https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sQwUCRhWoYs
Let me tell you something I learned about Hitler, which really, I haven’t recovered from my shock from this. So we’ve been looking at the relationship between political belief and personality. Okay, and your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament. So liberal left types are high in trait openness, that’s creativity, and low in conscientiousness. But you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness and orderliness. And the real predictor for conservatism is in orderliness, not industriousness. And you might think, well that’s no surprise, right wingers are more orderly, hence Hitler’s call for order, let’s say. But it’s one thing to posit that and another thing to measure it. Now it’s measurable. And it appears that orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust. And this is actually a really big deal. It’s a really big deal. So there’s a paper that was published in PLoS One about three years ago, looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political attitudes. And they did it country by country and then within countries by state or province. And the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian slash right wing political beliefs at the local individual level was 0.6. And so I want to take this apart a little bit. Okay, so the idea is that this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune system. And one of the problems with the interactions between groups of human beings in our evolutionary past was well, exactly what happened to the Native Americans is, you know, they came out and shook hands with the Spanish conquistadors. And then within a couple of generations, 90% of them were dead of smallpox and measles and mumps. And so it’s been a truism in our evolutionary past that if you meet a group of isolated, if you’re a group of isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you trade pathogens, there’s a real possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat. And so we have a disgust mechanism that produces this implicit, let’s call it racial and ethnic bias that is part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape. But the problem with that is that it’s rooted in a disgust mechanism that actually serves a protective function. Now, when I was sorting this out, I was reading Hitler’s Table Talk. And Hitler’s Table Talk is a very interesting book. It’s a book of his spontaneous mealtime utterances from 1939 to 1942. And I went through with this new knowledge because people think of conservatives as, like, or fascists, as afraid of those who are different. They’re not afraid. They’re disgusted. And that’s not the same thing because you burn things you’re disgusted by. And so it was terrifying to me to read it because then I also thought, oh, well, disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness. And you need order in a society in order to maintain it. And the Germans are very orderly. And that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of actually what makes them great and powerful. And that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary. And all of a sudden everything needed to get cleaned. And, you know, Hitler talked about cleanliness all the time. And he actually meant that. And so this thing that’s emerging, you know, you talked about its biological basis, its evolutionary basis. It is. It’s part of this deeply rooted disgust system that protects us from dangerous pathogens that can manifest itself and does manifest itself in the political realm. It’s not good. So I don’t know exactly how to tease this apart, but I agree with your point about there’s an actual danger when populations meet like a literal pathogen danger and that that is liable to have produced a certain instinctive fear of the other, which doesn’t have to be limited to that one thing. But that’s enough to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance to meet. But I want to point out that at least in the West and probably universally, human beings when they go to war tend to dehumanize the other population. And, you know, so of course, calling the other population subhuman, vermin, whatever it is that human beings do. And my concern is that we are doing exactly this with the Nazis or de facto Nazis who are showing up on our screens at this point. That what we are doing is we are comforting ourselves by saying, well, that’s a small outbreak of something that makes these people subhuman, justifies punching them or whatever. And, you know, I’m not squeamish about there being a right to violence when somebody is threatening a way of life. So it’s not that. But my concern is that if you take the pathogen model and you imagine that all those folks who showed up in Charlottesville, that that is a contagion and it needs to be isolated, then you will have the sense that as long as you do that, it’s not going to show up somewhere else. Whereas what’s I think the actual hazard is that that’s actually a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances. It’s indefensible, but it has served populations and the populations that we come from have it, therefore, on reserve. And when certain characteristics show up in the environment, that program can emerge. And so my concern is that that’s where we are in history. It can’t be isolated as a phenomena that’s associated with the other.