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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Philosophical Sex

Why do we need to transition to a matriarchy while also understanding that the situation where men win the vast majority of Nobel Prizes is normal and correct? What is the biggest scientific lie about IQ tests that society is not willing to acknowledge for social reasons? Why has the rise in intelligence among Jews halted? Why did the Jewish people need to switch to a Jewish dialect of the English lingua franca, as they previously did with Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Yiddish? And why did Kafka conceal the most significant influence on his writing?

By: A Philosopher from Nathan's School

The Battle of the Sexes: A Brain Fed by Frustration is More Creative Than One Fed by Satisfaction (Source)

What does Shakespeare need to do to prove he doesn't have a sister?

Are men better at abstract and creative thinking than women? On the surface, it seems so, and anyone claiming otherwise needs to explain. If men were on average 3 cm taller than women, something insignificant in daily life, and both had identical distributions, what percentage of the hundred tallest people in the world would be men? And what if the distributions are not identical, and men have a wider distribution and more variance among them? (As we know in almost every measurable field, including intelligence. There are more mentally retarded men and more geniuses - and in general, there are more mutations in men, for evolutionary reasons). There are almost no female painters, whereas there are female poets, even historically, and this is probably because men have a genetic advantage in painting, especially in spatial perception (although women have an advantage in color perception, but what's important in painting is composition, which is why there are also no female composers, while there are many female writers). There is a higher percentage of female rulers than female painters in history. If we look back in history, we'll see in which fields women are better than others, and where they achieved success despite obstacles, in various historical environments. For example, it seems that women are better at mathematics than at theoretical physics or philosophy. Enough time has passed since feminism for the top female talent to be revealed if women were as good as men (the top is relatively more visible than the average - it's harder to hide true genius). Therefore, it makes perfect sense to invest more in men than in women in such professions, as long as we don't miss out on the geniuses among women (which would then come at a heavy price). What are average women better at than average men? Women have undergone much higher and crueler optimization than men to be mothers, and to a lesser extent, partners. So they are better at parenting and relationships and teaching and psychology, and therefore feminism has hurt women because it destroyed the family structure and its value, which were the most available sources of excellence for them, and now they compete against men, and are always resentful because of their scarcity at higher levels and thus their subordination to men. That's why they are more depressed today, when they are in firms and companies under direct male control, than in the past. Not to mention that some of them are lonelier, which wasn't the case in the past. What can be offered to ordinary women today? Instead of ideology - religion. A religion that respects women and gives them a special place. Like the mutation of modern Judaism, just without the problematic and disrespectful history for them, which requires a lot of apologetics and cognitive dissonances. Therefore, a strong female religion is possible, which will give them the power to truly change the world. Against the institutions of government that are still male - religion can be female. Believers of the world, unite. The problem is also that women are much worse mothers than before, because they are afraid of technology, hierarchy, and even culture. And they also invest beyond the threshold of efficiency in each child at the expense of the number of children. But what are women really better at than men, historically, so that it makes sense to let them control the field? In governance. Despite a relatively small number of female rulers compared to male rulers - female rulers stood out significantly for the better, and some were very great and powerful - but on the other hand, they engaged less in conquest and fighting, but rather accumulated power gradually. In other words, what makes sense is to give women precisely the political sphere, where interpersonal relationships are important, and thus also the police-judicial-diplomatic-parliamentary-etc. sphere, meaning the entire governmental sphere, because of their lesser tendency towards physical violence. This lesser tendency alone already justifies transferring control of society to women - and transitioning to a matriarchal society. Therefore, it should be established that only women are eligible to be elected and rule, and to preserve the right to vote for men only out of fear of discriminating against them. In governance, it's actually preferable to have an IQ that's not too high, though above average, so geniuses shouldn't be allowed to rule, unlike other fields where it's worthwhile to nurture geniuses. There are also fewer psychopathic women, and this alone justifies transitioning to a matriarchy.

The Great Hypocrisy

Because IQ tests were engineered so that men and women (and not, for example, blacks and whites) would get the same average, as society couldn't digest any other result (the test wouldn't be considered reliable otherwise), we don't really know if women and men have the same level of intelligence, and in fact, it's likely not the case. It's possible that the female average is higher than the male or vice versa, but it's clear that at the high and low extremes, men have a significant advantage, so even if there shouldn't be discrimination between adults based on sex, the implication is that in education, there should be a preference for investing in men, or more precisely, talented men (and at an early age, we don't yet know who is talented). Because in intelligence, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. All of humanity together might be only a few hundred times smarter than a single person and not billions of times. Two people with an IQ of 80 are not as smart as one person with an IQ of 160. In fact, maybe it takes a country of a million people with an IQ of 80 to compete with one person with an IQ of 160 in intelligence, for example in a chess game, or in scientific cultural progress. A country where there are a million people with an IQ of 100 and another thousand people with an IQ of 160 who are in the capital will win in the long run over a country where all million have an IQ of 120, or a country where people with an IQ of 160 are evenly distributed. Golden ages were periods when suddenly all the potential genius pool connected and concentrated in one place or one discourse. Although they always existed before, scattered in the population, and their influence was low. Humanity is deteriorating because of the dispersion of the cultural center. And Israel is also deteriorating because of the social-religious split, which separates geniuses into separate discourses, unlike in the diaspora where political and economic division doesn't interfere with all geniuses being in the same discourse, by virtue of being Jewish. The likely genetic superiority of Jews in intelligence shows that humanity still had much to gain from improving intelligence through artificial breeding, but also that there's probably an intelligence limit in the current genome, say of 200, just as there might be a limit on the maximum age of 120. If we had bred with each other long-lived individuals (of course we couldn't have known in advance) then maybe we would have extended life expectancy. What ruined the rise of intelligence for humanity is the human attraction to beauty, which repeatedly mixed high intelligence with low, and mainly caused the rise of beauty in the human species, and not the rise of intelligence. Indeed, an ugly person resembles an ape. Especially a man, where there was less selection in the direction of beauty. Apart from Judaism, there was no human movement that bred people in the direction of intelligence. And even in Judaism, it's a matter of a few dozen generations and not a comprehensive approach but a byproduct of other trends. And still, it helped Judaism to be as strong in the world as about a billion people, as an order of magnitude, that is, a hundred times its size, just because of at most twenty percent more intelligence, and probably less (on average much less, but we're talking about the elite). You can create an index where every ten percent in intelligence, as an order of magnitude, is worth 10 times more people. Hence, only a more additive combination of intelligence, through a network of minds, will be able to compete with a computer, whose intelligence is likely growing exponentially, and has already surpassed that of a fly. And the question is what will happen first. There are all reasons to believe that the network of minds will happen before artificial intelligence, and then the Jews will lose their advantage, gradually, as the network becomes more additive. But because of the stupidity of the current network, it's not certain that it will be so easy to quickly reach a more additive network than today, and it may happen the other way around. The tiebreaker could be the ability to engineer golden ages through the network, meaning connecting only the geniuses. In the end, what caused women to be, apparently, less intelligent than men (or at least less intelligent than Nathanian philosophers), is precisely that men are more attracted to female beauty. And therefore women are selected more for beauty and less, relatively, for intelligence. That's why women are much more beautiful than men. If women were as shallow as men, and apparently they weren't much less shallow (otherwise the differences between the sexes would be more pronounced and men would be much smarter than women, which is certainly not true), then men would be as beautiful as women and as intelligent. There may also be another explanation that the genes for intelligence and beauty affect both sexes almost equally, and therefore what is created is an averaging between the sexes in both areas, but like in beauty, this probably doesn't negate the differences.

Your City's Sages Come First

The Holocaust is a huge failure of the Jewish people, but those who take great risks, and go for greatness, also fail greatly. And an example of going for greatness is the State of Israel. The whole question of the territories is a question of whether to go for greatness and take a risk. Perhaps another people after the Holocaust would not have taken the risk of the State of Israel - and perhaps they would have been right, given its cultural level - but instead would have become the elite of the world. If the Jewish people had remained scattered in various diasporas, but maintained a network of connections, their advantage in the era of globalization would have been enormous and visible to all. The State of Israel can justify itself only if it goes for greatness in the cultural field, and contributes great culture to the world, like the Bible and Christianity and Communism and Psychology. But history shows that it is precisely sitting and connecting with the Gentiles that creates great culture, and therefore only virtuality will be able to connect Israel to world culture, and in this sense, the biggest mistake was Hebrew. The Arabs are currently a people of low level, and even if it's not genetic but cultural - it doesn't mean that it can be easily changed through education. Because culture, in the social sense and not the personal sense, is something that takes generations of effort, and even in the personal sense it takes about ten full years of investment from life, to be an average native in a culture. And it's a project that few adults have the resources to invest in. The Holocaust was the destruction of human capital value of about between a tenth to a fifth of the world's human capital at that time. This is an enormous destruction of value. We need to move from the concept of human value as a human - as a spiritual unit - to a concept of spiritual capital. An eggplant has lower spiritual capital than a cow, and not all people have the same human-cultural capital, on the contrary, there are big differences. The moral question is how to behave towards someone who has different human capital from you - not just less than you, but also more? One should respect those who have less, but assist those who have more (not the opposite!). And especially there is importance in assisting those who are unable to realize the human capital within them. Hence the moral imperative to educate a child to culture - parenting - and also the imperative to help another person. But the degree of help depends on the quality of the person. Of course, causing harm is not justified between human beings, but the degree to which it is not justified depends on the greatness of the person and the greatness of the injustice alike, and not just on the greatness of the injustice alone, and so does the degree of good that should be given. Therefore, the Holocaust is terrible because it was done not to just any human beings but to those of particularly high value - it killed the gifted children of the class. Similarly, helping a gifted child has a higher moral value than helping an ordinary or struggling child. Society is not measured by its help to the foolish (whom Christian morality likes to call the weak) but to the wise.

1806-1906

There is no doubt that the Holocaust created an enormous challenge for the Jewish myth, that is, a tremendous cultural opportunity for renewal and the creation of a great book. Why didn't this happen? Where was the creativity in the Jewish myth before the Holocaust and where did it stop? In fact, at a dead end. But not just any dead end, but one with intent. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was part of the Romantic movement, and its representative in Judaism, and his tales anticipated Grimm's fairy tales, as the use of tales to create myth, but for him it was about a myth that would express the modern rupture. He starts from the Zohar's method of creating myth by copying an ancient genre, "from ancient times," and just as the Zohar did a renaissance so he does modernism. And just as the Ari introduced the personal into the mythical structure, in relation to the scientific structure, so did he introduce the personal into the narrative myth. Kafka took from him the combination of the personal with the mythical, and the combination of the real with fantasy, and the absurd and paradox and lack of solution, and the religious rupture and the dressing of the religious in literature. That is, the revival of myth writing through the tool of legend (in Nachman) passed to the revival of myth writing through the tool of the novel (in Kafka), which is the contemporary literature they knew. Agnon dealt with the renewal of religious writing through language and through cynicism (because the direct primitive approach was no longer possible after modernism), but in terms of genre he simply copied from legend, from the novel and from Kafka. And therefore he failed to create a significant innovation like his two predecessors. His peak is Edo and Enam, where he managed to touch the myth through the transparent handkerchief of research (cruel irony towards Agnon, who mocked research cruelly, but failed to touch the furnace of his own religion's soul without the tongs of researchers). And it's even less simple for Gentiles to write myth. Magical realism is also a watered-down version of mythical realism, just as magic is a reduction of myth, as practical Kabbalah. Goethe also failed exactly in this with Faust, and Shakespeare failed in the remnants of magic from the Middle Ages, unlike the Catholic Dante and the Zohar who used medieval bureaucracy and courtly literature. The Russians failed with creating modern mythical literature because of the weakness of Orthodox Christianity as a myth: Dostoevsky perhaps succeeded a little with the Grand Inquisitor, but the significant failure was in incorporating Gogol inside, which Bulgakov tried to assemble in The Master and Margarita, but fell into romanticism. In short, it's not simple to create a valid myth. Because the mythical space is an attempt to create a space of mystery and fantasy within reality - and it's easier to hide in the past than in the present. The Zohar understood that this is only possible through forging an ancient text, and its innovation was the personal aspect - the invention of its hero Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the ideal group around him - and it existed within a world of homiletic writing. The Ari already used the scientific perception of his time, that is, a hidden worldview and hidden structure. Nachman used fairy tales, and so it was possible to go back. Kafka used literature, after it became fiction, as a medium that allows this. Each according to what his era allows, because the old patterns become irrelevant and artificial and cannot be used. And today, virtuality can be used to create myth - and if it's already difficult to hide it even in the past, it can be hidden in the future. Kafka is like Paul - his success is in transferring the religious mythical context to a secular world, without direct Jewish context and without commandments, to go with and feel without, it's Kabbalah for Gentiles. And therefore his influence is much broader than the Jewish examples, because it's taking Jewish content and putting it in a form that would be suitable for Gentiles. The idea of book burning and tuberculosis he copied from Nachman, and also the idea of dying at age 40, and also the idea of taking some Nathan of Nemirov named Max Brod. Exactly one hundred years after the publication of the Tales, they were translated into German and Kafka read them, and of course hid the source of his writing, just as Agnon denied reading Kafka, and just as Nachman and the Zohar hid the source of their writing, and just as Moses hid. Hiding the source and influences is the tradition in this mythical tradition. Because myth has no source.

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

There is nothing new under the sun

When the sun is too strong - sometimes the bottom gets burned. The story of a column in Haaretz Magazine

By: The Bitch

Sun, bring the sun - if my skies are cloudy, I close my eyes - but the sun is inside (Source)

My partner and I always joke about how in "Haaretz" sections written by openly gay writers will always contain a supposedly refined allusion to this fact ("Under the Sun" [Translator's note: "Tachat HaShemesh" in Hebrew, where "tachat" can mean both "under" and "bottom"], or "Rear Window"). "Under the Sun" is therefore our private window into the (endangered?) species of the brilliant white gay intellectual. It must be said immediately: this is the best regular column in Haaretz Magazine, and in particularly weak supplements, it is sometimes the only thing worth reading. It almost always brings a unique perspective, sometimes even innovative, but there's a catch: the perspective is always - and miraculously without exception - mistaken.

"Under the Sun" has a fascinating and unique quality, some idiosyncratic distortion of thought, which consistently causes it to understand and draw absurd conclusions about the phenomenon (almost always interesting and important! to its credit) it deals with. This wonderful performance is put on anew every week, and often reminds me of our seminary head, who said about another well-known rabbi that he has a wonderful quality that allows one to know the correct reasoning in any issue - and this quality is to always, always arrive at the opposite of the truth. To get to the bottom of a difficult issue, all one needs to do is read what the rabbi with the inverted mind says - and understand the complete opposite.

"Under the Sun" is like a distorted prism, creating an interesting image out of everything, precisely because of the consistently skewed thinking through which its subjects pass. My beloved argues that this is some inherent tendency (which gains the prestige of "courage" or "innovation" in certain circles) of radical-critical thinking to reach, through a process of escalation, absurd ad absurdum results. I, on the other hand, believe it's a more banal mutation, seemingly, but in practice much more crucial in our contemporary intellectual sphere: a complete lack of quantitative thinking, prevalent in the humanities, and in contrast, a huge surplus of qualitative thinking. "Under the Sun" has no quantitative understanding whatsoever of the phenomena it deals with, and therefore marginal vectors become mountains of fate, while decisive factors are ignored: the shadow of mountains appears to it as mountains, and mountains become shadows, and the result in projecting to the future is nonsensical, so that every reading of the column begins with "really interesting" and ends with "oh dear".

But all this would not have earned "Under the Sun" even a bark from the Bitch, were it not for the phenomenon that has recently been revealed in the column, which is often the end of chaotic dynamic systems (for in "Under the Sun" there is no difference between a butterfly's wing flap and a hurricane): the convergence to a fixed point. This is the phenomenon of thematic fixation that has brought down no less diverse writers in the past (I think, for example, of Ayelet Shani, who was once an excellent interviewer - empathetic but penetrating and striving for the point, investing in research, surprising in her choices, personally involved but without bullshit - and at some point completely lost it with a fixation on tree huggers and refugee bodies, and even when she freed herself from it, she didn't return to her former self, and recently even attacks interviewees at low points, usually uninteresting ones).

"Under the Sun" has an issue (very understandable psychologically) with children. And without (or rather with) connection to that, "Under the Sun" has some desire to believe that the world is approaching its end, and what's easier than clinging to a fixation about climate blah blah and the environment ho-hum. There is zero understanding regarding the severity of the phenomenon on a scientific level, as always (requires serious treatment, not a global catastrophe, except in extreme scenarios that are currently far from scientific consensus). In the past, the skewed thinking started each week from a new starting point from the margins of our world, and therefore was an interesting take-off regarding reality, while here it seems that the skewed thinking is beginning to replace reality and constitute a starting point. And this is already a dangerous place for a column - and boring for the reader. The absurdity begins to collapse into itself, long before the collapse of the Earth. We enjoyed it more when each week they brought us a new trend from German academia, a flash from esoteric discourse circles, or from the goings-on in humanities faculties. It's better to leave the natural science faculties to those who understand them.

It seems that "Under the Sun" would prefer to end with a final column in the last supplement of "Haaretz" where all the prophecies of doom have come true, and nothing remains "under the sun". But meanwhile, the vanities we amused ourselves with, which in the original Ecclesiastes are the eternal occurrences "under the sun", are evaporating in the all-consuming heat of global warming, and we arrive at a situation where the column repeats itself, there is nothing new, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And perhaps, as my beloved claims, the critical-radical thinking in our world is reaching its mystical stage: a phenomenon known in messianic cults is created, where discourse focuses for years and decades on the imminent end, thus introducing an element of exciting tension to the dull reality of life, but the end - stubborn as it is - does not come. Then, a strange need arises to explain precisely why the daily reality around us still looks quite normal, and refuses to comply with the apocalyptic dictates, and so the messianic discourse reaches its point of annihilation - its end is in the denial of reality itself. "So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun" - this is the cloak of the Angel of Death (Ecclesiastes Rabbah).

Haaretz Critique


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Movement of Davka

As an alternative to the progression of intellectual history through antithesis and synthesis, religious logic advances through two other operators: "gam" [also] and "davka" [precisely]. Thus, religiosity is expanded into new domains and then becomes established precisely within them. For example, from a movement that added the book to religion as well, Judaism became a movement that sees religion precisely in the book. From viewing prayer also as intention, and the expansion of religious commandment also into the heart, the perception changed to precisely as intention - and precisely as duties of the heart. Soon, the entry of religion also into the world of computers will turn into a perception of precisely in the computer - and there will be the religious domain

By: A computer wearing a kippah

First conquest as an addition - also, then settlement - precisely (Source)

The religious world advances in double steps - one step is "gam" [also] and the second step is "davka" [precisely]. Hasidism, for example, began with also - "The whole earth is full of His glory", also in the lower realms - and Chabad continued with precisely - precisely in the lower realms (the lower worlds). In other words, the holy domain (of God) is initially expanded, as an addition, to a new area in the world, and then on the radical side, they find that God is mainly there. It's like the difference between the discovery of America, the New World, versus American independence and its transformation into a world superpower. Judaism was also, and Christianity - precisely. Christianity claimed that God is precisely revealed in man, in the weak, in the suffering, that one should precisely turn the other cheek, and precisely what's important is what's in the heart - all these are original Jewish "also" claims.

Thus, each time the religious act is finding holiness in a new domain. Rabbi Kook was also, also in the land, in the political - and Religious Zionism is precisely, hence its perverse character, up to the hills and the extreme right. Because at the extreme end of the precisely lies the deviation. The Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria] was also in the forbidden, also in the breaking of the vessels or in the empty space - holiness is found, the sparks. And Sabbateanism was precisely. Therefore, now the movement of also on the internet, also in technology, also in neuro, etc. holiness is found, will turn into precisely. And this is the "mamash" [really] at the end of Chabad Hasidism, the paradoxical movement of the dead Messiah into the grave. The precisely in the lower worlds is already turning into deviation.

The Spanish Zohar found holiness also in sexuality, also in the other side, also in the name of divinity, also in exile and in concealment and in the hidden, and the Anusim [forced converts] were precisely. If there had to be a post-Holocaust Judaism, meaning if the Judaism that died in the Holocaust had lived and they needed a new religiosity, then the first stage would have been also in the Holocaust, and the second stage precisely. But there was no such Judaism because of the State of Israel and America. Europe was emptied in every place where there was a Holocaust. No living body of Judaism remained. But on the other hand, after the destruction there was a movement from also in destruction to precisely in destruction. And since then, the ability of the people of Israel to be the people of precisely is its engine. What keeps it in the most difficult times.

But the movement of also and precisely is not limited to religion: Special relativity - also. General relativity - precisely. The Trial - also. The Castle - precisely. True religious change moves carefully between the also and the precisely, without crossing the boundary of precisely, and without becoming fixed before the also, but aspires to something between also and precisely. And every religious change begins with seeing a side of reality where religiosity has not yet crossed the hurdle of also and therefore remained in the past. The present is the time of also. The future is the time of precisely. And therefore it is not enough to remain on the side of also, because the energy (dopamine) is found precisely on the side of precisely. On the other hand, excess energy is destructive, breaking boundaries. But religion always lags behind the world. Holiness is conservative by nature. And it sows destruction when it reaches the precisely side of precisely.

Philosophy of the Future