 One of the things that here's here's something to think about with regards to Hitler so because one of the things you might ask is how the hell could he be so so Absolutely compelling to his audiences, but here I'll give you an explanation So let's let's make the let's make a few assumptions and the first assumption is There are a lot of resentful Germans kicking around why well they lost the first world war That wasn't so good and then there were a lot of brutal men left because they'd been in the trenches and they'd been shooting and Shooting at each other under absolutely abhorrent conditions for like years and years and so there were plenty of brutalized men around and Then their whole damn economy collapsed because they were forced into signing what historians regard as a very punitive peace treaty and so like Everything had fallen apart to a degree that we can't even begin to imagine and so you know in the 1930s the Germans were starting to get back on their feet and and When Hitler came to power he started not only to rearm but to reindustrialize the economy and he was actually pretty damn good at that So now Hitler was a good orator, but he but he it isn't exactly clear that he was a Coherent Philosophical theorizer although to think of him as stupid is it is completely missing the point. He was by no means stupid I wouldn't say that he was particularly educated But he had a very powerfully developed aesthetic sense And he spent a lot of his time designing the cities that would be built after World War two was over and those cities were generally Conceptualized by him as places where the arts or at least the Nazi version of the arts could flourish You know, so there's no real evidence that what was wrong with the Nazis was that they weren't civilized There's more evidence actually I think that they were too civilized and I'll talk to you about that later But anyways, you think how did Hitler get all these people under his spell? Well, here's a hypothesis that's basically derived from Jungian thinking and I should let you know by the way because sometimes Jung has been accused of being an anti-Semite and there's various reasons for this partly because of what happened during World War two and partly because His theory drew heavily from Christianity although from many other sources as well And he did believe that there were differences in the psychology of people with different ethnicities And now, you know, whether that's racist or not depends on whether or not you like the person you're talking to because the lefties Think that there are cultural differences and they're important But if you ever talk about them in the wrong way, then you're racist and the right-wingers Well, they just think there are ethnic differences to begin with so it's a tricky It's a tricky issue if there aren't differences that are important then who the hell cares about multiculturalism It's not even worth preserving and if there are differences. Well, then you're stuck with having to deal with the differences So you're basically screwed either way So anyways Jung has been the target of many accusations of anti-Semitism particularly by biographers who were resentful and clueless and historically uninformed and I would say malevolent fundamentally He worked as a CIA agent It was just revealed last year and he he he provided psychological reports to the American government on the underlying Psychological structure of the Nazi leaders for years and he never told anybody about that while he was alive It only came to light like it only came to light as far as I know last year or perhaps a year before that so So anyways the Germans, you know, they weren't very happy about the whole damn situation And so when they were aggregating on mass you think well, what happens when all people get together in a group? You know, we talked about that last time when we talked about Kierkegaard's idea that as soon as you get a bunch of people together No matter how truthful they are all as individuals instantly the crowd is not a truthful thing And you know, there there are there are real reasons for that real psychological reasons. So there's the famous ash experiments I hope that those are the right experiments a s c h about line length You know, so you draw two lines on the board and they're the same length and you get the the crowd to You know collaborate with you and you ask some poor sucker who doesn't know about the game To play and you know, you ask one person and they say no those lines are different in length And you ask another person they say well, you know, they're quite different in length and another person says Yeah, sure I can see the difference in length and then you ask the poor pigeon, you know Are they different in length and he says Yes, you know and you can understand why it's like if all those other people are saying it There's either there's either something wrong with all of them, which seems unlikely or he's the victim of a conspiracy Which is a little on the paranoid side, but happens to actually be true in this case or He's just not looking at it right and you might think well the humble thing to think is he's wrong And so you know the fact that somebody might go along with the crowd You know you can you can you can blame that on their on their ability to be social and Conventional which in many ways is a huge advantage because if you are all anti social and unconventional, you know I mean there'd be a good chunk of you in jail and we certainly wouldn't be having this, you know Delightful peaceful conversation that we're having so, you know, you don't want to Underestimate the utility of conventionality to too much of a degree Anyway, so There's this funny story I read once I don't think it's true, but it might be Where a psychology class got together and decided they play a trick on the professor and the trick was that? He would walk back and forth they and and the trick was that they wouldn't pay any attention to him at all If he was on the left side of the room, you know They talk a bit and look look up and if he was on the right side of the room then they'd really focus in and pay attention and the story goes that by the You know by several weeks of this little trick they had him like lecturing right beside the door You know and he wouldn't move from that spot And so the reason I'm telling you that is because it's pretty obvious that People can respond to the cues that a crowd is delivering, you know and a good speaker does that right? So a good speaker does a variety of things and one is they never talks to the to the crowd per se You know you pick out specific individuals and talk to them and they're sort of reflective of the crowd And then you can tell if everybody's understanding and the other thing that a good speaker does is pay attention to the damn responses of the crowd because You know if a lecture is really a dialogue even though the the audience is Only emitting nonverbal the nonverbal elements of the conversation those nonverbal elements those damn things are important So you want to stay in touch with the nonverbal communications now? Hitler he's kind of a chaotic guy, you know, he's very angry He's angry in part because he was a frustrated art student He tried to get into art school like four times So really the person to blame for World War two was the four-person committee that wouldn't let poor Hitler into the I believe it was the Viennese school of art because he really wanted to go, you know And he had some artistic talent. He was a little on the conventional side By all appearances, but you know, I've seen some of his sketches and you know He wasn't a complete piker and he kind of felt maybe it would be okay for him to go to university because he just being through World War one You know, and that wasn't much fun There's a story about Hitler where he was out on in the trenches and he was there with all his buddies And he wandered off to do whatever he wandered off to do and when he came back They were all dead because a bomb had blended right in the middle of them And you know you might think that would do a little something to your psyche because after an experience like that You're either gonna think oh man things are pretty damn random and horrible or there's pretty there's something pretty damn special about me Because I wasn't killed by the bomb, you know, maybe God has saved me for a higher purpose I mean you can be absolutely sure that if you went through an experience like that that something like that would be rattling around in Your mind and he wanted he won a medal for bravery, you know So he got many after World War one He kind of wandered around like a lot of men unemployed and sort of like a trap, you know So I wasn't very happy about that and and you know no wonder So anyways, he didn't get into art school now He didn't really have a fully developed political theory, you know, and but he was pretty good at speaking So and there were lots of people who had come just to hear him speak because people were sort of trying to figure out What the hell to do about all the chaos, you know, so then you think well, what did he what was Hitler good at? Well, okay now I'm gonna switch to a slightly different story and then I'll get back to this one So I don't know if you know guys know about the The daycare scandals that that were very very common in the 1980s so Horribly common actually this infested many towns and usually what would happen is somebody who is a little on the paranoid side Or maybe a lot on the paranoid side would send their children off to daycare And that was a whole new thing in the 80s right because women were you know moving into the workforce like mad And so they were handing over their often their infants kids below three say to total strangers And you know for some of them that set up a fair bit of worry like it still does and sometimes that worry got out of hand Especially among the people who are a little on the little predisposed to paranoid schizophrenia Maybe even had had some previous episodes and so, you know The kid would come home and the mother would observe or not Something kind of peculiar about their behavior and then she'd fantasize about maybe what that was and then you know She'd start asking the child if the child had been touched in any particular way And you know and she'd keep this up for a good length of time and then the child would start to have nightmares and then the child would tell the mother about what the Nightmares were and then that would freak her out And so she'd ask even deeper questions and soon you know her children were telling her that Horrible things were happening to them at daycare And so then she'd go to the police and they wouldn't look into her psychiatric background And then the police would go out and they'd start to interview other children And if they interviewed them properly then the other children would start to produce all these stories as well because the now How did that happen? Well a bunch of ways the first is The police would ask leading questions like did anyone touch you well Of course someone touched the kids I mean people touch kids did anybody touch you there? Well, that's not a question That's a piece of information the piece of information is if someone touched me there an adult would be very interested in that Right, so and now what's a child doing when he's answering an adult's questions? Well, the child doesn't bloody well know what the hell do they know? They're like three, you know, they can hardly organize their story You know if you're talking to a kid and you want to give get them to give you an account of their day You have to really guide them through the organization of their memory and partly what they're doing when you're doing that is they're looking at you Trying to figure out if they're telling you the right things Which is what they should be doing because what they're trying to learn to do is to tell people things in a way that they'll understand them But that makes the child very very responsive To the non-verbal and verbal cues of the adult you think about how fast those little rats learn how to pick up language You know, it's really very fast and no one really teaches them. They're just paying attention like mad So you get a bunch of Cops who are on a like a half-cocked adventure and they think there's some serial sexual Pervert in their midst and they go interview, you know 15 20 kids and they do a do do it do it a lot They use little dolls and they do it a lot and they do it a lot and they do a lot and sooner later all the kids start Having nightmares and then they start telling the cops There's also these terrible things happen like they're taken into underground caverns and they're stripped naked and they're forced to Like leapfrog over each other and like you just can't believe it what happened You can't believe it. It's all documented in a book called Satan's silence, which was written by a social worker and a lawyer It's mind-boggling the longest prison sentences in American history were handed out to it to a series of Middle-aged women who were taking care of little kids and the FBI even came up with a whole new criminal category Late-onset female sexual offender. Well, why didn't that category exist before it's simple There are no late-onset middle-aged female sexual offenders. That's why we didn't need the category But once all these accusations came up well poof, you know You had to have some damn category for these poor women some of them were put in jail for 350 years which seems a bit excessive Given that they're only going to last about 40, you know, they get 12 consecutive life sentences So and you know, there was actually a situation where one town Went so far as to start digging underneath the town to find these underground Satanic layers where all these weird ritual things were going on, you know And along with this was not one shred of Concrete evidence, you know and the eventual conclusions and this affected thousands of people the eventual conclusions was Well, there there actually isn't anybody who's you know satanically torturing children in daycare centers now now anyways, why am I telling you this? well What the children were doing you think about how the tale of the children come up with these weird ideas, you know I mean first of all we should note the children are not stupid and they can also dream up the most horrible things, you know Because they have an imagination that's capable of extending itself out into the terrifying now Everyone knows that because all you have to remember when you were a kid You know when you were hiding under the covers because there were horrible things in your dark room, you know You can populate the darkness with monsters with no problem And you should be able to because there are monsters in the darkness even though your parents might tell you there aren't It's like there might not be any dark monsters in that particular piece of darkness And that's a perfectly reasonable thing to tell your children, but in the darkness as a whole. It's like yeah Look the hell out so the children aren't stupid now So then the the adults start to question them and the kids are the back of their brain the little imaginative part Is thinking what do these people want? What do these people want? What do these people want? And so they'll throw them out a little bit of information and they'll the adults will perk up They'll focus right on that piece of information. So maybe it's a cop who really hates child Satanist abductors, which you know, it's perfectly reasonable stance And so when the child offers any information about about the existence of such a thing Well the cop will perk up and then the child thinks oh I see well So sort of what's going on seems to have something to do. They don't think this consciously, you know But their imagination is working. How do I model the reality that's being presented to me? And that's when the dreams start to kick in too okay so by speaking in the appropriate way You can get all sorts of things churned up in in the in the unconscious minds of your listeners and by watching them as well You can extract out Their unconscious desires. So now I'm speaking to you all and you're all irritated because your life has been really awful for 15 years And I'm saying this and I'm saying that and I'm saying this and I'm saying that You know, and then I say something maybe I say something Initially Dismissive of Jews and you're all mad and there's two or three people who go. Yeah and then I think oh, you know, that's kind of an interesting response and then, you know, I Lay out a couple more ideas and some of them don't get any response and others You know people perk right up and and I'm not stupid and I'm trying to get the bloody attention of the crowd and so If I do that 50 times The crowd is going to tell me an awful lot about what they want Especially if I'm willing to follow them and I can do that easily because especially if I can start to work The crowd a little bit because I can capitalize on their emotional on their emotional Capitalized on their emotions and the display of that emotion and I can learn to play that and then that turns into a positive feedback loop And so Hitler's informing the audience and the audience is informing Hitler And that's why Jung believed that Hitler embodied the shadow of the German people