I'm going to read you something that he wrote.

I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happened.

The mass genocidal movements in particular, which were probably the defining characteristic of the 20th century.

And then also what that has to do with individual psychology.

My first degree was in political science, and I was interested in political science because I was interested fundamentally in the reason that human societies went to war.

And when I was studying political science, which is quite a long time ago, the fundamental theory that underlie political scientists' explanations for conflict were economic.

People fight over resources.

And that never seemed reasonable to me because, first of all, obviously, many wars are fought for other reasons than resources.

Two Central American countries, I think it was Guatemala and the Honduras, if I remember correctly, went to war over a soccer game.

So the outcome of a disputed outcome of a soccer game.

And even if you do think that the reason that groups of people engage in conflict are for economic reasons, that doesn't exactly explain much because that doesn't explain whether they're fighting for because of absolute differences in wealth or because of relative discrepancies in wealth.

And those are very, very different causal elements.

And then even if people do fight for economic reasons, which means they're fighting for things that they value, it isn't exactly clear why people value what they value because different societies value different things.

So economics in the final analysis ends up being a shallow explanation.

And I pursued economic and political and sociological explanations for social conflict for a long time.

But eventually they became untenable to me.

And that's partly why I went and studied clinical psychology because it struck me that the right level of analysis for understanding mass movements like the Nazi movement or the, or the ideological possession that characterized the Stalinist Soviets or a Maoist communists or, or Paul Potts, Cambodian communists or any of the dictators that you can talk about who are on the far left.

And so far right during the 20th century, to me those were failings of individual personality.

And the most astute writers that I've ever read who described what they assumed to be the causes of these terrible conflicts made the same point, which is why I'm having you read Victor Franklin, Alexander Solzhenitsen,

not generally regard as a personality psychologist, but he of all the people I've ever read, he's the one who lays out the connection between the existential failure of the individual and the mass catastrophes of society.

And to me that's too important to link to overlook and it also strikes me that it's the primary lesson of the 20th century.

I mean one lesson for example is beware of ideologies and the reason I'm going to walk you through Nietzsche and a bit of Kirchegard today is because these people in the late 19th century with their antennas up knew that the collapse one way of looking at it is the collapse of traditional western values.

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