(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Why are the teddy bears not piled up nicely on my bed? Remake ze bed so that the teddy bears are piled up in the correct order on my bed! Remake it or I cannot sleep, you domkopf scheisser! Why is my bed not made in ze way that I like? Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to this edition of the Jolly Heretic. Now today I would like to talk about Uncle Addy, I would like to talk about Adolf Hitler, and I would like to talk about what seems to be a breakthrough in understanding the true nature of him, in understanding the psychology and the underlying personality disorders of Hitler, and I would like, and it particularly fascinates me because it just is more evidence of the nature of people who reach very high positions of status, the nature of people who are highly charismatic and persuasive and messianic, and that is that those people will tend to have personality disorders, will tend to have serious psychological problems, but yet we get taken in by them, which is an amazing dimension of what it is to be human. Before I do that, could you do me a favour? Could you please, please, please subscribe? Could you subscribe on YouTube and leave a like and hit the bell button and leave a comment and all that stuff? It really helps me so much if you do that.
And could you just grab my sub-stack, that’s jollyheretic.com, where I put all the most base content, stuff I can’t put on YouTube, in-person interviews, films I make, vlogs, and where if you like what I do you can support me for the cost of a pint of beer a month. Okay, back to videos. So, what has been found? Well, there’s a new programme that’s going to come out quite soon on Channel 4, and it’s called Hitler’s DNA Blueprint of a Dictator, and it’s a research by somebody called Turi King from the University of Bath, and what they’ve done is they found DNA from the sofa, from blood on the sofa, where Hitler killed himself.
And this DNA was compared to the DNA of a living descendant, or a living relative rather, of Hitler, and it was shown to match. So this is almost certainly Hitler’s DNA. Now, what does it show? Well, first of all, it shows that the idea, the anti-Hitler propaganda, if you like, Hitler, he’s only got one ball, and so forth, is probably true.
And this was commented on at the time, in 1923, when he was imprisoned because of the Beer Hall Putsch, it was noted down by a doctor that he had an undescended testicle. And what this DNA analysis shows is that he had a particular mutation called PROK2, which results potentially in Cowan syndrome, which means that you have only really semi-puberty, that you have relatively low levels of testosterone, and that you may have one or more undescended testicles. So it seems that this piece of supposed anti-Hitler propaganda, which was commented on, of course, at the time, was probably true.
Now, this raises another interesting issue. The main source of evidence with regard to the psychology of Hitler was a report by the CIA, you can easily find it online, which interviewed many, many people that knew him, including sort of ex-girlfriends, or kind of girlfriends, and things like this. And it painted him in a particular fashion.
Obviously, the problem with using that as a piece of historical evidence about the true nature of Hitler is that a lot of these people were enemies of his, were people who had fallen out with him, were people that had every reason to paint him in a negative light. So there is an extent to which any reasonable person would see it as an unreliable historical source. What this analysis of his DNA does is it makes it far more likely, I’m afraid, that it is not as complicated and nuanced as one might think.
We like to think that things are complicated and nuanced in history, that this probably isn’t. That there is a very strong degree to which this is a reliable or reasonably reliable source with regard to the psychology of Hitler. And the reason for that is that it portrays Hitler psychologically in a certain way, and the DNA analysis shows that he would be, according to the polygenic scores, so according to, you know, you can isolate scores on certain traits.
You can look at the degree to which a person carries certain alleles and what those alleles are associated with. And according to this analysis, Hitler carries alleles relating to schizophrenia, to autism, I assume, and to bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia, obviously, is that you are psychotic and you have delusions and so forth, paranoid delusions.
Autism is that you are very high in sort of systematizing, very low in empathy, take in too much information, are obsessive and need a kind of structured world, or it sends you mad and have trouble with social skills and trouble with people. And, of course, bipolar disorder is that you oscillate between periods of being extremely depressed and your life is awful and you want to kill yourself, and periods of mania where you are kind of happy to a maladaptive and over-the-top degree. And so there’s an extent to which some of these things intercorrelate.
People that are autistic are, because the world is not structured, a dangerous place for them, are more likely to suffer from depression and all of this sort of thing. So he’s higher than 99 percent of, I think it was the Danish population it was compared to, in alleles that would be associated with these traits. And all of these traits are in the region of about 50 percent genetic.
So this then gets rather interesting and we can kind of start to understand what’s going on. So particularly in terms of autism, my friend Keith Woods has done an interesting discussion of whether Hitler was a sperg, and the answer does seem to be yes. So what do we have with this person? He meanders into art and is quite interested in art.
Well, art and being good at art is associated to some extent with things like depression as a means of expressing your feelings, as a means of structuring your world psychologically, as having low impulse control so you can kind of let go and just sort of become really creative and immerse yourself in an alternative world. But he’s not considered very good at it and he doesn’t really get a job and he just kind of meanders around. And this is one of the things that can happen in extreme cases of autism.
They don’t really have a fixed space in the universe where they can say this is me and this is the universe because they’re constantly questioning things and the world is this kind of swirling chaos and they’re overwhelmed by it. And so it can take them a lot longer than it can with normal people to, as it were, understand themselves and make sense of themselves and understand where they are in the world and where the borders are between them and the world and what it is that they want. And so often these kinds of people will go through a long phase.
It will take them a long time to emerge and start to become talented and recognised because of this problem, because of this state. And we see this in Hitler. He just kind of meanders around and is vaguely interested in art and he’s just basically a tramp living in DOS houses before World War I. Now finally in World War I he starts to emerge.
Why? Because World War I gives him structure and order. Even though it’s traumatic, even though it might be that there’s too much noise and it’s overwhelming and whatever, there is an extent to which it gives him structure and order. And that is what autistic people really crave, what they really want.
The world is too much. They’re taking too much information. The world is just too over the top for them.
They can’t cope with it and they desire and they will move towards things structure and order and systematising. And they will also be obsessive. Why will they be obsessive? Because they will focus on little details.
That’s another aspect of autism. They will focus on little details and they will desire to make sense of the world through these little details and so they will become obsessed with them. So this is what it gives him and he emerges there as a not unsuccessful soldier to the extent that he is decorated.
Now in the CIA report they play this down and argue oh well it was some kind of corruption that caused him to be decorated. They were just handing out medals at the end of the war. Who knows? But it seems at least that what he writes about it is he liked soldiering.
He from people who know him well and some of them have then become dissidents and so forth. What do we find? We find many many aspects of autism and depression. So he is a poor sleeper.
They feel sensations more strongly which often can lead to them being picky eaters. He is an extremely picky eater and has food fads. He recoils from physical contact.
Some of them won’t like being touched. Because it’s a kind of lack of control and also because the sensation is too prickly. It’s too much.
These are not psychologically normal people. They feel sensations very strongly including the sensations within their own bodies and thus emotions. He has very few friends if any friends and of course he’s going to be bad at making friends because he’s autistic.
So he’s low in empathy and he can’t feel how other people feel unless he’s told. So he will have trouble making friends and certainly making deep friendships. The way in which he communicates is not a kind of communication where you take turns and where you understand that somebody else might have something to say and you let them speak for a bit and then it’s your turn and a sort of a back and forth.
It’s basically just harangues where he lectures people. Where he likes being the centre of attention. Well depression it’s a way of making you feel good.
A way of dealing with your negative feelings. You become the centre of attention and you feel worshipped and looked up to and so you enjoy that and so you like doing these harangues. But it’s not a particularly pro-social thing to do and that’s consistent with autism as well.
We have low empathy in terms of the fact that he’s described as being socially awkward. In terms of the fact that he dresses in an extremely odd way. Not like a slightly eccentric quirky way but a way that is completely abnormal.
So he will turn up at smart events where everybody else is wearing a suit and he’ll wear like traditional Bavarian clothes with shorts or whatever and just look completely ridiculous because he has no conception of the reaction that it will elicit in other people and how it will make other people feel and how they’ll feel weird and peculiar and whatever in the presence of him and so forth. He liked his bed to be made in a very particular way as I alluded to at the beginning and if it wasn’t made in that way then he kind of wouldn’t be able to sleep because it was weird. He needed to have the structure and order and because they become obsessed with it of it being a certain way or he just feels odd to the extent that he can’t sleep.
This is a very autistic trait. Clearly he was extremely obsessive and would get stuck on things if you become obsessive. Obsessiveness is good in an autistic sense is the world is swirling chaos.
You need something that you can latch on to and that you can control. You want to make sense of something it doesn’t make sense so you become obsessed with it and you want something in the world that you can hang on to and is certain and is clear so you become obsessed with it. So you might get an autistic that’s obsessed with frogs.
They can predict frogs. They understand frog and they’ll want to know everything about frogs. So there’s a little aspect of their world of their swirling chaos of a world that absolutely makes sense.
So he’s like that he’s obsessive and he’s rigidly inflexible. These people like order and structure and order and structure soothes them. It calms their nerves.
Anything that is new or is flexible is a problem and is a danger to and it can lead to an unstructured reality and chaos and then the and then the sensations are so strong and the heart’s beating faster and you feel fear and you and you can’t cope with it anymore and you’re hyperventilating and you go mad. So you can see why he was like that. Now finally and this hasn’t been mentioned in the summaries of this forthcoming documentary what it states in the CIA report is that he is a sexual fetishist.
Now there is sound evidence that autism is associated with developing sexual fetishes. Okay it seems he may have been low in testosterone but one of the things that can happen if you’re high in testosterone you’re highly sexual and so you can easily develop sexual associations. Even if you’re not you will have some sex drive and autistics are interested in things in objects and they feel feelings very strongly presumably even in the absence of high testosterone and this can include sexual arousal and so they can easily make sexual associations and they can easily become obsessed with things including you know specific parts of the body or things they’ve come to associate with sexuality like I don’t know a woman’s shoes or these things cross over for them in a way they don’t for others because they feel these feelings so strongly including their own internal sensations.
So you can see how these sexual fetishes are more likely to develop among autistics as indeed they are. Now you get common sexual fetishes that are some would argue maybe are not even sexual fetishes they’re just normal sexual attraction that’s taken to an extreme degree so something like a spanking fetish that’s the most common. This is something that many men are interested in but then to these people it will be to an extreme degree such that they need it they need to think about it they need they need that there and then of course you can see how from that interest in buttocks secondary sexual characteristic you know interest in power and dominance over somebody interest in being in submitting to somebody and being dominated by them because in a fast life history strategy easy but unstable ecology in a sense if a woman can even begin to you as a man then she has good genes that will survive in an unstable ecology and so that weirdly kind of becomes sexually arousing and so it’s something like a spanking fetish in general it will be the man that will be aroused by being dominant and the woman that will be aroused by being submissive for obvious evolutionary reasons if he can dominate you he’s got good genes and so therefore it’s arousing that he does so it can perhaps happen slightly in reverse in the sense that if she can fight back and try to dominate you then that’s good genes and whatever in that environment and so that’s arousing and so from there we see the development of what seems to be a very specific fetish in a testimony of a number of women that have been involved with or the testimony of people that have spoken to those women which is that he would want women to squat over his face so he could look up their anuses and this is something you might argue that is so extreme and so sort of odd that it must be propaganda it must be propaganda that you have the testimony independently of a number of different people the very least new people that were Hitler’s kinds of girlfriends and they all said the same thing and that would be consistent with autism to have a fetish of that kind so in trying to understand the psychology of Hitler I do think that this genetic research kind of puts to bed a great deal of the really rather healthy scepticism that has existed about the CIA report on Hitler’s psychology of course of course there are going to be things in it that are made up there are going to be things in it that are just propaganda there are these people some of these people they had an axe to grind against of course they’re going to exaggerate of course this is just how it works but it makes it rather more reliable as a analysis of his psychology so I think this is a really interesting breakthrough and isn’t it interesting that it’s a person that is that psychologically unusual schizophrenia autism bipolar that that is able in times of crisis to come across as a kind of messiah figure and to attract people and to draw people in because of the mania in the bipolar because of the obsessiveness and single-mindedness and whatever which in the right environment can lead to you being extremely ambitious and extremely successful and there may even be something adaptive about the paranoia in that it takes you to war and it means you keep going and you don’t give in and you dominate perhaps so these maladaptive psychological or broadly generally maladaptive psychological traits in these very specific circumstances come together to lead to somebody who normally you’d project as a nutter but in a time of crisis they are what we want which is a quite extraordinary thing about humanity and presumably it means on the individual level in a time of crisis in your own life you will be attracted to similar sort of cluster b of course that’s something cluster b somebody is not but um you know basically psychopathic people um it’s pause for thought anyway i hope this is a bit of interest and i will see you all soon chaps and uh goodbye are you ready for the future of the west
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
