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March 26, 2015 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:15:51
2015 Personality Lecture 20: Conscientiousness - Industriousness, Orderliness & Disgust
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So, we're going to talk about conscientiousness again today.
Its division into industrious and orderliness is relatively new.
Those separable elements of conscientiousness have only been established since 2007.
I talked to you a couple of weeks ago about the relationship between The relationship that I was hypothesizing between disgust sensitivity, contamination, and dominance hierarchy status, right?
And I was trying to tie that into the degree to which someone's belief systems would assure their status and safety in the world.
And I want to continue with that discussion today and narrow it to some degree As well as broadening it in others.
So, conscientiousness is a sub-element of the meta-traits stability.
And the correlation between industriousness and orderliness is relatively low, given that they're two elements of the same trait.
So for openness and intelligence, you see that there's a correlation of 0.35.
That's the lowest plasticity aspect intercorrelation.
And then, for conscientiousness, it's R equals 0.39 for industriousness and orderliness.
Now, here's the basic items for orderliness and industriousness.
So, for orderliness, it leaves belongings around, obviously.
That's negatively scored.
Likes order.
Keeps things tidy.
Follows a schedule.
Is not bothered by messy people.
Wants everything to be just right.
Is not bothered by disorder.
Dislikes routine.
Sees that rules are observed.
Wants every detail taken care of.
And for industriousness.
Carries out his or her plans.
Wastes time negatively scored.
Finds it difficult to get down to work.
Again, negatively scored.
Messes things up.
Finishes what he, she starts, doesn't put his or her mind on the task at hand, gets things done quickly, always knows what he or she is doing, postpones decisions, and is easily distracted.
There's a decisiveness that seems to go along with industriousness and inefficiency.
With orderliness, there seems to be something that's associated with the desire for categorical stability.
Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that Our propensity to categorize, the human propensity to categorize, is more tightly associated with disgust sensitivity than we might think.
And the reason I believe that is because we're omnivores, and that means that we have to make a lot of very complicated decisions about food.
Now, here's part of the problem with conscientiousness.
There's no theoretical model, there's no neuropsychological model, so we don't know how to integrate conscientiousness into into neuroscience in general There's no psychological model except that we know you can measure it with self-report and there's no pharmacological model so we have no idea,
for example, with anxiety so neuroticism, serotonin reuptake inhibitors and benzodiazepines and barbiturates and alcohol all work to decrease negative emotion and dopamine agonists work to increase positive emotion And oxytocin works for agreeableness.
It heightens agreeableness.
And you can even do pharmacological manipulations to change openness.
So, for example, one of the most recent studies done on psilocybin mushrooms, it was the first study done on psychedelics for probably 40 years, showed that one dose of psilocybin mushrooms produced a one standard deviation increase in openness one year later.
Which is staggering.
It's a huge change.
And it seems permanent.
So you see, even though the Big Five was developed statistically, that the details are being filled in constantly from a structural and a pharmacological perspective.
But conscientiousness is a tough one.
And it's also partly because our animal models of conscientiousness are not well developed.
You know, you could make a case in some sense that human beings are the only creatures that work and that will forego pleasures in the moment for increased security and opportunity in the future.
And since conscientiousness seems to be integrally tied up with that, it also seems to indicate that it's a fairly high order emotional, motivational, cognitive attribute.
Here's a problem.
The classic neuropsychological story, I suppose, is that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the cortex that's expanded particularly rapidly among human beings, is associated with planning and abstract thinking, and there seems to be very little doubt about that.
However, the correlation between dorsolateral prefrontal function, which is basically the cognitive functions, are very much akin to fluid intelligence, The correlation between dorsolateral prefrontal function and conscientiousness is basically zero.
So, and I believe the reason for that is that the ability to abstract, that conscientiousness has something to do with implementation of abstraction into behavior.
Whereas abstraction requires that you remove the abstraction from the behavior and run simulations on the abstraction in In a space of imagination so that you can investigate the consequences of different courses of action in the absence of acting them out.
It's quite interesting that despite the fact that it's a neuropsychological truism that the prefrontal cortex is involved in the inhibition of behavior and the control of behavior from a statistical point of view or psychometric point of view, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
I think actually what happens is that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can help you organize nicely arranged hierarchical goal structures, and that those can regulate your behavior, but that doesn't mean that there's any direct relationship between cognitive function and behavioral regulation.
Conscientiousness has been defined by Roberts as the tendency to be planful, organized, task, and goal-oriented and self-controlled, and to delay gratification and follow norms and rules.
It sounds like a cognitive attribute, you know?
So much of that, planful, organized, goal-oriented, all sounds like higher cognitive function, but it doesn't seem to be.
It seems to be associated with something else.
That's a big mystery.
Now, here's some consequences of conscientiousness.
It's strongly related to life satisfaction and happiness.
There's a number of studies that show that.
And the reason seems to be, I suspect, is that if you're a conscientious person, and so you run your conscientious life across time, you build a rather orderly and predictable and stable environment around you in multiple ways.
One of the ways to not be anxious is to be low in trait neuroticism, but another way to not be anxious is not to have anything to be anxious about.
And you know perfectly well from your own experience that if you adopt an unconscientious attitude to a task that you've set for yourself, the probability that you're going to experience negative emotion as a consequence of that is very high.
It might be As the deadline approaches and you haven't done what you had contracted with yourself to do, or maybe if you're particularly resistant to negative emotion, maybe the negative emotion only kicks in afterwards when, as a consequence of failing to do what you said you were going to do, you fail at the task.
But either way, the consequences come rolling in.
An interesting study by Fayard in 2012 showed that conscientiousness was associated with specific emotions and overall negative emotions, but was most strongly associated with guilt So in this situation guilt actually turns out to be a good thing.
Conscientiousness was negatively related to guilt experience but positively related to guilt proneness.
So that's kind of interesting because what it suggests is that if you're If you use your guilt to guide you, such that you stop doing things that make you guilty, you're less likely to feel guilt as a consequence of doing something wrong, because you won't be doing something wrong.
So, conscientiousness seems to be hovering around the guilt, shame, disgust nexus in some way that we haven't really sorted out yet.
Since dividing conscientiousness up into orderliness and industriousness, we've started to understand somewhat more clearly the temperamental basis of political preference.
Conservatives tend to be orderly and low in openness.
Now, orderly people, well, they make good roommates unless they've got to the point where they're completely obsessive.
You know, because everything trails off into catastrophe.
If you push any trait too far, there's a cliff over which you'll fall.
Orderly people seem to be good at process management.
You know, they make sure that everything is sequenced properly and it runs properly.
And you can understand that in many situations, that's going to be an incredibly useful trait.
It's useful in scientific endeavor because if you're doing data with spreadsheets full of numbers, if you transpose one row, you're done.
That's the end of the study.
You can't make one mistake in a spreadsheet.
It has to be perfect.
Especially when you can make catastrophic mistakes with computers.
Because they're very good at making major mistakes.
So you have to be very orderly to be a scientist.
Industriousness seems to be a better predictor of phenomena like grade point average, but orderliness still has its place.
In assuring that complex procedures are carried out properly.
Orderly people also seem to be more disgust sensitive.
They have a preference for order and tradition, and they're not particularly egalitarian.
So they're hierarchical.
And maybe that's because hierarchies are more efficient.
I mean, the problem with egalitarian organizations is that they can't organize themselves along any axis.
So you saw that, for example, with the...
What do they call those people?
In New York, in Central Park, after the 2008 crash.
What was it?
Occupy.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a chaotic demonstration, and no doubt there was something to demonstrate against, but the egalitarian left-wingers who were running the organization couldn't figure out what they wanted or what to say.
So...
That's a problem from a political perspective to some degree because it means the right wing is going to have an advantage over the left wing on almost a permanent basis because they're going to be better at organizing.
Now, the left wing is more open so they're going to be more creative so hopefully that's enough of an edge to keep the two sides properly balanced.
Orderly people also make harsh judgments of moral transgression.
I think that probably goes along with the hierarchy.
So I think for orderly people, there's a pretty steep hierarchy of good versus bad, or maybe good versus evil, and that each of the tiers in that hierarchy are clearly demarcated, and they're demarcated morally.
It's better to be at the top, and it's worse to be at the bottom.
Dr.
Keltner has and Jonathan Haidt have talked about the moralization of purity and they believe that one of the things that distinguishes the top of an orderly hierarchy from the bottom of an orderly hierarchy is that the people at the top who are following the rules fall into the metaphorical category of pure and
the people at the bottom who aren't following the rules fall into the metaphorical category of impure And you can also see to some degree, if you use your imagination a bit, how that's mapped onto dietary preferences, especially in religious systems, because there are purer foods and purer ways of preparing foods and impure foods and impure ways of preparing foods.
And you also see the same thing emerge in modern political, Western political discourse, where people spontaneously organize themselves into Groups of different self-proclaimed morality based on what they choose to eat.
It looks like it's something very deeply rooted inside people.
I think it's probably also, potentially also associated with the fact that at least since we've had agriculture and reasonably large settlements, we had to be pretty orderly with regards to our agricultural storehouses because if you're not orderly when you store food, then rats and insects eat all of it.
Or it gets moldy if it's damp, and then it gets rotten, and then you can't eat it, and then you starve to death, so it's not a good outcome.
So, I think there's a number of factors that have congregated together to align the disgust sensitivity system, and the orderliness system, and the system of harsh judgment, and the ideas of purity and impurity, to bring them all into one form of alignment.
We wrote a paper a while back, which hasn't been published yet.
Jacob Hirsch, who's the first author in this paper, entitled it, Conservatism as a Social Immune System.
And I'm going to read you a little bit of the intro from this paper.
Disgust 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.
It's a very embodied emotion.
So, If anxiety and excitement makes your heart race, well, that's one thing.
But disgust makes your stomach churn.
You know, and it's associated with vomiting and tremendous aversion.
It's also very, very unpleasant emotion.
It might be the most unpleasant emotion.
It's hard for modern people to judge that because our societies are so well organized that we almost never come into contact with anything that's disgusting.
It's all put away.
And you can understand why, because many things that are disgusting are actually contaminated and produce pathology.
They're illness generators.
So it's not an arbitrary judgment.
Physically disgust is accompanied by a distinct facial expression involving constriction of the oral and nasal cavities.
Remember when we watched the Crumb video, one of the things that the Crumb brothers typically got from women that they were trying to approach was a disgust facial expression.
And that seems to be associated with the idea of lowly status and contamination and the desire to close yourself off from the offending source.
Evolutionary models I've discussed propose that this emotion evolve to help us avoid contaminated or harmful foods or other potential sources of disease such as sexual contact.
Now, you know, we know that if you arrange creatures in a dominance hierarchy And then you run a pathogen through the population, an infectious disease.
Then the population tends to die from the bottom up, which means that the animals or people at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy who are chronically more stressed are much more likely to be carriers of infectious agents and much more likely to die from that.
Now I don't know what the stats are for sexually transmitted diseases.
I should have looked that up.
But I would suspect that the same thing probably applies there.
As you construct a socio-economic hierarchy, the probability of acquiring sexually transmitted disease decreases as you move up the hierarchy.
In addition to its role indirectly helping to expel harmful foods from the body, disgust 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.
The other thing that we should never forget is that the reason we can all sit here so clean and well put together is fundamentally because the plumbers produced a transformation in Western, North American and Western society a hundred years ago and by getting rid of All of the contaminants that were associated with poor plumbing, we cranked our life expectancy up tremendously.
So, it's another example of the actual relationship between sensitivity to disgust and longevity.
We also know that conscientious people have better standards of hygiene than unconscious people, and they do live longer.
Disgust may have its origins in the protection against physical contamination.
A number of studies have implicated disgust responses in moral decision-making.
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 transgressions.
Harsher moral judgments could even be induced following the consumption of a bitter drink.
Bitter taste tends to evoke a disgust response, not because all bitter tastes are poisonous, but because most poisonous tastes are bitter.
In addition, the same disgust-related facial expressions are observed in response to unpleasant tastes, disgusting photographs, and receiving unfair treatment in an economic game.
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 tends to increase self-reported political conservatism.
Such a finding is consistent with the notion that purity tends to be valued more 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.
In particular, a large literature has converged on the notion that there are two core dimensions of conservatism.
Resistance to change and tolerance of inequality.
Resistance to change reflects 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 the society.
Now, you know, we talked about this already.
It's a complicated issue because if you're absolutely egalitarian in your orientation, then you have to make the presumption That all differences in hierarchical status are fundamentally unjust.
If you're absolutely hierarchical in your orientation, then you have to make the assumption that the distribution of resources that obtains currently is a consequence of justice.
Right?
The people at the top deserve to be there and the people at the bottom deserve to be there.
Now, as we've already discussed, the situation is complicated by the fact that There seems to be some truth in both claims.
Insofar as conscientiousness and intelligence predict long-term socioeconomic status, and that conscientiousness and intelligence seem to be associated quite strongly with competence, then the degree to which they predict social status seems to indicate that the structure is just.
The fact that people are brought down the dominance hierarchy for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic competence or or their willingness to engage in productive activity weakens the conservative argument because there are certainly cases where the distribution of resources can be seen to be fundamentally unjust.
I think one of the things that happens With political belief is that you can think about political beliefs as heuristics.
And heuristics are unconscious rules.
They're really algorithms that people use to address large sets of data to simplify them so that they're not drowning in complexity.
The system is just.
Well, that's a simplification.
It means there's all sorts of things that you don't have to think about.
The system is unjust, is a heuristic oversimplification as well.
And it means that you don't have to think your way through the complexities of the actual topic that you're dealing with.
What seems to be happening is that the temperamental factors that we've discussed, so to speak, reflect the use of heuristics that are grounded deeply in motivation and emotion.
The two dimensions, resistance to change and tolerance of inequality, appear roughly aligned with social and economic conservatism as expressed in the constructs of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, respectively.
The core facets of conservatism are also closely related to the two higher-order value dimensions described in moral foundations theory, which reflect preference for order and tradition on the one hand and preference for egalitarianism on the other.
Importantly, the motivational basis of these two dimensions appears to vary independently from one another with an individual's overall political attitudes on a right-left spectrum emerging from their relative balance.
These motives are also strongly rooted in basic personality characteristics such that preferences for order and tradition are associated with higher levels of orderliness, non-industriousness, and politeness, which is an aspect of agreeableness, as well as with lower levels of openness and intellect.
In contrast, preferences for egalitarianism are uniquely associated with compassion, an aspect of agreeableness.
Political conservatism can be thought of as a social immune system, reflecting the extension of pathogen avoidance mechanisms to the integrity of the social system.
So the idea there, the metaphorical idea...
Look, if you're egalitarian, everyone's a big family.
That's the core metaphor.
I think that's part of the reason that women are more agreeable than men.
They're more compassionate than men.
And it's necessary for them to be more compassionate than men because they have the obligation or opportunity to concern themselves with the egalitarian distribution of resources within the family unit.
If you're orderly, The fundamental metaphor doesn't seem to be family.
The fundamental metaphor seems to be body.
And the purity of the body.
And the vulnerability of the body.
That's another element of it.
Just as the behavioral immune system has been conceptualized as helping to maintain the purity, integrity of an individual body, So too may the same pathogen avoidance system help to maintain the abstract integrity of the social order.
We don't call our society a body of laws for nothing.
We also tend to symbolize countries as people.
So, you can say things like, England took steps too.
Or, France recently decided to.
So there's the idea that each state can be represented as a body.
You could also say that a hereditary monarch like Queen Elizabeth is such a powerful figure because she embodies in her actual being the concept of the state.
The state is a body.
It's actually a body of laws.
And insofar as you are bound by that body of laws, you're all acting out the same body.
Because you're mimicking the same set of principles that describe the way that you orient your behavior and your perception.
So these are archetypal metaphors.
That's one way of thinking about it.
And they have consequences.
The social immune system would help to maintain order by suppressing any actions or individuals that deviate from a group's accepted social traditions.
If the cells in your body deviate enough from the traditions of the other cells, then what you develop is cancer.
So there's this idea, it's not only an idea, there's this fundamental reality that a certain amount of stability and safety is to be held in obedience to a structure there's this fundamental reality that a certain amount of stability and safety
It has been reported 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 likewise report higher levels of ethnocentrism and xenophobia.
One of the things we do know about socioeconomic status is that people who are lower on the socioeconomic hierarchy are more disgust sensitive.
Now, the reasons for that are exactly clear because people on the lower end of the socio-economic distribution on average also tend to have lower IQs and lower IQs are associated with increased disgust sensitivity so there's the confounding effect of intelligence but by the same token if you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy you are more prone to infectious disease because you're stressed and vulnerable so there's real reasons
for you to be careful about what you expose yourself to If you're just clinging on to the bottom of the hierarchy with both hands, or with one hand.
Such basic concerns about pathogen avoidance may thus contribute to the desire for order and tradition among conservatives, along with the harsh moral judgments associated with violations of the social order.
Because one of the things that's not easy to understand is, like, you see this a lot in the United States, where The attraction of Republican politics isn't limited to those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
In fact, the Republicans draw tremendous support from people who are in the lower strata of the socioeconomic hierarchy, even though it seems quite clear by some standards that the policies that the Republicans promote are not policies that are going to help people who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.
distribution if they stay there.
Now you could argue that the reason that the poor Republicans support the Republicans is because they see themselves as able to climb the hierarchy and so they're voting their dream and not their reality.
But you could also make a case, I believe, that the people at the bottom of the hierarchy are already so stressed that if you add more variability into the system, then that increases the probability that they're going to be completely overwhelmed by chaos.
And the more stressed they are, the higher the probability that they're going to suffer ill health for one reason or another.
So perhaps part of the reason for the desire to maintain social integrity, even if you're at the bottom of the heap, is because some order is better than none, especially if you're already stressed to your limit.
Severe moral judgment may be a key mechanism by which the social immune system, instantiated in conservative practices and policies, aims to eliminate Exposure to deviant social elements that may increase the risk of pathogen exposure.
According to a parasite stress hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens.
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 these limitations and provide further tests of the hypothesis.
This is the paper I mentioned before from PLOS 1.
Unfortunately, I didn't put the title of it here.
If you type into Google, authoritarianism and parasite prevalence, and you look for PLOS1, you'll find it right away.
Study 1 revealed that parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals' authoritarian personalities.
And this effect statistically mediated the relationship between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance.
The mediation result is inconsistent with an alternative explanation for previous findings.
To address further limitations associated with cross-national comparisons, Study 2 tested the parasite stress hypothesis on a sample of traditional small-scale societies.
Results revealed that parasite 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.
So, there is a correlation table.
So the correlation between authoritarian governance and pathogen prevalence is 0.42 That's higher than the correlation between IQ and academic performance at the University of Toronto by quite a substantial margin 0.42 especially in a sample of this size because it was a very large sample That's about as big a correlation coefficient as you're ever going to see between two variables, one of which is psychological.
So that would be the 12-item index of authoritarian governance.
So one of the things to remember, it's only a 12-item questionnaire.
That's not a very good questionnaire.
So, there's a lot of measurement error in that.
And that actually, in a situation like this, that actually means the true correlation is higher, because lack of reliability is going to, like, because if your measure isn't reliable and isn't completely valid, then some of what it measures is going to be noise.
And so the true correlation could easily be 0.5.
Famine adds another 0.26.
It's quite staggering.
Now, I want to walk you through some potential consequences of this.
And some of this is speculative and some of it isn't.
One of the things I want you to remember is that the end of World War I, the biggest influenza epidemic that was ever recorded in history hit.
And it killed four times as many people as the First World War.
So you've got to keep that in mind.
Germany lost the First World War and they suffered a harsh reparation burden as a consequence of the peace treaty that was signed at Versailles.
And then, during the 1920s, the German economy collapsed completely.
so that people were taking wheelbarrows full of money to the corner store to buy bread.
So you can imagine that those, the war, the flu, and the catastrophic inflation set the stage for German political thinking.
you.
Certainly what happened to the Germans could be regarded as immensely chaotic.
In a society that's collapsed into chaos, you're going to get an unconscious Or conscious demand for the imposition of order.
And one thing Hitler was good at was order.
You look at that picture on the left hand side.
That's tens of thousands of people.
All organized into basically perfect squares.
You remember how the Nazis marched?
They did the goose step.
And they did it absolutely precisely.
Hitler was certainly willing to subordinate the individual freedom of the Germans, the Aryans, let's say, to his overall vision and believed, in fact, that the individual should be subordinate to the overall vision.
And he was certainly willing to sacrifice anyone or anything that deviated from inclusion within this pure ordered body.
So that, that's a photograph of the Nuremberg Nazi party rally grounds.
From quite a distance, the light that you see that's horizontal across the bottom is the front of the stage.
The lights shining upward are the Luftwaffe's anti-aircraft lights all arrayed around the parade ground and shining straight up.
So he used the symbolism of light against darkness as an adjunct to his political maneuvering.
You can see the absolute order that is portrayed in that massive sculpture of light You can see in the top left hand corner there The precise precision with which everyone is lined up
So they make perfectly geometrical patterns.
And then on the right, and this is a small stadium for a political gathering compared to what the Nazis were planning.
Albert Speer was planning to build a stadium for such rallies that would have had 400,000 seats.
So I think the typical Football stadium has about 60,000 So you see on the right everyone perfectly aligned, everyone perfectly uniform and masses and masses and rows of people all ordered in precise perfection This is a piece
of Nazi propaganda From the 1930s, the rest of this lecture is going to be very disturbing.
But I want to show you what happened as far as I can tell.
When Hitler came to power, his fundamental goal was to purify what he thought of as the Aryan body.
And I want to show you how he went about doing that.
So that's Wording from a Nazi propaganda folder.
The people of the world will recognize the Jew as world parasite and there will be a time when there will be one united front of all people against the Jewish world parasite.
And humanity will be freed from the most severe illness from which it suffered for thousands of years.
Now the reason I picked those words precisely is because you can see the body metaphor lying underneath that.
It's direct.
It's not even subtle Now These are Pieces of Hitler's Spontaneous speech That were organized From Mein Kampf And These are all metaphors of disease that he used in his speeches and writing.
It's from a book by Richard Konigsberg called Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy and History.
Since 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.
The symptoms of decay of the pre-war period can be reduced to racial causes.
Anybody who wants to cure this era, which was inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all sum up the courage to make clear the causes of this disease.
They think that they must demonstrate that they are ready for appeasement, that's the English I believe, so as to stay the deadly cancerous ulcer through a policy of moderation.
The Jew must take care that the plague does not die.
If this battle should not come, Germany would decay and at best would sink to ruin like a rotting corpse.
You can see in the Reich today an example of mortal decay.
The 1st of May can be only the liberation of the nation's spirit from the infection of internationalism and the restoration to health of all the peoples.
Against the infection of materialism, against the Jewish pestilence, we must hold aloft a flaming ideal.
One of the things that's also extremely interesting about Hitler's use of propaganda was his intense fascination with fire.
And the thing about fire is that it's a purifying element.
It's a purifying element symbolically as well.
You know, when the Second World War was coming to a close and things had gone catastrophically wrong for the Germans, Hitler He became extremely disenchanted with his people and undertook actions that were, by all appearances, designed to increase the degree to which Germany was destroyed.
And it seems to me that—and this is This kind of ties into the Freudian idea of a death wish.
I think that Hitler had this fantasy that he laid out over his whole life that the best thing that could happen to life if it wasn't pure was that it should be burnt in fire.
And I think that's what happened in the Second World War.
I think he lived that right out to its ultimate conclusion.
Because he shot himself in a bunker when Berlin was burning.
You know, and fire has historically been used for purification.
It's not for no reason that many cultures burn bodies after people die.
The restoration to health of our people must start from the restoration to health of the body politic.
I give the order to burn out, down to the raw flesh, the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells.
You can't get much more direct than that.
The only way permanently to cure diseased conditions is to disclose their causes.
Infections in countries lead to a crippling of intelligence and of the forces of resistance.
This is the battle against a veritable world sickness which threatens to infect the peoples, a plague which devastates whole peoples, and international pestilence.
The international carrier of the bacillus must be fought.
If within this community one state is infected, that infection is decisive for all alike.
In 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 profess their desire to infect others with the same disease.
We have a very real interest in seeing to it that this Bolshevist plague shall not spread over Europe.
Same terminology applied to the communists, you know, the communist threat moving in from the east.
National socialism has made our people, and therefore the Reich, immune from a Bolshevik infection.
For hundreds of years, Germany was good enough to receive these elements, Jews, although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases.
Only when this Jewish bacillus infecting the life of peoples has been removed can one hope to establish a cooperation amongst the nations.
Well, you get the picture.
I want to show you something now.
Now this is from a particularly pernicious propaganda film that was produced by the Nazis.
1344, 2041.
All right.
1344.
Where'd we go here?
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Thank you.
Here at the Wailing Wall, they gather and morn her fall of Jerusalem.
Their homelessness, though, is a matter of choice.
And in keeping with their entire history, 4,000 years ago their evil ancestors were already modern.
Out of the land of two rivers, they wandered along the sea to Egypt, where they ran a loop of ravens for a while.
When the country farmers and other Egyptians rose against the poor hugers and speculators, they wandered once more, and plundered their way to the promised land.
They settled there, mercilessly, including the culturally superior rightful inhabitants.
Here, in the course of centuries, from the Oriental Far Eastern racial mixture, the decroid 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.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The cosmopolitan empire of Alexander the Great, reaching from the Near East across half the Mediterranean, and especially the foundless 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 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.
There they followed the path of the Aryan culture, created Germans colonizing the East, until they finally found the gigantic new untapped reservoir in the Polish and Russian sections of Eastern Europe.
The 19th century, with its model ideas about human equality and freedom, gave the Jews a great lift.
from East Europe, they spread across the entire continent during the 19th and 20th centuries, and then across the world.
Parallel to these Jewish wanderings throughout the world is the migration of a similarly restless animal, the rat.
Rats have been parasites from mankind from the very beginning.
Their home is Asia, in which they migrated in gigantic horns over Russia and the Balkans and New York.
By the middle of the 18th century, they spread over all of Europe.
For the end of the 19th century, with the growing shipping traffic, they took possession of America as well, and eventually Africa and the Far East.
Wherever the rats turn up, they carry destruction to the land by destroying mankind's goods of nourishment and spreading diseases and plagues such as cholera, dysentery, leprosy, and typhoid fever.
They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and usually appear in massive forms.
They represent the elements of sneakiness and subterranean destruction among animals, just as the Jews do among mankind.
Thank you.
The parasite nation of Cuba is responsible for a large part of international crime.
In 1932, the Jews, who made up only 1% of the world's population, were counted for 34% of the world's dope feathers, 47% of robberies.
47% of cricket games of chance.
82% of international crime organizations.
And 98% of dealers and prostitutes.
The most common expressions in the jargon of international gangsters stem from Hebrew and Yiddish words.
These physiognomies immediately refute the liberal theories about the equality of all with their human confidence.
The Jews altered their own way of the world.
Well, I'll show you the rest of four minutes.
Thank you.
The hair, beard, skullcap, and cap tap make the Eastern Jew recognizable to everyone.
January movement only shot by people and spot his racial origins.
The essential trait of the Jew is that he always tries to hide his origin when among non-Jews.
A bunch of Polish Jews still wearing cap tans.
Now in Western European clothes, prepare to infiltrate Western civilization.
Of course, these ghetto Jews don't yet move too well in their clean European clothes.
Somewhat more adept are the Jews of Berlin.
Their fathers and grandfathers lived in the ghetto.
But that's not arguably noticeable.
Here, in the second and third generation, assimilation has reached its sea.
I would relate to trying to act just like the host peoples.
The people without good instincts let themselves be deceived by this men in green and considered Jews the same as they are.
Therein lies the enormous danger These assimilated peoples remain forever Foreign bodies and organisms of their host peoples Regardless of appearances That film has the dubious distinction Of being perhaps the most evil single piece of propaganda The Nazis ever produced Which is really saying something, you know.
I mentioned something like this a couple of weeks ago.
The thing that's so frightening about this, I think, is that It shows you in some sense how delicately balanced a society has to be in order not to fall prey to a catastrophe on one side or a catastrophe on the other because what we seem to be seeing here at least in part is the consequence of the overgeneralization
of a deeply inborn human trait Some of whose consequences appear to be necessary both for survival and productivity.
It would be such an easier problem if you could take the cause, which is, at least insofar as this argument runs, which is sensitivity to disgust, and just assume that that in its entirety is a form of pathology, but you can't do that, because Sensitivity to disgust does protect people from pathogens.
But if you push it too far, well then, things seem to fall apart in an absolutely atrocious way.
One of the things that I've found so illuminating about this line of research is that it answers a question that people have struggled with for a very long period of time, which is How is it possible for human beings to dehumanize other people?
And the answer to this, the answer that you would derive from this line of reasoning, makes the answer quite obvious.
You just associate health with what you're trying to promote and to validate, and you associate that with purity.
And then you associate the other with illness and disease and then you have a metaphor lying underneath that that's just ready for the taking.
And it's a powerful metaphor and it still seems to have immense effect on people insofar as it is parasite prevalence that predicts authoritarian political attitudes now.
One of the things I don't understand is how the One of the things we talked about in the existential lectures was the existential idea that one of the things that promoted the development of totalitarian states was the willingness of the people who were occupied by the totalitarian ideology to falsify their own personal experience to keep it in accordance with the totalitarian claims.
So there was the idea of the lie that Frankl makes much of.
I think maybe the lie in part is It's got to be something like the denial of your own identity with the vulnerability that you want to shunt off into others and persecute.
You know, the taking to yourself of everything that constitutes purity and perfection and then the overburdening the other with everything that you don't want to be true about yourself.
It's true in the What you don't want to be true about yourself is partly the actuality of physical degeneration and decay, but it seems to me that the reality of moral degeneration and decay is a very, very close analog to that.
They stack on top of one another.
And so, maybe the lie is that you're not that, but they are.
And that provides at least a partial answer.
Anyways, I don't have much more to say about that today.
So maybe we could take some time for questions.
If you have any.
So if we're mentioning that the social immune system, so that it was, would you say that balance is better overall because if you think about children who are would you say that balance is better overall because if you think about children who are raised in an environment where they're encapsulated and they grow up to be
So it's almost like by accepting these more left, less conservative views, it's almost like you're That's an interesting metaphoric idea.
So the idea there would be that by insisting upon radical purity, you actually weaken a society, just like you would weaken an immune system.
Right, but then, so if you expose yourself to those ideas, then when you go out into the wide world as it is, you're more able to tolerate a broad spectrum of philosophical and whatever, on all sorts of levels.
Well, that would be a pretty good defense of the idea of a liberal education.
You know, because on the one hand, if you're a fundamentalist, you're going to say, well, you're only going to be taught the ideas that are exactly in keeping with the most pure of doctrines of your people.
But, as you pointed out quite rightly, that means that the second you step outside of that protective influence and you hear any other ideas, you're gone.
Because you have no defense against them whatsoever.
You need to be exposed to a whole variety of things in order to be able to have any sort of...
Yeah, well, that's like a resilience argument, fundamentally.
You know, the idea, the liberal association with openness would be something akin to that, right?
Because open people are interested in new experiences and new ideas, and they value them.
The reason that open people are interested and value them seems to be something pretty primordial.
They find new ideas deeply meaningful and attractive.
But you can certainly be sure that throughout human history there's been this tension between whether opening up produces more long-term strengthening than rigidifying and closing down.
Well, it's a gamble.
You know, liberal countries definitely take the latter strategy.
And, you know, there hasn't been a war of any consequence between two liberal democracies.
So, there is some historical evidence to suggest that it's working.
There are peaceful societies, general speaking, internally as well.
So, other questions?
Yes.
The study that we read in preparation for this lecture, one of them suggested that there wasn't a link between socioeconomic status and discussing. one of them suggested that there wasn't a link between But there was a link just with judgments about purity.
Well, most of this research is still in its infancy.
And the strength of the association between socioeconomic status and disgust sensitivity, I would say that's something that's been more suggested than something that's demonstrated and attributed to increased disgust sensitivity at the lower end of the spectrum. I would say that's something that's been more suggested than So, is the typhoon site?
Yeah.
Well, everything I told you today is still a hypothesis.
It's because it's all new.
It's new.
All of this data This has been gathered within the last 15 years, 10 or 15 years, and so people are still trying to sort out what it means.
I mean, I think that study I showed you, showing the correlation of point What was it?
0.45?
0.49?
0.42?
Between authoritarian political attitudes and parasite prevalence, that's a jaw-dropping study.
Who the hell would have ever guessed that?
You know, and it makes sense in retrospect when you look at, say, Hitler's propaganda and the discussions in light of that data.
But as far as I could tell, well, this sort of material just hasn't been brought together before by historians.
Yes.
That's a good question, too, because it's not exactly clear.
I don't think it's exactly clear why authoritarian attitudes would...
One of the implications of the paper, fundamentally, is that there's a reason that authoritarian attitudes appear when there's parasite prevalence.
The association is very strong.
So one of the things you could infer from that was that there's actually some utility in it.
Now, perhaps not.
Perhaps it's only that If you're so stressed by disease and parasites and so forth, you just don't want to have anything to do with any other kind of uncertainty.
Or maybe it's that you revert to extremely traditional and order-bound ways of interacting in an attempt to decrease the probability that you'll be exposed to the parasites.
I don't know I was thinking the disgust and terrifying kind of archetype Do you think it's related to like zombie survival TV shows like Locking Dead Where there's an infection and you have to band together to kind of survive and clear out the infection?
It's exactly the same sort of thing.
Yeah, the funny thing, the zombie idea, though, puts a weird twist on it that was more Associated with your hypothesis, which is that the zombies are often mindlessly obedient and then they become diseased and decaying and dead and cannibalistic.
So, it definitely does seem to be the case that if you take many virtues too far, they produce exactly the consequence that the person that was pushing them wants to avoid.
That seems to me to be a really good argument against the extension of the idea of orderliness too far.
It's going to kick back and produce a hell of a lot more chaos than you think if you don't keep it in balance with the other.
You know, because one of the things that the Big Five model seems to indicate is that in order to keep yourself oriented in the environment, you have to have five dimensions of value.
Because otherwise there wouldn't be five dimensions of value, right?
And maybe if you collapse everything into a single dimension, you tighten things down so much that they can no longer function properly, and then everything tends to deteriorate into chaos.
And there's got to be a reason there's five dimensions.
You know, so you have to regulate your social behavior, that would be extroversion, at least to some degree.
You have to respond to threat and punishment.
You have to care for or exploit other people.
Roughly, no, you have to care for other people and care for yourself.
That would be agreeableness, I would say.
We discussed conscientiousness at length and then, of course, openness is basically the intake of new information.
You have to solve all five of those problems in order for things to remain in some kind of reasonable balance.
You might even be able to make a case that if you want to keep a society optimally organized, given that there's variability on each of those dimensions, you have to keep a conversation going between everyone in that five-dimensional space regardless of where they're located on the distribution because if the idea is to optimize the fit of the society to the shape of the environment at any given time that's
going to be a very complicated problem because you don't exactly know what shape the environment is so if you could keep the dialogue going between all the interested parties Maybe you can move the society along properly and keep it matched enough to the environment so that it can stay healthy.
And if you tilt it too much in the direction of any of these unidimensional values, then it's going to increase the probability that it'll collapse.
That could be.
Otherwise, I can't understand why there would be five dimensions.
They must be.
They're necessary, obviously, in some sense.
Other questions?
So what do you think?
Yeah?
Earlier you talked about a correlation between cancer and one sort of conservative attitude, right?
Yeah, well I made an analogy, yeah.
Which one was that?
Well, if your cells go ahead and do their own thing, then you develop cancer, right?
The point being that if you're going to organize Quasi-individual entities into a higher-order structure.
There's obviously some minimum of cooperation and what would you call?
Similarity, uniformity between those members or it's not going to work.
The question is always how uniform you should be.
I mean the Nazi idea was that you should be uniform in everything.
You know, basically you would be just one person.
I think that probably does That does bear some similarity to the case that you made because what you see in extremely authoritarian states is they are trying to reduce the human complexity to the manifestation of a single personality.
And the problem with that is that if that single personality is matched perfectly to the environment, it's going to be extremely efficient.
But the probability that it's going to be perfectly matched is basically zero.
There's too many possible environments.
And so if the authoritarians push all the variability out of the state, which is what they want to do, then it's going to weaken it across time, not strengthen it.
I mean, most political battles, you have to fight on the turf of your opponent, right?
Because they're not going to listen.
Like, left-wingers and right-wingers never listen to each other.
So if you want to communicate with someone who's on the right, you have to communicate using the language of the right.
If you want to communicate with someone on the left, you have to communicate using the language on the left, at least roughly speaking, because the values differ.
So the strongest case you would make against right-wing authoritarianism would be that the authoritarianism itself pushed too far would endanger the values that the conservatives themselves want to maintain.
That's a hard argument to refute.
Wasn't there a prime example not too long ago where they did a study where they changed the semantic?
It was like the wording of something?
Yeah, pollution.
Yeah, yeah.
If you appeal to purity concerns when you're doing environmental agitating, let's say, or messaging, purity concerns are much more effective on conservatives.
So you can show them, you know, pictures of polluted water and that sort of thing.
They're quite responsive to that kind of thing.
You know, rather than we should respect our animal friends, which would be something that would be more appealing to someone who's on the liberal side of things, because they tend to be more egalitarian.
So what do you think about having been shown that film?
Is that an acceptable thing to do in a class?
What do people say?
Anybody think not?
You can say so.
I'm curious.
So that was alright.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I'd have to bar the doors otherwise.
Yeah.
Yes?
Yeah, I think it's important to see that from you, to truly understand, like, put yourself in place like they were thinking and how often that was.
Well, I don't think that you can combat anything you don't understand.
The problem is that understanding some things isn't very pleasant.
You know, because once you understand them, and this is a Rogerian perspective, once you understand them, to understand something is to see how it's allowably human.
Otherwise, you don't understand it.
And that's not good.
That's rough.
There's like a weird paradox that exists in that while I'm watching this, I feel that my viewpoints would be, if someone who embodied the ideals of that film would directly be opposed to my position and feel that my views and way of life, that living in community society is cancerous, but here I am sitting watching this film and I'm thinking like, oh god, I can't imagine thinking like that.
Right?
Yeah, well, I mean, the Nazi claims were very much antithetical to Western liberal claims in every possible way.
I mean, they viewed, you know, in modern society, we think of being cosmopolitan as a virtue.
You know, it means no matter where you go, you can adapt.
For the Nazis, that meant you'd been fatally corrupted.
I was thinking back to Zhen and how some people just attach to a persona or to one personality trait of themselves.
That's how psychopathology happens.
I was thinking that we do something like this all the time when we make a mistake where we say there's a part of us that's irresponsible that I just need to crush or control entirely.
I just want to be this happy, intelligent person, this one move.
And we try to crush everything Okay, well, so that's a good segue into the existential idea of the lie.
So, you know, because the psychoanalysts constantly reminded people that there was very much danger in cutting off a particular part of you and regarding it as diseased.
You know, and part of it, I should have remembered that, and part of Jung's claim, because he spent a lot of time thinking about the Nazis, was that If you alienate yourself from part of yourself, then you're going to do the same thing to anyone who resembles that part of yourself.
And so, you have to be very careful about doing that.
You know, this guy named Eric Neumann, who was one of Jung's students, and he wrote a book at the end of the Second World War called Depth Psychology to New Ethic.
And one of the things that Neumann proposed, he was Jewish by the way, one of the things that Neumann proposed was that you don't try to be any better than you are.
And by that he meant to not engage in that kind of radical splitting.
He didn't mean you shouldn't try to improve your moral character.
He meant that it's very dangerous to pretend that you're entirely pure.
You know, and it's a tough one because you don't want to eliminate the possibility of moral striving, obviously.
Because then there's no up, right?
There's nothing to do then.
But it certainly has to be tempered with some, well, probably tempered with compassion.
And maybe that's the idea of tempering in the personality trait domain.
You know, one of the things I do with people who are agreeable, because they don't stand up for themselves very well.
If they're agreeable and conscientious, I encourage them to tell the truth.
You know, because if they're being oppressed and then they get resentful, which always happens to agreeable people, then I make a case that they have to temper their agreeableness with some conscientiousness.
And adopt it as a moral obligation to speak out on behalf of themselves despite the fact that they won't like the conflict.
You know, and I guess if you're an orderly person...
My wife had a dream once about this that I just remembered.
She's quite an orderly person.
And she had a dream at one point that she walked into an auditorium that was full of people.
like this and she came down to the front of the auditorium where all the men and the dogs were and sat with them and that was a dream about the relationship between orderliness and agreeableness is that you know if you're orderly the problem is you can get so damn orderly that you can't stand people you can't stand men and dogs which is what her dream was basically you know she was making them equivalent you know So, and dogs shed all over the house and, you know, they're annoying and stupid and, you know, I guess men fit into that category too.
But her dream pretty much said that that was the proper place to sit.
And that, that was a very, it was a very intelligent dream in that regard.
You know, so, you temper orderliness with compassion, likely.
That'd be my guess.
So, and that was certainly not something that happened with the Nazis.
There was no compassion at all.
Only the desire to exterminate and to, and to, and to kill.
Alright guys, we'll see you on Tuesday.
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