This is a course about the causes of social conflict. I'm not interested in social conflict from the perspective of political scientist or 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 even using, for 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. There's a lot of, that's not obvious, this is a museum to the Jews primarily who were killed by the Nazis in World War II. There's 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 forgetting, 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 II. I think you might regard the Holocaust as an unlearned lesson, and I don't think that you can process information, you don't comprehend. So to say never forget, the question is, what is it that you're supposed to remember? And 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 occurred throughout history? Because there are people who think that what happened in World War II was a relatively unique event, something unparalleled in history. This is not a position that I adopt, I think actually. It's a very common sort of event, but it was perhaps the event of that sort that has proved most shocking to the European conscience, so to speak. But hardly strikes me as unique. And 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 play a part of victims and the Nazis often are always put in the place 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, that 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 seems to me, I mean, I'm not trying to equate the role of the Jews in the Nazis in the Holocaust. That would obviously be absurd. But what I'm trying to say is that the lesson seems to me to be, especially when you've considered the propensity for Holocaust-like events is deeply rooted in human nature. The lesson to draw from the events of World War II is that that's what human beings are like. 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. Well, the English invented the concentration camp in South Africa. Germans perfected it. Chinese used it to great advantage. So I just asked an estimate that I'll show this on the next slide. 66 million people in the Soviet Union were killed as a consequence of internal repression, many of whom went through camp-like procedures on their road to their demise. And the 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 being remembered because you can't remember what you don't understand. And that's what this course is about. I'd be working for, since 1985, I guess, on trying to figure out why it is about people. I'm not sure how to remember. Maybe you know this. Maybe you don't. She's a famous political scientist. She was a student of Martin Heinegger. She wrote a book called The Benalody of Evil. And one of her points was that these people, she was talking about the Nazis in particular, people who perpetrate events like this. If you meet them, if you talk to them, if you 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're very much like other people that you might have met. Which I suppose would be surprising when you think about how fairly, for example, the Nazi movement dominated the German conscious. That's what life-wise, with communism and 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. That's my perspective on all this, isn't it? The fact that people are capable of perpetrating atrocities like those that characterize the Holocaust says something about what people are like, what everybody's like. Because it strikes me that that kind of tendency is something that's deeply rooted in human nature and then to say that, but what was it about the Nazis or what wasn't about the Soviet communists that led them to participate in this sort of behavior is completely decided to point in a sense. All that does is you're looking for some sort of group characteristic that's devoid, and you don't have any personal relationship with that group. The problem is instantly made abstract, as far as I'm concerned, if it's abstract, well then once again, nothing is remembered. And what I want to do is to try to, I want to outline the reasons why something like a Holocaust could occur to you and what it is about us that make us so concerned with protecting our group identities, what those 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 going to study in part in this course of what emotions are and how they're rooted in neuropsychology and neurophysiology and how they manifest themselves in behavior, how they might be controlled, how that might tie into something as abstract as social identity. Usually there's not much of a link made between the concept of sociological processes, so to speak, and inter-psychic processes are neuropsychological structures, but it's obvious if you think about it for a moment that whatever your identity is plays some role in regulating your emotional nature and your physiology because your thoughts are embodied, they're part of your mind, you're part of your brain if you want to get right down to it. People have belief systems and they'll do anything to protect them, and I find that peculiar. Why is it so important about a belief system that would lead people to do things normal people as far as I'm concerned to commit acts that under normal circumstances would be conceived of as incomprehensible even by those people? If you want to see an awesome video of a young Wayne Dyer, check out the video right there next to me as you can enjoy it, continue to believe, I'll see you there. People do things to you, of course, it happens all the time, but what happens to you in your life is you live your life inside, and it isn't what people do to you, it's how you react.