Oh, ha alright
I should welcome my extension school students, who will be looking at this tomorrow night.
Okay, you turn to the back of the syllabus
Where it says 2: Calendar Events
This is a course about the causes of social conflict.
I’m not interested in social conflict from the perspective of a political scientist or a sociologist.
I’m interested in intergroup conflict, but not at the level of group analysis.
I’m interested in what role social identity or group identity plays in individual psychology...
and why it is that individuals are motivated to participate in acts of social conflict.
I am using for an example here the Holocaust.
I was thinking last week...
writing part of the preface to the book that you're going to read...
about the Holocaust Museum in Washington [DC]
Now there's a lot of--obviously this is a museum to the Jews, primarily, who were killed by the Nazis in World War 2.
There are a number of museums like this throughout the world, and their central motto is “never forget.”
This has always been confusing to me:
this notion of “never forget(ting)”
because I don’t think you can remember something that you don’t understand.
And I don’t think we understand why the Holocaust happened in World War 2.
I think you might regard the Holocaust as an unlearned lesson.
And I don’t think you can process information you don’t comprehend.
So to say “never forget” begs the question: “what is it you’re supposed to remember?”
Is it the fact that 6 million people were killed?
Is it the fact of that particular event, or
are you supposed to be giving some consideration to Holocaust-like events that have occurred through history?
Because there are people who think that what happened in World War 2 was a relatively unique event— of  something unparalleled in history.
This is not a position that I adopt.
I think, actually, it’s a very common sort of event.
It was perhaps…
It was the event of that sort that has proved most shocking to the European conscience, so to speak-
but it hardly strikes me as unique.
People often talk about the Holocaust in terms of the relationship between the Jews and the Germans
or between the Jews and the Nazis.
The Jews obviously playing the part of victims and the Nazis often—are always--playing the part of the perpetrators.
And, of course, this is absolutely comprehensible from the historical point of view
but it also strikes me that
if what we remember is that the Nazis killed the Jews
then we’re already on the road to making a mistake that’s similar
to the mistake that was made that led to the Holocaust to begin with
which is to identify characteristics that lead to patterns of action of that sort.
As characteristics of groups!
Identifiable groups.
And it is seems to me... I mean, I’m not try to equate the role of the Jews and the Nazis in producing the Holocaust—that would be obviously absurd.
What I’m trying to say is that
the lesson seems to me to be
especially when you consider the propensity for Holocaust-like events is deeply rooted in human nature.
The lesson to draw from the events of World War 2 is that: that’s what human beings are like--not what the Nazis were like.
Because these sorts of events happen all the time.
It’s obviously the case that there are, well, in the 20th century alone
the English invented the Concentration Camp in South Africa.
Germans perfected it.
Chinese used it to great advantage.
Solzhenitsyn estimated--I'll show this on the next slide--that 66 million people in the Soviet Union were killed as a consequence of internal repression,
many of whom went through camp-like procedures on the road to their demise.
We see ethnic cleansing occurring in places like Rwanda and even once again in Europe: 
in the Balkans.
Whatever it was that we were supposed to have learned from the events of the Second World War hasn’t been learned, nor been remembered,
because you can’t remember what you don’t understand.
That’s what this course is about.
I’ve been working since 1985 I guess on trying to figure out what it is about people...
Remember Hannah Arendt.
Maybe you know this, maybe you don't
She’s a famous political scientist.
She was a student of Martin Heidegger.
She wrote a book called “The Banality of Evil.”
One of her points was that--these people—
she was talking about the Nazis in particular—
people who perpetrated events like this—
if you meet them, if you talk to them, if you have encounter with them—
the thing that’s often striking about them is not their striking abnormality
or their evident evil
but the fact that they are much like other people that you might have met,
which I suppose might not be so surprising when you think about
how thoroughly, for example, the Nazi movement dominated the German consciousness,
or, likewise, with Communism in the Soviet Union.
Those ideological movements characterized people!
They didn’t characterize some strange sort of misfits
whose consciousness was characterized by something incomprehensible
that led them to perform the kind of actions that we’re theoretically supposed to remember.
My perspective on all this is that
the fact that people are capable of perpetrating atrocities
like those that characterized the Holocaust
says something about what people are like.
What everybody is like
because it strikes me that
that kind of tendency is something that’s deeply rooted in human nature.
And then to say that, well, “What was it about the Nazis?”
or “What was it about the Soviet Communists that led them to participate in this sort of behavior?”
is completely besides the point, in a sense.
All that does is: you’re looking for some sort of group characteristic
that is devoid—you don’t have any personal relationship with that group.
The problem is instantly made abstract.
As far as I’m concerned, if it is abstract,
well then, once again,
nothing is remembered.
Now what I want to do is,
To try to... I want to outline the reasons why something like the Holocaust should have occurred.
What it is about us that makes us so concerned with protecting our group identities.
What these identities mean.
What role they play in the regulation of emotion.
That’s the critical thing, right there:
for me, ideologies are the expression--in a sense--the verbal expression of the internal structures that regulate our emotions.
When you mess around with someone’s ideologies, therefore,
as a consequence, you’re messing around with the inhibitory structure that regulates the interplay between their emotions.
So we're gonna study, in part, in this course, what emotions are and...
how they are rooted in neuropsychology and neurophysiology and ...
how they manifest themselves in behavior, how they might be controlled
I also hope to make - as I said, I want to make - the lessons here personal.
I am not interested in discussing the issue from the abstract perspective because I don't think that...
an issue of this magnitude deserves to be discussed at an abstract level.
It's not an abstract problem.
There's something peculiar about us that we have to learn to control because...
as far as I'm concerned, ...
we're too technologically powerful to remain at the whimps of the uncomprehend aspects of our nature.
"Peace, predicatbility and the delusion of self-representation". Well, what does that mean?
Well, if you can predict something, as a general rule... like, it's hard to determine ...
why it is that you think that you understand something when you think you do.
If you think about it for a moment, it gets complicated becaue you're surrounded by things that...
at some level of analysis, you seize to understand.
It doesn't matter what phenomena it is.
Even the most mondain objects become mysterious if you look into them far enough.
You take something as simple as a chair. It's made out of wood. That's all. There is nothing remarkable about that.
But if you start looking into the structure of the wood, how the organism, the tree, produced it and...
all the chemical reactions that go about, bringing that about and the development of history that led to ...
the emergence of plants and trees. Well, you can see that even in something mondain are embedded all sorts of mysteries.
Let me step one step back.
What's Emotion?
Emotion is the subjective sensation that you feel
when you encounter a situation that has implications for action.
Emotion occupies the space between sensory input and motor output
If you encounter something that has significance
You feel an emotion;
and an emotion is the subjective sense that accompanies the activation or pre-activation of motor output systems.
Thats basically how it occurs, appears.
You say well...
You can think of the world
The way that we normally think
Which is as something that exists objectively
and something that is amenable to scientific description
Or you can think of it as a place that is full of things that has implications for actions.
As far as stories are concerned
The universe is  full of things that has implications for actions.
That's the environment from the narrative perspective.
The most fundamental substructure of narratives can become myths
The next thing I want to show you is how myths fundamentally represent the world
In so far as its conceived of as something that has implications for behavior.
Something that has emotional significance.
See, the world of the scientific option, so to speak, 
Is devoid of emotional significance.
Really by design. Part of what you do in the scientific procedure is eradicate anything that is purely subjective like emotion.
If you think a theory is true because you like the theory then that is not sufficient grounds for considering it to be true from a scientific perspective.
You are supposed to make yourself objective. Which basically means to eradicate your emotional assessment of a given situation.
The thing is that we are always assessing situations for their affective significance.
We have to do that because emotions or affect means how to act.
In every situation.
