Disgust Sensitivity and Totalitarianism and the Immune System – Professor Jordan Peterson

You think about a totalitarian state you think about the Nazis and their goose-stepping.  What's happening is that every single person in the military becomes an identical unit right a unit they're all uniform and they're all in some sense imitating the the dictator and in an absolutely perfect.  The dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire population.  That's order order and one of the things we've discovered that's really interesting is that disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness.  That's associated with conscientiousness.  One of the things about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive and thus a lot of his hatred for non-aryans.  Imagine inside the Aryan box it was all uniform outside it was all parasites and predators. That was a manifestation of disgust not of fear.  It's a whole different thing.   If you read Hitler's table talk which is a collection of his spontaneous dinner speeches from 1939 to 1940 – it's a very interesting book you see that his metaphor for the Aryan race was a body a pure body assaulted by parasites or predators and that he was trying to erect a border around it to keep all of that away.  So it's an immunological disgust like metaphor and there's some recent work that was published about three years ago. That brilliant study should have got much more attention.  It  showed that if you went around and and sampled political attitudes in different countries or even within the same country what you found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases the higher the probability of totalitarian political attitudes at the local level.  You can imagine well what happens if there's infectious diseases is you want to put borders around everything you don't want free movement between ideas or people because that's partly how the disease spreads.  You're going to have much more strict sexual rules for example because that's a great way for diseases to be transmitted.  Before Hitler went on his rampage against the non-aryans he cleaned up all the factories.  He went in there and fumigated them.  It was part of the law he went on a public health campaign to get rid of tuberculosis. He got rid of the bugs in the factories as well he used zyclon B.   That was an insecticide and that's the gas that he used in the gas chambers eventually.  Thus first it was the bugs in the rats and then it was people.  Then it was euthanasia that was the next move.   Forced euthanasia and the the rationale for that was compassion by the way just so you all know.  It's merciful to put these people who are burdensome to themselves and their families and the state who are living second-rate lives its merciful to euthanize them.  That was a huge campaign in Germany.  It was after that that the more racial purifications began and so that's the disgust thing that's unbelievably important.   Lots of times people think that conservatives are more anxiety sensitive than liberals and that's why they're closed in terms of their ideas but that doesn't look right.   First of all conservatives are less neurotic than liberals.  Although the effect isn't that big so it doesn't look and they actually are there how they score higher in measures of well-being.   The most unhappy people are liberal men by the way.  So but you know people are often accused if they're conservative of being fearful and that's why they you know suppress other people's viewpoints.  But that doesn't look right it's low openness and high orderliness and that looks like it's associated with disgust and that looks like it's associated with something called the extended immune system which is the proclivity of people to to keep themselves away from potential sources of contamination. It's really terrifying because one of the things people often said about Germany was that you know it was a very civilized country and yet it descended into barbarity.   However conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success and so you could say well conscientious societies are more civilized but they're also more orderly and that makes them more disgust sensitive.   What it might have easily might have easily been in Germany was that it was an excess of civilization rather than its lack that produced exactly these consequences.  That's a far more frightening proposition and one that I believe much more likely to be true/   Hitler bathed four times a day and he was also an admirer of willpower.  He could stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car.  The thing about conscientious people is they're very willpower oriented and so if you're unfortunate enough to be sick chronically in the house of someone who's conscientious especially if it's a mental illness you're more likely to relapse because the conscientious person is going to be judgmental.  They're gonna say to you if you're schizophrenic they're gonna say well if you just organize yourself and get up in the morning and try a little harder you could overcome this.   Which is of course true except you can't because you're schizophrenic.  The pressure put on you by the anger and the contempt is going to increase the probability that you'll relapse.  Orderly people are very judgmental and you know orderliness is very highly associated with things like anorexia.  Anorexic is basically someone who's so disgust sensitive that they become unable to tolerate their own body.  They see it as a source of corruption and imperfection which of course is exactly right it is and it's very difficult thing to maintain order around so you  

NOTE:  You must be careful to apply the definition of "conservative" correctly to sucessfully utilize the theoretical framework put forth by Peterson in this video.