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April 1, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:15:39
2016 Personality Lecture 13: Conscientiousness: Industriousness and Orderliness
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Time Text
Okay.
On to more traits.
Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is a good predictor of long-term life success.
It's a good predictor Negatively of divorce, so more conscientious people are less likely to get divorced.
It's a really good predictor of grades.
It's a decent predictor of income.
It's a good predictor of social status, eventual social status.
It seems to be particularly good at predicting outcomes for people who are engaged in managerial, administrative, and process management occupations, and so all of those Occupations are characterized by the necessity of reliability, integrity, and attention to detail.
It's not associated with creativity.
Right?
That's openness.
So the open people are better artists and entrepreneurs by all appearances.
So, altogether, conscientiousness seems to be a relatively positive trait.
And so then you might wonder why there's a distribution, right?
Like, why isn't everybody hyper-conscientious?
Well, it appears, at least in part, that, as with all the other personality dimensions, there's increasing price to be paid as you deviate from the average.
And so, unconscientious people, they tend to rely on others to support them.
They're not particularly ambitious or reliable.
But they're not particularly rigid, either.
And so one possibility might be that low levels of conscientiousness are an asset at certain times when combined with other traits.
So, for example, the data isn't all in on this yet, but it seems to me quite likely that orderliness, which is an aspect of conscientiousness—so conscientiousness breaks down into orderliness and industriousness.
And those actually seem to be importantly different.
I think orderliness probably puts an additional constraint on creativity.
So we've studied entrepreneurs for a long time.
And it's clear that higher levels of orderliness certainly aren't associated with entrepreneurial capacity.
And I have the sneaking suspicion that that's because orderly people are very concerned with doing Whatever needs to be done in the particular way that it's supposed to be done.
And the problem with that is, is that if you're creative, so if you're engaged in a creative enterprise, the thing flips around on you a lot.
Like, there's a lot of transformations as you're moving towards the end.
And that's not exactly something an orderly person is going to appreciate.
I also suspect that orderly people are likely to They're too likely to obey rules to be entrepreneurial or creative.
Now, obviously, obeying rules has its utility, right?
But it doesn't when the rules are wrong or when they start to interfere with something that might be conceptualized as a higher value than the rules themselves.
For conscientious people, it's not self-evident that there are more important values than following the rules and doing things properly.
You know, that's part of what makes them reliable workers and decent citizens and all that sort of thing.
It's also partly what tips them towards conservatism on the political spectrum.
So the best predictors of political conservatism are low openness and high conscientiousness, particularly orderliness.
So actually liberals and conservatives don't seem to be much different than one another In terms of industriousness, but they're quite markedly different in terms of orderliness.
Or, you know, you could say, well, what predicts liberalism is high openness and low conscientiousness, particularly orderliness.
Because you don't necessarily have to just be predicting conservatism.
So, now, you remember the big two model.
So, conscientiousness lumps in with emotional stability and agreeableness to produce stability.
And as people age, they become more stable, they become more conscientious, more emotionally stable and more agreeable.
And, you know, you probably interpret that somewhat pleasantly as an improvement in maturity.
And conscientiousness is quite highly correlated with neuroticism negatively, so it turns out, generally speaking, that the more conscientious you are, the less neurotic you are.
And we think that that might be actually because of the tendency of conscientiousness as a trait manifested across time to stabilize environments.
You know, so if you're a conscientious person, imagine that because you're conscientious but not perfectionistic, let's say, you stay on top of your homework.
And you get your assignments done, let's even say ahead of time.
Well, partly what that means is that the amount that you have to worry about how you're going to be doing decreases.
And, of course, if you're conscientious over time, Your field of opportunities opens up from an employment perspective, plus your income increases and you've stabilized the environment around you, and so there's less uncertainty in it and more security.
And so, you know, it could easily be that conscientiousness has its effect on neuroticism by stabilizing the environment, taking the uncertainty out of it, and then making people not so much really less, like, lower in neuroticism, but just less likely to be anxious and in emotional pain in general. but just less likely to be anxious and in emotional So here's some distinctions between orderliness and industriousness.
You guys can decide where you fit on these.
So if you're orderly, you don't leave your belongings around.
You like order.
That's an unsurprising one.
You keep things tidy.
You follow a schedule.
You're bothered by messy people.
You want everything to be just right.
You're bothered by disorder.
You like routine.
You see that rules are observed and you want every detail taken care of.
So the other thing you can kind of understand, likely, is that orderly people aren't that much fun.
You know, and I also think that's relevant because, you know, people have different kinds of social value, right?
And sometimes you value people because of their ability to contribute, perhaps from an economic perspective, because they're hard workers and they're productive.
But, you know, you think about comedians.
I mean, comedians have a fairly high social value as far as I'm concerned, but the probability that they're orderly as a class is pretty much zero.
Those people are high in extroversion, clearly.
Low in agreeableness, generally speaking, because you're just not going to make rude comments about people to get a laugh, which is what comedians do at least 50% of the time, unless you're disagreeable.
And they have to be pretty low in conscientiousness, because Like, really, a conscientious comedian?
It's just not going to happen.
The lifestyle doesn't lend itself to that, right?
I mean, it's erratic.
Your employment's just going to be erratic.
The probability that you're going to be regularly employed is low.
You're up at night all the time.
You're always partying, because though that's the milieu that you're in, you know.
And then, you know, you might think the same about people who are artistic performers, like musicians.
You know, if you want to be a rock musician, for example, when you're a teenager, of course, that makes you just a typical teenager in some ways, but if you're going to pursue that into adulthood, there's a lot of many more stable occupations that you have to forego.
You know, and you have to be willing to adopt the rather erratic and unpredictable lifestyle that would go along with being, say, a traveling musician.
And that also has to not make you feel bad.
And, you know, we don't exactly know what makes people It's industrious, or conscientious.
But avoiding feeling bad seems to have something to do with it, except that it's complicated, eh?
Because the hypothesis, fundamentally, behind the big five trait analysis is that all the negative emotions load together on a single factor, right?
Fundamentally, neuroticism.
So then you might say, well, if it's neuroticism that all the negative emotions are loading on, what's left over for the conscientious people to use to feel bad with?
And we think that conscientiousness isn't a well...
Understood dimension.
Like, it's understood from a measurement perspective.
We can measure it quite accurately, but mostly only using questionnaires, either self-report or other person's report.
We don't have any direct measures of industriousness.
And so that's kind of strange, because it's such a potent Phenomena that you'd think that you could come up with lab tasks that industrious people, for example, would do a better job at than non-industrious people, but we haven't been able to identify one, and we probably screened 50 to 75 different tasks, never got any effect at all.
With orderliness, though, we've had more luck, because what orderliness seems to be associated with, although not overwhelmingly powerfully, Is disgust sensitivity.
And so disgust seems to be an emotional axis that's distinct to some degree from neuroticism.
And, you know, you might say, well, the disgusting things, if you're too close to a disgusting thing, you'd also get anxious.
And I think that's probably true.
But the emotion of disgust isn't the same as the emotion of anxiety or the emotion of pain.
Disgust is a revulsion emotion.
It's a get away from me emotion.
Sometimes it's an emotion that will elicit anger, defensive anger, to push something disgusting away, or to be contemptuous of it, or to roll your eyes at it.
Now, here's an interesting little fact.
One of the best predictors of impending divorce is eye-rolling.
So if you have a couple in therapy and you notice that when one talks, the other rolls their eyes, you know that that's just not very good.
So that's something to remember in your own relationships.
If you're starting to roll your eyes at your partner, you might think, well, that's a contempt response.
That's a disgust response.
If you're starting to do that, then it's either time to stop or time to start looking for a new partner.
Now, the orderliness-disgust connection turns out to be, theoretically, extremely interesting, and we're going to talk about that in some detail as we move forward, but I'll go through industriousness next.
So, an industrious person carries out their plans.
Now, that might be the critical element of industriousness.
So, if you look at the general neuropsychological literature, what you generally Derived from that is that the prefrontal cortex is involved in behavioral regulation because the prefrontal cortex is the is the part of the brain that people use to generate plans and dorsolateral prefrontal Cortical function is primarily cognitive,
at least insofar as we've been able to measure it, and the cognitive abilities of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex appear to be quite tightly linked to fluid intelligence, as we discussed before.
And so it also stands to reason to some degree that your ability to plan and your intelligence It might be associated with your ability to carry out your plans or not to waste time, and the cortex overall has been viewed as an organ that inhibits impulsivity, you know.
But, as we've discussed, the idea that impulsivity is inhibited is probably not the world's most sophisticated idea.
It's probably more that impulsivity is unnecessary if you've developed a sufficiently sophisticated personality because you can get what you need to have Through more complex and sophisticated means with less social conflict.
But anyways, there's this idea that's been maintained in the neuropsychological literature for a very long time that the ability to plan is associated with increased control over impulsivity.
But the problem with that theory is that it doesn't seem to be true.
So there's no correlation.
The correlation between intelligence and industriousness is zero.
And that's weird because, man, if you take intelligence and correlate it with something, it's correlated with almost everything.
You know, so even disgust sensitivity, if we measure disgust sensitivity, and there's a variety of ways of doing that, what we find is more intelligent people are less disgust sensitive.
So even—and, you know, the connection there is by no means obvious, right?
Because you could just as easily think that intelligent people would be less or would be more disgust sensitive.
But that isn't how it is.
Now the idea of carrying out your plans, that's an interesting one, because imagine, think about what cognition is like, especially abstract cognition of the kind that we were talking about last class.
In order to abstract, you have to separate the objects of your internal manipulation from the world, right?
So here's an example.
So when you go to sleep at night, there's a little switch, for lack of a better term, that shuts your body down.
And so what happens is that when you're dreaming, of course you're dreaming about running around, and you move your eyes while you're dreaming.
Now, it turns out that the motor systems that control your eyes aren't shut down, because who cares?
You can move your eyes and still be in bed asleep, not running around in your dream.
But if you take a cat or another animal and you destroy that off switch, the cat will run around and act out its dreams.
Okay, so its thinking is linked to its behavior so integrally that when it runs the simulation it's going to act it out.
Now, human beings don't do that.
What happens when we think—or we often don't do that—there are times when we can avoid doing that.
You know, when you think, you sit there, you generate up your world of abstraction, You have your abstract representations and you manipulate them.
And so you might think, well, this is what I'm going to do tomorrow.
You run a simulation in your head.
But you wouldn't be able to do that if you couldn't pull the simulated you away from the actual you, right?
You have to divorce the representation from the thing it's representing in order to manipulate it abstractly.
So that opens up the possibility that you can think through things perfectly well without ever enacting your plans.
And that's actually what you see.
In the therapeutic realm, if you have a client who's unconscious, you've got a real problem, because the person won't do anything that they say they're going to do.
And so, you know, generally speaking, especially for behavioral therapy, what happens is that someone will come in with a problem, and you discuss an array of potential solutions, and, you know, an intelligent person could do that better than an unintelligent person.
And then you decide which of those potential solutions might be implemented, and then you wait, you know, you don't want to put too much of a burden on the person because you want to make the probability that they'll actually implement the change very high, so you do it quite slowly because people aren't that good at implementing behavioural changes.
And then, you know, hopefully the person comes back and says, well, I've tried this, and, you know, here's the outcome, and then you modify it accordingly.
That's essentially called collaborative empiricism.
But the problem with doing that with someone who's unconscious is they'll come back and they'll say, well, I didn't get around to it.
It's like, okay, well, what are you supposed to do about that?
It's like, if the person doesn't get around to doing things that'll help, how can you get them to get around to doing anything that'll help?
It's one of those flaws that seems to interfere with the process itself.
Now, I could say, well, maybe you could make the person enthusiastic about it and they'd be driven by enthusiasm, which is more of a positive emotion, or maybe you could terrify them half to death by the negative consequences of not doing it, which is also useful, or maybe they're agreeable and so they'd be willing to do it for someone else, like there's other places—or if they're open you can think of a creative way to do it—there's other places you can get leverage.
Without the conscientiousness, there's a real problem.
It's really difficult.
Okay, so industriousness seems to be associated with the ability, or the willingness, God only knows, to take plans that are formulated and then to implement them into behavior, to reinstantiate them voluntarily into behavior.
And you know, everyone knows that's a relatively difficult thing to do, you know, if you're trying to settle yourself down to do a task, especially one that you don't want to do, so you're not enthusiastic about it, right?
That can't carry you.
If you want to settle down and do a task that you're not enthusiastic about, that takes effort.
You know, you could say it takes willpower.
And I actually think the conscientious person, especially, I think especially the orderly person, is a person who admires willpower.
And that seems to be associated with something like dutifulness as a moral construct.
So a conscientious person will do something because they should do it, or because they have a duty to do it, and that's partly also why you see conscientiousness as an element of conservatism, because conservatives tend to be more patriotic, for example, and they are more willing to think of their moral obligation in terms of service to the structured community.
Now, we just did a factor analysis of Conservative belief, conservative versus liberal belief, and one of my students is presenting that for her PhD defense.
We took a long time to do it, about four years, to really get the measures down.
You know, you hear about social conservative and fiscal, social conservatism and fiscal conservatism, right?
So the social conservatives are usually in the states, they're pro-life, they're They're usually not fans of gay marriage.
They're, you know, they're not advocates, generally speaking, of a welfare state.
They're against single-parent families.
So that's all social conservatism.
It's like a moral dimension of belief.
Whereas fiscal conservatism is something like don't run deficits, you know, if you wanted to put it simply.
The government shouldn't spend any more money, A, than it has, so that's an important principle, but it also isn't an agent of economic development.
It's not really seen that way.
They're more like minimal government people.
But we got no evidence for a split between fiscal and social conservatism, so I don't think it exists.
I think it's just a media invention, because we did construct validation of the sort that I've been talking to you about.
What we got instead were three factors.
We got masculine independence, that's what we decided to call it because it was much more common among men, and it kind of looked like libertarianism, which is a brand of conservatism, which is basically, you go and do your bloody thing and I'll do my thing and we'll either leave each other alone or if we don't we'll compete and one of us can win and that'll be just fine.
So it looked like—so one of the things that's interesting about that, and it really got me thinking, was that, you know, The classic explanation for why conservatives are conservative is because they're afraid of—they're afraid.
But there's just no evidence for that.
Conservatives are less neurotic than liberals by a substantial margin.
And, you know, there is evidence that they have a negativity bias, which I don't really want to explain.
But what that means sometimes is that they'll actually pay more attention to negative information rather than less in comparison to liberals.
So what it means is not clear.
But the masculine independence dimension is a very interesting one because it implies that there's a reason for hierarchy beyond structure.
You can't win unless you play a structured game.
So, you know, a lot of what the masculine independent types want is they want to say, just get the damn rules straight.
I don't really care what they are, but if you get them straight I'll follow them, but that'll produce a hierarchy because that, you know, as soon as you produce a value structure.
You produce a hierarchy, because people compete towards fulfilling the, you know, they compete towards the endgame, and that'll immediately produce a hierarchy of accomplishment, let's say.
And then you might say, well, why would men be particularly motivated to do that?
And the answer seems to be because of hypergamy, and hypergamy is the tendency of women to mate across or up dominance hierarchies.
So the males compete with one another, and they want to, because they want to win, and part of the consequence of winning is that they have much more success With women, and that's a primary motivator.
So that's interesting, because it provides a rationale for supporting a relatively structured hierarchy that has nothing to do with, you know, having to deal with the negative consequences of not having a stable worldview.
It's more—and, you know, there's another thing to think about, too, here, with regards to hierarchies.
It's like, if you have an ideal, you immediately have a hierarchy.
Because, of course, let's say that you have a bunch of children in gymnasium, and you say, well, let's do somersaults to the other side of the wall.
You know, there's an implication there, and the implication is that you can be better or worse at it.
So the kids will immediately compete, especially the boys, will immediately compete to roll to the other side of the wall as fast as they possibly can.
If you wanted to get rid of hierarchy, you'd have to get rid of values, and that seems like a really stupid thing to do to me, you know, because without values you have no positive motivation.
Because you feel almost all your positive motivation in relationship to a goal, right?
Because it's not attainment of the goal that makes people happy, generally speaking.
It's observation of the fact that their efforts are contributing to them moving towards a valued goal.
So, okay, so there's masculine independence, that was one dimension.
Another dimension was basically religious traditionalism, and there was more women who were aligned with that, which was interesting because we found more women on the far left of the spectrum too, which I'll talk about in a minute.
So, and then the last one was something like ethnocentrism, which is like, you know, if you're not like us, go away, basically.
And so, but none of those were fiscal, social, none of those were fiscal or social.
So that was quite interesting, and it also shows you the utility of getting your measurements right, because if you don't get your measurements right, you don't even know what you're talking about.
And conservatism characterized along those three dimensions is a lot different than conservatism characterized as fiscal versus social.
They're not the same phenomenon.
Okay, so back to the industrious person.
Carries out his or her plans.
Wastes time.
Negative.
Industrious people don't waste time.
So they stay focused on their goal.
Or they continue acting in relationship to their goal.
That's more accurate.
Finds it difficult to get down to work.
No, that isn't characteristic of industrious people.
And you can see the willpower element to that to some degree.
You know, you can tell yourself to sit down and work, and you will.
Messes things up.
No, that isn't what an industrious person does.
Finishes what he or she starts.
Yes.
Puts his or her mind on the task at hand.
So there seems to be an intentional phenomena there, right?
Is the person is able to focus in without distractions.
Gets things done quickly.
Well, industrious people seem to be fans of efficiency.
And you can kind of see the relationship between efficiency and order.
Although you can also see at times where The demand for more efficiency would require the disruption of something that was previously orderly, so an industrious person and an orderly person might have a, you know, a dispute about that.
Always knows what he or she is doing, so that's, again, there's a kind of certainty and direction that's associated with that.
Doesn't postpone decisions, isn't easily distracted.
And orderliness is the big predictor of long-term life success.
Now, orderliness is more predictive of success in jobs that require careful attention to the management of process, so that if something has become, something has been turned into an algorithm, so that means there's a process by which it might be done, then an orderly person is very good at making sure that the, you know, that the That the algorithm runs exactly as it's supposed to without error.
You see conscientiousness, actually, as quite a good predictor of scientific productivity, because one of the things that science does, in large part, is Reduce the reliance on intelligence and increase the reliance on conscientiousness.
I mean, that's one of its powers, right?
Because you can be a not spectacularly bright scientist, but if you're good at methodology and you're detail-oriented and you know the literature, you can figure out what the next problem is to solve.
It's a micro-problem.
Because you know where the problems are.
And then science is like a...
It's almost like a meat grinder, you know, if you turn the crank properly, you feed in raw information, you turn the crank properly, you're going to make the next, you know, tiny step forward.
And so it's maybe the more open scientists who leap way the hell into the future and completely transform a field at the level of Fundamental presupposition, but most of the scientists are just nibbling on the edges between order and chaos, and you know, it's a whole monstrous mass of them moving forward tiny amounts at once, and so that's partly what makes science extremely powerful.
Okay.
We don't know why people are industrious.
We can't figure it out.
I have a sneaking suspicion I told you that maybe part of it is that they want to win within a defined framework, and that that might be associated with hypergamy.
Now, one of the things you see is that there is a gender difference between men and women in relationship to conscientiousness.
Not conscientiousness overall, but women are more orderly than men, and men are more industrious than women.
And that kind of goes along with the hypergamy So, you remember, hypergamy is this tendency that I described already.
It's the case among many, many types of creatures.
So, there might be that as a motivation, although I don't… I don't think that you can simply say that men think that if they get successful they're going to have more luck with women, although that's certainly a conscious realization on the part of many men.
I think it's such a deep phenomena, though, that it's more like it's built into the motivational system a priori, you know.
So, anyways.
So that would go on the masculine independence front.
But we still haven't been able to manipulate that to any great degree.
Maybe we're thinking as well that what conscientious people are doing is not so much striving to get to the top as they are trying really hard to stay away from the bottom.
And that would go along with the orderliness-industriousness overlap.
You know, say if If part of what makes you orderly and somewhat industrious is disgust sensitivity, one of the things that you might want to do is flee from the bottom of dominance hierarchies, because the bottom of the dominance hierarchy is a bad place to be from the perspective of Maintenance of health, like people at the bottom of dominance hierarchies, are generally speaking in much rougher shape than the people who are closer to the top.
And so part of being industriousness might be maybe you're motivated by not wanting to fail.
And then you might think, well, that's anxiety.
But maybe not, you know.
Conscientious people, let's say you have someone walking down the street and they encounter a homeless person.
Okay, is a conscientious person more or less likely to give the conscientious person money?
Or give the homeless person, to give the homeless person money?
What do you think?
No, that's right.
No, agreeable person.
Ah, they'll give the person money.
The conscientious person, especially the one that's sort of hyperordial, you say, get a job.
And they do that because conscientious people are also more judgmental.
And that goes along with the hierarchical attitude, I think.
You know, they generally run on the principle that being higher up in the hierarchy is better, and that there's something wrong with you from a moral perspective if you happen to be, you know, among the failures.
And so, one possibility is that part of the reason that conscientious people, industrious people, are that way is because they judge themselves quite harshly, and they really do not want to fail.
But it's not because they're anxious, it's because They're disgusted, self-disgusted, by the possibility that they might count among the failures.
And so, that grounds it in an entirely different motivational system.
So, now, there's some other things about How about conscientiousness that are pretty interesting?
I think they're kind of revolutionarily interesting.
So, well the first thing I told you was that overall, especially for industriousness, we have no theoretical model, no neuropsychological model, no psychological model, and no pharmacological model.
I could add to that no animal model.
That's pretty damn weird because almost always when you discover something psychometrically and it's stable, you can start connecting it to other things that you've discovered, like, you know, extroversion is associated with incentive reward, Neuroticism is associated with the anxiety systems, and, you know, stability looks like it's associated with higher levels of serotonin, and openness looks like it's associated with decreased latent inhibition.
Like, you know, we've got some insight into what's going on at other levels of analysis with regards to these traits.
Conscientiousness?
No.
Except for this connection between orderliness and disgust.
Yes.
So is there, like, conscientiousness?
Well, that's a good question.
Are there conscientious animals?
You know, that's a tough one.
You might say yes, eh, because sled dogs and that sort of thing, and like Australian blue heelers, first of all, they're super intelligent, so that is something to take into account.
But they also really seem to like to work.
But I would say they're probably more enthusiastic than conscientious.
You know, because they love to work.
They're out there wagging their tail.
It's like, that's not what you're doing when you're doing telephone sales, you know.
So, yeah.
But, like, it seems like, sort of like this idea of some kind of value moral judgment embedded in the idea of consciousness.
So, I mean, I don't think animals have this kind of, like, moral… Well, it's not obvious.
Because if you look at chimpanzees, for example, the chimpanzees and other primates, they have pretty stable dominance hierarchies.
They're actually hereditary.
And the top Primates are pretty rough on the bottom primates, and a lot of it looks like contempt.
So, you know, because what else would it be exactly, you know?
But, by the same token, it's not that easy to generate an animal model of disgust.
That's another problem.
Well, I mean, you think about dogs, those bloody things, they're not disgusted by anything.
You know, they're enthusiastic about lots of things that nothing in its right mind should ever be enthusiastic about.
So, anyways, okay, okay.
Alright, so overall, if you're conscientious, you're going to be more satisfied with your life, especially as you progress through time, and you're going to be more happy.
You're going to be happier.
Which is funny, because of course, happiness is basically extroversion, so you might What does it have to do with conscientiousness?
But what it seems to happen is that because you're conscientious across time, your life actually stabilizes and gets better.
And so, even though you might not be more happy, you'll be less miserable.
And I'll tell you, if you give people a choice between less miserable and happier, they'll take less miserable.
Because it's really painful to be miserable, but it's only moderately good to be happy.
We have a much bigger capacity for negative emotion than for positive emotion.
It's positively related to life satisfaction and happiness, but it's also positively related to depression.
Conscientious people are more likely to get depressed now.
So there's part of the reason why there might be some variation in conscientiousness.
So you might say, well, conscientious people do really well when they're fully employed.
But if you fire someone who's conscientious, they do not have a good time of it.
Because the judgmental part of their personality starts to wreak havoc with themselves, you know, because their attitude is, if you work hard, you can get ahead, right?
And so that's an index.
Your success is an index of your moral value, essentially.
Well, so then you lose your employment.
What the hell are you supposed to conclude?
Well, you could conclude that the whole system is rotten, but you're very unlikely to do that if you're conscientious because you're sort of a patriotic type and, you know, you identify quite strongly with the structure of the system.
You know, conscientious people are very concerned with justice, and they might think, well, if I'm going to have this attitude towards other people who failed, you know, who are unemployed, let's say, I have to have the same attitude towards me.
And so what you see with conscientious people, if they're having, you know, maybe they've got laid off at work really through absolutely no fault of their own.
They're just torn up by it, because one of the things they do that's different—for an unconscious person, everything is always someone else's fault.
But for a conscientious person, it's the opposite.
Everything is always their fault.
Well, the problem—there's an advantage to that, eh?
Because if you take responsibility for your situation, then there's a possibility that you'll make whatever changes you can to improve your situation.
You know, so even if you're only ten percent at fault, if you take responsibility for that, Then you can fix that 10% and maybe things will work out better for you.
So, you know, there's some advantages to overestimating the degree to which you're at fault.
And if you say, well, it's the system, well, okay, good, fine, go fix that.
Like, it's not going to happen, so it's not a very effective means of coping.
But, in psychotic depression, for example, which is a very, very extreme form of depression, what you often see is that the depressed person erroneously concludes—it's like a metaphysical conclusion, almost—that their faults are integrally tied to the, you know, to everything that happens that's bad in the world.
And so they take on all of the guilt for everything that's gone wrong, and obviously that's There's a point at which that's a relatively counterproductive conclusion, you know, and especially because often when bad things happen to you in life, there's a random element.
And, you know, you can't really treat yourself properly unless you take that random element into account.
Now you can overestimate it, which is what you do if you're unconscientious, and you could overestimate it if you're unconscientious, and underestimate it if you're conscientious.
And there's going to be times when you pay for both of those attitudes.
So anyways, conscientious people don't do very well when they're not doing very well.
Because they judge themselves very harshly.
And so that's partly what And it's related to guilt.
It's a funny thing, because there's an element of guilt that's associated with conscientiousness, too.
So, conscientious people feel guilt less often, but they're more sensitive to it.
And then you think, well, that's kind of paradoxical.
It's not exactly paradoxical.
If you're sensitive to guilt, you might arrange things so that you have nothing to feel guilty about.
And that's what conscientious people seem to do.
Guilt and shame seem to be emotions that are integrally associated with conscientiousness, and they're kind of difficult to disentangle, you know, and maybe they're not even really separate things.
But shame seems to be something that you feel when you fail perhaps in the eyes of others, and guilt is something that you feel when you fail according to your own standards.
And I know that that's kind of a messy definition, but conscientious people do seem to be more prone to shame and guilt.
And those seem to be, in principle, mediated by different systems than the systems that mediate anxiety and emotional pain.
But we don't know what the systems are.
Now, you can also think about it in relationship to something, you know, to what the existentialists call, like, the existential burden.
So, you know, people are always doing things in groups.
The groups are often oriented to produce a certain outcome, like a hunting party.
We could say that if we're thinking of it from an evolutionary perspective.
Like there's a goal, and it's an important goal.
And there are going to be good hunters and hunters that aren't so good.
Part of the way—and this is to think of a hierarchy as something other than a dominance hierarchy, because the dominance hierarchy theory is slightly flawed because it implies that the hierarchy is only based on power.
But that's not right.
Like, if you have a hunting party or a building crew or anything like that, a lot of what elevates one man above the other in the dominance hierarchy isn't power, it's competence.
You know, so the best hunter has the highest reputation, or the best builder has the highest reputation.
You know, it depends on what the hierarchy is devoted for, but the person who's best at that rises to the top.
You know, all other things being equal.
And that's often the case even if people don't like them very much.
You know, we've done investigations into corporate structures where someone will be approved by a relatively large majority of the people who work for the company because they're hyper-competent, but no one really likes them.
You know, and so You can't really think of that as either a popularity contest or something that's based on power.
And I think that a decent hierarchy is almost never based on power.
It's based on competence.
Now, those two things get tangled up.
Well, so then you think, one of the things that's going to make people prone to being successful is to feel some responsibility in relationship to their capacity to attain a goal in a group situation.
And I think that's partly the origin of both conscientiousness and guilt and shame.
You know, lots of times if you talk to unemployed people And, you know, we hear a lot about rates of depression and that sort of thing, but we're kind of boneheaded about the way we measure things.
If you want to be depressed, the best thing to do is lose your job.
And then you've really got to ask yourself, are you depressed or are you unemployed?
You know, those aren't the same thing, you know.
And you might say, well, for some people unemployment doesn't make them depressed.
It's like, well, we know that.
That's the unconscientious people.
Or maybe the unconscientious people and the emotionally stable people.
Something like that.
But for the people who are conscientious and also maybe somewhat neurotic, man, that's just going to wipe them out.
But to think about that as psychological is rather foolish.
You know, it's an actual loss, and they're responding to it in an actual way.
And so, you know, and usually people who are unemployed, I mean, part of the reason that they get depressed is because they're worried about their future, you know.
But that's not the only reason.
What they often talk about is that they've let people down, eh?
So that would be people in their family, or they let themselves down, or they're Performing underneath their capacity, or they're just useless and aren't contributing, and those are all places where, you know, their guilt will start to eat them up, and those are the sorts of things that seem also to be associated with conscientiousness.
It's like the idea that, you know, you're part of a A team of sled dogs, and you have a responsibility to pull your weight, and if you're not pulling your weight, then there's something contemptible about you, and if you happen to be one of those people who aren't pulling their weight, then there's something contemptible about you, even if it's you making the judgment.
So, and conscientious people are definitely more judgmental.
So, for example, if you read them, if you tell them stories about people who performed various criminal and quasi-criminal acts, and you get them to estimate The sentence that they should be subjected to.
The conscientious people will reliably, you know, put people in prison for longer periods of time.
They don't like violations of norms or violations of rules.
And so, you know, so one of the reasons that people might—that there might be a distribution in conscientiousness is, like, maybe when the whole economy collapses, which happens fairly frequently, the conscientious people just wipe themselves out.
You know, they're so depressed and so self-judgmental and so crushed that they can't handle the, you know, the—what would you call that?
That's the—yeah, it's variability.
That's not the word I was looking for.
So they get clipped off when things fail.
Unconscientious person doesn't really care, and that's actually sort of almost like the defining characteristic of an unconscious person, is they don't really care.
And that's an interesting thing, too, because it's often more fun to be around unconscious people than it is to be around unconscious people, because it's very hard to relax around people who are really orderly and judgmental.
You know, you can't even sit improperly, or you get judged for it.
Whereas if you're in someone's house and they're unconscious, You know, and you throw your beer can on the floor, they'll just laugh and throw their beer can on the floor.
You know, and so that's—I think it's difficult to relax with really hyper-conscientious people.
It's probably difficult to have fun with them.
I think it's difficult for them to relax.
You know, they tend—like, conservative people tend to read less.
You know, and you might think, well, That might be associated with their interest in intellectual activity, because they're also lower in openness.
But I think it's also because they regard reading as a waste of time.
Not because they exactly regard reading as a waste of time, but they feel guilty if they're not working, and instead they're sitting down reading a book.
What are you doing sitting down reading a book?
You know, there's work to be done.
And so, they're very work-oriented.
So, okay.
Orderliness is a good predictor of conservatism, as we've already said, and it's associated with disgust sensitivity and preference for order and tradition, not egalitarianism.
So then you think, well, where's the egalitarian motivations?
And they all seem to pile up pretty much on agreeableness.
So the conscientious people basically say, you can get ahead if you play the game properly and you abide by the rules and you work.
And the agreeable people say, well, yeah, but there's lots of people who can't really manage that, and, you know, we're not just going to push them off a cliff, they need to be taken care of, and, you know, the situation wasn't fair to begin with, you know.
And there's a battle between that all the time, and there's a battle because agreeableness and conscientiousness are...
They're orthogonal, which means that they actually traverse different ethics, right?
And they're not opposites on the continuum, conscientiousness and agreeableness.
That's not it at all.
So, and it looks like in order for, you know, in order for people to adjust to the world of human beings, you have to be agreeable to some measure and you have to be conscientious to some measure.
And the question is, how much of each?
And the answer is, well, it depends on the circumstances and where you place yourself.
But the same question applies to the polity at large.
How agreeable should it be versus how conscientious should it be?
And that's a very, very—it's not a problem with a solution.
The solution is only to be derived from a continual dialogue, say, between the conscientious people and the agreeable people.
Because the answer varies as the environment varies.
So you can't come up with an end solution to that problem.
You know, the conscientious people—so we'll say the conservatives for the sake of argument—they like hierarchies.
They like order.
They like a game that everyone can play and some people can win.
And they make the assumption that if you play properly and you win, that you've done something good.
Well, the problem is that if you steepen up the hierarchy enough, No one gets to climb it and then the whole bloody society starts to crumble and break down because the rates of violence go way up.
So you can see there's an upper bound to the steepness of a hierarchy.
And so you might say, well, that's where conscientiousness hits its limit.
Or you could even say that's where meritocracy hypothetically hits its limit.
Because, you know, if you're intelligent and conscientious, you're much more likely to rise to the top of a hierarchy.
Well, fine.
Maybe you want smart, hard-working people at the top of structures.
But if it's steep like this, well then There's a point at which that isn't sustainable.
And so the hierarchy has to be flattened somehow.
You know, no one—but the problem is—and that's also something that agreeable people would say right off the bat.
It's like, what about the strata at the bottom or just above the bottom?
How are you going to ensure that they don't fall right out of the game altogether?
Which is a perfectly reasonable—a reasonable question.
And the answer to both those questions is, well, we don't know how to do that, and so we're trying to solve that problem continually as we go along.
Orderly people also have harsh judgments and moral transgressions.
We talked about that.
Now there's an idea of a behavioral immune system here.
Now this is a cool, cool idea.
So disgust is considered to be one of the basic human emotions, defined by a strong revulsion and desire to withdraw from and eliciting stimulus or event.
Physically, disgust is accompanied by a distinct facial expression involving constriction of the oral and nasal cavity.
So it's something like that, to close yourself off.
Evolutionary models of… people make that face when they hear a dirty joke that they're really quite offended by.
Evolutionary models of disgust propose that this emotion evolved to help us avoid contaminated or harmful foods or other potential sources of disease, such as sexual contact.
Now that's interesting, you know, because there's also an idea that floats around the general culture, and I think it's been more elaborated upon, partly since the time of Freud, but particularly since the 60s, that sexual disgust is culturally produced.
It's like, you can just drop that idea.
It's not the case at all any more than disgust related to food is culturally produced.
Culture moves it, but the disgust response to sexual contact and to food is extremely Powerful, innately, and you know that, because otherwise everyone would always be sleeping with everyone else.
Like, there has to, because obviously sexual contact is a primary motivator.
Well, something has to regulate it.
And you might say, well, good sense is what should regulate.
It's like, yeah, right, man, good sense doesn't regulate anything.
And so, there's no way that's going to happen as the regulator for sexual behavior.
And that's grounded in contempt and disgust, you know, and we saw a lot of that in the In the parts of the Crumb video that we watched because the Crumb brothers were always being the targets of contempt and disgust.
So that's pretty rough.
But, you know, you've got to think about why that is too.
Sexually transmitted diseases are no joke, you know, and we don't know how long human beings have been plagued by them, but you can presume that it's pretty much since the beginning of time, you know.
Syphilis was imported from the New World to the Old World and was very, very hard on Europe.
It was one of the reasons that the Victorians were so strict in their sexual behavior, because syphilis was a nasty disease until we, you know, more or less finally brought it under control.
It's quite susceptible to antibiotics.
And it was, you know, transmissible to infants, which is also a major catastrophe.
And then, of course, AIDS, which was, you know, the primary vector for the spread of AIDS was promiscuity.
And the virus evolved to capitalize on promiscuity, because it does that.
And, you know, that could have easily wiped us out.
Wiped out tens of millions of people.
And so, you know, we're pretty smart and got it under control pretty fast, but, you know, in some ways It could have easily been otherwise, and also AIDS turned out to be not that easy to catch.
You know, you actually had to engage in sexual contact, and generally you had to engage in sexual contact of a relatively non-standard type, because the most typically used tissues are more robust to the probability of infection.
So we have any number of There's any number of reasons for people to be disgusted by sexual contact, and that's something that has to be contended with.
In addition to its role in directly 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.
So, there's the immune system, right?
It attacks invading pathogens, but there's an analog in your behavior which is that you're unlikely to approach Touch and consume anything that happens to be disgusting.
And it's a weird system.
So, for example, people are unlikely to want to touch a sterilized cockroach.
And I don't mean one that's unable to breed, you know, I mean one that's being treated, being heated, so that it's free of contaminants.
People don't like to do that.
They won't eat, and this will hardly come as any surprise, high-quality chocolate, molded to resemble dog feces.
Okay.
And everyone laughs about that, right?
Which is kind of an interesting response.
Like, of course, no one would do that.
Well, right, exactly.
Although you cannot attribute that to logic.
You can just attribute to the fact that you know that if you were in that situation, how you would feel.
And the first thing you would feel is certainly not hungry, and then turned off, which is an interesting way of thinking about it because turned off is essentially a sexual expression.
Turned off.
And then you'd feel, I think, you'd feel like a moron, so to speak, if you ate it, right?
To yourself and to anybody who also happened to be around.
There would be something about self-contamination, voluntary self-contamination there, that would make you appear really not very Admirable or honorable.
It's something like that.
So now the question becomes, and this is where things get tricky, just exactly what should you be disgusted by?
So here's another example.
So if you get people to spit into a, you know, to put saliva into a cup, they will not take it back in their mouth.
Well, and you think, well, that's kind of strange, too.
It's like, you know, when the cup is sterilized, we'll say, you know, it's sterilized.
Well, it was just in your mouth like half a second before.
What the hell's wrong with it now?
And the answer is, it's no longer in your mouth.
And, you know, so there's an identification of the exterior of the body envelope as one of the things that defines you and not you.
And, you know, the immune system, per se, is always defining you and not you, getting rid of things that aren't you and keeping to things that are you, and that's extended out to our behavior.
So you can get, here's the sorts of things that Jonathan Haidt has been discovering.
Haidt was really the guy who did the first, you know, major work on disgust.
It's a big deal, man, like two thumbs up for him.
He's discovered something genuine.
Inducing disgust responses, whether via a foul odor, a disgusting work environment, or recalling a disgusting experience, led individuals to assign harsher punishments to others who had committed moral transgressions.
So that's interesting, because what it also means is that the sense of disgust, at least in part, is at the core of what we might describe as our desire for justice.
So, which we tend to think is a primarily cognitive thing, but most of the things that we do and hold dear are not primarily cognitive.
They're grounded in, you know, phenomena that are deeply embedded within us.
Harsh moral judgments can even be induced following the consumption of a bitter drink.
Well, poisonous things are often bitter, even though bitter things are sometimes not poisonous.
And the bitter flavor evokes disgust.
The same disgust-related facial expressions are observed in response to unpleasant tastes, disgusting photographs, and receiving unfair treatment in an economic game.
So that basically means that if you're playing—imagine some kids are playing together, and one of the kids cheats.
Well, you might say, well, the other kids are going to be angry, or the other kids are going to be upset, or the other kids are going to be anxious because they've upset the structure of the game.
It's like, okay, maybe all those things happen.
But one thing that happens as well is disgust.
It's like, how could you do that?
And then, of course, if you're disgusting, the probability that you're going to get shunted out of the dominance hierarchy altogether is pretty damn high.
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 highly by conservatives than by liberals.
Well, for much of human history, Female virginity, in particular, was highly valued, and sometimes the punishments for deviating from that were, and still can be, extraordinarily high.
Well, part of the reason, you might ask, why precisely is that?
And part of the reason is an exaggerated disgust response.
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.
Yeah, so preferences for order and tradition on the one hand and preferences for egalitarianism on the other appear to be Intagrally related to two core dimensions of moral value.
And so the preferences for order and tradition are associated with higher levels of orderliness and politeness, as well as lower levels of openness and intellect, and preferences for egalitarianism are uniquely associated with compassion, an aspect of agreeableness.
Political conservatism, now this is where the claims get frightening, I think.
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.
Just as the behavioral immune system is being conceptualized as helping to maintain the purity and integrity of an individual body, so too may the same pathogen avoidance system help to maintain the abstract integrity of the social order.
In particular, the social immune system would help to maintain order by suppressing any actions or individuals that deviate from a group's accepted social traditions.
Okay, now we're going to make a bit of a segue here from this.
It has been reported, for instance, 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.
Now, that's something else to consider.
So, I don't know if you know this, but when the Spaniards landed in Central America, They had been from a European population that was concentrated in cities, and the cities were, from our perspective, disgusting, filthy, close proximity with animals, and subject to continual waves of epidemic disease.
Now, the upside of that for the Europeans was that all the ones that didn't die developed immunity to these various diseases, even though, you know, I would suspect that over time it was the majority of people who died from one epidemic disease or another.
Well, so then the Spaniards went to the New World.
Well, for one reason or another there were hardly any epidemic diseases in North America.
Now that was partly because of a relative dearth of domestic animals and partly because there weren't as many big closely packed cities, but, you know, God only knows what the overall reason was.
So what happened?
All the Native Americans died, 95% of them.
They died from smallpox, they died from measles, they died from mumps, they died from chicken pox in successive waves of epidemic demolishment.
Centered in Central America and radiating out all across North America and South America.
So that by the time the Europeans landed in—because the Spaniards got there, say, in the late 1400s, right?
Early 1500s.
And so the people who landed at Plymouth Rock—and that's kind of often what you think about as the beginning of the European colonization of North America—that was like a hundred years later.
Well, everyone was dead by then.
And there are reports that when the white settlers, the religious escapees really, landed at Plymouth Rock, the natives were happy to see them because there weren't enough people left bringing the crops.
So, why am I telling you this?
Well, and in return syphilis was delivered to Europe.
At least that's the theory.
Although it's not, you know… There isn't any certainty about that, but it seemed to appear at about the same time.
So the Europeans brought endless numbers of horrible diseases to the New World, and then the New World returned the favor with one horrible disease.
But there's a point here.
Well, and still, this still happens.
So if you go into the Amazon, you find a tribe that, you know, hasn't been discovered yet, or anywhere else in the world, and you go up and you shake their hand, it's like, that's great, but they're all dead in, like, a month.
So, why is this important?
Well, we don't know how often this sort of thing has happened in the past.
And so it could easily be the case that part of the reason that people are leery of people who aren't like them is because over the course of our evolutionary history, it was at least moderately probable that if you ran into another group of people, even if they didn't kill you and you immediately went to war, that the mere contact would devastate you.
You know, and you can imagine how that sort of thing would be attributed to things like magical power or curses or, you know, whatever have you when people are trying to strive for an explanation for the phenomenon.
So, that's a nasty little idea.
Now, check this out.
So this study 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.
Study 1 Revealed that parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals' authoritarian personalities, and that this effect statistically mediated the relationship between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance.
Okay, so let's unpack that.
What does it mean?
More disease, the more the people are authoritarian.
The more the people are authoritarian at the local level, at the level of their individual beliefs, the more likely the government is to be authoritarian.
Individual?
Government.
Right?
So that's really something.
Study two tested the parasite stress hypothesis in a sample of traditional small-scale societies.
Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance and did so evenly even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare.
One additional threat, famine, also uniquely predicted authoritarianism.
Yeah, but I should also point out that the historical reasons for famine were often tightly associated with the historical reasons for disease prevalence.
So, you know, if you were invaded by rats, they were going to eat everything that you produced, and the probability that they were going to bring disease along with them was pretty damn high.
But look at the correlations.
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.
Okay, what's the correlation between authoritarian governance and pathogen prevalence?
.42.
Remember what we said about effect sizes?
That's as powerful an effect as the relationship between IQ and grades.
It's a whopping effect.
And, you know, there's a lot of error in these measurements, so you can be sure that the true correlation is higher.
Famine was also associated with authoritarian governance.
So, wow.
I read that paper and I thought, really?
Could that really be the case?
Is that what happens is that, especially as the incidence of transmissible diseases increase, people clamp down on their moral structures.
They don't let, you know, they don't allow contact between each… They tighten the borders at every level.
At every level.
Sexual, personal, familial, at the level of the village, at the level of the state.
They close the borders.
You know, and you can think of the ultimate border as the surface of your skin.
You know, there are very few people who believe that borders should be so open that they don't want control over the border of their own skin.
And then you might say, well, how far out should that be extended?
And the answer to that is, well, that's debatable.
But there's obviously a limit on universality of access.
And there's a reason for that.
I mean, there's multiple reasons for it, but this appears to be one of them.
So, you know, one of the things that indicates—and this is mind-boggling, who would have guessed this—is that perhaps the best way to fight authoritarianism across the world is to institute effective public health programs and get rid of the infectious diseases.
Now, who would have guessed that?
But, you know, it makes sense to some degree.
If the general level of danger and threat is actually lowered, maybe people don't have to be so defensive and, you know, And judgmental and xenophobic, you know?
We think often that it's political argumentation that does this sort of thing, but, you know, there's no malaria in North America.
There's no malaria in Europe.
There was, like, you know, 200 years ago, Washington, Boston, those places were malarial pits, you know?
But it was public health programs that got rid of almost all of that.
So maybe we're all liberal and friendly because we don't have any infectious diseases.
Wouldn't that be something?
But you know, a.42 correlation, this was a big study too.
That's a big correlation.
I've never seen a correlation like that.
Especially, look, think about the probability that those things would be related, right?
One's a self-report measure of political belief, and the other is a public health measure of disease prevalence.
The probability that those things would be associated just by, you know, you would just never guess that unless you came to it the hard way through this entire logic that we just discussed.
Okay, so...
So, while I was going through this literature, I was also reading Hitler's table talk, and Hitler's table talk was a collection of his spontaneous speeches delivered over the dinner table from 1939 to 1942, which was roughly the period where the Nazis were winning the war.
And I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before, and what I noticed before was that Hitler had a very powerful behavioral immune system, and so what did that mean?
So, you know, you often hear that the Nazis annihilated the people that they annihilated because they were afraid of them, let's say.
But then you think about Nazis, you know, and you think, yeah, maybe fear wasn't their overwhelming characteristic.
You know?
It's some more like brutality or something like that, but it's not fear.
You don't picture them trembling in their boots, you know, down in a basement or something like that.
It's not that.
So, okay, so anyway, so I was reading this book, and Hitler was very high in openness, by the way, and very high in orderliness, by all appearances.
He—his vision for the Aryan race—so he had this racial theory, right?
And the racial theory was that the proper inhabitants of Europe and hypothetically the world were blonde, blue-eyed Aryans, which is really not a category, and that And that the world would be a better place if they were the dominant group, and that all the other groups were gone.
Also then you think, well, how did Hitler conceptualize this Aryan race?
And the answer is, he conceptualized it as a body.
It was the body of the Aryan race.
And then he conceptualized all the people that he was out to annihilate as parasitical invaders.
And so, Hitler's metaphor for the Nazi genocide wasn't fear.
It was disgust.
And that's a whole different idea.
Now, let me tell you some things about—oh, with regards to the orderly part.
Well, you can just check out the You know, you're just not going to see a more orderly gathering of people than the picture on the right.
You know, at Nuremberg, which was the prime place where the Nazis staged their Celebrations.
It was the biggest gathering field ever made in human history.
People arranged themselves, hundreds of thousands of people, into perfect squares.
Everything.
And you remember the Jack Boot, Goose Step March, and the Hail Hitler.
It's like it's all done in absolutely perfect sequence.
And Hitler was a great admirer of willpower.
He was very happy that he could stand in the back of his car for eight hours and keep his hand out like this.
And he bathed four times a day.
So, what you saw, what seems to have driven what happened in Nazi Germany, and perhaps is one of the things that drive right-wing political movements to this day, is heightened sensitivity to disgust.
Now, here's how it all got going.
And this is a very brief overview, and many other things happened.
When Hitler came to power, and that was about 1933 thereabouts, he put into place a variety of public health initiatives.
And one of them, for example, was he built these vans that had x-ray machines in them, and he went around everywhere and screened people for tuberculosis.
Seemed like a good thing.
Okay, and then one of the things he did after that was go on a factory beautification.
Binge, so to speak.
And so, partly that was driven by openness because he wanted things to be aesthetically pleasing, but a lot of it was driven by orderliness.
And so, you're supposed to go into your factory and sweep the damn thing out and fix the yard in front of it and plant some flowers and, you know, make it all look all nice and suburban and under control.
Alright, so that was, you know, maybe still not such a bad idea.
But, you know, when you go into your factory, well, there's rats there, and there's like bugs and things that shouldn't be there, and so maybe you think, well, let's get rid of the rats and the bugs, and so then you use an insecticide spray, and that spray happened to be Zyklon B, which we'll return to momentarily.
Well, so after that, then Hitler went on a euthanasia kick.
And it was sort of like, you know, we can get rid of the people who are not contributing and, you know, who are not fit to live, shall we say.
And so that started with euthanasia.
And so it started with people who were in mental hospitals, for example, and people who had biological, intellectual deficits and such.
And from there it went to people of the wrong religious tradition.
And from there, and that was first of all only being rounded up and herded into camps, let's say, or first deprived of your property and of your identity and then rounded up and put into camps.
But what it ended up with was genocidal annihilation in gas chambers with Zyklon B. Right.
And so, you know, the Nazis would describe the people that they were tormenting as parasites and as insects and as rats.
And that's not fear language.
That's disgust language.
And so, it's an appalling paradox.
Because the behavioral immune system, along with the immune system, is clearly designed to stop people from dying.
Right?
I mean, your immune system distinguishes between you and not you.
And you do the same thing at many levels of behavior, especially sexually.
And, you know, who's going to say that there's anything wrong with that?
It's the same thing when you try to keep your bathroom clean and your kitchen clean and the city streets clean and all of that.
And you think, well, that's all of the good.
It's like, yeah, but look what happens when that gets out of control.
You know, and that's a terrible thing in a sense because it's one thing if something that's bad in and of itself gets out of hand and then makes something really bad.
But it's really a whole different category of awful when something appears to be pretty much there only for benefit and it gets out of control and it gets so horrible that it produces worse effects than the effects that it was designed to prevent.
I wanted to show you a little bit of a film that goes along with this.
Oh!
There's an example of Nazi order as well.
So that's at Nuremberg, and I need to explain this picture to you.
So the Nuremberg field was massive, as I said.
You see those curtains?
Those are lights.
And the lights are the searchlights from the Luftwaffe, which was the Nazi air force.
And Hitler would put those up behind him.
When he was speaking, and so then he'd have a curtain of lights behind him that stretched up so high into the sky that you couldn't see the top of them.
And everybody was organized out there on the marching field.
See, there's a good example there.
Look at those people on the left, top left.
They're organized in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
And then on the right you see a Nuremberg parade ground and there's hundreds of thousands of people there and they're all in absolutely perfect corridors.
These are comments from Hitler and from the Nazis.
The people of the world will recognize the Jew as world parasite, and there will become 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.
So, and here's some quotes from Hitler, from a paper called Hitler's Ideology, Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy, and History.
The state did not possess the power to manifest the disease, the menacing decay of the Reich was manifest.
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.
This 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.
Anyone 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 so as to stay the deadly cancerous ulcer through a policy of moderation.
If this battle should not come, Germany would decay and at best would sink to ruin like a rotting corpse.
Well, you get the idea.
And, you know, it's so interesting to me because, you know, this is straight psychological research.
Most of it's psychometric, you know, and all of a sudden out of that comes this finding that orderliness is linked to conservatism, and it's linked to the behavioral immune system, and poof!
You have a completely new explanation for what happened with the Nazis.
So that's what happens when orderliness gets out of hand.
And it's interesting too because the Germans are known for their orderliness, for their engineering prowess, you know, for the organization and cleanliness and freedom from corruption of their political state.
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