Discussed I wanted to I wanted to ask you a couple things about that so
You know the big five research into political differences basically shows that the Liberals are high in trade openness and low in trade
Conscientiousness, and the Conservatives are the reverse
but we fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness with the big five aspect scale and
Orderliness is strongly associated with disgust
So so right
Right right exactly it does sound a lot like Freud
but it but it also is in accordance with your observations that conservatives have neater spaces for example, so
So now in their meetings start on time yes, and yeah exactly right right so
So then the the nexus for political beliefs seems to be an openness. It's not that exploratory tendency that you talked about
exploration of ideas and creativity and low
Orderliness and so then I thought well why in the world would why would the political Nexus go across those dimensions?
Which are some relatively uncorrelated?
Then I thought and this is in keeping with your work on discussed is that it's an issue of borders
Which of course seems more or less self-evident in the wake of Trump's election when he talked about borders
But you might say
And I think this is reasonable that the conservative is someone who wants the borders between
categories to remain intact no matter what level of analysis
so its borders from the highest resolution level of cognition all the way up to the actual physical borders of
rooms towns
states
Countries all of that so the borders should be thicker and the reason they want that
Now there was a paper published in PLoS ONE. I don't know if you saw it it was a couple of years ago
It was a mind-boggling paper. It should have been like front page news as far as I was concerned and what the researchers did was
between countries and then within
provinces or states within countries they correlated the level of
of
Frequency of infectious disease with authoritarian political beliefs and
Found a walloping correlation was like 0.6
It was one of the highest by the four for those of you who don't know social scientists never discover anything
That's associated with anything else at a correlation of 0.6
Other than heritability right other than heritability yes
and so what they found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious disease the higher the probability of
Totalitarian or authoritarian political attitudes, and then they controlled for governance because one of the questions was was this top-down
authoritarianism or bottom-up authoritarianism and the answer was that it was bought him up okay, and so I thought about that in -
from two perspectives
Simultaneously at the time, okay, so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness
So it's a a fundamental sub trait, then I was reading this book that
Was called Hitler's Table Talk, and it was a it was the recordings of virtually everything
he said at dinner from 1939 to 1940 - yeah, so it's a spontaneous utterance assay and
It's full of discussions about Jews and gypsies and all the people he tormented, but what's really interesting is all the languages discussed
It's not fear so so Hitler's basic metaphor was that the Aryan
Race and country was a pure body and that it was assaulted by
Parasites right and then I remembered what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up and shook hands
What happened was that 95% of them were dead within 50 years right because of smallpox and measles and so that?
That border issue that separates conservatives from liberals. Let's say is the conservatives say
The novel is potentially contaminated. It's not so much that it's dangerous. That's different
That's fear its contaminating and the Liberals say hold on a minute if you make the borders too thick then information can't pass through
Exactly. That's the Omnivore's Dilemma right there right right and and then since we have a biological
Architecture on which our cognitive platforms are erected
We have the same attitude towards abstract information, which would be ideas that we do to?
things like food or illness right right and so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a
Contaminating idea that's right now. I'm a big fan of George Lakoff metaphor as we live by
That we we use our bodily our bodily schemata
To think about abstract things like politics and like what our policies should be about borders and immigration
There's a Canadian psychologist Mark shalour. He and his colleagues have developed what they call an account of these the behavioural immune system
Yeah, right that we don't just try to you know
microbes killed probably many more of our ancestors than did lions and tigers and bears and
So it whoever can keep themselves and their children?
From being exposed to fatal illnesses wins the evolutionary game and so a lot of that is
Judging carefully about people is he dangerous is she dangerous and that's both for sexuality for contact for all kinds of Association
So yeah in a lot of ways our emotions and our bodily interactions structure
how we think and feel about about
Well even with the black death in Europe
I mean
So the black death occurred in Europe when the Europeans started to move around the world and they brought back rats that were infected
Exactly so so what you saw there was both of those forces at work at the same time so the European expansion produced a tremendous
Interchange of ideas from all around the world that's globalization
But it wiped out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population at the same time