Borsalino Test #36: The politics of disgust
Note: I am releasing myself from the obligation to write bi-weekly. I will publish more sporadically now, perhaps with breaks in between. I will be focusing more on the quality of my writing, and dive into less familiar subject areas. Thank you for reading.
The politics of disgust
A theory of personality
Knowledge of personality traits seems fundamental to the problem of how to live. But the literature on the subject is basically brute force empiricism. It’s not actual theory. However, there’s always some theory once you accept a certain set of axioms.
Although there’s some debate around the edges, the Big Five Model encompasses the most widely accepted set of axioms that underlie personality development. The theory states that personality can be boiled down to five core factors: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion.
Unlike other trait theories that sort individuals into binary categories (i.e. introvert or extrovert), the Big Five Model asserts that each personality trait is a spectrum. Therefore, individuals are ranked on a scale between the two extreme ends.
For instance, when measuring Extraversion, one would not be classified as purely extroverted or introverted, but placed on a scale determining their level of extraversion. By ranking individuals on each of these traits, it is possible to effectively measure individual differences in personality.
Each of the Big Five personality traits represents extremely broad categories that cover many personality-related terms. Each trait encompasses a multitude of other facets, therefore while Big Five is not completely exhaustive, it covers virtually all personality-related terms.
Conscientiousness holds hidden truths about people’s political leniences. It is also a strange form of neurological wiring that can explain much about history and even why countries tilt a few degrees to the right.
What is conscientiousness?
Conscientious people seem to be inclined to carry things out. The idea that your prefrontal cortex is responsible for planning is central to the literature on human cognitive functioning at a neurological level. On average, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex.
Conscientiousness can be broken down into industriousness and orderliness. If you’re an industrious person, you carry out plans, don’t waste your time, don’t mess things up, get things done quickly and don’t postpone decisions because you are not easily distracted.
Orderliness is about not leaving belongings around. Naturally, if you are orderly, you like order. You keep things tidy, follow a schedule. You get annoyed by messy people. The “bothered” part is interesting here, because implies a certain amount of judgment in order to be bothered by messy people.
It’s pretty obvious why it would be desirable to be conscientious. It’s not so obvious why it would be good if you weren’t. It is more interesting to scrutinize the downfalls of conscientiousness rather than the upside of being unconscientious.
Why is conscientiousness so interesting? In psychology, it is believed to be second-best predictor of life outcome. The first best predictor is IQ. IQ is a very powerful predictor and accounts for about 20%- 25% of the variance in overall success, depending on how that’s measured. That’s a very high proportion given how difficult it is to measure life success.
The next best predictor is conscientiousness. That’s especially true in managerial and administrative positions. So, it’s hard to see given its positive association with life outcomes how there could be any utility in being unconscientious. To understand that you have to look at the pathologies that are potentially associated with hyper-conscientiousness.
Pathogens and authoritarianism
Disgust is a basic emotion, and orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust. There is a disgust system and there’s a specific facial response that’s associated with disgust, and it’s associated with orderliness. So, why are people orderly? Because they get easily disgusted. They don’t like to be disgusted, so they yearn for a state of orderliness so they’re not disgusted.
Then, the question becomes - what’s the utility of disgust? Well, if you’re really disgusted with something, you vomit, and you get rid of it because it’s contaminated. So, the purpose of disgust is actually terrifying and incredibly ramified.
In “The Coddling of the American Mind”, Jonathan Haidt looked into the mechanics of disgust as an independent psychological phenomenon for the first time. He associated the emotions of disgust with moral purity. In his view, purity is the opposite of disgusting. And that’s where physiological wiring translates into a psychological first and then moral stance.
Whatever is pure is the opposite of whatever’s disgusting. Orderly people are aiming for what’s pure, and they’re aiming away from what’s disgusting. How might that be associated with political leanings?
The answer is pathogen prevalence. Pathological prevalence as measured by blood parasite count strongly correlates with authoritarianism. This is way, way up there in terms of the power of relationships found by psychologists. The main reason people exist under authoritarian governments is because of pathogen prevalence.
Pathogens, politics and sexual morality
You might be thinking this is crazy. Is there some direct biological consequence of pathogen infestation? The answer to that seems to be no. However, conservative forms of political belief are part of the process by which we put borders and barriers between things.
The two best psychological predictors of political belief are openness and conscientiousness. Open people are creative. They like to think laterally because it produces new possibilities. They don’t like things to be bounded and bordered. That’s sort of the definition of creativity – to think outside of the box.
If you’re conservative, you don’t want to think outside of the box. You want to say in the damn box. And you do that partly because you’re low in creativity, so you don’t have any intrinsic interest in the aesthetic or intellectual consequences of lateral thinking. You also do it because you’re orderly.
Why would a conservative want to stay in the box? What exactly is the box keeping out? The liberal answer to that is ideas and the free flow of information and goods. That’s a big cost of having things boxed in. But what else does it keep out? Pathogens.
Many historians believe that Europeans opened up trade into other countries, the rats that were on the ships got infected with fleas that had bubonic plague, and they brought them back to Europe. Then, one-third of the European population died. Clearly, there were reasons to keep things inside the box.
Some pathogenic processes are transmitted sexually. This certainly happened in Victorian times when syphilis became an epidemic. Strictures on sexual behavior emerged as a logical response to the presence of pathogens. That’s a more conservative attitude.
The same thing happened, at least to some degree, in the rise of AIDS in the 1980s. Of course, that’s what’s going to happen, so you can see that one of the forces driving strictures on sexual promiscuity is the attempt at the population level to avoid exponential contamination.
A desire for moral purity
Now, what constitutes a pathogen? We don’t really know. It’s not like we’re evolved to detect microorganisms. We didn’t even know about microorganisms until about 300 years ago. But we do have an innate disgust system. We get disgusted by things that are quite likely to harbor contamination.
What does someone have to do in order to do something disgusting? They can do something that’s directly associated with the contamination. But there’s also moral significance to the idea of disgusting. You can identify an idea as disgusting. Or you can describe behaviors as disgusting, independently of whether or not they are associated with something that was biologically contaminated.
The idea of disgust is a broader category that reaches up into what we consider moral and pure. What happens if the desire for purity becomes paramount? Hyper-conscientious people get hyper-judgmental, and they do it morally.
There is abundant literature in social psychology suggesting that conservatives are more afraid than liberals. This is tricky because it’s not like judgment isn’t necessary. It’s necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s necessary to do things efficiently, but there are limits to that.
Whatever it is that makes conservatives more ethnocentric, because that is one of the elements of conservatism, doesn’t have anything to do with fear. If conservatives were more afraid than liberals, that might account for their desire for borders. To keep other people at bay, to keep people where they belong – in their boxes. That is one way of thinking about conservatism.
Think of Trump’s effect on conservatives when he talked about building a wall. Conservatives like borders. That interplay between openness and orderliness is best actually conceptualized in terms of boundaries and borders.
Clean factories
When Hitler first came to power, he wanted to get rid of tuberculosis. He ran around these vans equipped with x-ray machines that would screen people for tuberculosis. He was big on public health campaigns. That makes sense with someone who’d be obsessed with pathogen and contamination.
Hitler used the metaphor of the Aryan people as a body that was under assault by pathogens. What do you do with things that are disgusting? You don’t freeze in fear. That’s neuroticism, withdrawal. Instead, you burn and destroy.
Cleanliness and hygiene are actually very effective techniques in the battle against pathogens. Obsessive-compulsive disorders are disorders of disgust. Those people always feel like they’ve been contaminated if they touch the wrong thing.
In his early days into power, Hitler promoted a “let’s clean up the factories” campaign. Factories were full of rats, mice and flies. It was just messy and counterproductive, and so he had the German people clean up and fumigate the factories with Zyklon gas, and then plant flowers there.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing to have squeaky clean factories. But then he started to clean up the hospitals. That campaign wasn’t as ambivalent as it marked the beginning of Aktion T4, or involuntary euthanasia. In Hitler’s mind, it was an act of mercy to put people who were living substandard lives out of their misery.
Then, he started to go after those who weren’t ethnically identical with the Aryans, chiefly gypsies, homosexuals and Jews. We all know where that went. The gas that was used in the concentration camps was Zyklon B – a variant of the gas that was used to fumigate factories.
Conscientiousness keeps the world on track and keeps the trains running on time, which was something that the fascists were always proud of.