https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zIsBbZzyfNU
The sociopathic types too, they prey on the elderly, like they’re bad people. Oh yeah, well this is a big problem now with computers, I mean. Oh, these are the guys. You know, the frauds. Yeah, yeah. You just have to answer my grandma. She calls me up out of the blue, she’s like, I just got a call from you in Mexico saying that you were stranded there and needed me to send you 1500 bucks. I was like, what the f- Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well that’s a sociopathic. You think they’re sociopaths who do that or they’re just like opportunistic people or what’s the difference? You’ve got to be… The real psychopathic types, they have no conscience, like you’re there to be plucked. You’re an NPC in a video game, as it’s been described. Yeah, exactly. And they’re relatively rare and they do have to move around. And you know, they can be successful in extraordinarily corrupt environments for short periods of time but it’s just not a stable solution. I can give you an example. Well, I’m curious, what do you think about like the high ranking officers in the Nazi party? Psychopaths that were thriving in an unstable, corrupt situation or these otherwise decent people that just got twisted up in the times? Well, some of them, well, they’re a little of column A and a little of column B. You know, like there was certainly openings in the Nazi hierarchies for people who were compassionless and cruel and vengeful and all of that. The SS is a good example of that. But there’s a great book that I would recommend to your listeners, to your viewers called Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. It’s a great book and it tracks the development of, so when the Nazis moved through Poland, they left policemen behind to maintain order, let’s say, but it was still under wartime and Browning tracked the behavior of this one unit of policemen. They’re all middle-aged guys, just typical middle class, you know, bourgeois guys. They’d grown up really before Hitler, so they weren’t thoroughly indoctrinated like the Nazi youth, say, and they were sent to Poland and their commander said, look, you guys, it’s wartime and you know, there are traitors everywhere and you’re going to have to do some pretty horrible things here, but if you, you don’t have to, you can go home if you think that’s just too much. And none of them did. And you think, well, why not? They had the opportunity. The reason was, well, they were comrades, let’s say, in arms, you know, so they had that esprit de corps thing going and they were all thinking, well, I’m not going to like run away and leave my colleagues to do all the dirty work. It’s a war and they have a duty. Yeah. Okay. So fine. So, you know, they started by rounding up all the Jews who were between 18 and 65, the men and like shipping them away and they ended up by, this is rough. It’s a rough book. They ended up, you know, taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And so you think, well, how does a man transform in that manner? And Browning shows you like, it’s not pleasant. They went through psychological hell each step of the way, but they went, you know, so lots of times it was ordinary men who went down the bad path one step at a time. And sometimes it was like people who were rotten to the core, like their minister of or Mingali, the doctor. I mean, you know, he was a sadistic psychopath of the highest order. Is is there a mastermind at, it seems so complicated to, to, to transform an ordinary man, as the book says, and to just someone who’s willing to, to execute a pregnant, innocent woman. Is there a mastermind that plots the course of that? Or is it just, um, Cirque like, does it just happen naturally as the, along with the objectives of the, like, how did, how do they orchestrate something so complicated like that? Well, I mean, the Germans were an organized, are an organized people, were an organized people, and Hitler really didn’t give out directives precisely. He sort of hinted at what he might want, and then his minions would get together and, you know, lay out policies in accordance with what they thought were his wishes. And I mean, there’s a book, another book I would recommend called Eichmann in Jerusalem. And Eichmann was really the architect of the final solution in many ways. And it’s a characterological analysis of Eichmann, and Eichmann was in no way a psychopath. You know, he was perfectly capable of, I think this is actually a true story. I might have it confused with another story, but it doesn’t matter really. It’s the same idea. He, one, there’s a story about him driving home after work one day and running over a cat and having like a terrible emotional reaction to it, you know. And it’s not like his kids didn’t love him, and you know, but, and he wasn’t out there actually killing people. He was just making the plans. He was the bureaucrat behind the scenes, and he was the sort of guy who had his mum do his laundry when he went off to the army, you know. He was a, he was a faceless bureaucrat, and he would have worked in any bureaucracy. He was worried about his next promotion. He wasn’t thinking about the larger consequences. And so, and that’s Hannah Arendt, and she, that’s a very classic book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and that’s, that’s very much worth reading if you’re interested in this sort of thing. One of the interesting things I always heard about the Nazis, that he really humanizes them in a way, is that they were, and you could, I might be wrong about this, but they were passing out alcohol to all the soldiers, especially those in the concentration camps, to keep them intoxicated all the time so that they could not confront the horrible things they were doing. You know, they had all sorts of, of, of, they learned how to do it across time, right? I mean, you know, it, it, so, Hitler started, one of the things Hitler started, it’s a very strange story in many ways, because Hitler was obsessed with order and cleanliness. He was a very orderly person, and he was very sensitive to disgust, you know, because you think, well, the Nazis were afraid of the Jews, you know, because they were other, and that’s not right. What, what’s more accurate is that the, especially Hitler, he, he, he was, he was very sensitive to disgust. That’s what it looks like. And if you’re disgusted by something, then you want to eradicate it, right? If you’re afraid of something, you want to run away from it. If you’re disgusted by it, you want to burn it to the damn ground. You want to get rid of it. And his writings, like I read a book called Hitler’s Table Talk, which was his spontaneous discussions during dinnertime from 1939 to 1942. It’s really another amazing book. We had been doing some work, and inspired a bit by Jonathan Haidt, who’s done a lot of work on disgust and the relationship between trait personality. And I was reading this book at the same time, and it was just unbelievable how often Hitler referred to the people he was eradicating, you know, the Slavs and the Gypsies and the Jews and all the people he went after, as parasites and as rats and as insects and all of that. So they were kind of put into that category. And here’s a horrifying part of that story. When Hitler first came to power, he put in a lot of public health initiatives, including mass tuberculosis screening, which actually turned out to be a good thing. And at the same time, he went on a beautify the factories campaign. And so he convinced the German factory owners and so forth to increase the levels of hygiene in the factories, to get rid of the rats and the mice, to plant flowers out front, you know, to make everything look neat and orderly. And the insecticide they used was Zyklon. Well Zyklon, so to eradicate the rats and the insects, Zyklon, a slightly different formulation was the gas that was used in the concentration camps. And so Hitler went from cleaning up the rats and the mice in the factories and the insects, and then he went into the mental hospitals and started cleaning up in there. And then like it just went broader and broader again, sort of one step at a time. You know, and the Germans had plenty of reason to be resentful and hateful because, I mean, think about what they went through. We can’t even imagine it. First of all, there was World War I. And so there was many men like Hitler himself who served in the trenches. And there’s one story about Hitler. He won a medal for heroism in World War I. He was sitting around with a group of his buddies and went off to do something. God only knows what. When he came back, they were all dead because a mine had, not a mine, I don’t remember, some kind of shell had landed in the middle and killed them all. It’s like that changes you. You know, and then afterwards there was all these brutalized men who’d come out of the trenches. I mean, you just can’t imagine what it must have been like in the trenches, you know, especially if you’re there for like a couple of years. You aren’t the same person. Get out of there. You’re destroyed. Your country’s in ruins. Then the hyperinflation hits. And every single person in Germany who ever saved any money at all is flat, bloody broke. And then there’s a communist revolution brewing in Russia. And it’s like, it’s hell. And the Nazis came along and said, well, not only are we going to restore order and greatness, but we’re going to bloody well tell you whose fault this is. And Hitler, I’ve studied him a lot trying to understand what happened. Hitler was, Carl Jung called him the mouthpiece of the collective unconscious of the German people. So you imagine there’s all this resentment and hatred brewing underneath the surface and all this chaos is there. And the desire for order is clamoring in everyone’s minds. And Hitler comes along and he’s a very powerful emotional orator. And he’s watching the crowd. And he listens. And when he says thing A, nothing happens. When he says thing B, everybody roars. And so he takes note of that. And it’s not even conscious exactly, right? Because he’s being molded by the crowd. And so they roar. And so that’s a reinforcement. That’s a reward. And so then he goes down that line a little bit farther and they roar some more. And then he tries something else and it’s silent. It becomes what they want. You bet. Exactly that, man. He acts out the dark desire of the mob. So he becomes the embodiment of the dark desire of the mob. And that’s partly why he had the charisma. It’s right because there’s this unconscious fantasy brewing in the back of everyone’s minds. You see that to some degree now with Antifa, for example, and their proclivity towards violence. You know, if you ask what just exactly what’s going on there? Well, Hitler came to embody the desire of the German people for order and revenge. And he embodied that fully. And you could say, so what happened was a collaboration between him and the people. It wasn’t Hitler turned everyone into Nazis. It’s like, no, that’s not how it worked. I’m sure there was a lot of good people still left over who got just overrun by the mania too, who were disgusted by it. The other thing too is that people are not that brave. And everybody thinks this is one of the things I teach in my maps of meaning class. You know, it’s like, okay, you look at Nazi Germany in the 30s and you think, well, I’d be one of the heroes who rescued the Jews. It’s like, statistically, that’s very improbable. And one of the things I’ve learned in the last year with all this strange political, what would you say? The strange situation that I’ve been in is how unlikely it is for people to speak up. They just won’t. Even tenured professors who are tenured, they’re protected. It’s like the probability that they’ll pop their head up and say something that might make them identifiable is very, very low. So it’s scary. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Well, at that time, and you know, Nazi Germany, the stakes were as high as it could get. They didn’t tolerate that. That’s exactly right. But even when the stakes are low, people won’t speak up.