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