https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ucnnhi9iQHU
Anyways, back to the hellish domain. Now I told you that that domain that’s outside of knowledge, you could think about that as the underworld, or you can think about it as nature, the negative element of nature in particular. And so, I mentioned that one element of that is hellish. And that’s exactly what the movie explains next. It does exactly that. We go back out to this domain that scar the adversary, or the negative king. And that’s another way of looking at him. This is the domain over which he rules. And so, you can see him there, surrounded in fire. Same idea as the hyenas surrounded by fire earlier. This is green fire and smoke, which I think is even worse. And this is where the movie starts to draw on, essentially, Nazi symbolism. At least the symbolism of totalitarian states. And you know, you think about a totalitarian state, you think about the Nazis and their goose stepping. What’s happening is that every single person in the military becomes an identical unit, right? They’re all uniform. And they’re all, in some sense, imitating the dictator in an absolutely perfect way. And so, the dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire population. That’s order. Order. And one of the things we’ve discovered that’s really interesting is that disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness. And that’s associated with conscientiousness. And one of the things about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive. And a lot of his hatred for non-Aryans. So imagine inside the Aryan box, it was all uniform. Outside, it was all parasites and predators. And so, that was a manifestation of disgust, not of fear. It’s a whole different thing. And if you read Hitler’s table talk, which is a collection of his spontaneous dinner speeches from 1939 to 1942, it’s a very interesting book. You see that his metaphor for the Aryan race was a body, a pure body, unassaulted by parasites or predators. And that he was trying to erect a border around it to keep all of that away. So it’s an immunological disgust-like metaphor. And there’s some recent work that was published in PLoS One about three years ago showing that brilliant study, should have got much more attention, showing that if you went around and sampled political attitudes in different countries, or even within the same country, What you found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases, the higher the probability of totalitarian political attitudes at the local level. And you can imagine, well, what happens if there’s infectious diseases is you want to put borders around everything. You don’t want free movement between ideas or people, because that’s partly how the disease spreads. You’re going to have much more strict sexual rules, for example, because that’s a great way for diseases to be transmitted. And before Hitler went on his rampage against the non-Aryans, he cleaned up all the factories. Like he went in there and fumigated them, it was part of the law. He went on a public health campaign to get rid of tuberculosis, and he got rid of the bugs in the factories as well. He used Zyklon B, that’s an insecticide, and that’s the gas that he used in the gas chambers eventually. So first it was the bugs and the rats, and then it was people who were… then it was euthanasia, that was the next move, and forced euthanasia. And the rationale for that was compassion, by the way, just so you all know. It’s merciful to put these people who are burdensome to themselves and their families and the state who are living second-rate lives, it’s merciful to euthanize them. And that was a huge campaign in Germany, it was after that that the more racial purifications began. And so that’s the disgust thing, that’s unbelievably important. Because lots of times people think that conservatives are more anxiety-sensitive than liberals, and that’s why they’re closed in terms of their ideas, but that doesn’t look right. First of all, conservatives are less neurotic than liberals, although the effect isn’t that big. So it doesn’t look… and they actually score higher in measures of well-being. The most unhappy people are liberal men, by the way. But people are often accused, if they’re conservative, of being fearful, and that’s why they suppress other people’s viewpoints, but that doesn’t look right. It’s low openness and high orderliness, and that looks like it’s associated with disgust, and that looks like it’s associated with something called the extended immune system, which is the proclivity of people to keep themselves away from potential sources of contamination. It’s really terrifying, because one of the things people often said about Germany was that, you know, it was a very civilized country, and yet it descended into barbarity. But conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success, and so you could say, well, conscientious societies are more civilized, but they’re also more orderly, and that makes them more disgust-sensitive. And so what it might have easily been in Germany was that it was an excess of civilization, rather than its lack that produced exactly these consequences. And that’s a far more frightening proposition, and one that’s, I believe, much more likely to be true. Hitler bathed four times a day, and he was also an admirer of willpower, so he could stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car. And the thing about conscientious people is they’re very willpower-oriented. And so if you’re unfortunate enough to be sick, chronically, in the house of someone who’s conscientious, especially if it’s a mental illness, you’re more likely to relapse, because the conscientious person is going to be judgmental, and they’re going to say to you, if you’re schizophrenic, they’re going to say, well, if you just organize yourself and get up in the morning and try a little harder, you could overcome this. Which is, of course, true, except you can’t, because you’re schizophrenic. And so the pressure put on you by the anger and the contempt is going to increase the probability that you’ll relapse. So orderly people are very judgmental, and orderliness is very highly associated with things like anorexia. And the anorexic is basically someone who’s so disgust-sensitive that they become unable to tolerate their own body. And they see it as a source of corruption and imperfection, which, of course, is exactly right. It is. And it’s a very difficult thing to maintain order around. So, anyways, so what happens out here in this terrible domain, where Scar rules, is that things turn into a totalitarian state. You know, and he’s presented here as a Nazi-like leader. And see, there’s another thing that’s really interesting that’s even deeper than this, from a mythological perspective. I don’t know if I can even go into it. Well, not really. I guess what I’ll have to do is satisfy myself with this observation. There’s always been some antagonism, for example, between the Catholic Church and rationalism. And everyone knows that. It’s a very long-standing antagonism that sort of runs its way through at least the last thousand years or so of Western civilization. And the people who regarded Catholics as antithetical to science take the Catholics to task for that, describing it as prejudicial and superstitious. And fair enough. But there’s something else going on there that’s more important. And that’s the observation, and this is at a deep level again, the observation that rationality has one big problem. So it can easily become arrogant and believe in its own theories. So if you’re smart, and there are going to be some of you people who are like that, too. The primary trait that distinguished you from other people over the course of your whole life was that you were more intelligent than most. And you may have staked your identity on that and overvalued intelligence and rationality. And the problem with that is that you make a theory of the world and then you tend to assume that it’s 100% correct. That’s the tendency to fall in love with your own theories. And that’s what a totalitarian does. The totalitarian says, here’s the damn theory. And it’s exactly right. And you’re going to act it out exactly. And if you don’t, well, we’ve got some special treats in mind for you. And one of the most terrible things that I encountered while reading about totalitarianism, and this was even more true of the Soviet Union under Stalin, was that the true believers, and there were many of them, were in a terrible position. Because according to their own doctrine, they were already involved in the process that was going to bring utopia to mankind. The problems had already been solved, but many of them were still suffering terribly as individuals. But if you’re a totalitarian believer in utopia, your own suffering becomes heretical. Right? Because your suffering is an indication that the damn theory isn’t correct. And so then you’re in a terrible position because you either admit that the theory isn’t correct and fall apart because of that and maybe face terrible punishment as well. Or you have to separate yourself from your own suffering and lie about it fundamentally. And of course, that’s exactly what happened in places like the Soviet Union where everyone lied about everything. All of the time. To themselves, to their family members, to their friends. The entire system was completely permeated by lies. And so you get this terrible place that scars the ruler over, which is totalitarian and brutal and murderous and resentful and deceitful and arrogant all at the same time. And that’s brought about. So the Columbine guys, for example, when they’re justifying their murderousness and their plans to shoot up the schools, they keep making reference to the fact that people had slighted them, for example. You know, and insulted them and they were alienated. They weren’t bullied exactly the way the press made it out. I don’t know if they were bullied any more than people usually are in high school. But they took their alienation personally and regarded that, their isolation from common humanity as indication of the pathology of everything. And then they went out to destroy. And that’s exactly what this sort of thing represents. That’s the uniformity. You see, he’s got this kind of vicious grin on his face, which is malicious and pleased all at the same time. There’s no fear in that. It’s quite the opposite. And there’s another image of, you know, using what’s essentially imagery of hell, which everyone understands, strangely enough. And that associates him with the crescent moon. And the crescent moon is, well, it’s a symbol of darkness and the underworld, fundamentally. So, alright, so anyway, so that’s, we see the underworld, we see that which lies beyond the light, and in there we see a fragment of that that’s basically hellish. And all of that’s incorporated into the story. And everyone understands that when they see it. Even without, I would say, the overt references to Nazism.