Jordan Peterson points out that orderliness and disgust is what prompted the 1920s Germany to sink into totalitarianism, rather than social chaos or unrest. He recalls that Germany started off with programs to disinfect the factories and prevent the spread of infectious diseases, followed by euthanasia and forced euthanasia programs, which eventually lead to genocide. He points out that too much civilization, adherence to rules, and orderliness is what leads to totalitarianism.
Jordan then identifies another cause of totalitarianism - the fanatical belief in scientific theories. He points out that just as religious people tend to fall into a trap of indiscriminately following religious doctrine, rational people, who are typically more intelligent than average people, tend to make the mistake of assuming that their scientific theories are 100% correct and applicable in all circumstances. In other words, the fatal mistake of rationalism is arrogance. The firm belief in specific scientific theories on one hand creates social pressure since the believers forcefully try to impose their beliefs on the more skeptical people, and on the other hand, opportunists take advantage of these firm beliefs, because they allow them to enforce policies through which they can gain personal benefits. As the mismatch between theory and reality becomes more apparent, the urge to suppress dissenting information interestingly becomes stronger: the more intelligent, or the experts, do not wish to be called out for previous incorrect claims, since their reputation is now at stake, or are arrogant by nature to begin with; while the lowly believers refuse to alter their views partly because the system offers them comfort and reassurance. In any case, such a totalitarian system can only further support itself on lies - it depends on oppressing speech of those that could criticize it, on censoring opposing views and opinions, and on labeling ideological opponents as disinformation spreaders and as fundamental threats to one's well-being.

Although evidence for these claims were drawn from the history of 20th-century totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, this lecture is somewhat prophetic in that it was given several years before the Covid-19 pandemic, during which the dynamics of totalitarianism played out quite clearly.