseases now we're less cognizant of that as modern people because of the invention of antibiotics which we are currently in the process of destroying as rapidly as we possibly can right because they're Given wide scale to animals and to people to far too great a degree and all over the world we're generating new infectious diseases that are resistant to antibiotics all known antibiotics and we don't have any new antibiotics in the pipeline so although we've had a 60 70 year Hiatus where infectious diseases were well controlled they're they're back on the March again and for

example there are multiple strains that have emerged of antibiotic resistant Tuberculosis that can't be treated by any known combination of antibiotics and those are actually tend this is a terrible thing they tend to be bred in hospitals and my guess is if we did the epidemiology properly that hospitals kill more people than they save and the reason they do that is because they bring people together who have diseases and they breed infectious disease of all sorts that's antibiotic resistant it's absolutely insane and here's another Thing we do that's completely crazy so um if you bring

cattle to a feed lot they're fed this is particularly the case in in the US but it's also the case in Ontario um they're fattened up on corn and the reason they're fattened up on corn is because corn is heavily subsidized as a as a crop so it's Dam near free that's why there's corn syrup in everything right because it's a very lowcost a very lowcost source of calories and you might say well hooray You know a lowcost source of calories isn't that wonderful because that means that people don't have who have any who don't

have any money get to eat and right fair enough but the subsidy is made corn so cheap that you can you can feed it to cows to fatten them up because they get quite fat fast they gain a lot of weight fast with corn the problem is cows can't digest corn so it makes them sick or they digest it very badly it makes them sick they're not Designed for it they're designed to eat grass not corn and so in order to stop the cows from from dying when you feed them corn you pump them full

of antibiotics and that's one of the things that's breeding antibiotic resistance so it's not very smart but that's what we're doing and no one really notices and that's a very bad idea so you can be sure one of the things that you can be virtually certain of is that whatever you're worried about happening terribly In the future it will be something else that you're not worrying about that will actually cause the problem and this could certainly be one of those things local parasite types and host defense systems will typically typically be involved in a co-evolutionary

arms race and so at any given time a host's immunological defenses will be specialized to be most effective against local parasite species to the extent that a host defense system is Specialized locally contact without groups will be associated with an increased risk of exposure to infectious diseases against which there is no a prior immunity okay I'm going to read that again because you should think about it to the extent that a host defense system is specialized locally contact without groups will be associated with an increased risk of exposure to infectious diseases against which there is

no a prior immunity black Plague Europe came in on ships right the Europeans started to spread out they came back with the ships the rats came off the ships poof third of the European population died the relevant infection avoiding behaviors such as avoidance of strangers and high conscientiousness in for example food preparation are assumed to arise from the operation of a behavioral immune system the behavioral immune system comprises adaptive psychological Response mechanisms that are sensitive to cues that might predict the presence of infectious pathogens and which respond with appropriate cognitive processing and affective reactions such

a system this is the next thing that you want to pay attention to such a system is likely to be over sensitive the cost of a false positive avoiding non-existent infection is small relative to the possible cost catching an avoidable infection okay so you're Walking through the grass and your snake detectors go off they're they're the the F or the paraphobia of your eyes the per periphery is specialized for the detection of things that might threaten you and so you could say well your snake you have snake detection systems in the periphery of your vision

that are hypers sensitive because if you see a stick and you think snake and you jump up in the air the cost is you jumped up in the air so who cares that you misidentified the Snake but if there's a snake there and you don't see it and it bites you then you're dead so the logic is why not set the systems that protect you to be hyper sensitive because the cost of the hypers sensitivity is low compared to the cost of hyposensitivity right in Social terms an important component of the parasite stress hypothesis is

that high levels of infection may lead to ethnocentrism xenophobia Trust of different others and Conformity because Such behaviors will reduce the likelihood of exposure to unfamiliar infections to which immunity has not been developed why is there strict sexual morality because promiscuity is a prime vector for disease transmission that's one of the reasons conservatism as the social immune system discusted is considered to be one of the basic human emotions defined by a strong revulsion and desire to withdraw from an eliciting stimulus Or event physically disgust is accompanied by a distinct facial expression involved con involving constriction

of the oral and na nasal cavity so that's the disgust phase which closes up your nose and your mouth so that things can't get in evolutionary models of disussed propose that this emotion evolv to help us avoid contaminated or harmful foods or other potential sources of disease such as sexual contact you know there's lots of Psychoanalytic theories about sexual shame and sexual disgust but it's much more straightforward as far as I'm concerned to view it as a biological battle there's approach systems and sexual arousal systems that are involved in moving you forward to towards a

sexual partner but there's disgust systems that guard you against it and those two things are mutually Regulatory and so you're basically Stuck in the Middle it's half move forward and half Be repelled and that's partly also the balance of those two things is help is what helps you select a sexual partner and people generally are quite selective about their sexual partner so and we said well why are you selective about your sexual partners well there's the obvious practical reasons but then there's the reasons that are more more tightly associated with biological protection and so even

though we don't like to think that Way in addition to its role in directly helping to expel harmful foods from the body discust also forms an important component of the behavioral immune system the suite of psychological mechanisms that Aid in the detection and avoidance of potential contaminants before they can make contact with the body although disgust may have its origins in the protection to get physical contamination a number of Studies have implicated disgust Responses in moral decision-making there's been experiments that are specifically associated with the elicitation of disgust and the observation of the corresponding behaviors

in the lab so here here's an example so imagine I gave you a sterilized Beaker and I said well expel some saliva into it now wait 10 seconds and drink it with you well people no you see you made a disgust face right well the question is why right you know it's Sterile it was in your mouth seconds before why all of a sudden have have you've switched from it being part of your body to not being part of your body and also being part of your body that what wasn't ingested it was was part

of you to being something that there's no damn way you're going to have anything to do with so um well so that's a good example that's a good example of the of the of the discussed mechanism in in operation you Know distinguishing between self and non-self is a very very difficult thing and there's multiple mechanisms that do it and it's it's definitely necessary although disgust may have its origins in protection against physical contamination a number of Studies have implicated disgust response disgust responses in moral decision-making I mean you know that you you can see the

activity of the uh behavioral immune system in such simple things as avoiding Sources of contamination on a sidewalk right if you see something that's disgusting say rotting food or something like that on a sidewalk the probability that you're going to step in it is very low you're going to see it and you're going to make a face and you're going to go around it and the reason for that is because you don't want that attached to you in any way and the reason for that is well it's disgusting it's contaminating and the association there Is

that it's the a place where you could conceivably pick up a disease now you see pathologies of this system arise generally obsessive compulsive disorders so chronic handh for example is is classified as an anxiety disorder but there is an anxiety component to it but I don't believe that that's an accurate classification I think that obsessive compulsive disorder is actually a disorder of disgust because all of the behaviors including hyper grooming People sometimes have trania they'll pull out the hairs on their body The Grooming behaviors and that sort of thing seem to be more associated with

the operation of the disgust system and almost everything about obsessive compulsive disorder has a discussed basis and so one of the things things that people who are who have OCD obsess about is that I got a client once who was this poor woman by the time her OCD was done with her she' built the Equivalent of an airlock on her house like not technically proficient or anything like that and her husband and her children had to go through an elaborate decontamination process before they were allowed to step foot in the house and one of the

things she was very concerned about was that she would go out to a supermarket and touch a piece of fruit and and become contaminated and then come home and touch her children and then they would become contaminated And so well she ended up in the in the hospital and she was divorced and I I just did in her life you know and so and people who have obsessive compulsive disorder you know they'll they'll wash their hands until the soap is gone like a whole bar of soap right and you can often tell who they are

because their hands are shiny from washing too much and they'll shower they can't get out of the shower they'll shower until the hot water is completely gone and you know so The their their self-cleaning mechanisms so to speak have gone seriously astray and the way you treat them is by exposing them to things that are disgusting and contaminating um I had a client with OCD once he was quite the character and um I one of the things I had him do was we would look for things on the internet pictures of things that really disgusted

him it's not that much fun by the way treating someone who has OCD because I'm rather disgust sensitive And and so that was also rather hard on me so anyways we would look for things on the internet that that he really didn't like and then I'd print them out and have them put them on his fridge which he did not like at at all and he would he would he had a bunch of other problems and we got along quite well but for a long time I treated him for about 3 years he would phone

me like three or four times a day because he had obsessive compulsive disorder and just Swear at me like mad you know he just swear I didn't get these messages he he he'd phone me and he was just so mad at me because I'd have him put these things on his fridge you know and so he'd curse and swear and yell at me and then 2 minutes later he would phone and apologize and say he was really sorry and hoped I would continue to see him God that just went that just went on forever but

I felt sorry for the poor guy you know he eventually ended up Getting a puppy um yeah yeah yeah see you agreeable people oh a puppy God unbelievable eh yeah anyways that was good for him because he had to go around and clean up after the puppy but that that poor puppy it was quite dominant and it oh the things that happened to that poor guy so the puppy would dominate him so he'd take it outside to to take for a walk and he wasn't a very skilled person in many many ways um he had

a very large number Of severe impediments and so but he really liked this pupp he didn't have any friends or anything like that and he was supported by his aged mother and it God it was just a catastrophe and he'd go outside and try to walk the puppy and the puppy would just sit down right because it was doing dominant stuff and he didn't know how to overcome it and then these crazy people from across the way who styled themselves as animal rights activists started to harass him He and they phoned up his mother and

told him that if they if if she didn't take the dog away from that they were going to come over and you know do terrible things to him and then he got harassed on the street and then he went to a park with his dog and they came up to him and pushed him on the car and swiped his dog and ran off to the to the SPCA and dumped it there and he had to move away from his apartment and God it was just it was just an absolute Catastrophe they had plenty of sympathy

for that damn dog but no sympathy whatsoever for the guy you know it was really it was really something anyways the story ended happily weirdly enough he got a he got a job with a woman who used to be a psychiatric nurse who was training dogs and she gave him a little job setting up the dog training thing and then he got to learn to train his dog he lost like he was a thin guy to begin with he lost like 30 lbs trying to Learn how to take care of this puppy it was just

I thought he was going to die but there's no way he was going to give up that dog and so anyways OCD it's quite the bloody uh catastrophe so and it's a good thing for someone who has OCD to have a dog right because dogs are messy and so there's all sorts of things that are messy about them but you have to kind of live with the mess like you have to live with the mess if you're going to have a child or if you're going To have a partner of any sort you know you

can't let the orderliness part of you get the upper hand so terribly that it's impossible for you to live that's what happens to girls who have anorexia by the way you know how you get there's this idea with regards to anorexia that it's often High achieving girls who have it well it's hyper conscientious girls they get so disgust sensitive they can't stand their own bodies and so for example then they start being able to Look at their bodies properly and so what they do instead of looking at their whole body they they lose the ability

to do that they only can see parts of their body and then they can't tell the difference between a part that's healthy and well-shaped and a fat part and so anything that's that's that's what would you call of dubious anything that's hard to measure becomes impossible to see so I had an anorexic client at one point wasn't a very big Woman maybe about this big and and thin yes obviously and so I was trying to work with her on her body perception disorder and one of the things I did was so I had her come

and sit beside me so I was sitting like this and so was she and I said well you look at our two thighs which one is bigger and like mine was like 40% bigger and she said well I can't tell they look the same to me and so I said okay this is what we're going to do I let her do it I said you take a Pencil and I'll sit on a piece of paper and you just trace my thigh okay and then you can put that piece of paper underneath your thigh and trace

it and then you can look at the difference well so I had her do that and she looked at the two pieces of paper and she couldn't believe it she could not believe that that was actually the case because her perception had become so disordered that it was impossible for her to see the real shape of her body and we we would Go outside and I would ask her you know is that person thin is that person fat and with other people she could tell but with her own body not a chance she couldn't see

it properly at all and so there's a real obsession with Purity among women who have anorexia no they'd like to starve themselves right down to the bone because the bone is sort of pure and white and there's no excess tissue on it and so anorexia also looks like a disease of disgust and so it's Very very difficult to she she thought in very black and white terms one of the things I I had her do at one point was said she has a music she said I really like a song or I don't like it

at all and I said okay well you've got a music collection why don't you go through like 20 of those songs and rate them on a scale from one to 10 and she couldn't do it it was either yes or no orderly right the boundaries around the categories were absolutely segregated and and her Apartment tended to be decorated in black and white and she was hyper clean you know so everything in the apartment was extraordinarily orderly well put away she couldn't stand to see anything disgusting on the counters and that sort of thing so very

very difficult disorder to treat anorexia very very difficult so and you know you can see how it can go wrong because food you know when you're eating your disgust systems are on alert you Know like you you want the thing you want to eat and you absolutely don't want the thing you don't want to eat and your mouth is very sensitive to that sort of thing you know to the texture and all of that and your sense of smell is very sensitive to that sort of thing because you know you don't want to eat anything

that's contaminated or poisonous so it's another situation like sex where the reward system is driving you forward for to to engage in a Consumatory behavior but the discusted system is right there Mo modulating and moderating it and there's a tension between those two things that's already always at work with the anorexic types the discuss sense discust system gets the upper hand so she was also extraordinarily judgmental and perfectionistic but that goes along with it because orderly people are judgmental and perfectionistic and so if you're you're a perfectionist often what that Means is you have very

high levels of orderliness and very high levels of neuroticism and those two things Chase each other around like mad because you can't stand the idea that you would make a mistake and you get anxious about it as well so then you get stuck in this perfectionistic mindset and you can't get out of it so inducing disgust responses whether via a foul order a disgusting work environment or recalling a disgusting Experience LED individuals to assign harsher punishments to others who had committed moral trans transgression so you you describe a moral transgression maybe breaking a law you

expose person the the people in the experiment to some disgusting stimulus and then you have them you ask them about the probability that the person was guilty and then also how long they should be imprisoned or how much they should be fined and if you get the people disgusted then the Probability especially if they're orderly then the probability of of assigning a harsh punishment goes upward so so if you're ever in court don't discuss the judge right that's part of the deal harsher moral consump judgments can even be induced following the consumption of a bitter

drink because bitter bitter substances are often poison or poisonous substances are often bitter and that induces a disgust response as well although you can Overcome that coffee is bitter olives are bitter so you can you can retrain your system to accept those things as food but it's not particularly easy in in addition the same discussed related facial expressions are observed in resp response to unpleasant tastes disgusting photographs and receiving unfair treatment in an economic game concerns about cleanliness and interesting so some of you may know I was at McMaster University a couple of Weeks ago

and there were a bunch of protesters there and I went up to to meet the protesters because I kind of wanted to see what would happen there were a bunch of them around the end the back of the room and I offered to shake their hands and mostly what I got was disgust faces you know and that's not good that's not good so here's something to know too here's here's a good predictor of whether or not you're going to get divorced you go into the Therapist office and you talk the two of you talk and

you roll your eyes that'll predict if you roll if you're rolling your eyes at your partner you're going to divorce them why it's a disgust response right it's something like I'm lifting you up with my eyes and throwing you into the garbage it's something like that but eye rolling is a great predictor of the probability of divorce so so it's something to keep in mind with regards to your relationships like If you're starting to develop some contempt or some disgust you bloody well better get on that right away because that's a bad road to go

down and so well so well so then you have to do whatever you have to do not to go down that road yeah so see one of the things I think that's happening on the political landscape and like we know for example that the more authoritarian politically correct types are high in agreeableness And high in orderliness so that's a very interesting combination and I think what's happening is that they're very rapidly dividing the world into contemptible Predator like a snakes often elicit a disgust response right a predator will will elicit a disgust response like a

crocodile or an alligator a snake or something like that and so it's the it's the Predator response that's being evoked to the people who are on the other side of the Political Spectrum roughly speaking and so they're categorized as like contempt Predators something like that and the people that are being protected are like innocent victims it's it's that's how it appears and that's a very very dangerous to have happen as I'll show you concerns about cleanliness and feelings of disgust have likewise been related to political attitudes situational reminders of the importance of physical cleanliness such

as asking participants To wipe their hands with antiseptic wipes tend to increase self-reported political conservatism such as find finding is consistent with the notion that Purity tends to be valued more highly by conservatives than by liberals individuals who report being disgusted more easily also tend to hold more conservative political views on topics including abortion gay marriage tax cuts and affirmative action in addition to the effects that have emerged when using Self-reported disgust sensitivity more conservative political views have also been associated with stronger physiological reactivity to disgusting images there's a lawyer Martha nusom who's also a

political philosopher who says that we should eliminate the effect of disgust on our political theorizing that disgust shouldn't be something that's considered as a valid means of information from which you might drive derive political conclusions so if I Find your behavior disgusting or if you find my behavior disgusting according to NAS bom that should be independent you should try to make that rationally independent of your political views I'd like to believe that but there's a problem and this is the problem that we're going to go through you can't mock about with these underlying systems you

can't just say ignore the reports of your discust system because it isn't it isn't like your emotions are insane and Irrational and you have the rationality on top of that that's guiding you properly that isn't how it works all of these underlying biological systems guide you and to the degree that you're the degree to which you're guided properly is a consequence of the balance of the action of these underlying biological systems but the balance is very complexly maintained you need a discusted system because if you didn't you'd eat something that would kill you And then

you would die or you'd do something stupid and you'd end up like you you'd get cut and it would be dirty and you wouldn't clean it and then you would die so the idea that you can somehow just rationalize the output of the discussed system and decontaminate your political viewpoints as a consequence seems to me to be un it seems to me to be very very naive not that there's no danger to it because there's plenty of danger to it in Addition a large literature has converged on the notion that there are two core dimensions

of conservative political ideology resistance to change and tolerance of inequality resistance to change refs the extent to which people wish to maintain the status quo while tolerance of inequality reflects the acceptance of an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities within Society Jo has done a lot of that work Jo's supervisor is maerin banaji and Ma maerin banaji is a known Marxist and so this is another place where political ideology contaminates as far as I'm concerned scientific inquiry because Jo's work on on uh on let's say resistance to is predicated on the idea that the conservative

in the conservative inclination to support the maintenance of already existing structures is precisely equivalent to supporting an Unjust system and that's not a reasonable thing to do if you're looking at these sorts of things from a scientific perspective you don't get to make judgments like that but they're built into the questionnaires so resistance to change reflects the extent to which people wish to maintain the status quo while tolerance of inequality reflect reflects the acceptance of an unequal distribution of resources and Opportunities within Society these two Dimensions appear roughly aligned with social and economic conservatism as

expressed in the constructs of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation respectively there is no left-wing authoritarian psychological scales we're trying to derive one right now but the reason for that is that after World War II the social science Community was responding to what had happened in Nazi Germany and Perfectly appropriately and they examined rightwing authoritarianism as a consequence but they never examined left-wing authoritarianism because the prevailing what would you call it political landscape of the time prescribed made the idea that there could be left-wing authoritarianism sufficiently incorrect politically so that it was never analyzed from

the perspective of social science even though the evidence for left-wing Authoritarianism say by the end of the 1940s was absolutely overwhelming right by the 1930s people were reporting on what had happened in the Soviet Union you know the forced the forced dekulakization for example of the agricultural industry in the Soviet Union and the consequence death consequent deaths of several million people in the Ukraine was all extraordinarily well documented these core facets of Conservatism are also closely related to the two higher order value dimensions described in moral foundations Theory which reflect preferences for order and tradition

on the one hand and preferences for egalitarianism on the other important ly the motivational basis of these two Dimensions appears to vary independently from one another with an individual's overall political attitudes on a left right Spectrum emerging from their relative Balance these motives are also strongly Ro rooted rooted in basic personality characteristics such that preferences for order and tradition are associated with higher levels of orderliness now you might think that's obvious right well obviously orderliness is associated with preference for order that's not the issue the issue is whether or not you can measure it right

that's the issue so these things seem self-evident but it's taken a very long time to build up the Instruments that allow them to be measured in such a way that you can also start to look at the correlates and the underlying psychophysiology so it's it's by no means obvious um higher levels of orderliness an aspect of conscientiousness and politeness an aspect of agreeableness as well as lower levels of openness and intellect in contrast preferences for egalitarianism are uniquely associated With compassion an aspect of agreeableness so and that's exactly what we found when when we were

looking at political correctness which is primarily predicted not by openness or by conscientiousness but by agreeableness political conservatism can therefore be thought of as a social immune system reflecting the extension of pathogen avoidance mechanisms to the Integrity of the social system borders boundaries right that's the orderly Person we'll keep borders between Concepts we'll keep borders between people we'll keep borders between between towns will keep borders between political ideas and religions and States why because we don't want the Terrible Things flooding in from everywhere now the liberal will say wait a minute all the things flooding

in from everywhere aren't terrible they have great utility and that's true but the problem is they're both true they're both true at The same time because well and and we'll document that as we move forward so then the question is well how do you know when things should be more open and when things should be more closed and the answer to that is well you better have a chat with everyone and find out what they think because it's a balance of probabilities there's no way of determining at a priority it's a balance of probabilities and

so you have to have a discussion to determine how wide the Gates should be open and how narrow they should be closed and that's also going to depend on the circumstances and the situation so there's no way of the thing this is the thing that's so terrible about this there's no way of determining a prior whose position is correct just as the behavioral yes in particular the social immune system system would help to maintain order by suppressing any actions or individuals that deviate from a group's accepted Social traditions it has been reported for example that

regions with higher levels of disease prevalence tend to be associated with higher levels of social Conformity and autocratic rule individuals who feel more vulnerable to disease likely likewise report higher levels of ethnocentrism and xenophobia such basic concerns about pathogen avoidance May thus contribute to the desire for order and tradition among conservatives along along with the harsh Moral judgments associated with violations of the social order how do you purify something how about with fire that's something to keep in mind as we move towards the more political expressions of this and the thing about something that's disgusting

is you don't isolate it exactly you destroy it right you it's the thing you do with rats and insects for example is destroy them right and you do that with poison you do it with fire you do it by cleaning Things up and you do that because well the rats EAD all your crops and the in carry disease and all of that so or they infest your food which which you know I don't know what proportion of today's food production is eaten by rats and insects but it's a huge proportion still according to the parasite

stress hypothesis authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease causing pathogens now who the Hell would have ever guessed that this is where you see the real utility of a genuine social science because it's by no means self-evident this hypothesis and this paper that I'm going to discuss with you right now just blew me away when I read it I thought it should have been Front Page News across across the world but didn't really attract that much attention recent cross National evidence is consistent with this hypothesis but

there are inferential Limitations associated with that evidence we report two studies that address some of the limitations and provide further tests of the hypothesis study one revealed that parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals authoritarian personalities so that's very interesting so the more parasitic and transmissible diseases in a particular local the higher the probability that people when Measured at the individual level held authoritarian attitudes because you might say well there's parasite prevalence that produces a repressive government but it doesn't really affect people at the level of personality and that's not what was

found in the studies it was reversed the parasite prevalence SL infectious diseases made people more authoritarian and that was what was driving the more authoritarian government so here's something cool who Knows about this right so how do you fight authoritarian governments across the world you get rid of infectious disease that could be it that could be the key so and then again that that is by no means a self-evident hypothesis study one that revealed that parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals authoritarian personalities and effect statistically mediated the relationship between Parasite prevalence

and authoritarian governance parasites personality authoritarian State that's the causal pathway this mediation result is inconsistent with alternative explanations for previous findings to address further limitations associated with cross-national comparison study 2 tested the parasite stress hypothesis on a sample of traditional smallscale societies results revealed that parasite pre prevalence predicted measures of Authoritarian governance and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare one additional threat famine also uniquely predicted authoritarianism together these results further substantiate the parasite stress hypothesis of authoritarianism and suggest that societal differences in authoritarian governance result in part from cultural

differences in individuals authoritarian personalities here's the effect sizes so look they're they're Mindboggling so first that's authoritarian governance One path prevalence the correlation is42 42 right there's malnutrition there's Warfare It's actually negatively correlated with Warfare famine. 26 so if you square that that's about 8% of the variance that's about 16% of the variance so those are walloping effect sizes right that effect size is about so that's 16% the typical effect size for a personality variable is about 0. 2 to3 So let's say 0.25 so that's about 7% of the variance that's 16 to 177% of

the variance you almost never see a correlation of that size so it's a it's an absolutely remarkable piece of work and it has all sorts of terrifying implications so the question is now why would you have such a powerful immune system behavioral immune system discussed system okay so let's look at some little known facts about the history of North America I don't know How many of you guys know this but it's worth knowing okay so what was the the pre-colombian population of the Americas the answer is we don't really have any idea the estimates vary

from 10 million to 100 million with an emerging consensus of 50 million well it's halfway okay we don't know we could be out by one order of magnitude but a fair number of people so what happened to all the Native Americans well that's easy they all died why because when the Spaniards came see there was no diseases in the new world except for maybe syphilis there's some evidence that syphilis was transmitted back to Europe as a consequence of contact with North North and South America but there were almost no diseases in in in in the

Americas and that's partly because there were no big cities and also because even where there were not compared to Europe and also because where there were big cities in Europe people lived close with animals and there was lots of movement of disease pathogens back and forth between the animals and the human beings and so lots of Europeans died as a consequence of that like huge numbers of them especially from diseases say like small plocks or or measles or and but the Europeans built up a whopping immunity to all these diseases including influenza and then they

came to the Americas with their diseases and bang it Killed all the Native Americans it figured 90% of them so here's some of the statistics what were the diseases that wiped them out influenza Bubonic plague small poox measles they even chickenpox was deadly to the Native Americans so from 1492 to 1650 there was a death toll of 90% so you know when the Puritans landed in the US at Plymouth Rock that was a long time after the Spaniards had had landed in in in the more Southern areas The Indians the Native Americans there they were

desperate to see them because they didn't have enough people to take off their crops they didn't have enough people left imagine nine out of 10 people died that's everyone right you're done at that point and so there were 20 to 25 to 30 million people in Mexico before the arrival of a Cortez 50 years later there were 3 million so and the Aboriginal population in Canada estimates this is accepted by the Canadian government no one really knows and the estimates do vary substantially there might have been 500,000 people in Canada in 1450 and that decreased

by 80% after contact with the Europeans there's the population collapse in Mexico 16th century population collapse in Mexico so the 1545 and 1576 epidemics appear to have been hemorrhagic fevers caused by an indigenous viral agent and aggravated by unusual climatic conditions the Mexican population did Not recover recover to prehispanic levels until the 20th century absolutely catastrophic consequences so then you look at that and you think well is it really all that surprising that people have evolved extraordinarily powerful immune systems disgust responses and behavioral immune systems I mean this is no joke it's absolutely catastrophic so

now I want to talk to you a little bit about Hitler so when I was sorting some of this stuff out trying to Look at the this discust sensitivity literature and then understanding finally that it was associated with orderliness and that orderliness was associated with conservatism I was also reading a book by Adolf Hitler which was called Hitler's tabl talk it's a very interesting book and Hitler had the secretaries at his dinner tables from 1939 to 1942 and they basically took shorthand notes of what he said spontaneously and so there's a book that You can

buy called Hitler's table talk that that that is nothing but a presentation of his spontaneous utterances across that time period now Hitler was a very strange person um he was very high in openness surprisingly enough but also extremely high in orderliness at least that's that's what you can infer from reading the historical data so he bathed four times a day for example he was also a great admir of willpower so which is something That's also associated with conscientiousness and orderliness so he was very proud of his ability to stand like this for eight hours in

the back of a car and his ability to withstand you know what would you call them trying circumstances by willpower alone one of the most famous film documentaries that was made in the Nazi area was called Triumph of the will right Triumph of Willow that was by Len riffin stall I'm not saying that quite right you can look At that on YouTube it's a very interesting film a horrifying film but a very interesting one well if you're wondering about orderliness I mean take a look at that man so that's nberg right that was the biggest

rally grounds ever made in human history nurg and Hitler was unbelievably good at spectacle look at how absolutely perfectly ordered that is there's God only knows how many people there several hundred thousand cuz they could all fit on the parade Ground at the same time all in absolutely perfect formation orderliness gone out of control it's interesting because people think about Nazism Nazism as a descent into barbarity right but what it looks like is a disease of civilization that's a whole different thing because conscientiousness predicts be predicts success in complex industrial societies and this is actually

conscientiousness gone out of control on the orderly end Of things and why why well the 20s the the World War I that was plenty chaotic and there was a huge famine after World War I right in Spanish influenza killed more people than the war did and it actually mutated in the trenches because if people are packed close together then viruses or other pathogens can be very deadly because you don't have to live very long to give it to her if people are dispersed then the the virus or the bacteria can't afford to kill you fast

Because then it dies too and so if you pack people together then you can breed unbelievably virulent forms of pathogens infectious pathogens and that's what happened in World War I packed all the men together in unsanitary conditions poof up came Spanish influenza went all around the world after World War I and killed more people than the war so and after the war after World War I of course Germany descended into utter chaos and so what happens when you Descend into chaos and the answer is there's a corresponding call for order and that was answered by

the that was answered by Hitler and the national socialists and Hitler was very good at listening to the German population and what they were demanding in the period of chaos was order and so that was exactly what he decided to provide spectacles of order which is exactly what you'd expect from someone who is really high in openness and high in Orderliness right spectacles of order and Hitler was also extremely interested in art but he categorized art into like proper hygienic art and improper chaotic art and he often would have art exhibits at the same time

of the approved art that he approved of so those were in the official museums let's say and then there would be a corresponding exhibit of degenerate art and that that was art that was associated with movements like Expressionism for example which has garish colors and it's very emotionally expressive Hitler sort of preferred kind of eroticized Greco Roman representations of heroic people you know that was the Nazi aesthetic a essentially so there are some more examples of order right look at that everything everything geometric everything regular the border is completely well defined everything here is squares

everyone's lined up perfectly Everything is uniform right look at there's Pathways between the the rows of people this is again at nurg perfect order along with his plans for the world Capital Germania Albert Spear that was the Nazi architect made the plans for the world's largest stadium which was to be located on the nberg rally grounds derived from the panthic stadium of Athens it would have offered 400,000 seats it was to get the shape of a horseshoe planned Dimensions 800 M wide 450 M High 100 met with a building area of 350,000 square meters the

laying of the foundation stone was on 9th of July 1937 it was to be finished for the party Congress of 1945 in 38 the construction began with the excavation it was stopped in 39 but during the whole War the casting pit had to be kept dry from entering groundwater after the war the northern half of the pit filled up with water and is today called Silver sea Silver Lake the Southern half was used to deposit the debris of the destroyed downtown nurg that's nberg at night so what Hitler did because he was very good at

using fire and light as display as well so those that curtain there so you see there's the nurg buildings that we saw in the last photograph that those are the search lights from the from the Nazi Air Force so they had the marade all the way around the the the grounds there and pointed straight up so that the Nighttime rallies were illuminated by a a cube of light very effective um what display artistic display of orderliness now here's where things get seriously ugly so this is a this is a pamphlet from I think 19 yeah

1944 and the pamphlet is called uh Jew as World parasite so this is something I found on the net I'll share it with you very rare original Late 1944 anti-jewish Third Reich pamphlet this varies scarce 6 by 8 and 3/4 20page soft Cover booklet by EML rifer and Eric schwarzburg was published 1944 in Frankfurt it was published at a time when a great percentage of the European Jews had already been deported to concentration camps in the East perhaps to justify what had happened to the Jews since the Nazi seizure of power the authors compare the

Jews with parasites the most unpleasant forms of life on Earth and that it is only natural and just to fight against them to free Humanity of them for the sake and survival of mankind this is from the pamphlet the people of the world will recognize that Jew is World parasite and there will be a time when there will be one united front of all people against the Jewish World parasite the pamphlet ends and Humanity will be freed from the most severe illness from which it suffered from thousands of years here's what happened in Nazi Germany

so when when When Hitler came to power he was very interested in public health campaigns and so he set he he formulated a number of policies including formulating these uh vans that went around screening people for tuberculosis at the same time he announced announced a policy to beautify and purify Germany and so he encouraged the factory owners to clean up the factories to get rid of the rats and the insects and to plant flowers and so forth in front right so it was Cleanliness and Beauty they used zeyon b as the agent for for disinfect

in the factories zeyon b zeyon b was the gas that was used in the gas Chambers so Hitler started out by getting rid of the rats and the parasites and the insects in Germany along with his Public Health campaign then he moved into the insane asylums and started a euthanasia campaign and then he moved outside into the broader political sphere and started to target the people that he didn't Consider pure as parasites capitalizing on the behavioral immune system and people's intrinsic sense of disgust and so I'm going to show you some of the propaganda that

did that so that you know how sort of thing works okay so this is from Richard Kingsburg who wrote a book called Hit Hitler's idology embodied metaphor fantasy and history so we've already we've already sort of discussed the idea this is sort of an archetypal idea uh Grounded in biology you know that you're you're run in some sense on this underlying biological platform of deeply rooted hypothalamic systems in the melic systems and so forth that that and that you're a a collection of those underlying systems organized at some higher order level while those underlying systems

manifest themselves in fantasy so for example if you're hungry you're going to get a fantasy about going to get something to eat and If you're lonely you're going to get a fantasy about someone that you'd like to be with and so forth because the fantasy is part of the manner in which these underlying biological motivation systems think okay so what do you think how do you think and talk if you're possessed by disgust okay the state did this is this is these are from Hitler's Hitler's utterance the state did not possess the power to master

the disease the menacing decay of The Reich was manifest the masses feel that the mere fact of the Jews existence is as bad as the plague politicians tinkering around on the German national body saw at most the forms of our general disease but blindly ignored the virus at the time of the unification the inner Decay was already in full swing and the general situation was deteriorating from year to year the nation did not grow inwardly healthier but obviously languished more and more It's all disease metaphor it's all disease metaphor the symptoms of decay of the

pre-war period can be reduced to racial causes anyone who wants to cure this era which is inwardly sick and rotten must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of the disease they think that they must demonstrate that they are ready for appeasement so as to stay the deadly cancerous ulcer through a PO policy of moderation the Jew must take care that The plague does not die if this battle should not come would Decay and at best would sink to Rune like a rotting corpse you can see in the Reich today

an example of mortal Decay that is not the speech of someone who's possessed by anxiety that's the speech of someone who's possessed by disgust they're not the same thing the 1st of May can only be the liberation of the nation's Spirit from the infection of internationalism the Restoration to health of peoples against the infection of materialism against the Jewish pestilence we must hold a loft a flaming ideal another purification metaphor the restoration to health of our people must start from the restoration to health of the body politics so that was Hitler's essential metaphor the the

nation was a body right it was a pure body it was a pure Aryan body and it was being assaulted by parasites that were subjecting it to Disease and Decay that's the fundamental metaphor at the bottom of his political message I gave the order to burn burn down to the raw flesh Jesus the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells yeah pretty rough man this is the battle against a veritable World sickness which threatens to infect the peoples a plague which devastates whole peoples an international pestilence the International carry of the basilis must be fought

it is with if within this community one state is infected that infection is decisive for all in Europe Europe no common life of the Nations is possible when amongst their number there are some who are suffering from a poisonous infection and who openly Pro profess their desire to infect others with the same disease we shall have a very in real interest in seeing to it that the bulist plague does not spread Over Europe national socialism has made our people and therefore the Reich immune from a bevic infection I'll read you one more although obviously you

get the point table seven is called the National body is being consumed the Jew is and Remains the typical parasite of sponger who likes a like a noxus billus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him all right now I want to show you a brief Film and you can you can look here at the at the what would you call it artistic and propagandistic transformation of the idea of order into a politicized message and the thing that's so interesting about Hitler's particular brand fascism it wasn't precisely an uh see it it wasn't

precisely a movement that was predicated on ideas like communism communism was predicated on ideas but the Nazis went at it with something that wasn't really In the realm of idea it was more in the realm of like embodied disgust and image and so it was also very much more difficult to fight against from the ideational perspective you know it wasn't a well-developed intellectual movement it was an embodied movement and Hitler was extraordinarily good at using the metaphors and the images and then his incredible capacity for for propagandistic display to fire people up at a level

of analysis that they weren't Really even aware of so let's take a look at this film [Music] for [Music] the campaign in Poland gave us the opportunity to really get to know the Jewish people nearly 4 million Jews live here in Poland but they won't be found among the rural population nor have they suffered from The chaos of War as has the native po they set it out indifferently in the gloomy streets of the Polish [Music] ghetto within an hour after the German occupation they were back in business [Music] we Germans had a look at

the Polish ghetto 25 years ago this time our eyes are sharpened by our experience in the last few decades unlike in 1914 we no longer see just the Most grotesque and comical of these questionable ghetto figures this time we recognize that there's a plague here a plague that threatens the health of the Arian peoples rard Wagner once said the Jew is the demon behind the corruption of mankind and these pictures prove it [Music] Jewish Home life reveals remarkable lack of creative ability to civilize in plain language Jewish dwellings are Filthy and neglected these Jews aren't

at all poor after Decades of business they've hoarded enough to acquire decent comfortable homes but they live for Generations in the same dirty and bug ridden dwellings untroubled by their surroundings they go right on with their prayers the bobbing motion is part of the ritual for reading Jewish scriptures [Music] Part of Jewish so-called Community Life takes place in the [Music] street the connection with trade you know you see what's going on in the okay so with the ju deposition of those two films you see the jux deposition of order versus chaos and so part of

the order versus chaos archetype obviously is is rooted in the dichotomy between disgust and Purity it's not the only it's not the only axis of O opposition Between Order and Chaos and then so this is all invocation of archetypal chaos and it starts with the the the the use of the disease imagery and then also the use of uh music composed in a minor key and threatening and low right so that's all josed together and then they switch to trade again with the this undertone of threat and there's a hand-to-hand exchange of goods and it

seems to me that they're they're using the image to continue the metaphor that in this Situation trade is associated with contamination rather than with productivity right and so you and you can see obviously a dichotomy with regards to trade because when you're taking goods from someone else the question is are the goods of high quality and useful and are they useful are they something that is going to introduce a foreign element or or an unexpected element into your house and so this film is obviously taking the the That ambivalence that's associated with trade and placing

it into the chaos order archetype and then associating it with disgust so it's very very sneaky and it's not done it's done by inference rather than directly which I think is much more powerful way of doing this sort of [Music] thing and one of the things that's interesting too is that you know you can imagine that if you're if if you're Seeing people who are poor and downtrodden that that might evoke two possible sets of responses one might be a compassionate response and that would be the desire to help right and the other would be

the desire to distance yourself of course you feel the same thing for example if you're walking down blur and you find somebody who's you know a completely wrecked Street person lying there in their sleeping bag in a doorway it's like well what's your Response going to be is it Compassion or is it is it fear is it disgust well it's going to depend on your mood and all sorts of other things it's going to depend on the particulars of this situation it's going to depend on your temperament but you can see that those two things

they're both automatically evocable responses and it isn't self-evident which one is going to come to the four nor is it always self-evident which one should come to The four because part of the reason that you're ambivalent about a situation like that is because you have no idea what would happen even if you did choose to interact and so you can't just simply what would you say there's no simple way of solving a problem like that and so that's why why there's a war of competing emotions when you're in a when you're in a situation like

that but you could imagine as well you could have taken the same images and put them to Different music and used a different overlay and it could have been a call to compassion but that's not what it is here it's a call to contempt and extermination because that's also another danger of I suppose insisting upon the fact that a a given population is victimized I suppose that might be way of one one way of thinking about it because there's two different sets of categorical responses to people who are at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy

And one of them is compassion but the other one is more like this it's not necessarily something that you want to carelessly evoke [Music] one might want to regard these haggling children as a sign of great poverty but watch them a while and it becomes clear that they're proud to act as their grown-ups do these young people don't have the idealism that ours Do with them the egoism of the individual is not in the service of higher common goals instead Jewish Morality In crass contradiction of the Arian concept of Ethics proclaims the unrestrained egoism of

every Jew to be Divine Law his religion makes cheating and usury a duty in the fifth book of Moses for example it is stated that a non-jew thou May loan to upon usury but not th Brother that the Lord May bless thee in all thy dealings for the Jews then doing business is something holy this is totally incomprehensible to non-jews Arian man attaches a sense of Worth to every activity he wants to create something worthwhile food or clothing houses or machines and so there's a contrast there they actually use a contrast there between industrious and

non- industrious Too which is quite interesting works of art or anything else of value to everyone he's ruled by the feeling of being responsible for his achievements [Music] for the Jew there's but one thing of value money how he gets it makes no difference the first trade goods are generally worthless trash of All Sorts that's how the little Jews start out Soon they reached the point where they can sell from a tray and before long they've assembled a complete line of [Music] goods not long after they own a regular stand the most ambitious soon own

a small shop and then a bigger [Music] shop the most cunning that is the most unscrupulous eventually have warehouses and Banks and move into the most Splendid mansions in the cities Provided that they don't get in each other's way as in the narrow ghettos of the [Music] East that's why they try to escape to Rich lands with rich people [Music] they need other so in the next part of the film there's another something else that's done implicitly so you'll see a globe and then there's spread of um of migration and the underlying metaphor There is

again the spread of disease peoples because they need the Wares with which to do business creative Aran peoples find a value has been reduced by the Jew to Mere merchandise he buys and sells but produces [Music] nothing the production he leaves to the workers and farmers of the host nation it's funny there there's an echo Of marxist ideology in there too that's very interesting because what they're the the the insistence is that the the labor that goes into basic production qualifies as labor but the labor that goes into Mercantile activity doesn't qualify as labor at

all it's not like the Nazis were Pro capitalist by any stretch of the imagination so there's this strange distinction drawn between like it's almost like physical Production that seems to be something that's valued it's the use of your musculature say but then as soon as it's elevated up into trade which is obviously a value added process I mean that that's almost self-evident but it's put forward here as something that's only that's only uh parasitical that's right that and that's a commonality with with the Marxism of the time the Jews are a people without Farmers or

workers a race of [Music] parasites wherever the body of a Nation shows a wound they anchor themselves and feed on the decaying organism they make business out of the sickness of the Nations and therefore Endeavor to deepen and prolong all conditions of sickness how it is in Poland and was in Germany the Jews have been this way throughout their entire history their faces bear the AG old features of the Perpetual sponger the Eternal Jew who in the course of time and worldwide wanderings has always been the same there's no difference between these Jews in Poland

and those in Palestine though the two are geographically separated [Music] [Music] Palestine is the spiritual center of international jewry though the Jews are numerically insignificant There here at the Wailing Wall they gather and mourn the fall of Jerusalem [Music] their homelessness though is a matter of choice and in keeping with their entire history 4,000 years ago their Hebrew ancestors were already wandering out of the land of Two Rivers they wandered along the sea to Egypt where they ran a lucrative grain business for a while when the country farmers and other Egyptians Rose against The foreign

usurers and speculators they wandered once more and plundered their way to the promised land they settled there mercilessly looting the culturally Superior rightful inhabitants here in the course of centuries from the Oriental Far Eastern racial mixture with negroid admixture the ultimate mongrelized Jews developed foreign from us Europeans born of totally different racial elements they differ from us in body and above All in Soul we probably would never have been bothered by them had they stayed in their Oriental home but the Cosmopolitan Empire of Alexander the Great reaching from the near east across half the Mediterranean

and especially the boundless World Empire of the Romans brought about the evolution of the trade and migratory traits of the Jews who soon spread across the open Mediterranean area while some of them said settled in the large Urban traffic and Trade Centers of the Mediterranean others wandered relentlessly on across Spain France Southern Germany and England everywhere they made themselves unwelcome in Spain and France the people Rose openly against them in the 13th and 14th centuries and they wandered on mainly to Germany [Music] There they followed the path of the Arian culture creative Germans colonizing the

East till they finally found a gigantic new untapped Reservoir in the Polish and Russian sections of Eastern Europe so well let's let's tie that together we talked about the use of archetypes archetypes in stories we talked about the the relationship between archetypal symbolism and the biological Underpinnings of the human psyche and then you can see that manifesting itself in this sort of propaganda in the political positions that come out of it you tap into the archetyp archetypal Dimension that's chaos versus order you can you can place one against the other however you want from a

propagandistic perspective because you could make a film decrying excessive order that that's not a difficult thing to do but that isn't What happens here Order is associated with the sun and with what's good and with honest labor and with Purity and with health and chaos is associated with Decay and disgust and and impurity and also with trade which is extremely interesting and the trade Dynamic you could see that in the second part of the film there there was a there was the implication that it was involvement in trade that was associated with this pathological spread

right and so trade Is that's another reflection of of the ambivalence towards the transgression of borders is trade a good thing or is it a bad thing well that's always a political issue it's a huge political issue right now right you're going to have internationalist trade or you're going to close the borders you're going to have internationalist trade and open it or you going to close the borders and so the degree to which the borders should be open or closed I think generally Speaking is the prime political question and of course we're going through an

absolute convulsion of that sort of argumentation again right now part of the reason I I wanted to show you this I mean there's a variety reasons I wanted to show you um how the how the archetype and the underlying biology are are tightly Associated but I also wanted to show you how those associations can be hijacked essentially and used for propagandistic and political purposes Because you need to know that because these sorts of things have a very powerful they have the capacity for a very powerful emotional appeal and the only possible way of resisting that

I would say and and avoiding the temptation of allowing extraordinarily complex issues to be catastrophically reduced to there to to principles that are far too simple to do them Justice is to become at least aware to some degree of what the mechanisms for the Production of such propaganda are and why they have such potency then you have at least some ghost of a chance of reducing your own what would you call it proclivity we could even call it a temperamental proclivity to the kind of propagandistic information that happens to suit your temperament best so well

we all know the aftermath of this sort of thing right was Absol abolutely Dreadful and we're by no means out of the woods on that yet you know you see in Europe And in the United States increasingly calls for the the nationalistic enclosure of borders again you saw that with Trump and the building of the wall between Mexico and the United States so these things can get very badly out of hand and it's a it's a very bad idea to allow things to swing too far to one way or too far to the other because

all hell breaks loose when you do that and well all right we'll see you on Thursday [Applause]