Good find, she does a good job of discussing both issues. Maybe she would appreciate hearing your feedback on her videos (you could make a comment or send her a message on YT?)
Thanks for posting this video Zzartemis, its been a while since I watched this one. I think JBP makes some very interesting points in the video that may be relevant to our current situation. To summarize:
- He references a study that correlates prevalence of parasitic infection in an area to authoritarian and tyrannical governments. The study demonstrates that "authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens". The study also shows that this effects people on an individual level. This is important to keep in mind because it shows that higher parasite prevalence makes individuals more authoritarian, which drives the creation of more authoritarian governments and not the other way around.
- He discusses disgust and the biological disgust mechanism and how that drives morality and judgement in the human personality. He ties disgust back to a biological survival mechanism that helps the organism avoid disease (ie people tend to be disgusted by rotten foods, outsiders who may carry disease, promiscuity, etc).
- He also ties in orderliness as an element of the personality that is connected to disgust by explaining that people who are more easily disgusted are more likely to be orderly. He uses OCD and anorexia as examples of "the disgust mechanism in overdrive" or "orderliness in overdrive"
- He then goes on to discuss Hitler and German Nazism in this context (around 59:56) based on a book called "Hitler's Table Talk". He says that the historical record suggests that in the Big Five system Hitler most likely had a high degree of Openness, Orderliness (he bathed 4 times per day), he was an admirer of willpower (proud of his ability to hold up his arm in the nazi salute for 8 hours at a time, Triumph of the Will).
- He argues that Nazism was a type of pathological orderliness on a societal scale driven by fear of chaos from the interwar period and fueled by their portrayal of the Jews as a "disease of society".
- If we accept the referenced study's hypothesis that the prevalence of disease in a geographical area drives individuals to be more authoritarian and to not only be more likely to accept but actually call for authoritarian government, does it follow that the FEAR of disease will have a similar effect. In other words is it the FEAR of or PERCEPTION of disease prevalence and not the actual prevalence that is driving the societal changes? It seems that this is a psychological and behavioral factor that the Nazis used and it appears to be in play in the current circumstances as well. In this way we can see how the Nazis were a "trial run".
- In JBPs video he gives an example of how Hitler and the Nazis began imposing order by making factories clean up, plant flowers and destroy pests like rats and insects with Zyklon B, the pesticide that was later used to murder Jews in the gas chambers. Similarly we are seeing governments all over the world attempting to impose order by spraying pesticides to "sanitize" city streets and beaches to supposedly destroy "the virus". People are being told to stand in spaced out orderly lines with masks on, to conform to seemingly arbitrary rules. In Germany there was a progression from imposing general order on the society steadily to mass murder. What is unclear to me at this time is who the eventual human victims will be. Will it be the "freedom protesters" as they suggest in the Corbett Report posted a couple days ago? So in other words will it be a general war on those who value personal freedom over "order" and control? Or will it be some racial or ethnic or religious group?
- How long will this progression take? Hitler's early rise to power began in the 1920's after WWI, but he didn't seize control until the early 1930's. My sense is that our current period more closely mirror's the 1930's. I don't see a single figure like Hitler who is seizing control, its seems to be more of an amorphous faceless consortium, which makes it harder to resist in a way. Anyway I'm interested in the question because I'm trying to think about how long it may take for things to develop or play out following the Nazi template, the "trial run". Are we on an accelerated track, or will there be a "slow" build as there was in Germany from the early 1930's to the start of WWII in 1939? My memory is that there was a gradual build of persecution against the Jews throughout the 1930's, so we we see a similar gradual change over the next 8-10 years? Or maybe the details are different since we've already seen many changes since 9/11 and before that, so maybe we're already further along on the curve?
So food for thought, if you want to call it food.
