2017 Personality 20: Biology & Traits: Orderliness/Disgust/Conscientiousness

[Music] So we're going to discuss some very rough things today. Um, maybe you're somewhat accustomed to that already, but this is particularly brutal, I think. Um, I'm going to tell talk to you about a body of research that's been produced over about the last 10 years, and I think it's per perhaps it's a body of research that might outline some of the most important things that psychologists have ever discovered. It's really changed my view, for example, on what happened in Nazi Germany, which we're going to talk about a lot today.

And you know, we've already talked a fair bit about the temperamental determinance of political belief, right? And I've made a case for you that people who are liberal or lean to the left tend to be high in trait openness and low in trait conscientiousness, especially orderliness. And people on the right tend to be low in openness and high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness. And the effect is not trivial. If you look at just voting behavior, then you get the typical sort of effect sizes that are characteristic of personality research. 2 to point 4 something like that correlations, but if you start to analyze people's political beliefs in detail, so you get your measurement up to the point where it's nice and reliable and nice and valid, then temperament accounts for a substantially higher proportion of the variance.

And so a lot of what people seem to do is one thing you could think of is that they politicize their temperament by constructing post-hoc arguments about the way the world is. But it's deeper than that you see, because we already know that you have to use filtering mechanisms in order to orient yourself in the world, right? Because the world is just too complicated for you to orient yourself without using filtering mechanisms. And the question is, well, what are the filtering mechanisms? And to a large degree, they're your temperamental proclivities because they set up your value structure, for example, and that sets up your perceptual frame.

And so what that means is that you screen the world at the level of the facts that display themselves to you because you know, you could say, well, you're a dispassionate observer of the universe of facts and that you extract out the conclusions that a reasonable person would extract out from that body of facts. But unfortunately, that's not the case, because your perceptions are biased by your temperament, and they have to be because, well, because you have to screen things. And so you screen things in accordance with your temperament. You know, you're oriented towards certain things in the world, certain values, for example. And that's perfectly reasonable because you can't do everything at once anyways, so there's no reason for you not to be directional.

The question is, what are the pathologies associated with directionality? Now conscientiousness is a very interesting trait in relationship to that because there are obvious benefits to being conscientious, right? I mean, it's the best long-term predictor of job performance, for example, and I'll outline some other data that might be more associated with industriousness than orderliness, but there's utility to orderliness as well. And we'll cover that in detail today. The question is, now the issue is that you never get a benefit without a price.

And so you can see that with agreeableness. If you're agreeable, high in agreeableness, then you're compassionate and polite, and you're empathic, and you can work well in teams. But the price you pay for that is that you don't negotiate very well on your own behalf and that you can be easily taken advantage of. And then if you're very low in agreeableness, well, then you're more competitive and more out to win, I would say. But the price you pay for that is that if you become too disagreeable, then you're likely to be sufficiently antisocial, let's say, so that you might end up in prison. So you don't get a cost without a benefit, you don't get a benefit without a cost.

So then the question might be, well, what's up with conscientiousness? Because it seems all things considered that it would be a good thing to be conscientious. Now, I can think of some exceptions to that. So conscientious people are dutiful, industrious, orderly, that sort of thing, and they tend to sacrifice the present for the future, and that's a good thing. So you save up, let's say you save up wealth, you save up labor and effort for the future. You know, don't live for today, don't be impulsive, work hard, and all that. That'll accrue you success over the long run. The downside of that is the long run has to be stable in order for that to be a reasonable strategy.

And so conscientiousness is not a good strategy, at least under some conditions in situations that are radically unstable, because in situations that are radically unstable, you might as well get what you can now. Or that's one way of looking at it, anyways. The other thing about being conscientious, if you store up wealth, say, as a consequence of hard work, then that can make you targets for people who would like to come and take your wealth.

And so it’s also one of the things that happened to many people in the 20th century, most recently in Venezuela is that, let's say you're conscientious and you save money. Well, what happens in a period of hyperinflation? Well, your money's wiped out. And so, you know, this happened to Germany, say, in the 1920s. And you got to understand what hyperinflation does to a society because what hyperinflation does is destroy the people who worked hardest to construct the society because they're the people who have been prudent and careful and sacrificed and so forth. And then when a period of high inflation comes along, poof, everything they have disappears.

And that happened in Germany during the 1920s. Now, there were a bunch of reasons for that, but so Germany was very unstable in the 1920s, right? Because of the war had just ended. They had been subjected to the Versa treaty, which was a very punitive treaty aimed against Germany. It's not like the Allies had lacked reasons to impose a punitive treaty, but nonetheless, they did. Germany lost a lot of territory, including their industrial areas.

Germany was flooded by men who were brutalized in the trenches in World War I. I mean, you could hardly imagine how terrible trench warfare is, and you can't imagine what you'd be like after a month of that, a day of that, let alone a couple of years of that. And then Germany underwent a period of hyperinflation at the same time. In the Soviet Union, the Comm Comm revolution had been successful, and so there was tremendous political upheaval in Germany during the 1920s as well.

I want to just set the stage for that. And so, but the hyperinflation wiped out all the people that were prudent and saved and left them with a terrible sense that the entire system had betrayed them, which is of course exactly what had happened. So, alright, so anyways, conscientiousness is a bit of a mystery, you know we've looked at plasticity, right already? That's a combination of extroversion and openness. I just want to walk you through again where conscientiousness is located in the big five space. So plasticity is a combination of extroversion and openness. And then stability is a combination of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness.

And conscientiousness is made out of industriousness and orderliness. Now here's some markers for conscientiousness. So here's what you're like if you're orderly or if you're industrious: you carry out your plans, you don't waste time. You don't find it difficult to get down to work, you don't mess things up, you finish what you start, you put your mind on the task at hand, you get things done quickly, you know what you're doing, you don't postpone decisions, and you're not easily distracted. That's what an industrious person is like.

We don't know anything about industrious people. We cannot figure out why they're industrious. If you read the neuropsychological literature, you might assume that people who have highly functioning prefrontal cortexes might be more conscientious because people associate the prefrontal cortex with such things as the capacity to plan. The problem with that is that we've, for example, tested now thousands of people using tests of dorsal lateral prefrontal cognitive ability, which are basically cognitive tests.

And as you know from being in this class, if you take a battery of cognitive tests and you subject them to a factor analysis, you can extract out a first factor, and that's fluid intelligence. And the correlation between fluid intelligence and conscientiousness is zero, right? So, so that's very, very strange because you would tend to think that people who were smarter might be better at planning, and maybe they are, but they're not necessarily better at implementing. And that's a, and we don't understand the difference between planning and implementation.

We don't know what that is. You got to think about it this way too though, just because you're better at planning wouldn't necessarily imply that you're better at implementing because actually one of the prerequisites for thinking abstractly is that you can detach your plans from your action, right? Because otherwise, you just automatically act out everything you planned, but that isn’t what people do. They separate out their thinking so that they can work in an abstract space that's divorced from their action, and so they can lay out multiple plans without necessarily acting them out.

But then that introduces the additional complication of having to implement, and industrious people seem to be good at implementation, but we don't know why. We've done all sorts of laboratory studies trying to see if we could get some sort of laboratory task that industrious people would do better in than non-industrious people. God, you’d think that would be a snap. We’ve probably tested 50 things and have never got anything. Differences in language use is as close as we’ve got.

You can extract out estimates of people's conscientiousness or their industriousness from the way they use language, but that's not a lot different than using self-report personality scales. It's different, but it's not a lot different. So, we've done things, for example, like imagine we present people with a row of H's, N's, M's, and U's, row after row of letters, small type, you say go through and circle all the U's. Well, obviously, you would think that that would be a task that would require diligence and industriousness.

You could time how long it took people to do it. You could see how accurate they were, correlation with conscientiousness: nothing. Zero, it's an IQ task as it turns out. And so the best we've been able to do so far maybe with industriousness is, and this is so vague it's embarrassing, is that we think that maybe industrious people find inactivity aversive.

So because they're not motivated by enthusiasm, right, for the task— that would be an extrovert—and they're not motivated by intrinsic interest in the task; that would be someone who was open. And they're not motivated by the desire to decrease anxiety or emotional pain because that's someone who's high in neuroticism, right? And they're not motivated by the desire to foster affiliative relationships or to compete because that looks like it loads on agreeableness. It's something else. It does a good job of predicting military prowess, for example.

We tested a number of people who worked in the US military in a number of different places. Conscientiousness was a deadly predictor of ranking in military performance in schools like the US Naval Academy, for example, and also on military bases themselves. And that kind of makes sense. I mean, the military is a conservative place, you'd expect people who were conscientious and dutiful to do better in a place like that. But so they're good at implementation, they're good at following orders, they're good at doing their duty.

Now we're starting to understand a little bit about the value concerns that conscientious people would have too, and so let's go through orderliness. So you can decide whether you're orderly or disorderly. Leave your belongings around that you're disorderly, obviously. If you do that, like order, well, that's a no-brainer. Keep things tidy, follow a schedule, is bothered by messy people, wants everything to be just right, is bothered by disorder, likes routine, sees that rules are observed, and wants every detail taken care of.

You can imagine all sorts of occupations where that would be useful— accounting for example, or there are people who go around and check, you know, natural gas fittings and that sort of thing by a checklist. And you know, you want someone like that in any position where careful attention to detail is absolutely vital. The question is, as we said before, what's the potential downside? So with industriousness, we don't know anything about it. Here's the problem with conscientiousness.

Okay, broadly speaking, there's no theoretical model. Nobody has any idea why people are conscientious except for the few things that I've told you. There's no neuropsychological model because the prediction would be something like people who are higher in prefrontal cortical ability, because that's associated with planning, would be more conscientious. That's not true. There's no psychological model, and that's partly because conscientiousness as a trait was extracted out of the linguistic pools that we described by factor analytic processes.

Nobody predicted that that would emerge as a fundamental trait, it just came out of the statistics. So there was no model surrounding it really, and there's no pharmacological model. We don't know how to make people more conscientious, with the possible exception of drugs like ritalin and amphetamines, you know, that seem to be able to make people focus in more. And so maybe there's an association to some degree between conscientiousness and the ability to pay attention, but when we've used attentional tasks in the lab, first of all they load on fluid intelligence, and second, they don't correlate with conscientiousness. There's another dead end.

Very, very difficult to-for it's a real mystery to me because we don't have that many good predictors of life outcome. IQ, that's a good one. Conscientiousness, that's a good one. Well, what's conscientiousness? Well, we don’t know, we don’t know anything about it, with the exception of the things I told you, and I'm going to describe some of the other things that we found out more recently.

So, okay. So what else is useful about conscientiousness? Well, it's strongly related to life satisfaction and happiness, actually. If you look at the big five, if you look at the traits that are most correlated within the big five, conscientiousness and neuroticism are negatively correlated. Make sure I got that right. The more conscientious you are, the less likely you are to suffer from anxiety and emotional pain. And I think the reason for that, but I don't know, but I think the reason for that is that by being conscientious, you stabilize your environment, right?

Because everything becomes more predictable, more scheduled, more routine. You're more likely to be successful. So if things aren't going wrong around you all the time, then you're going to be less anxious and in less emotional pain. So I don’t think that there's a direct relationship between being more conscientious and less neurotic, but I think there's one that's mediated by the environment. And this is very interesting, you see, because you'll hear all sorts of social psychologists tell you that conservatives are more likely to be high in negative emotion. They're more threat sensitive, say, than liberals.

But the weird thing about that is, is that the conservatives are not higher in neuroticism than liberals. Actually, the contrary happens to be true. The liberals are slightly more neurotic than the conservatives. And so if conservatives are threat sensitive because that's supposed to be the theory, then why the hell don't they show up as being higher in trait neuroticism? And you could say, well, they're so effective at their conservatism that they've reduced their neuroticism by organizing their environment. And to some degree, that's true, but Jesus, if your theory predicts one thing and the opposite happens to be true, you can't just post-hoc say, well, there's some other reasons we didn't pay any attention to to account for that.

Like, it's really bothered me because it does seem to be the case that the political landscape is shaped to some degree by some sort of negative emotion that's broadcast at the people who are on the other side of the political spectrum. But the evidence that it's anxiety related seems to be very, very thin. So the question is, well, what else might there be? So, well conscientiousness is related to depression and guilt. There's a researcher named Fard who looked to show, used a meta-analysis to show that conscientiousness was associated with specific emotions, an overall negative emotion, but was most strongly associated with guilt.

It was most negatively related to guilt experience, but positively related to guilt proneness. And so maybe guilt is the emotion that you feel when you don't do your duty, something like that. And that's partly why we were thinking as well. It's part of it. It's not exactly why we were thinking that conscientiousness is motivated by an inability to tolerate inactivity, but it's a finding that's along the same sort of theoretical lays out the same sort of theoretical territory. So you must know people— maybe the maybe the person is your mother or perhaps it's your father— they come over to your place or you go over there and they're just working all the time. They can't sit down and relax, they just work all the time, and they say they'll tell you if you ask them, "Well I can't stand sitting around, I have to be doing something."

And you can imagine too how that might have been selected for across the evolutionary time span. I mean, if you're living in a situation where resources are somewhat limited like we pretty much all do, you're going to want, you're going to demand of the people around you that they at least pull their fair share of the weight, right? And so you could imagine that the people who were likely to feel a negative emotion of some sort for not chipping in and doing their share or more than their share, which would be a way of indicating their value to the community, would be more likely to be well, less likely to be selected as mates and also perhaps more likely to be severely punished from time to time.

Now you might say, "Well, how do people get away with not being conscientious then?" Well, the answer to that would be there are other things that you can offer the community that are of value that aren't associated with dutifulness. And I think comedians are a good example of that. I don't believe that comedians are particularly conscientious because it's not the kind of lifestyle you would pick if you were a conscientious person, or people who go out on the road and play music, for example, because that's such an erratic lifestyle and so unlikely to be stable across any reasonable amount of time.

So maybe you could be valuable to the community by being amusing—an extrovert would do that—or by helping ensure security and safety, and maybe someone high in neuroticism would do that, or maybe you would be useful because you're really good at developing affiliative relationships, that would be someone who is agreeable, or you're creative. But the conscientious person demonstrates their value by working hard and being dutiful and contributing to the broader community, and following rules and all that sort of thing, and there may be other things they do as well.

So now here's a downside to being conscientious. If you're working in a big company, say, and there's mass layoffs, and you happen to be affected independently of your work history, the probability that you'll become depressed is quite a lot higher if you're conscientious. And some of you may be conscientious people, and you know that if you fail at something, or even if you think you might be failing at something, you're going to tear yourself apart. You're going to blame yourself for it, because conscientious people, especially orderly people, are also judgmental, right?

And so, which is something the liberals always accuse the conservatives of doing, is being judgmental and laying down their value structure on everything. But if you're conscientious, you're going to tend to assume that if things aren't going well for you, that it's your fault, and you can understand why that might be a useful supposition when it is the case that there's something you could have done that would have stabilized you or improved your chances. And you can often think of something, even if it's trivial, but it's not so good when you happen to be caught up in, you know, waves of mass movement, for example, when you're laid off by a big company, where the relationship between that happening and your own work ethic is very, very tenuous.

Nonetheless, you'll still pull yourself apart. So, alright, so let's take a look at orderliness, because we don't have much to say about industriousness because we don't know anything about industriousness, but we're starting to understand a lot about orderliness, and it's extremely interesting. So we managed to parse out orderliness roughly speaking, only managed to parse out conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness over about the last 10 years. I mean, people have had placed orderliness under conscientiousness before that, but psychometrically, it's become with the big five aspect scale, it's become more straightforward to measure.

And so, here's what we know about orderliness so far. It predicts conservatism along with low openness. Low openness is a better predictor of conservatism and high openness of liberalism than conscientiousness is, but conscientiousness is a pretty good predictor, and that's almost all orderliness. It's also associated with disgust sensitivity. Now that's a very cool thing. So, Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work on disgust sensitivity, and so has a guy named Paul Rosen, and I knew their research from really almost, I guess it's almost 30 years ago now, and I thought they were really onto something back in the 90s.

I really thought that investigating disgust would be useful because no one had ever really talked about it, hadn't conceptualized it as a separate emotion system, and we found that disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness, with the preference for order and tradition, and not with egalitarianism. It's also associated orderliness with harsh judgments of moral transgression, and this is the kicker here, I think it's associated with the function of something that psychologists have started to describe as the behavioral immune system.

And so, we're going to talk about the behavioral immune system, and then we're going to talk more speculatively, I would say, about the role that the behavioral immune system might play in political choice and also in political pathology. And I find this overwhelmingly shocking, this body of data because it's opened up a view for me of why people are prejudiced that I had no idea existed. And it makes prejudice a more terrifying thing. I was terrified about prejudice before I knew any of the stuff I'm going to tell you about today, but this makes it more terrifying because it locks it so deeply into people, you can't believe it.

And the worse than that, if you understand why it's locked so deeply into people, you also understand why it emerged as a necessity, and that's the terrifying thing. Now, so we're stuck with that now, and no one really knows what to do about it. And so, well, we'll walk through this, and you can tell me what you think. So, what's the behavioral immune system?

Alright, according to the parasite stress hypothesis, levels of parasitic infection within a region may drive variability at both individual and societal levels, okay? So they're talking about individual variability in political attitudes in personality traits, both among individuals and both in the social world, and so we’ll outline that in some great detail. The avoidance of death or disability through avoidance of infection is a major evolutionary driving force.

For example, until times that are recent in evolutionary terms, almost 50% of children failed to survive to reproductive age, with the majority of deaths being due to infectious diseases. Now, we're less cognizant of that as modern people because of the invention of antibiotics, which we are currently in the process of destroying as rapidly as we possibly can, right? Because they're given wide scale to animals and to people to far too great a degree, and all over the world, we're generating new infectious diseases that are resistant to antibiotics—all known antibiotics—and we don't have any new antibiotics in the pipeline.

So, although we've had a 60, 70 year hiatus where infectious diseases were well-controlled, they're back on the march again. And, for example, there are multiple strains that have emerged of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis that can't be treated by any known combination of antibiotics, and those are actually, tend—this is a terrible thing—they tend to be bred in hospitals, and my guess is if we did the epidemiology properly, that hospitals kill more people than they save.

And the reason they do that is because they bring people together who have diseases and they breed infectious disease of all sorts that's antibiotic resistant. It's absolutely insane. And here's another thing we do that's completely crazy. So, if you bring cattle to a feedlot, they're fed—this is particularly the case in the US, but it's also the case in Ontario—they're fattened up on corn. And the reason they're fattened up on corn is because corn is heavily subsidized as a crop, so it's damn near free. That's why there's corn syrup in everything, right?

Because it's a very low-cost source of calories. And you might say, "Well, hooray! You know, a low-cost source of calories, isn't that wonderful? Because that means that people who don't have any money get to eat," and right, fair enough. But the subsidy has made corn so cheap that you can feed it to cows to fatten them up because they get quite fat fast, they gain a lot of weight fast with corn. The problem is, cows can't digest corn, so it makes them sick, or they digest it very badly. It makes them sick. They're not designed for it; they're designed to eat grass, not corn.

And so, in order to stop the cows from dying when you feed them corn, you pump them full of antibiotics, and that's one of the things that's breeding antibiotic resistance. So, it's not very smart, but that's what we're doing, and no one really notices, and that's a very bad idea. So, you can be sure, one of the things that you can be virtually certain of is that whatever you're worried about happening terribly in the future, it will be something else that you're not worrying about that will actually cause the problem, and this could certainly be one of those things.

Local parasite types and host defense systems will typically be involved in a co-evolutionary arms race. And so, at any given time, a host's immunological defenses will be specialized to be most effective against local parasite species. To the extent that a host defense system is specialized locally, contact with outgroups will be associated with an increased risk of exposure to infectious diseases against which there is no prior immunity. Okay, I'm going to read that again because you should think about it. To the extent that a host defense system is specialized locally, contact with outgroups will be associated with an increased risk of exposure to infectious diseases against which there is no prior immunity.

Black plague Europe came in on ships, right? The Europeans started to spread out; they came back with the ships, the rats came off the ships, poof. A third of the European population died. The relevant infection-avoiding behaviors, such as avoidance of strangers and high conscientiousness in, for example, food preparation are assumed to arise from the operation of a behavioral immune system. The behavioral immune system comprises adaptive psychological response mechanisms that are sensitive to cues that might predict the presence of infectious pathogens, and which respond with appropriate cognitive processing and affective reactions.

Such a system—this is the next thing that you want to pay attention to—such a system is likely to be over-sensitive. The cost of a false positive avoiding non-existent infection is small relative to the possible cost of catching an avoidable infection. Okay, so you're walking through the grass and your snake detectors go off. They're the— the fear or the paraphobia of your eyes, the periphery is specialized for the detection of things that might threaten you, and so you could say, well, your snake—you have snake detection systems in the periphery of your vision that are hypersensitive because if you see a stick and you think snake and you jump up in the air, the cost is you jumped up in the air, so who cares that you misidentified the snake? But if there's a snake there and you don't see it and it bites you, then you're dead.

So the logic is why not set the systems that protect you to be hypersensitive because the cost of the hypersensitivity is low compared to the cost of hyposensitivity? Right? In social terms, an important component of the parasite stress hypothesis is that high levels of infection may lead to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, distrust of different others, and conformity, because such behaviors will reduce the likelihood of exposure to unfamiliar infections to which immunity has not been developed.

Why is there strict sexual morality? Because promiscuity is a prime vector for disease transmission. That's one of the reasons conservatism—as the social immune system—disgusted 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. Physically, disgust is accompanied by a distinct facial expression involving constriction of the oral and nasal cavity. So that's the disgust phase, which closes up your nose and your mouth so that things can't get in.

Evolutionary models of disgust propose that this emotion evolved to help us avoid contaminated or harmful foods or other potential sources of disease, such as sexual contact. You know, there's lots of psychoanalytic theories about sexual shame and sexual disgust, but it's much more straightforward, as far as I'm concerned, to view it as a biological battle. There's approach systems and sexual arousal systems that are involved in moving you forward towards a sexual partner, but there are disgust systems that guard you against it, and those two things are mutually regulatory.

And so you're basically stuck in the middle. It's half move forward and half be repelled. And that's partly also the balance of those two things helps you select a sexual partner. And people generally are quite selective about their sexual partners, so—and we said, well why are you selective about your sexual partners? Well, there's the obvious practical reasons, but then there's the reasons that are more tightly associated with biological protection.

And so even though we don't like to think that way, 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. Although disgust may have its origins in the protection against physical contamination, a number of studies have implicated disgust responses in moral decision-making.

There've been experiments that are specifically associated with the elicitation of disgust and the observation of the corresponding behaviors in the lab. So here's an example. So imagine I gave you a sterilized beaker and I said, well expel some saliva into it. Now wait 10 seconds and drink it, would you? Well, people—no. You see, you made a disgust face, right? Well, the question is why? Right? You know it's sterile; it was in your mouth seconds before. Why all of a sudden have you switched from it being part of your body to not being part of your body?

And also being part of your body that what wasn't ingested was part of you to being something that there's no damn way you're going to have anything to do with. So, well, so that's a good example. That's a good example of the disgust mechanism in operation. You know, distinguishing between self and non-self is a very, very difficult thing, and there's multiple mechanisms that do it, and it's definitely necessary.

Although disgust may have its origins in protection against physical contamination, a number of studies have implicated disgust responses in moral decision-making. I mean, you know that you can see the activity of the behavioral immune system in such simple things as avoiding sources of contamination on a sidewalk, right? If you see something that's disgusting, say rotting food or something like that on a sidewalk, the probability that you're going to step in it is very low.

You're going to see it and you're going to make a face, and you're going to go around it, and the reason for that is because you don't want that attached to you in any way, and the reason for that is, well, it's disgusting; it's contaminating. And the association there is that it's a place where you could conceivably pick up a disease.

Now you see pathologies of this system arise generally, obsessive-compulsive disorders. So chronic handwashing, for example, is classified as an anxiety disorder, but there is an anxiety component to it, but I don't believe that that's an accurate classification. I think that obsessive-compulsive disorder is actually a disorder of disgust because all of the behaviors, including hyper-grooming—people sometimes have trichotillomania, they'll pull out the hairs on their body. The grooming behaviors and that sort of thing seem to be more associated with the operation of the disgust system.

And almost everything about obsessive-compulsive disorder has a disgust basis. And so, one of the things that people who have OCD obsess about is that—I got a client once who was this poor woman—by the time her OCD was done with her, she built the equivalent of an airlock on her house. Not technically proficient or anything like that, and her husband and her children had to go through an elaborate decontamination process before they were allowed to step foot in the house. And one of the things she was very concerned about was that she would go out to a supermarket and touch a piece of fruit and become contaminated, and then come home and touch her children, and then they would become contaminated.

And so, well, she ended up in the hospital, and she was divorced. I just did in her life, you know? And people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, you know, they'll wash their hands until the soap is gone, like a whole bar of soap, right? And you can often tell who they are because their hands are shiny from washing too much. And they’ll shower—they can't get out of the shower. They'll shower until the hot water is completely gone. And you know, so their self-cleaning mechanisms, so to speak, have gone seriously astray.

And the way you treat them is by exposing them to things that are disgusting and contaminating. I had a client with OCD once. He was quite the character. And, um, I—one of the things I had him do was we would look for things on the internet, pictures of things that really disgusted him. It's not that much fun, by the way, treating someone who has OCD because I'm rather disgust sensitive, and so that was also rather hard on me. So, anyways, we would look for things on the internet that he really didn't like, and then I'd print them out and have him put them on his fridge, which he did not like at all.

And he would, he had a bunch of other problems and we got along quite well, but for a long time—I treated him for about three years—he would phone me like three or four times a day because he had obsessive-compulsive disorder and just swear at me like mad. You know, he just swore. I didn't get these messages. He’d phone me, and he was just so mad at me because I’d have him put these things on his fridge, you know? And so he'd curse and swear and yell at me, and then two minutes later, he would phone and apologize and say he was really sorry and hoped I would continue to see him. God, that just went on forever.

But I felt sorry for the poor guy, you know? He eventually ended up getting a puppy. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. See you agreeable people? Oh, a puppy! God, unbelievable, eh? Yeah, anyways, that was good for him because he had to go around and clean up after the puppy, but that poor puppy, it was quite dominant. And, oh, the things that happened to that poor guy.

So the puppy would dominate him, so he’d take it outside to take for a walk, and he wasn't a very skilled person in many, many ways. He had a very large number of severe impediments, and so he really liked this puppy. He didn't have any friends or anything like that, and he was supported by his aged mother. And God, it was just a catastrophe. And he'd go outside and try to walk the puppy, and the puppy would just sit down, right? Because it was doing dominant stuff, and he didn't know how to overcome it.

And then these crazy people from across the way, who styled themselves as animal rights activists, started to harass him. He and they phoned up his mother and told him that if they— if she didn't take the dog away from him, that they were going to come over and do terrible things to him. And then he got harassed on the street, and then he went to a park with his dog, and they came up to him and pushed him on the car and swiped his dog and ran off to the SPCA and dumped it there. And he had to move away from his apartment. And God, it was just an absolute catastrophe.

They had plenty of sympathy for that damn dog but no sympathy whatsoever for the guy, you know? It was really something. Anyway, the story ended happily. Weirdly enough, he got a job with a woman who used to be a psychiatric nurse who was training dogs, and she gave him a little job setting up the dog training thing. And then he got to learn to train his dog, he lost like—he was a thin guy to begin with—he lost like 30 lbs trying to learn how to take care of this puppy. It was just—I thought he was going to die, but there’s no way he was going to give up that dog.

And so, anyways, OCD, it’s quite the bloody catastrophe. So, and it's a good thing for someone who has OCD to have a dog, right? Because dogs are messy, and so there are all sorts of things that are messy about them, but you have to kind of live with the mess. Like you have to live with the mess if you're going to have a child or if you're going to have a partner of any sort, you know? You can't let the orderliness part of you get the upper hand so terribly that it's impossible for you to live.

That's what happens to girls who have anorexia, by the way. You know how you get—there's this idea with regards to anorexia that it's often high-achieving girls who have it? Well, it’s hyper-conscientious girls. They get so disgust sensitive they can't stand their own bodies. And so, for example, then they start being able to look at their bodies properly, and so what they do instead of looking at their whole body, they lose the ability to do that. They only can see parts of their body, and then they can't tell the difference between a part that's healthy and well-shaped and a fat part.

And so anything that's—what would you call it? Of dubious anything that's hard to measure becomes impossible to see. So, I had an anorexic client at one point. Wasn't a very big woman, maybe about this big and, and thin? Yes, obviously. And so I was trying to work with her on her body perception disorder. And one of the things I did was, so I had her come and sit beside me. So I was sitting like this, and so was she. And I said, well, you look at our two thighs, which one is bigger?

And like mine was like 40% bigger, and she said, well, I can't tell. They look the same to me. And so I said, okay, this is what we're going to do. I let her do it. I said, you take a pencil and I'll sit on a piece of paper and you just trace my thigh, okay? And then you can put that piece of paper underneath your thigh and trace it, and then you can look at the difference. Well, so I had her do that, and she looked at the two pieces of paper, and she couldn't believe it.

She could not believe that that was actually the case because her perception had become so disordered that it was impossible for her to see the real shape of her body. And we would go outside and I would ask her, you know, is that person thin? Is that person fat? And with other people, she could tell, but with her own body, not a chance. She couldn’t see it properly at all. And so there’s a real obsession with purity among women who have anorexia.

No, they'd like to starve themselves right down to the bone because the bone is sort of pure and white and there’s no excess tissue on it. And so anorexia also looks like a disease of disgust, and so it’s very, very difficult to she—it’s very, very difficult to treat. She thought in very black-and-white terms. One of the things I had her do at one point was, she has music—and she said, “I really like a song or I don’t like it at all.” And I said, okay, well, you’ve got a music collection; why don’t you go through like 20 of those songs and rate them on a scale from 1 to 10? And she couldn’t do it.

It was either yes or no, orderly, right? The boundaries around the categories were absolutely segregated, and her apartment tended to be decorated in black and white, and she was hyper-clean, you know? So everything in the apartment was extraordinarily orderly, well put away. She couldn't stand to see anything disgusting on the counters and that sort of thing, so very, very difficult disorder to treat, anorexia. Very, very difficult.

So, and you know, you can see how it can go wrong because food, you know, when you’re eating, your disgust systems are on alert. You know, like you want the thing you want to eat, and you absolutely don’t want the thing you don’t want to eat. And your mouth is very sensitive to that sort of thing, you know, to the texture and all of that. And your sense of smell is very sensitive to that sort of thing because you know, you don’t want to eat anything that’s contaminated or poisonous.

So, it’s another situation like sex where the reward system is driving you forward toward engaging in a consumatory behavior, but the disgusted system is right there modulating and moderating it. And there's a tension between those two things that's always at work with the anorexic types. The disgust sense; the disgust system gets the upper hand.

So she was also extraordinarily judgmental and perfectionistic, but that goes along with it because orderly people are judgmental and perfectionistic. And so, if you're a perfectionist, often what that means is you have very high levels of orderliness and very high levels of neuroticism, and those two things chase each other around like mad because you can't stand the idea that you would make a mistake, and you get anxious about it as well.

So then you get stuck in this perfectionistic mindset and you can't get out of it. So inducing disgust responses, whether via a foul odor, a disgusting work environment, or recalling a disgusting experience, led individuals to assign harsher punishments to others who had committed moral transgressions.

So you describe a moral transgression, maybe breaking a law, you expose persons—the people in the experiment—to some disgusting stimulus, and then you have them—you ask them about the probability that the person was guilty, and then also how long they should be imprisoned or how much they should be fined. And if you get the people disgusted, then the probability, especially if they’re orderly, then the probability of assigning a harsh punishment goes upward.

So if you’re ever in court, don’t disgust the judge. Right? That’s part of the deal. Harsher moral judgments can even be induced following the consumption of a bitter drink because bitter substances are often poison or poisonous substances are often bitter, and that induces a disgust response as well. Although you can overcome that; coffee is bitter, olives are bitter. So you can retrain your system to accept those things as food, but it's not particularly easy.

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. Concerns about cleanliness, and interesting. So, some of you may know I was at McMaster University a couple of weeks ago, and there were a bunch of protesters there. And I went up to meet the protesters because I kind of wanted to see what would happen.

There were a bunch of them around the end of the back of the room, and I offered to shake their hands, and mostly what I got was disgust faces, you know? And that's not good. That's not good. So here’s something to know too—here’s a good predictor of whether or not you’re going to get divorced. You go into the therapist's office and you talk, the two of you talk, and you roll your eyes. That'll predict if you roll, if you're rolling your eyes at your partner, you're going to divorce them.

Why? It's a disgust response, right? It’s something like, I'm lifting you up with my eyes and throwing you into the garbage. It's something like that, but eye rolling is a great predictor of the probability of divorce. So, it’s something to keep in mind with regards to your relationships. Like if you’re starting to develop some contempt or some disgust, you bloody well better get on that right away because that’s a bad road to go down.

And so, well, so then you have to do whatever you have to do not to go down that road. Yeah, so see, one of the things I think that’s happening on the political landscape, and like we know, for example, that the more authoritarian politically correct types are high in agreeableness and high in orderliness, so that’s a very interesting combination.

And I think what’s happening is that they’re very rapidly dividing the world into contemptible predator-like—snakes often elicit a disgust response, right? A predator will elicit a disgust response, like a crocodile or an alligator, a snake, or something like that. And so it’s the predator response that’s being evoked to the people who are on the other side of the political spectrum, roughly speaking.

And so they’re categorized as like contempt predators, something like that, and the people that are being protected are like innocent victims. It’s—that’s how it appears, and that’s very, very dangerous to have happen, as I'll show you. 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, tend to increase self-reported political conservatism. Such a finding is consistent with the notion that purity tends to be valued more highly 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-reported disgust sensitivity, more conservative political views have also been associated with stronger physiological reactivity to disgusting images. There's a lawyer, Martha Nussbaum, who’s also a political philosopher, who says that we should eliminate the effect of disgust on our political theorizing. That disgust shouldn't be something that's considered as a valid means of information from which you might derive political conclusions.

So if I find your behavior disgusting, or if you find my behavior disgusting, according to Nussbaum, that should be independent. You should try to make that rationally independent of your political views. I'd like to believe that, but there's a problem, and this is the problem that we're going to go through. You can't mock about with these underlying systems. You can't just say, ignore the reports of your disgust system, because it isn't like your emotions are insane and irrational, and you have the rationality on top of that that's guiding you properly.

That isn't how it works. All of these underlying biological systems guide you, and to the degree that you're— the degree to which you're guided properly is a consequence of the balance of the action of these underlying biological systems, but the balance is very complexly maintained. You need a disgusted system because if you didn't, you'd eat something that would kill you, and then you would die. Or you’d do something stupid and you’d end up like you’d get cut, and it would be dirty and you wouldn't clean it, and then you would die.

So, the idea that you can somehow just rationalize the output of the disgust system and decontaminate your political viewpoints as a consequence seems to me to be very, very naive. Not that there's no danger to it because there's plenty of danger to it. In addition, 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, refs 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.

Jo has done a lot of that work. Jo’s supervisor is Mahzarin Banaji. And Mahzarin Banaji is a known Marxist. And so this is another place where political ideology contaminates, as far as I'm concerned, scientific inquiry because Jo's work on let's say resistance to change is predicated on the idea that the conservative inclination to support the maintenance of already existing structures is precisely equivalent to supporting an unjust system, and that's not a reasonable thing to do if you're looking at these sorts of things from a scientific perspective. You don't get to make judgments like that, but they're built into the questionnaires.

So 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. 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. There is no left-wing authoritarian psychological scale. We're trying to derive one right now, but the reason for that is that after World War II, the social science community was responding to what had happened in Nazi Germany, and perfectly appropriately, and they examined right-wing authoritarianism as a consequence.

But they never examined left-wing authoritarianism. Because the prevailing, what would you call it, political landscape of the time prescribed, made the idea that there could be left-wing authoritarianism sufficiently incorrect politically so that it was never analyzed from the perspective of social science, even though the evidence for left-wing authoritarianism, say by the end of the 1940s, was absolutely overwhelming. Right? By the 1930s, people were reporting on what had happened in the Soviet Union. You know, the forced dekulakization, for example, of the agricultural industry in the Soviet Union, and the consequent deaths of several million people in the Ukraine was all extraordinarily well documented.

These core facets of conservatism are also closely related to the 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. Importantly, the motivational basis of these two dimensions appears to vary independently from one another, with an individual's overall political attitudes on a left-right spectrum emerging from their relative balance. These motives are also strongly rooted in basic personality characteristics such that preferences for order and tradition are associated with higher levels of orderliness.

Now, you might think that's obvious, right? Well, obviously, orderliness is associated with preference for order. That's not the issue. The issue is whether or not you can measure it, right? That's the issue. So, these things seem self-evident, but it's taken a very long time to build up the instruments that allow them to be measured in such a way that you can also start to look at the correlates and the underlying psychophysiology. So, it's by no means obvious. Higher levels of orderliness, an aspect of conscientiousness, and politeness, an aspect of agreeableness, as well as lower levels of openness and intellect, in contrast, preferences for egalitarianism are uniquely associated with compassion, an aspect of agreeableness.

So—and that's exactly what we found when we were looking at political correctness, which is primarily predicted not by openness or by conscientiousness but by agreeableness. Political conservatism can therefore be thought of as a social immune system reflecting the extension of pathogen avoidance mechanisms to the integrity of the social system borders, boundaries, right? That's the orderly person. We'll keep borders between concepts, we'll keep borders between people, we'll keep borders between towns, we'll keep borders between political ideas and religions and states. Why? Because we don't want the terrible things flooding in from everywhere.

Now the liberal will say, "Wait a minute, all the things flooding in from everywhere aren't terrible." They have great utility, and that's true, but the problem is they're both true. They're both true at the same time because—and we’ll document that as we move forward. So then the question is, well, how do you know when things should be more open and when things should be more closed? And the answer to that is, well, you better have a chat with everyone and find out what they think because it's a balance of probabilities.

There's no way of determining a priori whose position is correct. Just as the behavioral—yes—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. It has been reported, for example, 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. How do you purify something? How about with fire? That's something to keep in mind as we move towards the more political expressions of this. And the thing about something that's disgusting is you don't isolate it exactly, you destroy it, right?

It's the thing you do with rats and insects, for example, is destroy them, right? And you do that with poison, you do it with fire, you do it by cleaning things up, and you do that because, well, the rats eat all your crops and they carry disease and all of that, or they infest your food, which, you know, I don't know what proportion of today's food production is eaten by rats and insects, but it's still a huge proportion.

So according to the parasite stress hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. Now, who the hell would have ever guessed that? This is where you see the real utility of a genuine social science because it’s by no means self-evident, this hypothesis, and this paper that I'm going to discuss with you right now just blew me away when I read it. I thought it should have been front-page news across the world, but it didn’t really attract that much attention.

Recent cross-national evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but there are inferential limitations associated with that evidence. We report two studies that address some of the limitations and provide further tests of the hypothesis. Study one revealed that parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals’ authoritarian personalities. So that's very interesting. So, the more parasitic and transmissible diseases in a particular locale, the higher the probability that people when measured at the individual level held authoritarian attitudes, because you might say, well, there's parasite prevalence that produces a repressive government, but it doesn't really affect people at the level of personality.

And that's not what was found in the studies; it was reversed. The parasite prevalence of infectious diseases made people more authoritarian, and that was what was driving the more authoritarian government. So here's something cool. Who knows about this, right? So how do you fight authoritarian governments across the world? You get rid of infectious disease, that could be it. That could be the key. So, and then again, that is by no means a self-evident hypothesis.

Study one—the parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals’ authoritarian personalities, and, effect statistically mediated the relationship between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance—parasites, personality, authoritarian state, that's the causal pathway. This mediation result is inconsistent with alternative explanations for previous findings. To address further limitations associated with cross-national comparison, study two tested the parasite stress hypothesis on a sample of traditional small-scale societies.

Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare. One additional threat, famine, also uniquely predicted authoritarianism. 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.

Here’s the effect sizes. Look, they're mind-boggling. So first, that authoritarian governance, one path prevalence—the correlation is .42. .42, right? There’s malnutrition, there’s warfare—it’s actually negatively correlated with warfare, .26. So if you square that, that’s about 8% of the variance; that’s about 16% of the variance. So those are walloping effect sizes, right? That effect size is about—so that’s 16%.

The typical effect size for a personality variable is about .2 to .3, so let’s say .25. So that’s about 7% of the variance; that’s 16% to 177% of the variance. You almost never see a correlation of that size, so it’s an absolutely remarkable piece of work and it has all sorts of terrifying implications. So, the question is now, why would you have such a powerful immune system, behavioral immune system, disgust system?

Okay, so let’s look at some little-known facts about the history of North America. I don't know how many of you guys know this, but it’s worth knowing, okay? So, what was the pre-Columbian population of the Americas? The answer is, we don't really have any idea. The estimates vary from 10 million to 100 million, with an emerging consensus of 50 million. Well, it’s halfway, okay? We don't know; we could be out by one order of magnitude, but a fair number of people.

So what happened to all the Native Americans? Well, that's easy—they all died. Why? Because when the Spaniards came, see there were no diseases in the New World, except for maybe syphilis. There's some evidence that syphilis was transmitted back to Europe as a consequence of contact with North and South America, but there were almost no diseases in the Americas. And that's partly because there were no big cities and also because even where there were, not compared to Europe, and also because where there were big cities in Europe, people lived close with animals, and there was lots of movement of disease pathogens back and forth between the animals and the human beings, and so lots of Europeans died as a consequence of that, like huge numbers of them, especially from diseases say like smallpox or measles.

And but the Europeans built up a whopping immunity to all these diseases, including influenza, and then they came to the Americas with their diseases, and bang, it killed all the Native Americans. It figured 90% of them. So, here's some of the statistics: what were the diseases that wiped them out? Influenza, bubonic plague, smallpox, measles. They even—chickenpox was deadly to the Native Americans.

So, from 1492 to 1650, there was a death toll of 90%. So, you know, when the Puritans landed in the US at Plymouth Rock, that was a long time after the Spaniards had landed in the more southern areas. The Indians, the Native Americans there, they were desperate to see them because they didn't have enough people to take off their crops; they didn't have enough people left. Imagine, nine out of ten people died— that's everyone, right? You're done at that point.

And so there were 20 to 25 to 30 million people in Mexico before the arrival of Cortés. 50 years later, there were 3 million. So, and the Aboriginal population in Canada—estimates, this is accepted by the Canadian government. No one really knows, and the estimates do vary substantially. There might have been 500,000 people in Canada in 1450, and that decreased by 80% after contact with the Europeans.

There's the population collapse in Mexico, 16th-century population collapse in Mexico. So, the 1545 and 1576 epidemics appear to have been hemorrhagic fevers caused by an indigenous viral agent and aggravated by unusual climatic conditions. The Mexican population did not recover to pre-Hispanic levels until the 20th century—absolutely catastrophic consequences.

So then you look at that and you think, well, is it really all that surprising that people have evolved extraordinarily powerful immune systems, disgust responses, and behavioral immune systems? I mean this is no joke; it’s absolutely catastrophic. So, now I want to talk to you a little bit about Hitler.

So when I was sorting some of this stuff out, trying to look at this disgust sensitivity literature and then understanding finally that it was associated with orderliness and that orderliness was associated with conservatism, I was also reading a book by Adolf Hitler, which was called "Hitler’s Table Talk." It's a very interesting book. And Hitler had the secretaries at his dinner tables from 1939 to 1942, and they basically took shorthand notes of what he said spontaneously.

And so there’s a book that you can buy called "Hitler's Table Talk" that is nothing but a presentation of his spontaneous utterances across that time period. Now, Hitler was a very strange person. He was very high in openness surprisingly enough, but also extremely high in orderliness at least that's what you can infer from reading the historical data. So, he bathed four times a day, for example. He was also a great admirer of willpower, so which is something that's also associated with conscientiousness and orderliness.

So he was very proud of his ability to stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car and his ability to withstand—you know, what would you call them—trying circumstances by willpower alone. One of the most famous film documentaries that was made in the Nazi era was called "Triumph of the Will," right? "Triumph of the Will." That was by Leni Riefenstahl. I’m not saying that quite right. You can look at that on YouTube; it's a very interesting film—a horrifying film, but a very interesting one.

Well, if you're wondering about orderliness, I mean take a look at that man. So that's Nuremberg, right? That was the biggest rally ground ever made in human history. And Hitler was unbelievably good at spectacle. Look at how absolutely perfectly ordered that is. There’s God only knows how many people there—several hundred thousand, because they could all fit on the parade ground at the same time—all in absolutely perfect formation, orderliness gone out of control.

It's interesting because people think about Nazism—Nazism as a descent into barbarity, right? But what it looks like is a disease of civilization. That's a whole different thing because conscientiousness predicts—be—it predicts success in complex industrial societies, and this is actually conscientiousness gone out of control on the orderly end of things. And why? Well, the '20s, the World War I, that was plenty chaotic, and there was a huge famine after World War I, right?

The Spanish influenza killed more people than the war did, and it actually mutated in the trenches. Because if people are packed close together, then viruses or other pathogens can be very deadly. Because you don't have to live very long to give it to her. If people are dispersed, then the virus or the bacteria can't afford to kill you fast because then it dies too. And so if you pack people together, then you can breed unbelievably virulent forms of pathogens, infectious pathogens.

And that's what happened in World War I. Packed all the men together in unsanitary conditions, poof, up came Spanish influenza, went all around the world after World War I and killed more people than the war. So—and after the war, after World War I, of course, Germany descended into utter chaos. And so what happens when you descend into chaos? And the answer is there's a corresponding call for order, and that was answered by the— that was answered by Hitler and the National Socialists.

And Hitler was very good at listening to the German population. And what they were demanding in the period of chaos was order, and so that was exactly what he decided to provide—spectacles of order—which is exactly what you’d expect from someone who is really high in openness and high in orderliness, right? Spectacles of order. And Hitler was also extremely interested in art, but he categorized art into like proper hygienic art and improper chaotic art, and he often would have art exhibits at the same time of the approved art that he approved of.

So those were in the official museums, let's say, and then there would be a corresponding exhibit of degenerate art, and that was art that was associated with movements like expressionism, for example, which has garish colors, and it’s very emotionally expressive. Hitler sort of preferred kind of eroticized Greco-Roman representations of heroic people, you know? That was the Nazi aesthetic, essentially.

So there are some more examples of order, right? Look at that; everything, everything geometric, everything regular. The border is completely well defined; everything here is squares—everyone’s lined up perfectly, everything is uniform, right? Look at—there's pathways between the rows of people. This is again at Nuremberg, perfect order along with his plans for the world capital, Germania.

Albert Speer, that was the Nazi architect, made the plans for the world's largest stadium which was to be located on the Nuremberg rally grounds, derived from the Panathenaic stadium of Athens. It would have offered 400,000 seats. It was to get the shape of a horseshoe, planned dimensions, 800 m wide, 450 m high, 100 m with a building area of 350,000 square meters. The laying of the foundation stone was on 9th of July, 1937. It was to be finished for the party congress of 1945. In '38, the construction began with the excavation, it was stopped in '39, but during the whole war, the casting pit had to be kept dry from entering groundwater.

After the war, the northern half of the pit filled up with water and is today called Silver Sea, Silver Lake. The southern half was used to deposit the debris of the destroyed downtown Nuremberg. That's Nuremberg at night. So what Hitler did because he was very good at using fire and light as display—so those are—the curtain there. So you see there’s the Nuremberg buildings that we saw in the last photograph. Those are the search lights from the Nazi Air Force, so they had the marade all the way around the grounds there and pointed straight up so that the nighttime rallies were illuminated by a cube of light, very effective.

What display, artistic display of orderliness. Now here’s where things get seriously ugly. So this is a pamphlet from I think 19—yeah, 1944. And the pamphlet is called “Jew as World Parasite,” so this is something I found on the net; I’ll share it with you. Very rare original late 1944 anti-Jewish Third Reich pamphlet. This varies scarce 6 by 8 and 3/4 20-page soft cover booklet by EML Rifer and Eric Schwarzburg. It was published in 1944 in Frankfurt.

It was published at a time when a great percentage of the European Jews had already been deported to concentration camps in the East, perhaps to justify what had happened to the Jews since the Nazi seizure of power. The authors compare the Jews with parasites, the most unpleasant forms of life on Earth, and that it is only natural and just to fight against them to free humanity from them for the sake and survival of mankind. This is from the pamphlet.

The people of the world will recognize that Jew is world parasite, and there will be a time when there will be one united front of all people against the Jewish world parasite. The pamphlet ends, “and humanity will be freed from the most severe illness from which it suffered for thousands of years.” Here’s what happened in Nazi Germany. So when Hitler came to power, he was very interested in public health campaigns. And so he set—he formulated a number of policies, including formulating these vans that went around screening people for tuberculosis.

At the same time, he announced a policy to beautify and purify Germany, and so he encouraged the factory owners to clean up the factories, to get rid of the rats and the insects, and to plant flowers and so forth in front, right? So it was cleanliness and beauty. They used Zyklon B as the agent for disinfecting the factories. Zyklon B was the gas that was used in the gas chambers.

So, Hitler started out by getting rid of the rats and the parasites and the insects in Germany along with his public health campaign. Then he moved into the insane asylums and started a euthanasia campaign, and then he moved outside into the broader political sphere and started to target the people that he didn't consider pure as parasites, capitalizing on the behavioral immune system and people's intrinsic sense of disgust.

And so I'm going to show you some of the propaganda that did that so that you know how sort of thing works. Okay, so this is from Richard Kingsbury who wrote a book called "Hitler's Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy, and History." So we’ve already sort of discussed the idea this is sort of an archetypal idea grounded in biology, you know, that you're run in some sense on this underlying biological platform of deeply rooted hypothalamic systems, and the limbic systems, and so forth, that—and that you're a collection of those underlying systems organized at some higher order level, while those underlying systems manifest themselves in fantasy.

So for example, if you're hungry, you're going to get a fantasy about going to get something to eat. And if you're lonely, you’re going to get a fantasy about someone that you’d like to be with, and so forth, because the fantasy is part of the manner in which these underlying biological motivation systems think. Okay, so what do you think? How do you think and talk if you're possessed by disgust? Okay, the state—this is—these are from Hitler's utterances.

The state did not possess the power to master the disease. The menacing decay of the Reich was manifest. The masses feel that the mere fact of the Jew’s 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.

The nation did not grow inwardly healthier, but obviously languished more and more. It's all disease metaphor; it's all disease metaphor. The symptoms of decay of the pre-war period can be reduced to racial causes. 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, decay—and at best would sink to ruin like a rotting corpse. You can see in the Reich today an example of mortal decay.

That is not the speech of someone who's possessed by anxiety; that's the speech of someone who's possessed by disgust. They’re not the same thing. The 1st 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. Another purification metaphor, the restoration to health of our people must start from the restoration to health of the body politics.

So that was Hitler's essential metaphor. The nation was a body, right? It was a pure body; it was a pure Aryan body, and it was being assaulted by parasites that were subjecting it to disease and decay. That's the fundamental metaphor at the bottom of his political message. I gave the order to burn down to the raw flesh. Jesus, the ulcers, the poisoning of the wells—yeah, pretty rough, man. 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 basilis must be fought.

It is within this community one state is infected that infection is decisive for all in Europe. Europe, no common life of the nations is possible when amongst their number there are some who are suffering from a poisonous infection and who openly profess their desire to infect others with the same disease. We shall have a very real interest in seeing to it that the bulist plague does not spread over Europe. National socialism has made our people and therefore the Reich immune from a bevic infection.

I’ll read you one more, although obviously you get the point. Table seven is called the national body is being consumed. The Jew is and remains the typical parasite of sponger who, like a noxious bilious, keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. Alright, now I want to show you a brief film, and you can look here at the—what would you call it—the artistic and propagandistic transformation of the idea of order into a politicized message.

And the thing that’s so interesting about Hitler's particular brand of fascism, it wasn't precisely a—it wasn’t precisely a movement that was predicated on ideas like communism. Communism was predicated on ideas, but the Nazis went at it with something that wasn’t really in the realm of ideas; it was more in the realm of like embodied disgust and image. And so it was also very much more difficult to fight against from the ideational perspective. You know? It wasn’t a well-developed intellectual movement; it was an embodied movement.

And Hitler was extraordinarily good at using the metaphors and the images, and then his incredible capacity for propagandistic display to fire people up at a level of analysis that they weren’t really even aware of. So let's take a look at this film. [Music] For [Music] the campaign in Poland gave us the opportunity to really get to know the Jewish people. Nearly 4 million Jews live here in Poland, but they won’t be found among the rural population nor have they suffered from the chaos of war as has the native po—they set it out indifferently in the gloomy streets of the Polish [Music] ghetto.

Within an hour after the German occupation, they were back in business. [Music] We Germans had a look at the Polish ghetto 25 years ago. This time our eyes are sharpened by our experience in the last few decades. Unlike in 1914, we no longer see just the most grotesque and comical of these questionable ghetto figures. This time we recognize that there’s a plague here—a plague that threatens the health of the Aryan peoples. Richard Wagner once said, “The Jew is the demon behind the corruption of mankind, and these pictures prove it.” [Music]

Jewish home life reveals remarkable lack of creative ability to civilize. In plain language, Jewish dwellings are filthy and neglected. These Jews aren’t at all poor. After decades of business, they've hoarded enough to acquire decent comfortable homes, but they live for generations in the same dirty and bug-ridden dwellings, untroubled by their surroundings. They go right on with their prayers—the bobbing motion is part of the ritual for reading Jewish scriptures. [Music]

Part of Jewish so-called community life takes place in the [Music] street—the connection with trade. You know, you see what’s going on in the, okay, so with the juxtaposition of those two films, you see the juxtaposition of order versus chaos. And so part of the order versus chaos archetype obviously is rooted in the dichotomy between disgust and purity. It’s not the only—it’s not the only axis of opposition between order and chaos, and then so this is all invocation of archetypal chaos, and it starts with the use of the disease imagery and then also the use of music composed in a minor key, and threatening and low, right?

So that's all josed together, and then they switch to trade again with the undertone of threat, and it seems to me that they’re using the image to continue the metaphor that, in this situation, trade is associated with contamination rather than with productivity, right? And so you can see, obviously, a dichotomy with regards to trade because when you're taking goods from someone else, the question is, are the goods of high quality and useful? And are they useful? Are they something that is going to introduce a foreign element or an unexpected element into your