https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qH9-xsuPiUk
On Tuesday, obviously, I wasn’t here, and so I prepared that combination slideshow PowerPoint thing. That took me like 12 hours to make. It was ridiculous. But I’m wondering something. I mean, I have quite a bit of tape material, and I’m going to obviously be taking these courses. And I was wondering, one of the advantages of doing it that way was that I could sync the material, like the slide material, with the lecture much more precisely. And you can imagine that if I, once I got good at that, I could put a lot more material into the lectures and I could edit them very carefully. So then I’m wondering, what did you think of that use of technology compared to a spontaneous lecture? What was your attitude towards that? I think that while you could present more information, it would obviously be less responsive. And so I prefer black pictures rather than even watching the tapes. That’s why, yeah, I prefer black music. Yeah, no, no, I understand. I mean, the thing about a lecture is that it’s a conversation if it’s a good lecture, right? I mean, because the lecture is hypothetically paying attention to the audience. So then it’s more dynamic. But, you know, it suffers a bit because it’s not a structure. That’s the thing. Anybody else? Yeah? I thought it was a pretty good substitute. Like, obviously I prefer an in-person lecture, but given the circumstances, I thought it was definitely a good substitute and like the information kind of crossed it out. So I was wondering, like, what would happen, do you think, if I prepared like a really tightly edited half-hour presentation like that and then followed it up with a looser lecture? Would that be a reasonable combination of the two things? Because that way I could more, you know, I could be much more certain that I covered a wide range of material, you know, in depth. And then hopefully the lecture could be, you know, maybe a little looser and a bit more fun. So do you think that would be a reasonable thing to try? So anybody? Yep? Yeah, that would be a really good idea, especially because then during the lecture section, I think we’ve all got a chance to sort of ask some more questions. Whereas, you know, currently there’s often a lot of time and it’s just because of the nature of the class. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, I was thinking that maybe that would allow me to increase the degree to which it was interactive. So okay. Did anybody particularly object to that mode of presentation? I mean, I know you wouldn’t have to be in the lecture hall for it, obviously. That’s one thing, right? You could watch it at home. I think there’s some danger in just having the lecture material online so you’re at home because, well, the internet is full of things you can watch, you know, so there’s got to be some utility bringing people together. But anybody else have any other comments? Okay, okay. All right, so today we’re going to talk about conscientiousness. And I’m going to stick closer to my notes in some parts because a lot of the stuff I’m going to tell you about is really only stuff that I’ve learned in the last year or so. And so I’m not absolutely familiar with it yet. There’s actually been a fair bit of progress made in understanding conscientiousness. And in very surprising ways, some of the stuff that I’m going to talk to you about today really shocked me when I learned it. You’ll see. I mean, I’ve been interested in belief systems and ideology for a long time. And the role that, I never really understood the role that conscientiousness plays in that so particularly, but it’s really starting to come together. So not only are we going to talk about conscientiousness today, we’re going to talk about, I think, some of the pathologies that are associated with conscientiousness both at the individual level and at the social level. It’s a tricky topic because we’ve discussed this before to some degree, you know, that intelligence and conscientiousness are the best predictors of life success, right, at least in managerial and administrative professions and in academia and also in professions like law, you know. So conscientiousness in many ways seems to be a very good trait. I don’t think that you can have a civilized society without conscientiousness being at the base of it in some sense because conscientious people do what they say they’re going to do, they’re industrious, they keep things in order. A lot of that’s the basis for the kind of interpersonal trust that’s necessary to set up complex trading systems. And so, and as an individual trait, as I said, if you’re conscientious, not only do you do better in life, but by the time you’re middle-aged or so, your life quality seems to be much higher. So, you know, being conscientious seems to be a good medium to long-term strategy. So that all sounds pretty positive, but then one of the things that a multitude of labs have been looking at over the last few years, including mine, is what happens if conscientiousness is taken too far. And it kind of looks, this is work that hasn’t been published yet, but it’s based on some of the new personality models that I’ve been looking at that have been derived using a different technique, a semantic analysis technique instead of factor analysis. And what appears to be the case is that any of the traits become pathological if you push them too far. So whatever virtue is, it can’t be identified with a particular trait. I mean, I don’t know what virtue would be from a Big Five perspective, but it doesn’t look like you could localize it specifically. Maybe it’s something like the appropriate situational balance of the temperaments, or one of the things I’ve been thinking is that maybe as you mature, your width of temperament increases, you know, so that maybe your baseline for conscientiousness is sort of average, but as you mature, your ability to be very conscientious when it’s necessary and your ability to not be conscientious when it’s necessary are more thoroughly developed and differentiated so that you could match your behaviour more particularly to the demands of given situations. Maybe that’s something like the development of wisdom. But anyways, it turns out that it appears that conscientiousness can take a very vicious turn if it’s pushed beyond a certain point. And it also appears that perhaps the point at which conscientiousness is really positively associated with the success of individuals and maybe the success of nations is also relatively close to the point where if you push it any farther it starts to kick back very badly and things go downhill. And so that’s the sort of thing that we’re going to discuss today. So we’ll put it in its context first. You remember the highest order personality traits are plasticity and stability, and plasticity is made up of extroversion and openness. Those are good predictors of long-term creative achievement. And then there’s stability, and stability is associated with conscientiousness, emotional stability and agreeableness. And we’re going to concentrate on conscientiousness today which is obviously, that’s industrious and orderliness at the big five aspect scale level. Now, when we derived the big five aspect scale, so broke the big five down into ten, it wasn’t clear to begin with what the aspects were going to be useful for because when you do statistical analysis like that you’re just pulling out a semantic structure and there isn’t really any necessity that those additional differentiations that you make are going to have practical utility. But it’s turned out that the distinction between orderliness and industriousness is extremely useful. So one of the things we know for example is that orderly people tend to be more conservative. So we know that conservative people tend to be more conscientious, but it seems to load specifically on orderliness. Now you might say, well that’s not so surprising to associate the right wing with orderliness. But it is surprising because we didn’t know that orderliness was a subset of conscientiousness. So people have been trying since the end of World War II to slot the idea of the authoritarian personality into standard personality models. And that’s been extremely difficult to do. So one hypothesis has been that conservative people, because they’re more xenophobic and they’re more anti-immigration and they’re more anti-gay rights and that sort of thing, one primary theory has been that that’s because they’re more afraid. But the problem is that conservatism isn’t associated with neuroticism to any degree at all. And when it is, it seems to be reversed. It seems that the conservatives are less plagued by neuroticism than liberals are, say. So you could make the hypothesis that conservatives are so conservative that they’re covering up their fear to such a degree that it actually reverses. But you know, really, you’ve got to be pretty damn convinced of your theory to hold on to when the data seem to indicate that the opposite, the actual opposite is true. And so, well, here are some items. You guys can take a look at this. So this is how you would distinguish orderliness from industriousness. I wouldn’t worry about the slides, okay, because I’m going to cut them in. So anyways, so if you’re orderly, you don’t leave your belongings around, obviously. You like order. Well, there’s a surprise. You keep things tidy. You follow a schedule, so you order your time. That’s definitely a good predictor of productivity. You’re bothered by messy people. And bothered is an interesting word, right? Because if you’re orderly and you’re somewhere messy and it bothers you, you might think, well, exactly what it is that you’re experiencing when you’re bothered. You know, I know if I go to a place that’s in real disarray, it looks like people have been failing to live up to their responsibilities. Say it’s a visceral sensation. I really don’t like it. I’m very strongly compelled to put things in order. But it’s obviously a negative emotion, but it’s not the kind of negative emotion that seems to load on neuroticism. So it doesn’t seem to be fear or anxiety or emotional pain or frustration or disappointment or any of those things. So then you might ask, well, you know, what’s left? Bothered. Wants everything to be just right. Dislikes routine. Opposite, obviously, orderly people like routine. They see that rules are observed and they want every detail taken care of. Well, you can see that in some ways orderliness is the soul of bureaucracy, right? Because everything in its place and a place for everything is basically the sort of hallmark of an orderly person. Well, in my clinical practice, I’ve certainly observed that people who are really disorderly and really high in neuroticism, they just never improve. Because their fear and their anxiety sort of paralyze them into immobility and the fact that they’re low in conscientiousness or low in orderliness means they will never do anything and then disorder grows around them and that exacerbates their anxiety and their fear. Like it’s a real catastrophe. So that’s where the conservatives are different. They’re more orderly than liberals are. Industrialists and liberals and conservatives seem to be about the same. So industrious person carries out their plans. They don’t waste time. They don’t find it difficult to get down to work. They don’t mess things up. They finish what they start. They put their mind on the task at hand. They get things done quickly so there’s an efficiency element to it. They don’t postpone decisions and they aren’t easily distracted. So industrious people tend not to procrastinate. Procrastination actually seems to be something like low industriousness and high neuroticism. So it’s a very pernicious phenomenon and procrastination can really drive people start raving mad. Is it below what waste time is supposed to be reversed or is that a component of industriousness? It’s reversed. So the ones that don’t make sense are reversed. So now it isn’t exactly obvious why orderliness and industriousness are related so tightly or why they’re somewhat differentiable. But it turns out that that is the case statistically. Now I thought a lot about why orderliness and industriousness really is a mystery. We’ve started to associate orderliness with sensitivity to disgust and I’m going to elaborate on that quite a bit. We haven’t been able to get a handle on it all. So conscientiousness is somewhat of a mystery because up to maybe a year ago or two years ago, even though it was a really good predictor of long term life success and happiness, we didn’t have any models for it because it just came out of the statistical analysis of the semantic structure of language, right? So it was a theoretical. So there’s no theoretical model. Why are people conscientious? Well we have no idea. There’s no neuropsychological model. We have no idea what part of the brain is associated with conscientiousness. And weirdly enough, the sorts of things that are associated with conscientiousness are very close to what theorists have identified as the function of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, say, which is the part of the brain that deals with the highest order of abstractions. The whole prefrontal cortex people have associated with the ability to plan and the ability to inhibit impulses and the ability to think in the long term. And that all sounds like conscientiousness, but if you assess people’s dorsolateral prefrontal function with tests, cognitive tests, that are characterized by activation, when people are doing those tests their prefrontal cortex is activated in, say, functional MRI, the correlation between the prefrontal ability, assessed cognitively, and conscientiousness itself is zero. So it’s really weird because this also means to me that most theories of prefrontal function are wrong. So you can think about it this way, is that in order to… the prefrontal cortex does seem to be good at manipulating abstractions. But by definition, an abstraction is something that’s abstracted from the real world, right? It’s no longer connected to the real world. And so when you’re thinking about your future, say, you’ve pulled abstract representations of the world up into this space where you’re doing your thinking, and it’s a disembodied space, obviously you’re not acting it out. And so you have to be able to dissociate the abstractions from the real world in order to manipulate the abstractions, which is thinking, without acting them out. But the thing about conscientious people isn’t that they make plans so much. It’s that if they make a plan, then they do it. And so that means that there’s this ability to take the abstraction, you know, well I promise to do X. Okay, well that means you’ve been able to think up X. But the next question is, if you promise to do it, will you do it? And the answer to that could easily be no, and it is the answer generally if you’re not conscientious. But that doesn’t seem to be associated with prefrontal function at all. And you see these weird dissociations in a lot of clinical cases. So borderline, people with borderline personality disorder is a good example because they’re very unconscious and very high in neuroticism. And they’re often very smart. And so these people, you talk to them, you know, and they’re perfectly capable of identifying what their problems are, and even telling you what the causal pathways, and even telling you about what they should do in the future, but they absolutely will not do it. So the ability to think and the willingness to put those thoughts into operation seem to be completely separable phenomena. And we don’t know much about the system that motivates people to put their plans into action, or to keep a promise, or to not procrastinate. We don’t know what that’s associated with. So there’s no psychological model, there’s no pharmacological model. We don’t know how to increase conscientiousness. You know, you might think that when you give kids with attention deficit disorder Ritalin, for example, that that might make them more conscientious. But well, first there’s no evidence for that because Ritalin is an amphetamine, and that would make them more extroverted, generally speaking, because it’s a dopaminergic agent. And plus there’s no evidence whatsoever that if you follow up people who have ADHD who are on Ritalin in the long run, that the Ritalin does them any good whatsoever. In fact, the evidence is actually the reverse, is that the long-term consequences of Ritalin use are negative rather than positive. So now it’s worse in our lab, like we’ve done all sorts of things to try to measure conscientiousness. So one of the things we did, for example, because we thought of it as a kind of persistence, you know, maybe like conscientious people will persist at boring tasks longer than non-conscientious people. Sounds reasonable, right? Because, you know, it sounds like you’re kind of grabbing yourself and saying focus on this and don’t be distracted. It has nothing to do with whether you’re interested in it. So we had people do things like we made lines and lines of N’s and M’s and U’s, and we had people count the U’s, which is pretty boring, you know, and it’s also difficult because N’s and M’s and U’s look a lot the same. And all that we found was that intelligence predicted it. Smarter people could do it more accurately and faster, right? No correlation whatsoever with conscientiousness. We couldn’t get a correlation with any prefrontal tests, no IQ tests, and then we test used tests that were associated with the orbital frontal cortex, which is sort of lower and a little bit more hooked into the limbic system, and we couldn’t find any correlation between conscientiousness and performance on those tests either. We looked at like 200 different performance measures and conscientiousness didn’t predict any of them. We can’t get people who are conscientious to do something better in a lab than people who aren’t conscientious. And it’s a real puzzle because, you know, because it’s such an important predictor of things like long-term life success and performance and political affiliation, you’d think that you’d be able to discriminate between people who are conscientious and people who aren’t conscientious in the lab. But I know that the chair of our department has recently used some attentional tasks to and showed a differentiation between conscientious people and unconscious people, and so I’m hoping that I’m going to follow up with her to find out exactly what that is. But I mean, it’s been deadly difficult. So you know, Roberts, the references for all this are at the end of the slides, by the way, so I’m not going to go through the complete references, but a researcher named Roberts has defined conscientiousness as the tendency to be planful, organized, task and goal-oriented, self-controlled and to delay gratification and to follow norms and rules. So we looked at things too like future discounting, you know, so future discounting, we can play a future discounting game, so I’ll do that with you very quickly. So I’m going to point at you and ask you a question, so you could, it’s not a trick, by the way, so you don’t have to worry about your answer. So I might say, okay, here’s the deal. I can give you 15 in a month. What would you take? 15 today or 15 today. 5 today or 50 a year. Okay, so now imagine that I played that game with one of you a hundred times, say, or 200 times using different amounts, small and big, over different time frames, and what you can calculate is how much people value the present compared to the future. Now you should value the present a bit more than the future, right? Why? Because you don’t want to make it. That’s right, the future is uncertain. So you have to discount it because there’s some probability that it isn’t just going to occur, like maybe something will happen or maybe I won’t be here. And then the farther out you go into the future, the more you have to discount it because it becomes really unpredictable. And my experience, and I don’t really know of any data to support this, but my experience is being that it’s pretty hard to plan in your life, it’s pretty hard to plan more than into the future because there’s so many variables that start to, the effect of the variables that you’re not accounting for starts to become exponential as you move out into the future. So you should discount the future because the present is more certain. Plus if you have 50? And we found that there was no correlation whatsoever with conscientiousness. If people were extroverted or if you made them happy, then they discounted the future more. And the way we interpreted that was that, well, if things are going well now, you might as well capitalize on it. Because if all the signals that are coming towards you say, well, this is a good time, why not take the resources now and use them? So anyways, that’s just an example of how tricky this is. You’ll notice if you know anything about prefrontal cortical function theories that all of these descriptions, planned for, organized, tasked and goal-oriented and so on, have been attributed to the prefrontal cortex. But we sure haven’t found any evidence for that, even though it’s the prime theory of prefrontal function. Okay, so what is conscientiousness associated with? Well, Deneve and Heller have showed that if you measured over any reasonable amount of time, it’s associated with life satisfaction and happiness. Now you might want to ask yourself, well, what is life satisfaction or happiness, which is a really good question, especially if you measure it with a questionnaire, because we’ve already established that if you measure with a questionnaire something like emotion or personality, you get the big five. So it’s not obvious that you can derive something like a life satisfaction or happiness questionnaire and have it measure something separate from the big five. And so what happens is that most people who report that they’re satisfied with life are happy, are high in extroversion, they’re happy, and low in neuroticism. They’re not unhappy. So that eats up a big chunk of the variance, and unsurprisingly, right? And so that sort of puts whether you’re happy or satisfied with your life firmly in the domain of temperament. But it does turn out that conscientiousness also influences that, especially over longer spans of time. So hard work pays off. But it’s tricky too, because you also have to understand that hard work only pays off in a society that’s very stable. And so maybe that’s part of the reason for the association between industriousness and orderliness, right? Because maybe you work really hard to gather up your little pile of, what would you call, acquisitions and assets, which you need, obviously, and then the whole society collapses and the thugs come in and steal it all. It’s like, aren’t you stupid, because you should have just spent all that money before the thugs could steal it. And that’s obviously the case in very many human societies. It’s dangerous to be industrious, because you’ll gather up property that’s valuable, and then that just makes you a target. So it might be that industriousness doesn’t pay off without order, something like that. So, and I’ve also wondered too, it’s like, well, I’ll talk to you about that a little bit later. Okay, now recently, researcher Fayard, also working with Roberts, was looking at the emotions that might be associated with conscientiousness. And this is rather a new approach, because we kind of thought that we had the emotions tied up already in the Big Five, right? There were the positive emotions, and they loaded on extroversion, that’s nice and simple, and there were the negative emotions, and they loaded on neuroticism, and that’s that. But it turns out that that’s not that, that there are emotions that fall outside of the rubric of simply negative neuroticism and simply positive extroversion. And they seem to be what people have often called, like, social emotions. And so those would be guilt and shame, those are two of them. Because, like, you feel guilty maybe when you haven’t lived up to an obligation, and so an obligation is usually something that occurs because you’re embedded in the social context. And you feel ashamed, the distinction between guilt and shame is a tricky one. You feel guilt for yourself and shame in front of other people, something like that. You know, guilt won’t necessarily make you turn red, but shame will. And so there’s, you know, there’s actual behavioral displays that are associated with these emotions. Turns out that conscientiousness is associated with guilt-proneness, but not the experience of guilt. So that’s a tricky thing. So let’s say you’re prone to guilt, well that’ll make you conscientious, and if you’re conscientious enough you do the things you’re supposed to do, then you don’t have to feel guilt. So you can see why that would be rather tricky to discover. So guilt seems to be associated with conscientiousness, and although this hasn’t been assessed yet, we think that it may be particularly associated with industriousness rather than orderliness. And the reason I’m pausing that, and it’s not demonstrated yet, the reason I’m pausing that is because we know that orderliness is associated with something else. It’s associated with sensitivity to disgust. And disgust is a whole different emotion than fear or pain, let’s say. And it’s tricky because, you know, think of a horror movie. Okay, so what exactly constitutes horror? Well there’s the, what’s that movie called, the witches of Blair Witch Project. Have you seen the Blair Witch Project? Okay, the Blair Witch Project is all fear. Nothing ever happens in the movie, it’s just this horrible sense that something awful is going to happen at any moment. Pure fear. And so that’s a horror movie. But then there’s the other kind of horror movies where people get like, sawed up with chainsaws. And so then you think, well those both come under the horror rubric. But the one is almost pure fear, and then the other is, what is it exactly? Is it fear and disgust? So it looks like the splatter film, so to speak, capitalizes on disgust, and the sense of horror is partly fear but also partly disgust. And so the disgust sensitivity system looks very old evolutionarily, although it looks particularly well developed in human beings, because it’s not that obvious that animals show disgust the same way human beings do. I mean, think about dogs, right? Jesus, those things. They’re like, everything smells good to a dog. You know, and they’ll eat virtually anything too. But humans aren’t like that at all. We’re very picky. Maybe because we’re omnivorous, I don’t exactly know. We’re very picky. And you know, there’s also specific facial expressions that are associated with disgust. You know, they’re like that. It’s partly an expulsion facial expression. You’re closing your eyes so you don’t have to see it, you’re closing your nose so you don’t have to smell it. It’s like repulsion and repugnance are associated with disgust sensitivity. So here’s the things… Yes, you had a question? Yeah. So, people that have eating disorders, do you think that they’re… Because you said orderliness, you don’t think that’s related to guilt as much as sensitivity to disgust is related to orderliness? Yeah. But since people with eating disorders are high in orderliness, do you think that they have eating disorder because of sensitivity to disgust or because they don’t feel guilty? No, I think it’s my experience is being there pretty sensitive to disgust. Oh. And part of that seems to be this constellation that I want to talk about. So being sensitive to disgust seems to go along with a lot of other things like black and white moral thinking. It’s like things are either good or they’re not and there’s no gray area in between. And like anorexics are like that to a great degree, like it’s black or white, there’s no gray at all. And they’re also very judgmental, people who are orderly. And I think the black and white thinking goes along with the judgment. It’s like, well, you’re either doing well or you’re not. There’s no mucking about in the middle. So they’re hard on themselves, orderly people, but they’re also hard on other people. And one of the things we know, for example, is that if you’re conscientious, although it predicts workplace success and that sort of thing, and general well-being, if you’re conscientious and you become unemployed, you’re in real trouble. Maybe because you’re conservative in your fundamental orientation, you think all those people without jobs, they’re just fundamentally useless. And if they just tried harder, they would get to where they’re going, which of course has some truth to it, but not completely. So then you fall into that category, and well, then you’re kind of, they say, hoist with your own petard, right? Because now you’re among the great unwashed. And because you’re disgust sensitive, that’s not going to make you very happy. So conscientious people suffer a lot when things happen to them that are bad, because they also assume, because they seem to be very fond of willpower, they also assume that, well, with just enough effort and with just enough willpower, you can get yourself out of anything. And that’s sort of true. If you put a lot of effort into something, the probability that you’ll do well increases. But that isn’t the same as if you try hard enough, you can get out of anything, right? You know what I mean? The grayness there really matters. Because there’s lots of things that hard work isn’t going to get you out of. And sometimes persisting and perseverating at something is actually the wrong thing to do, rather than the right thing to do. So it’s very tricky. So the orderly types are conservative. To make you conservative, you have to be high in orderliness and low in openness. Especially the more creative element of openness, say, rather than the intellect element. So that’s interesting too, because of course people tend to think that their political preference is established by their rationality. You know, I’m a liberal because being a liberal is the right way to be, and here’s a bunch of reasons why that’s the right way to be. And I’ve thought that through, and that’s why I’m a liberal. It’s like, turns out that’s probably completely wrong. Or at least mostly wrong. You have your temperament. And your temperament makes you intrinsically value certain things. And then because you intrinsically value them, the arguments about why those things are good are attractive to you, and then you remember those arguments. And so liberals, for example, are much more concerned with harm and care than conservatives are. And conservatives are more concerned about things like purity. And so, and those are basic, you know, those are basic. You should be concerned about both of those things. So the purity issue, it’s like, well, what happens if your living quarters are filthy and your hygiene habits are terrible? The answer to that is your house gets full of parasites, rats and mice and bugs, and you get sick and then you die. And maybe people around you do too. So, you know, the purity issue really matters. You don’t want to eat rotten meat. You want to make sure it’s stored properly. You don’t want to have the rats eat all your grain. So your grain weeds have to be in really good order and there can’t be any holes in them and so on. And so, like, orderliness and food preservation and preservation from illnesses and contamination and all those sorts of things, it’s like, yeah, yeah, that’s really important. You can’t just push that away and say it’s irrelevant. It’s not irrelevant at all. So, but then again, you can make it too relevant, you know. So, one of the things you see with the anorexics is that, you know, they’re so sensitive to disgust that they can’t stand their own bodies. And that’s a weird thing, right? Because, like, is a body a good thing or a bad thing? Well, here’s an example. So, here’s an experiment. So, you have, you give someone a sterilized cup and you say, well, you know, put some saliva in the cup and then you let it sit for ten seconds and then you say, well, drink that. Right, now a lot of you are going like this, right, and that’s disgust. Now, you won’t do that, but then you might ask, well, why? Why wouldn’t you do that? I mean, it was in your mouth like ten seconds ago. So, like, what’s the big problem? Well, people won’t do it. And you can see a heuristic at work there, right? The heuristic is, don’t drink saliva. And it’s not, like, moderated by any sort of trivial situational determinants. You’re just not going to do it. But I suspect that you do kiss your partner, for example. Right, and then you think, oh, well, that’s kind of a weird exception. It’s like, oh, well, my partner turns out not to be disgusting. At least that’s what you hope. And so, you know, there’s this, and that, you know, and there’s also this weird inhibitory process that goes on between sexual attraction and disgust, too. You know, and the psychoanalysts, you know, they thought of that as something that was perhaps somewhat pathological. Sexual guilt, sexual shame, disgust, and all that. But as far as I can tell, it’s a biological moderating factor. And part of the reason for that is, well, you know, just how many sexually transmitted diseases do you actually want to have? Especially given that many of them are, you know, syphilis in the 19th century. Man, that was deadly. It was transmissible from generation to generation. It acted like every other kind of disease, and there wasn’t any cure for it. And then, of course, we had AIDS in the 1980s. We kind of got a handle on that, but it was just bloody luck, you know? And it was very transmissible. And so sexual contamination is a big issue, and it always has been for the human race, because it turns out that sexual activity is a really good way of transmitting disease. So, you know, the borderline between disgust as something that protects you in your life and disgust as something that turns you off of life completely, it’s a really tight and contradictory set of, like, mutually inhibiting forces. It’s a real problem for people. So, okay, so what do you have? Orderliness, okay. Orderly people are black and white thinkers. They’re judgmental. If you show orderly people, imagine that you describe to them some kind of crime, like maybe it’s living off the fruits of prostitution. So maybe you talk to them about a pimp, and you give them a little story about the pimp, and then you say, how long should this pimp be thrown in jail? It’s like the orderly people think, just lock him up and throw away the key, you know? They judge moral transgressions very harshly. And so that’s part of the aspect that’s judgmental. They’re not egalitarian either. They don’t think that everybody should have the same amount all the time. They’re pretty interested in hierarchy and structure. And, you know, there’s some real advantages to hierarchy. People think that they’d be happier in an egalitarian situation, but the problem with egalitarian situations is people are always arguing, right? Because no one’s right in an egalitarian situation. They’re just, everybody gets to have their opinion, and it’s like, you know, when are we going to stop with all the opinions and do something? And the thing about a hierarchy is, the advantage to a hierarchy is, there are things you are responsible for, but there’s also things you’re not responsible for. And that’s a big advantage. And then you also know who is responsible for those things. So it looks like people are more comfortable in hierarchies than they think, even if they’re liberals. So that’s kind of interesting too. So, anyways, all those things seem to chunk together. Now, the industrious people also seem to want to climb up the hierarchy, right? Because you know that industrious people become more successful as they move through life. And so you think, well, that’s sort of a motivation. But then you might ask, is the industrious person trying to get to the top, or is the industrious person trying to get the hell away from the bottom? And my suspicions are that the industrious person is trying like hell to get away from the bottom. They don’t want to be down there with, you know, like I said, the unemployed and the great unwashed. Now, why? Well, here’s a bunch of reasons. First of all, we know pretty clearly that if you’re in a dominance hierarchy, the closer you are to the bottom of the hierarchy, the more likely you are to die. So when that’s independent of absolute income, like obviously if you’re poor enough, that’s going to make a difference because you’re just going to starve to death. But assuming you have enough money to take care of your basic needs, then dominance hierarchy position is a big determinant of mortality, even in heart disease. And more. If you look at songbirds or any other kind of animal that lives in the dominance hierarchy, and that’s pretty much the case for all animals. So imagine you have a dominance hierarchy of songbirds in your neighbourhood. And the high dominant songbirds, so maybe the industrious songbirds, they get the best nest. And then you think, well, what does the best nest mean? Well, it’s close to nesting material, so they don’t have to like exert a lot of energy building the nest. And it’s dry when it rains, so that’s a good thing, because then their eggs don’t get wet and get cold. And there aren’t a lot of predators lurking around, and it’s well hidden and it’s well ventilated. Like there’s a bunch of things that make an optimal nesting site really useful. So there’s a bunch of birds, and some of them have great nesting sites, and some of them have like, you know, slum nesting sites. And then some kind of epidemic comes through. Guess what happens? The birds die from the bottom of the hierarchy upwards. Well, why? Because the ones at the bottom are chronically stressed. And stress shuts off your immune system. And so it’s like, poof, epidemic comes through, dead. And so one of the things that may well have been built into human beings as the biological basis of industriousness is the desire to get the hell away from the bottom of a dominance hierarchy as fast as possible. Because you’re much more likely to die if you’re down there. And you know, we know that your trait preferences have emerged as a consequence of evolutionary pressure. And if the bottom of the dominance hierarchy happens to be the place where disease is rife, which is exactly how it is, then of course you should be motivated to get the hell out of there. And so I think a lot of the class distinctions that people draw, and their desire to have markers of status and so on, are a reflection of their high motivation to be associated with the high levels of the economic classes. Here’s something interesting, for example. You know that names go down the dominance hierarchy. You know, so what are you going to name your children? Well, the originator of names are the people at the top of the dominance hierarchy. And then once they establish the names, then the next group starts to copy them, and then the next group copies them. And then by the time the name gets common at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, the people at the top are no longer using it. They’ve got some other names figured out. And so names get not only generated that way, but also recycled that way. So you never want to underestimate the motivation of people to not be at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. And so it’s kind of the reverse of achievement motivation, right? It’s sort of like getting away. But if conscientiousness is mostly associated with these kind of negative emotions, guilt, shame, and disgust, then those are all getting away from emotions. Those aren’t, oh, it’s good to go that way, emotions. But those would be more associated with extroversion and openness. So when conscientious people seem to be dutiful. So they’re not doing things because they’re interested in them. In fact, they would say, who the hell cares if you’re interested in it? Do it anyways. That’s what a good citizen does. And of course, there’s some truth in that, right? You do your damn duty. So, okay, so you kind of get the sense of how conscientiousness is structured. Now that’s often be called a behavioral immune system. So the other thing we know about orderly people and conservatives is they’re anti-immigration, as I said, and they’re xenophobic, so they’re much more pro-in-group, and they’re quite harshly judgmental in their attitudes towards non-standard sexual behavior. And you can explain that all in terms of contamination fear. And so you might think, too, you know, like, you know what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up, eh? Because the Europeans, they lived in these like filthy, filthy cities. They were just crammed together. And they lived with their animals, too. So like they were parasite-ridden and they had all sorts of diseases, but they got good immune systems functioning as a consequence of that. And over, you know, a long period of time, they developed immunity to things that would have otherwise killed them, like, well, chickenpox and measles and that sort of thing. So the Europeans came over to North America and they shook hands with the Natives. It was like, poof, 95% of them died in the next 50 years. So it was like by the time the settlers came to Plymouth Rock, you know, the pilgrims, there were so few Native Americans left that they were happy to see them because they couldn’t get the damn crops off. There weren’t enough people left. So part of the reason that North America looked empty when the Europeans showed up is because three successive waves of absolutely catastrophic plagues had decimated the entire population of the continent. You know, and the same thing still happens when the, you know, in places like Brazil and Peru, when they find isolated Native groups in the jungle. Because, you know, that still happens now and then. It’s like, oh, look, some Natives. Shake their hand. Poof, they’re all dead in like a year. So the idea that the foreign person is a danger has been like critically correct for much of human developmental history. And that’s a real problem, right? Because obviously in the modern world, we’d better get along with everybody because, of course, we’re all powerful enough to wipe each other out. But, you know, the problem is, is you might think about things like xenophobia, you know, personal preference for your own group and out group prejudice and that kind of thing as like a cognitive issue. Well, you could just sort it out if you thought properly. But all this research indicates it’s a lot worse than that in some sense because it’s grounded in something much deeper. And not only is it grounded in something much deeper, it seems to be grounded in something that’s necessary, right? If you’re not disgust sensitive, well, then your hygiene habits aren’t very good. Well, then you get sick more, plus you don’t work as hard, then your life isn’t as good. You know, so it’s another one of those examples where the virtue is and where the vice is. It’s a very, very difficult thing to tell. So I’m going to read this. This is from a paper that I wrote with one of my students named Jacob Hirsch. We haven’t published this paper yet. I want to read it to you because, like I said, I don’t have this information at hand quite as well as I would like to. So this way I can get the information to you better. Disgust is considered to be one of the basic human emotions defined by a strong revulsion and desire to withdraw from an eliciting stimulus or event. Darwin noted this fact in 1872. He was the first person to note that disgust was a basic emotion. Physically disgust is accompanied by a distinct facial expression involving constriction of the oral and nasal cavities. You know, and that’s a really good way to insult someone, you know. All you have to do to really insult someone is make a disgust face at them or at something they said. They really do not like that. Because basically what you’re saying is you’re kind of like a parasite or an infectious disease. Evolutionary models of disgust propose that this emotion evolved to help us avoid contaminated or harmful foods or other potential sources of diseases such as sexual contact. 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. It means obsessive compulsive disorder. You know, people will touch something that they regard as contaminated, then rush off to wash their hands and wash and wash and wash. Some of them will wash till the soap’s gone, they’ll have showers till they run out of hot water, like they just can’t stop. That’s part of obsessive compulsive disorder. It looks like it’s a disorder of disgust, even though it’s classified with the anxiety disorders. Inducing disgust responses, whether via a foul order, a disgusting work environment, or recalling a disgusting experience, leads individuals to assign harsher punishments to others who had committed moral transgressions. Ha! Here’s something else. So if your judge is easily disgusted and you’ve done something relatively disgusting, or maybe if the courtroom doesn’t smell so good that day, well then you’re going to end up in jail longer. Here’s the worst situation. You go into court and you’re applying for parole. Okay? And it’s just before lunch and the courtroom doesn’t smell good. It’s like you’re not going to get parole. Because hungry judges are much more likely to deny you parole, and then of course judges who are sensitive to disgust are going to regard your moral transgression as harsher, and you can prime that. And so I think the data show that judges after lunch are like 70% more likely to grant parole. It’s like whether or not the judge is hungry is a bigger determinant of whether or not you get parole than what you’ve done. It’s really quite funny. You know, unless you’re up for parole. Harsher moral judgements can even be induced following the consumption of a bitter drink, because people are often disgusted by bitterness. In addition, the same disgust-related facial expressions are observed in response to unpleasant tastes, disgusting photographs, and receiving unfair treatment in an economic game. So our sense of justice, that’s a weird thing. Our sense of justice seems to be, who would guess that, eh? That it’s centred from a biological perspective in the systems that mediate disgust. So I’ve seen this among people who’ve received an injustice. So something’s been done to them that’s not good. And they’re often unable to let it go, partly because they’re disgusted with themselves for not responding to it properly. It’s like, you know, someone throws a dart at you, and it’s like you have a moral obligation to respond to that, right? And you can think about it as anger or something like that, but part of it also seems to be that you’re ashamed if you don’t respond. And you can see that sort of thing happening in cultures of honor, you know, where if purity is violated, you see these in these situations where, you know, a father maybe kills his daughter, which happens reasonably often because she’s violated some sort of social norm. Part of the idea is that, well, you know, if you don’t respond harshly to something that’s associated with disgust, then you bring dishonor on your entire family, and maybe on your entire community. And you know, we don’t like that sort of thinking in the West, but, well, but the reasons that we don’t approve of that sort of thinking, we think it’s because we’re liberal, but I think the evidence suggests that the reason that we don’t approve of those sorts of behaviors is because we live in a very clean environment, and we have plumbing. And so there’s all sorts of things that we do that reduce the probability that we’re going to be contaminated by parasites or infectious diseases, and so that means that we don’t feel that it’s necessary to respond as harshly to moral transgressions. And you know, you might think, well, I doubt it, but let me show you the evidence because it’s unbelievable. Concerns about cleanliness and feelings of disgust have likewise been related to political attitudes. Situational reminders of the importance of physical cleanliness, such as asking participants to wipe their hands with antiseptic wipes, tends to increase self-reported political conservatism. Such a finding is consistent with the notion that purity tends to be valued more by conservatives than by liberals. Individuals who report being disgusted more easily also tend to hold more conservative political views on topics including abortion, gay marriage, tax cuts, and affirmative action. In addition to the effects that have emerged when using self-report disgust sensitivity, more conservative political views have also been associated with stronger physiological reactivity to disgusting images. We’ve found that conservatives are not only more aroused by disgusting stimuli, they’re more aroused by any stimuli. Happiness, hunger, fear, you name it. It affects the conservative more than the liberal. And then we’ve also found that if you put, you take undergraduates and you expose them to videos that induce various physiological states. Happiness, sadness, fear, disgust. And then we also ask people how long it was since they last ate. Well, if you put people in one of those emotional or motivational states and then you show them political speeches, the more emotional they are, or the hungrier, the more they like conservative speeches. So that was actually very interesting. So, a large literature has converged on the notion that there are two core dimensions of conservative political ideology. Resistance to change and tolerance of inequality. Resistance to change reflects the extent to which people wish to maintain the status quo, while tolerance of inequality reflects the acceptance of an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities within society. And so there’s sort of the idea that the best rise to the top, and the best is a moral judgement, and the top is the right place for the best people to be. And then you might ask, well, why is the top the best? I mean, why do we assume that the top of a dominance hierarchy is the right place to be? Well, part of it is, of course, that the closer you are to the top of the dominance hierarchy, especially if you’re male, the more likely it is that you’re going to, you know, be attractive to people of the opposite sex, so that’s partly it. But then this other thing seems to be, well, it is a better place to be at the top, because it’s cleaner and safer and there are more resources there. And so that accounts at least in part for the judgement of the people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. So these two dimensions appear roughly aligned with social and economic conservatism, as expressed in the constructs of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation respectively, which you can measure hypothetically with questionnaires. So these core facets of conservatism are also closely related to two higher-order value dimensions described in moral foundations theory, which reflect preferences for order and tradition on the one hand and preferences for egalitarianism on the other. Okay, so we’ll leave that part. Political conservatism can thus 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 behavioural immune system has been conceptualised 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. So, 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. Such basic concerns about pathogen avoidance may thus contribute to the desire for order and tradition among conservatives, along with the harsh moral judgments associated with violations of the social order. In particular, severe moral judgments may be a key mechanism by which the social immune system, instantiated in conservative practices and policies, aims to eliminate exposure to deviate social elements that may increase the risk of pathogen exposure. Okay, now, we wrote that about two years ago. Now, there was a paper published about three months ago in Clause 1, which you can look up online. I’ve got the reference for it here. Now, this paper is absolutely mind-boggling. So, I told you guys what effect sizes are big, right? Like, .2, that’s pretty good. .3, that’s larger than about two-thirds of social science studies. Published .5, it’s like, well, you’re dancing on the moon because you just don’t get a correlation of .5 between two things unless you’re extraordinarily lucky. It’s like 95th percentile effect size. Okay, so this paper was published about three months ago. Now, I’m going to read you the abstract, okay? And then I’m going to briefly show you the data. According to the Parasite Stress Hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. Recent cross-national evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but there are inferential limitations associated with the evidence. Causality, you don’t know what direction the relationship is. We report two studies that address some of those limitations and provide further tests of the hypothesis. Study one revealed that parasite prevalence, and so that’s parasites or infectious diseases, predicted, strongly predicted, cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals’ authoritarian personalities. And this effect statistically mediated the relationship between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance. So what does that mean? The more infectious diseases in the area, the more likely the individuals in that area are to have authoritarian political beliefs, and it’s the authoritarian political beliefs of the people, the individuals in the area, that produces the authoritarian government. So it isn’t pathogen prevalence, authoritarian government, authoritarianism. It’s not a top-down thing. It’s a bottom-up thing. And it’s driven by individuals, and that seems to be driven by just how likely they are to catch something that’s nasty and infectious. So then you think, well, in the West, well, what’s the probability you’re going to catch something nasty and infectious? It’s like, well, very low. So you’re liberal. Now wouldn’t that be something, if that was actually the case? You know, the West is liberal because it has plumbing. It could easily be. I mean, plumbing is no trivial thing, right? I mean, you think of all the things you don’t want to do without. It’s like in Canada, plumbing would be number one, and then maybe heat would be number two, or maybe you’d reverse those, but it’s way the hell up there. Study two tested the parasite stress hypothesis on a sample of traditional small-scale studies. Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare. So it was pathogen prevalence, particularly one additional threat, famine, also uniquely predicted authoritarianism. Okay, so it’s famine and disease. 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. There’s the data. Now look, this is just unbelievable. So look at this. So one is authoritarian governance, right? There’s the correlation with pathogen prevalence. 0.42. So there’s another figure that I didn’t show here that shows it even. This is from study two. Study one, the correlation was 0.65. It’s like, huh, isn’t that interesting? Maybe the reason that there are authoritarian countries in the world is because there’s too many infectious diseases. And so the way to get rid of authoritarianism is to get rid of infectious diseases. So, God, who would have ever guessed that? You know, look at the… warfare was negative 0.11, right? Do you think that might be associated with authoritarianism? Malnutrition wasn’t even a very big predictor. You know, famine actually hit the equation. So famine and the probability of disease. Man. So, now let’s look at this from a sociocultural perspective. So, I spent a lot of time studying Hitler because I’m interested in ideological possession. You know, and Hitler is a great example of that because, well, because his ideology was so harsh, but it was also so attractive to people. It was so unbelievably attractive. You know, and you go and ask how the hell you account for something like that. So, I’m going to give the lights a little bit here because you guys have to be able to see this. So, alright. So, you look on the right there, right? That’s the Nuremberg parade ground. So, I hope you can see this a little bit. The left there, that’s all people, right? So, the Nazis built this parade ground in Nuremberg that was like the biggest parade ground ever built on the planet. And they’d have hundreds of thousands of people at these rallies, right? And so, you look at the order. There’s a line down the middle there where the leaders walk. And that’s at Nuremberg. And then it’s just surrounded by these masses and masses and masses of people in lines and all these orderly displays of power. And then there’s Hitler there like this. And one of the things Hitler was really proud of was the fact that he could stand like that for like eight hours. And that was willpower, as far as he was concerned. And he was a worshiper of willpower. And he bathed four times a day. So, he’s also somebody who was very much obsessed with cleanliness. Cleanliness and willpower and order. So, that’s Hitler. So, now look at that. That’s something. That’s Nuremberg again. So, this is called the Cathedral of Lights. And so, that’s the parade ground there at the bottom that I just showed you that was full of people. So, you get some idea of how big that is. Now, all those lights around that, which they called the Cathedral of Lights, was the Luftwaffe gave the Nazis all their anti-aircraft lights. And then they arrayed them around the parade ground so the whole thing was enclosed by this perfectly orderly Cathedral of Lights. And that was part of the spectacle that went along with the Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg. And then, so, you know, you look at the top left one there. Those are soldiers. Those are, I can’t remember. At the Nuremberg rallies they had all sorts of people there. They had like the shovel brigade and they were all standing there with their shovels ready to shovel for Germany. And athletes and all sorts of people arrayed so that, you know, there was this massive display of order and power. So, you look at the top left hand corner. You see all those people are lined up. It’s absolutely perfect. And then you see the same thing on the right here. Look at the organization of that. Everything’s square and perfect and everybody’s in line. And, you know, they’re all in uniforms and they’re all going like this the same way. And then when they march, the soldiers, they’re in perfect lines, in perfect squares, and they’re all going like this. It’s absolutely rigid, orderly perfection. And so the Germans, well, Germans tend to be conscientious, you know, which is part of the reason why they have excellent engineers and part of the reason why their economy is so damn powerful. But one of the downsides of conscientiousness is orderliness. Right? And so, well, you know, people think the Nazis were uncivilized, but the new evidence seems to suggest that they weren’t uncivilized at all. They were really, really, really civilized. And that if you get too civilized, too orderly, too conscientious, then things go to hell in a handbasket very, very rapidly. So, now, some of this stuff is awful, but I’m going to read it to you anyways because you need to know how this sort of thing works. Now, you know, Hitler emerged into power in the 1930s when Germany was in a real state of chaos, right? Because it was after the Second World War or the First World War. You have to remember what happened at the end of the First World War. The Spanish Flu. The Spanish Flu epidemic, which was generated in the trenches, because you can generate really intense, intensely deadly illnesses if the illness can be transmitted from one person to another very quickly. Right? Because it’s okay for the organism to kill you as long as you last long enough to get the illness to the next person. And so, if you’re all crammed together in filthy conditions, the illness can just hop from person to person, and so it can breed particularly deadly forms. That’s what happened with Spanish Flu. And then the Spanish Flu went all around the world, and it killed more people than World War I did. Okay, so that was World War I, then there was the Spanish Flu. Then the German economy fell completely apart, and there was hyperinflation, and so there was complete chaos. And then the Germans were worried that the communists were going to take over, and it was like a little bit of hell on earth. And so along came Hitler. Now Hitler was one of these orderly types. And so here’s the kind of language he used. This is from a pamphlet from 1936. The Jew is world parasite. The people of the world will recognize the Jew as world parasite, and there will be a time when there will be one united front of all people against the Jewish world parasite. And the pamphlet ends, and humanity will be freed from the most severe illness from which it suffered for thousands of years. Now you can think about this as metaphor, and of course it is metaphor, but it’s weird because it’s not precisely conscious metaphor. What seems to be happening is because Hitler is one of these people who’s hypersensitive to disgust and extremely orderly, it’s natural for his mind to conceive of categories in this way. Hitler was always talking about the Aryan people as like pure and perfect, but also as a body, you know. So the Aryan race was a body. And the problem that the Aryan race faced was that there was all these parasites that were attacking it. And it was the moral obligation of the Germans to push back against those parasitical forces. So here’s what happened in Germany. So Hitler, when he came to power, some of the things that happened in Germany, he first started a public health campaign. And so he had these vans that had doctors in them, x-ray machines and so on, and they went all over Germany screening people for tuberculosis, which, you know, was an infectious disease and also a particularly terrible one. They actually knocked down the rates of tuberculosis in Germany quite a lot. So it was like, well, let’s embark on a public health and cleanliness campaign. It’s like, well, okay, you can get rid of tuberculosis that way. So then the next thing that he did, or one of the next things that he did was he was kind of irritated about how messy and ugly the German factories were. So, you know, because they’re kind of dirty and they’ve got rats in them and mice and bugs and so on. So the next thing that they decided to do was to clean up the factories. So they had people, you know, sweeping them all up and fixing the grounds in front and planting flowers and that kind of thing. And they were fumigating them to get rid of the parasites. And the fumigation agent they used was an insecticide called Zyklon B. And Zyklon B was the gas that was eventually used in the concentration camps. And so you can see the connection there, right? It’s like a logical progression of ideas. So the next thing that happened was that they decided they’re clean up the mental asylums, right? Because, well, you know, do you really want those sort of defective people being parasites on everyone else? And should they really be allowed to reproduce? And maybe it’d be just better to, you know, euthanize them because they’re useless and they’re suffering anyways. And so that seemed to go pretty well. And then, well, then you know what happened next, you know? Then the extension, the next extension was, well, to anything that was foreign, like a foreign body. And this showed up in all sorts of weird ways. So Nazism also grew to some degree out of, like, nature worship. I don’t know how else to describe it. There were kind of nature cults in Germany in the 1930s. And they went way back. They went way back. And one of the things the nature cults were concerned about in Germany was the presence of invasive species in the German, you know, in the German ecological system. You know, we complain about that now, too, because, you know, you get plants coming over from China and places like that that, you know, spread through ecosystems and hypothetically disrupt them. But, you know, and that seems like a reasonable thing to be concerned about. But the reason I’m pointing out the connection is because you never know where these systems of ideas are going to lead, right? It’s like, oh, contamination. Okay, fair enough, you know, contamination’s real. Well, who’s responsible for the contamination? Aha! That’s where things start to get tricky, you know, when the Nazis just kept pushing the limit. And so I’ll show you some of the things that come from Hitler’s speeches or writings. This is from Mein Kampf. So, since the state did not possess the power to master the disease, the menacing decay of the right was manifest. That’s all discussed sensitivity and contamination. The masses feel that the mere fact of the Jews’ existence is as bad as the plague. Politicians tinkering around on the German national body saw at most the forms of our general disease but blindly ignored the virus. At the time of the unification, the inner decay was already in full swing and the general situation was deteriorating from year to year. So it’s all decay and disgust and contamination metaphor. The symptoms of decay of the pre-war period can be reduced to racial causes. The nation did not grow inwardly healthier but obviously languished more and more. Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of the 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. The Jew must take care that the plague does not die. If this battle should not come, Germany would decay and at best would sink to ruin like a rotting corpse. You can see in the right today an example of mortal decay. The first of May can only be the liberation of the nation’s spirit from the infection of internationalism, the restoration to health of peoples. Against the infection of materialism, against the Jewish pestilence, we must hold aloft a flaming ideal. Now that’s interesting because Hitler really liked the use of fire. Fire was a really primary element. Fire and light were real primary elements in the Nuremberg rallies. Fire has this purification element. That’s partly why they used to burn heretics at the stake. It was like that’s how you purify things with fire. And of course you do purify things with fire. Part of the reason that we cook things is because if you cook them then the pathogens die and then that’s purification. So it’s not illogical. I gave orders to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells. Really unbelievably harsh language. The only permanent way to cure diseased conditions is to disclose their causes. This is the battle against a veritable world sickness which threatens to infect the peoples. A plague which devastates whole peoples. An international pestilence. The international carrier of the bacillus must be fought. If within this community one state is infected, that infection is decisive for all alike. He also doesn’t just address this sort of language towards the sorts of people that he ended up eradicating or trying to eradicate in the camps. He also used that with regards to communists. We have a very real interest in seeing to it that this Bolshevist plague shall not spread over Europe. National socialism has made our people and therefore the right immune from a Bolshevik infection. Et cetera. You get the point. And here’s some more language from this metaphor. This is from a book, and I’ll tell you the book in a minute. This is the man who wrote this book analyzed Hitler’s writings and his speeches looking for metaphorical foundations. The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people’s pores. Here we face will of the wisps eating like poisonous abscesses into the nation. It’s all this, like you can hardly read these things without being disgusted by them, you know? It’s all language that’s associated with disgust and not with fear. And so that seemed to be very, very appealing to the Germans of the time. Horrible language. I’m going to show you a bit of a film now. We don’t have a lot of time for it unfortunately, but I’ll show you a little bit of it anyways. Oh yes, this is what I have to do. It kind of shows you how these ideas were portrayed in like what we call propaganda, in effect, by effective propaganda means. I’m going to go to where the political rounds actually start. The first time the Reichsverbeiliger came together at the front line, it didn’t look like it did today. The unholy enemy of the world, the enemy of hatred, had the international socialist party as a murderer and murderer. When the first Reichsverbeiliger heard the news, the brown battalions marched through the streets of the city, no one was allowed to enter the rear. Only the brave, brave men were left alone by the Kengstner. That was it. And what a miracle your children were. That’s on a shovel. So you get the picture. I mean, you could hardly get a more compelling representation of perfect order than that. How many thousands of people do you think there are there? All nicely arrayed into perfect squares, all moving in exactly the same way. It’s like war against pestilence. It’s a very strange way of looking at the Second World War. The evidence is increasingly strong that that’s the right way to look at it. Alright, so we’ll see you guys on Tuesday.