Thought Lab 4: The Psychology of Horror

Summary

Grizzly bears are scary. But what about zombie grizzly bears? What’s makes something horrifying rather than just frightening? 

 Paul has a theory. It turns out that humans have a psychological way of organizing the world that also creates the possibility of getting really creeped-out. It helps explain the horror of the zombie grizzly why the old Dracula was creepier than Twilight and how war propaganda can turn enemies into monsters. 

References

David Livingstone-Smith (philosopher where Paul’s getting his ideas about essentialism and dehumanization from)

Credits

Clayton Tapp (intro)
David Zikovitz (outro)
Sep (art)

Transcript

Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a lot of errors. We do don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.

Clif Mark  00:13

Today, zombie bears, ethnic minorities and a philosophy of monstrosity. I'm Clif mark. And this is good in theory. Welcome to the Halloween edition of good in theory. We've got Paul Sager from King's College University back with us. And, Paul, you have a spooky thought experiment for me today.

Paul Sagar  00:43

I certainly do, Cliff, I'd like you to imagine two different scenarios. In the first scenario, you're being chased through the woods by a very hungry grizzly bear. Okay. How does that make you feel?

Clif Mark  00:57

I'm very afraid, you're very, if I'm not already dead, my heart's pounding. I'm running as fast as I can. I'm trying to think whether I'm supposed to climb trees, or supposed to make a lot of noise and like, look big. I don't know. But, you know, I may have so on myself, and I'm on my way out of there.

Paul Sagar  01:13

Okay, that all sounds pretty reasonable. Try this scenario. Scenario two, you're faced with the bear from the movie annihilation, which is not only a grizzly bear, but it looks to be half dead, because its face seems to be rotting off as it walks towards you. And every time it opens its mouth rather than growling, like a grizzly bear. The voices of dead people that it's eaten start emerging. How do you feel about this bear?

Clif Mark  01:42

I got it. I gotta tell you, Paul. I don't feel I don't feel very good about this bear. I feel. Okay, so I think this is interesting, because this bear is obviously also scary. I also want to get away from it. But zombie bear with the voices of dead of dead human victims coming out of his mouth, does not produce the same sensation in me as regular grizzly bear. Right? Absolutely. It's creepy. It's a natural. In this case, I think there's more of a chance. I have like a kind of disgusted fascination. But I'm also I don't, I don't think of a grizzly bear as a disgusting or repellent being in itself. But the zombie bear is an aberration in genetics in our world, and is making me feel very uncomfortable in a way that isn't just isn't just fear,

Paul Sagar  02:33

right? There's something else about this, right? We're afraid of both scenarios. But in the second scenario, this is like the hands up on the back of your neck. There's a sense of you want to get away from this, not just because it might eat you. But because it's it has something about it, which is intrinsically more disturbing and threatening. It's hard to even find the words to describe it. It's not right. Yeah, it's just not right. It's not right. And the words that are sometimes used to describe this feeling are the uncanny, or creepiness. So that that that has lots of different meanings in different contexts, or sometimes the German word unheimlich. But this idea of not right, there's something wrong about this, and it makes me feel deeply, not queasy, but unsettled in a way that goes beyond physical fear. There's something else about the zombie bear. And the question then is why? What's going on here? Why is this one so much more disturbing than the first? Because it can't just be fear? Because yeah, we're afraid in both cases, but we're not afraid in the same kind of ways.

Clif Mark  03:33

Okay, I fully get the distinction about why zombie bears are scary in a different way than regular bears. And I can think of other examples, like why haunted houses and monsters are frightening in a different way than war or natural disasters. But I don't know if I can get much further in explaining why than to just say that some are kind of unnatural and creepy and don't belong in this world, and others are just fearsome. So I mean, your thought experiment? What do you think?

Paul Sagar  04:05

Good. So I have a theory about what sets apart? Well, we might tentatively call monsters though. That's a broad category. And it's not clear this theory is going to explain all monsters, but monsters like the zombie bear, or some more traditional depictions of things like Dracula, or, or to use an example from one of my favorite living philosophers. David Livingston, Smith has this idea of a dog that is running towards you. And as it gets closer, you realize it has the head of a lizard. And these Yeah, these kinds of things that make you feel like wow, this isn't right. And that feeling you're trying to put into words of the something not right about this is a violation of the natural order. I think that's pretty accurate. I think that in these kinds of cases, what's being messed with is our intuitive sense that there are certain categories that should never be violated and certainly shouldn't be mixed together and when they are mixed together, we really don't like We have a very strong, intuitive gut reaction.

Clif Mark  05:03

Okay, let me just ask you before we really jump into the details of this theory, is this something you mentioned is coming from, like some other research you were doing on something else?

Paul Sagar  05:13

Yes. So I've been working away on a big project to do with why we might consider that all human beings are equal, and some very foundational moral centers, I hope that all your listeners agree. Putting that aside, what I've been interested in recently is the idea of psychological essentialism, which is a theory about how human beings process the world, and why we tend to think the world divides up into neat categories, and probably why we don't like it when those categories are violated. And so the background here is this wider theory called psychological essentialism, which is very interesting when she went to pick it pick into the details.

Clif Mark  05:54

Okay, then I want to pick into the details. So this is going to mean a little theoretical detour. Let's figure out what psychological essentialism is, and then we'll come back and see what it has to do with monsters. So let's break it down and start with what is essentialism? So it helps

Paul Sagar  06:14

to think about it in terms that we might be familiar with already. So there's a famous legal verdict that it may not be possible to define pornography, but you're sure know it when you see it. Right. There's a sense there that it's got something about a certain kind of quality that makes it not just erotica, or not just sort of some some other form of art. But But pornography has a kind of, there's an essence to it, that we kind of know we know it when we see it.

Clif Mark  06:42

So you're talking about back in the 80s. There were all these legal battles over pornography and obscenity, and you know, the they want to outlaw porn. And the trouble is, if you're a judge, and you're trying to give a definition of it, you say, I don't know. Shows nudity, there's sex in it people getting horny. No matter what definition you give, it winds up picking up things that don't seem like porn. So old, sexy novels, Victorian novels, erotica, stuff like that. Right?

Paul Sagar  07:15

Good. So they meet all the definitional criteria, they propose a porn, but everyone knows that that wasn't porn. i But equally, most people know porn when they see it. They know the difference. Another one might be you know, what makes somebody funny. You know, we all have friends who have you know, like, that's a bit like, in Goodfellas, or you're a funny guy, Tommy, you're a funny guy. But it's very hard to say what makes somebody funny. Okay, they make you laugh. But that's not really the essence of somebody having a being not just not just someone who is funny, right? Like,

Clif Mark  07:45

there's, there's people, they can tell the exact same joke or do the same kinds of jokes. But one is funny. Yeah, one person has it.

Paul Sagar  07:52

Yes. Yeah. And, and some people have that kind of essence of being funny of being able to make people laugh. And it's hard to put your finger on exactly what that is. But you know, there's something about them, you know, there's something there. And so, the essence is often the thing that gives give something its nature. And often it's hard to identify it. But we all kind of know it when we see it.

Clif Mark  08:16

How about I'm thinking, you know, obviously did a lot of stuff on Plato and Republic. So like, I'm thinking immediately of how Socrates describes the forms in the Republic. So it's something like, you know, all empirical houses participate in the form of the house, or, you know, all trees, there's a form of the tree and everything else is a kind of reflection of it, or

Paul Sagar  08:37

Exactly, exactly. So Plato is one of the most prominent philosophical essentialist in the Western tradition. He is exactly saying that, look, it's not just the idea of funniness or porn, it's everything, everything has deep inside of it. An essence that makes it that thing what it is. And in Plato's phrase, it's according to these essences that we can carve nature at its joints. And this is the idea that the world the natural world, prior to our observing it, or meddling with it, or interpreting it, has certain divisions built into it.

Clif Mark  09:13

Okay, fine. The world has divisions built into it. But why are we defining it up in terms of essences? Why isn't it based on say, external characteristics? So, instead of saying humans are the beings that have a human essence? Why don't we just say humans are rational animals or languages, animals or featherless bipeds, or something like that?

Paul Sagar  09:37

So the essentialist response to that is, but what determines whether something stays in a category or not, is not simply its physical surface manifestation? Because there's something inside it that determined that he can help determine what it looks like essences tend to encourage certain manifestations. But those manifestations are defeasible as in they don't necessarily have to to occur, and for the thing to still stay what it fundamentally is. So a kind of interesting way to explore this idea is one that psychologists have used with children. Because it turns out the children are very, very committed to essentialism. And to say take take a porcupine now we can define a porcupine like you just said cliff in terms of its external characteristics. Its prickly quills it lives it lives in Africa. Well, some of them there anyway.

Clif Mark  10:27

Is 10 feet to mate with. On its mate.

Paul Sagar  10:31

I didn't know that. But I'll tell you what I

Clif Mark  10:33

wrote. I wrote an article on weird animal mating rituals. And the porcupine stuff is all about P. But there we go a distance like

Paul Sagar  10:40

Okay, so we've got our definition of porcupines based on our empirical study of porcupines. But then, if I take if we find this creature, this porcupine that has suffered a tragic accident and can no longer pee 10 feet onto its mates. And even worse is for some reason it's quills have fallen out, and it's fallen into a bog and it's now covered in green slime, instead of being black and white to it no longer fits the category of porcupine according to our empirical observation of porcupine features, but surely it hasn't stopped being a porcupine.

Clif Mark  11:14

Okay, so appearances aren't everything. The reason we have to resort to essences is because even if something doesn't look like you should, according to the definitions, then it still might have the essence of a porcupine it still might be the thing.

Paul Sagar  11:30

Right? Exactly. Yeah. So so the idea here is that surface manifestations can be a clue to essences, but essences do what's on the inside, or what's fundamental, and they determine category membership. So if we really want to carve nature at its joints, it's not enough to simply be an empiricist and go around counting off the verbs over features. Because observable features can be misleading, you have to go deeper. And to go deeper, you have to find the essence. The essence is what determines whether something is one kind of thing, or a different kind of thing. Good.

Clif Mark  12:04

And what does that all have to do with monsters?

Paul Sagar  12:07

Well, what seems to be going on potentially with monsters is that they offend our intuitive sense that things have essences, and that there are natural categories, which shouldn't be violated, which delineate how nature itself is why it should be carved at the joints in these ways. So to go back to our example of the zombie bear, bears to our minds are a specific kind of animal that has sort of barinas inside them. And they're not supposed to be dead, right bears a part of the living animal kingdom, and they're supposed to be alive. They're not supposed to be supposed to grow. It's not supposed to say when they're supposed to growl, they're not supposed to scream, they'll die in words of their last meal, right? That's not what bears are supposed to be. This zombie bear seems to be a violation of multiple different things that we think should be separate that have been shoved together. That's a one potential explanation here is that this messes with our intuitive sense of how the world is composed. And gives us that sense of exactly as you put it earlier, this is unnatural. There's something not right about this. And one clue here is that it's screwing with our idea of the essence of the creature. The bear shouldn't be behaving like that's just not just scary, because it might eat me. It's it's not right. It doesn't belong. It shouldn't be here at all when it's opening its mouth and making those kinds of human noises of pain and misery.

Clif Mark  13:30

Right. So that's maybe the same kind of thing. When the exorcist when the little girl starts talking in her deep adult demon voice, and that's really scary.

Paul Sagar  13:40

Exactly. It's messing with two categories there, or in or the traditional view of the vampire. So traditionally, if you read Bram Stoker's account of Dracula, you know, when he's cold to the touch because he is undead, and you'll notice on that is of category violation, it's not dead, because it's walking around talking. It's not it's not alive and dead is a specific, deliberate category violation in our nation. So Dracula's cold touches clammy, he makes people shiver. In the early descriptions, the sort of person used to travel to Transylvania See, Dracula, opened the window at the top of his tower and crawl down the front of the building headfirst on all fours like a sort of lizard. The original vampire turns into a bat. That's not right Pete people especially people, humans, not bats. And they're not supposed to do both not supposed to sleeping coffins because dead people sleeping coffins humans are supposed to sleep in beds where you know,

Clif Mark  14:35

right? So there's at least a couple of category violations that Dracula does that make them more scary. So there's the living dead thing like a zombie, which we talked about. But especially in the older portrayals of Dracula, there's also this violation of the division between human and animal. So, Dracula is presented as climbing down the wall on all fours vertically. He's very animal lipstick in the old movie Nosferatu, right? He's a horrifying, disgusting kind of being sleeping in dirt. There are rats everywhere. And so I think that's interesting because he's a much more disgusting animalistic kind of monster in the old versions. And that's very different from the more recent sexy Tom Cruise Brad Pitt's. And then Twilight versions of the vampire.

Paul Sagar  15:28

Yeah, of course. And that's an interesting question, though, about what's happened to the trope of the vampire. And that's probably cultural, that something's going on there. I would argue personally, that the vampires and Twilight are not monsters, because they are more like sort of aliens. They're kind of like her weird humans who live forever and tried to seduce teenagers. They're no longer like, we call them vampires. But it's sort of cheating. It's sort of playing on the long established cultural trope. But but the author of Twilight, whoever that was, has removed everything about them that made them monstrous, and they're now that they're more like, more like aliens,

Clif Mark  16:02

that he can still be dangerous. They're more like bears than zombie.

Paul Sagar  16:06

Right? Exactly. They've become more like that like, like moody, seductive bears rather than zombies. Yeah. So So I think that's quite interesting. Because otherwise, because we can do things with the category of monster, it doesn't have to stay static, and it can evolve over time. But I do wonder if you take if you stopped doing the category violations, and you stop, you turn it from a zombie bear into just a regular Bear, I'm tempted to say that you might call it a vampire. But it's not really a monster anymore. It's not what vampires used to be.

Clif Mark  16:35

Okay, so give me some other kinds of category violations aside from alive dead that are also scary or uncanny or creepy.

Paul Sagar  16:44

Should the Livingston Smith example of the lizard dog, two different creatures simultaneously as one. So traditionally, in in mythology, mermaids are a good example, mermaids have traditionally been dangerous monsters, but also what makes a monster says it's half fish, half female. And that you again, that can evolve that can be presented as something like The Little Mermaid who's is not really a monster anymore. She's kind of cutesy. But traditionally, mermaids were very much monster. So mixing of two different species, that seems a very strong category violation that our brains don't like, and the dead and the undead, as you've already said, is a very, very strong one, and the artificial and living. So things that are alive should have been organic, and always been alive, and not have died in between and come back to life. That's creepy and weird. But things that are like puppets, and dolls, that take on human like characteristics and start acting a little bit like people as though they're alive, but they're also inanimate. That's a fairly common site for this kind of sense of creepiness and something unheimlich and something weird. That's why often people find dog collections creepy, or, or the example of Chucky, the character from the 80s movie. That's another quite common one and so yeah. Or at least it was once upon a time, and yeah, yes, so Exactly. I so I think it probably has to, first to elicit I think the eliciting that sense of horror, or unkindness, or unheimlich probably just requires the category violation, but we can get used to the category violation. If we're exposed to it enough, we can stop treating it as a category violation or maybe not can stop bothering us. But if it comes along with the threat of danger, if the thing seems hostile, or likely to do as harm, then I think that kind of sort of reinforces each it just something wrong about that. There seems to be very, seems to be a common and it's interestingly, the research so far done and there needs to be more but what has been done seems to get this is pretty universal. It seems to be cross cultural. This doesn't seem to be an artifact, if they just Western culture, these kinds of violating natural categories, by which we basically mean things that are determined by the essence that makes them what they are then as as the Caucasian their joints, when we mess with those categories, it really bugs us. They tends to make us upset and give us that feeling. And when you mix it with with physical threat, it gets nasty why some things are scary. It's where something okay, there's that sense of creepiness or horror or whatever you want to call it. It's not a purpose. Is there a way to explain everything but it seems to me to get at something important about what's going on right, so this is the kicker. Remember, we've we started off talking about psychological essentialism. But then we started basically talking about essentialism. essentialism, a true, the kicker is that essentialism is false. Right. Things do not have essences, right? You see

Clif Mark  20:51

that there's no fish essence different than a man essence?

Paul Sagar  20:55

Absolutely not. Since the Darwinian revolution in biological science, we know for a fact that there are no essences that determined species membership. And it's no good saying, Oh, but what about DNA, which is the classic response here that people like you and me who don't actually know anything about science will say, but it has fish DNA, not horse DNA, therefore, it's a fish, not a horse. Because that those are just words that we use to make it sound superficially, scientifically respectable? We don't know what DNA is you and I collect, I mean, a biologist? Well, but we don't, what we actually mean is, it has fishiness on the inside, and I'm going to reach for the scientific lingo in my, you know, cultural matrix, I'm going to call it DNA don't actually know what that means. And what's interesting here is it's the power of our intuitions, presenting itself as kind of tracking the world and reaching for justification, because we think that the world is divided up into these natural kinds of the retreats, and the sparrows and the report pines. And that's because, you know, look at the world, you can just see that they're out there, the different kinds of things right, right, right. And why they're different well, because because they are, right, because there's bits of them, not the same as other bits. And it doesn't matter if you take all its quills out and cover it in green slime, it's still a porcupine, because it has porcupine. But this is all going on in our heads. If you talk to biolog biologists, climate scientists, real scientists, they'll tell you that species classification is incredibly complex, it actually changes based on different context. It's not simply about DNA. It's not simply about which animals can reproduce with it, whether animals, it's much more complicated than that. And there are no hard and fast distinctions between species in the animal world. But we find that so difficult to accept and so difficult to believe, because we are psychological essentialist. We interpret the world as though it has firm categories, even though in fact, it doesn't. Why though? Why do we do that? So there's a good evolutionary explanation for why we think the world is made up of categories that exist according to nature, according to simple essences that determine what they're supposed to be like, because it allows us to navigate the world very, very, very quickly, because most things that superficially look the same, are members of the same categories. And they tend to behave in the same kinds of ways over time. So you know, if you think oh, well, that big, orange and black cat that ate a member of my tribe last week, oh, there's another one that looks just like it. And wonder if this one would like a belly rub. You know, creatures that reason like that. They don't, they don't hang around, right creatures, the go, bad thing is the same kind of thing as that thing, those things are all the same. And they all behave in the same kind of way, because they have something that makes them that category of thing. There's obvious evolutionary adaptative reasons why human beings would have been redubbed this way. But it doesn't make it true. It doesn't mean that the world is like that. It just means that it's been very advantageous for us to think that the world is like that.

Clif Mark  23:43

Okay, so we have got like a Darwinian Lee motivated continent, right? So because of evolutionary reasons, because of the primordial Tiger, that heat says, there's this pressure to start dividing up the world into categories, we can make generalizations, and we start thinking in terms of essences, that's how we think the world is. But then when we send out our scientists with their clipboards in their microscopes, and they break down the data, they find out that all these categories have been thinking in terms of all these categories that we've been putting on the world. They're not tenable at all right?

Paul Sagar  24:24

Well, that's exactly exactly what you said that if we put them on the world, that's exactly the right way. But it's always projecting onto the world, fixed categories that nature does not actually contain prior to our interpretation.

Clif Mark  24:36

So science is how a lot of people think astrology is right. The zodiac signs, they're their projections on the world. They're a set of categories that help you navigate your everyday life. But when scientists go and look for evidence of them of personality differences correlated to when you're born, it's Hard to find them. And that makes some people think that these categories don't exist in the universe at all.

Paul Sagar  25:05

signs of the zodiac are an extremely essentialist way of thinking that people have on their inside something that makes them a certain kind of character. Right? They've all got human essence. That's why they're humans. But that one was born at this time of year. So it's got Libra essence, and that one's got cancer assets. And that one's got Scorpio essence. And that's why they behave in different ways. That's why they manifest with different characters. Of course, it's all nonsense. But

Clif Mark  25:29

you're walking around trying to act like a Pisces, yeah, there's something about this person.

Paul Sagar  25:34

So of course, obviously, there's, it's all nonsense, but it's very appealing to human psychology, because it appears to explain the world through a division of categories, which are hidden, but determine x, external manifestation of certain traits, in this case, character traits.

Clif Mark  25:52

So are you saying that all these categories, zodiac, scientific, zoological, every category just exists only in our minds and not in the world?

Paul Sagar  26:02

So they certainly don't just exist in your mind, right? I'm not, I'm not taking an extreme philosophical position that this is all a projection of our mind. This is simply a blob of undifferentiated matter and everything that's just being projected onto it. The point is that the distinctions between these things are not neat and sharp. And there aren't singular properties inside are different members of different supposed categories that determine their category membership, that if you it's not just biology, if you talk to physicists and chemists, it turns out that even elements and compounds like water, when you get into the nitty gritty of what makes something water, it's not as simple as h2o. Because h2o can have all kinds of different ways of being manifested. I don't actually understand the science. But I've read enough people who do who have explained it to me and made it clear that nobody who is working in this area, you know, today anymore believes that there are essences,

Clif Mark  27:00

okay, I believe you, you can tell me that science has proven that there's no essences or sharp divisions between species. But I feel like I just can't help but keep thinking that way.

Paul Sagar  27:15

None of us can. I think that's not to baseline truth that we can. And it's probably for the best that we can't stop thinking like that you will be able to function on a daily basis.

Clif Mark  27:23

But But, but even though this is useful, politics. And what I mean is, we have this ability to think in categories and essences, and we can mess with that to create monsters that are fun to watch in the cinema. But it might also be the case that we can use the same mechanism for some pretty to create some pretty nasty political effects. Am I right?

Paul Sagar  27:48

So the most disturbing way that our social construction of categories can get coupled with our belief that things have essences, is when malicious political forces start trying to convince, say one group of people that another group of people are not what they seem. So, on the face of it, we've all got the human essence, right, because, okay, now that's not scientifically supportable, but it's intuitively something we probably believe. Well, right, you know, so the classic South Park episode, gingers don't have souls right? It's supposed to be a kind of funny joke, because it's kind of toying with this idea that they look human, but they're not really right. And South Park or being stupid, and like they're just doing what South Park do. But of course, that way of thinking about it has been manipulated into some pretty horrendous ends in human history. And it's not too hard to find examples.

Clif Mark  28:43

So great. So I'm thinking immediately of like, wartime propaganda that like tries, you know, anti semitic propaganda, right, they're rats, they're vermin. It's like, almost exactly what they're doing in the early tellings of Dracula right. Dracula is like part rat, part bat. He's vermin. He has this different essence, inside him.

Paul Sagar  29:05

Exactly. So so if you look at Nazi propaganda about the Jews, for example, they're often depicted as part cockroach part rat. They have simultaneously the features of a human but also a vermin. And one thing that's signaling to the intended so called Aryan audiences, these Jews, they may look like they're human on the outside, but they're not on the inside. There's something else. What's inside that putative the human creature that lives next door is maybe a rat, or a cockroach. And that is really dangerous. That's what David Livingston Smith philosopher I mentioned earlier, describes as the beginning of dehumanization, where you start to claim that a certain group of people don't have the human essence they have some other kind of essence.

Clif Mark  29:51

Well, there's the lizard people that rule us today. Well, for example, right?

Paul Sagar  29:55

It's a sword as you say, it says this example but it's got this pulling in the same intuitive direction, but our rulers are not really us. They're a malevolent force that's pretending to be us. And of course, why this is really powerful in human psychology is that firstly, you're turning these people into monsters when you start talking about Jews, or gypsies, or any other persecuted group as cockroaches or, or vermin, you start to say it's not really human. It's a kind of monster, because things with mixed essences don't belong in nature. And things with mixed essences are often going to be scary, and they're going to be dangerous. They're especially going to be dangerous if the essence that of this thing that looks like a human is secretly a rat, or a cockroach or some other kind of or a rabid dog, something that spreads disease. And that gets really dangerous because not

Clif Mark  30:43

only are you exterminate them, dump them out

Paul Sagar  30:46

exactly. What What are your responses to the zombie bear? Either you run away from it, or you destroy it, and all the horror movies with monsters, they all end with a monster being destroyed somehow. That's the ultimate, you know, way out here, the redemption. But of course, when it's real life, when it's politics, what you're saying to one group is that other group that looks like you isn't like you it's a hidden threat. It's a diseased animal posing as a human. And not only is it a threat to you, is it something that you should destroy, you have a duty to destroy

Clif Mark  31:20

it. And that's not just like every side and war propaganda. You also see the same kind of language when people are talking about anti immigrant rhetoric. Like there's always a language of swarming.

Paul Sagar  31:32

Yeah, exactly. So there was outrage in the UK not too long ago, as woman, Katie Hopkins, who's now sort of been banished from our shores and sent somewhere else. And I think over to the United States, and what she was sort of outrageous sort of kind of argument a shock jock, but she described Syrian refugees as like cockroaches. And this did sort of an enormous reaction against her because we remember what that kind of discourse led to. But it was no accident that she went for immigrants who were one of the most reviled and politically beat up on groups in in British political discourse. Now, she didn't get away with that. But it was so

Clif Mark  32:11

striking as Dracula like the first fear of the Eastern European immigrant. Well, you know,

Paul Sagar  32:16

he turns up in Whitby and his coffin from his, there's certainly something about the Roman

Clif Mark  32:22

undercutting the local workmen.

Paul Sagar  32:24

And the dead, definitely something something there in that Dracula example. And, of course, what makes us so dangerous is that it's very powerful to our psychologies, because we're comfortable with the idea that essences are hidden, and that things aren't always what they appear. We're very, we find it easy to fall into the trap of believing these kinds of stories. The dehumanization is dangerous, not just because it can lead to genocide, which historically, we know it can, but because it can get a grip on many, many people's minds. It's not going to be unique to say just the Germans in the 1930s. Like you said, I propaganda use many of the same tropes. Now. The Allies never descended into full scale dehumanize, Jason and genocide. But it was very useful to depict, well, not not, not on the scale of the death camps. But the reason it was so useful to describe the Japanese as less than human is because it's much easier to kill them if they're not really human. So that's why dehumanizing discourses is fine for political purpose. And that's when we get from, you know, not just the fiction of monsters, but turning people into monsters.

Clif Mark  33:30

Right? That's super interesting, because in the movies in Gothic horror novels, we've identified a kind of way to make monsters right? How do you make a count scarier? You make them turn into a bat and drink blood, he's more animalistic. How do you make a bear scarier? You turn into a zombie, how do you make a doll? scarier? You bring them alive, like Chucky. And so there's just this trick of crossing essences making things uncanny. And that makes it more disgusting and horrifying. And it turns out that when it comes time to make political propaganda, you can do exactly the same thing about other people. And I guess you would probably say that, if you're playing with this mechanism, you want to be careful about what kind of monsters you create.

Paul Sagar  34:19

Yeah, and you know, if we're going to learn anything from from our histories, it's that we do really need to be careful with what we do when we're creating monsters. And of course, it's no accident that many of the monsters in history have been tied to tropes of persecuted minority groups. That so psychological essentialism is really interesting and really wacky. But probably also something we need to be really careful about, and we need to be aware that it has this pull in our minds in the wrong hands and in the wrong historical circumstances. It's going to be about more than just creating, you know, Dracula, and zombie bears. It can it can go in an altogether more sinister direction. It's not just a kind of weird titillate. Have the imagination. It's dangerous.

Clif Mark  35:02

Okay, and I think that's probably a good place to leave it. So thank you Paul Sager of King's College London for coming on and celebrating the spooky season with us.

Paul Sagar  35:15

Yeah, well, thanks for having me cliff and stay safe out there

Clif Mark  35:29

thank you, as usual to set for editing help, and for episode art. Thank you to Clayton tap for his amazing Halloween remix of the theme music he made in the first place. And also to Abbey Dan Wolski Rasul zichy, and Bill Rogers, all of whom decided to support this podcast on Patreon. Thank you, I appreciate it. You're really helping me keep it going. And if you listener would like to support us on Patreon, head over to their website patreon.com/goodintheoryandtheywilltellyouhowtosendusmoneyifyou don't want to send money right now or you've already send us all your money and you're looking for something else to do to help the show. Go over to Apple podcasts or whatever podcast player that you use. And leave us a rating and review. Big shout out to my most recent reviewer, a crazy new fee who wrote listener beware Side effects may include a sudden interest in philosophy, five stars. The review reads, This man made me take a philosophy class in university in my first semester, I now have to write a 15 page term paper. Thanks Clif. Well, you are very welcome. And thank you too.