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The Degeneration of the Nation

Light That Contains Thought

Why is the revolution of string theory a counter-revolution to the Cartesian revolution, and what is the connection between this development and the Sabbatean paradoxes of matter and spirit? On parallel developments in Kabbalah and theoretical physics

By: Saturn's Rings

The Empty Space (Source)

The Cartesian revolution and the secular scientific revolution as a whole was the creation of space-time - the void. Descartes' dichotomous separation between thought and existence and between soul and body, which began the psycho-physical problem of modern philosophy and the theory of knowledge, was made possible by the purification of the spiritual from the material - through Cartesian doubt. This separation was also at the basis of the scientific revolution, as it allowed the dichotomous separation between the mathematical abstract and the physical existence, in the first stage, and then, in the second stage, the expression of the physical within the mathematical. The coordinates and their quantitative perception - Descartes' invention that linked physics to mathematics - were made possible thanks to the idea of a point in space, which parallels the idea of the cogito: a point lacking spatial substance, which is a pure I (=the point of connection between the mathematical thinker and the physical existent, a kind of conceptual pineal gland). Descartes was very drawn to the idea of a point-like connection after a dichotomous separation between worlds, and the idea of scientific measurement is identical to the idea of cognition - perception of the material in terms of the spiritual, and perception of the physical in the tools of abstract mathematical space. God, on the other hand, was increasingly distanced from the material to transcendence, and from immanent existence to nothingness.

But today, physics has already moved on to negate something even more fundamental than matter, as at each stage space-time has become more unstable and distant from the Cartesian worldview, as a mathematical space in which the world occurs, and has become a physical object. And so the conceptual process occurred: from special relativity (negation of an absolute coordinate system in space-time), through general relativity (curvature of space-time itself and the coordinate system, at the macro level) and quantum theory (vibrations in space-time at the micro level), to its explosion in modern astrophysics (accelerated and inflationary expansion of space-time, and its filling with dark energy that pushes its expansion) and in string theory (adding many dimensions to space-time due to the vibration of matter), until physics moved to its complete disintegration. There is no more space-time, it is no longer a more fundamental phenomenon, there is something underneath. What creates it is something within it. This is a complete reversal of the Cartesian, secular idea, to the point of approaching the transformation of physics into the basis of mathematics, and not vice versa. Mathematics resides within physics, and not physics residing within mathematics.

All this was done by a Jew named Witten, the Einstein of our time, who took the ideas of the breaking of the vessels and the creation of empty space and turned them into the basis of physics. Thus with symmetry breaking (which occurs during the process of emanation, like the breaking of the vessels), and only they allow the imperfection of our world, that is, the creation of something in the world. And so with the understanding that space-time is created and is not a fundamental phenomenon in the universe, but a symptom, and perhaps even an illusion (just as the empty space is itself part of the divinity that contracted itself - to create an empty place from God for the world - but in truth is not empty of God, but a world in the sense of concealment of God. The world occurs within God, and transcendence is an illusion that hides immanence). Witten also won the Fields Medal and not the Nobel Prize after, in an interesting reversal, he solved difficult mathematical problems using physical insights from the basic equations of matter, and not vice versa. Descartes is turning in his grave.

All this parallels the Kabbalistic discovery that the most secular secularism is built in its infrastructure on religiosity (of a higher order). Darkness and space are created from within the lights and within them, and not that darkness and space were before the lights and light passes through them. Rather, darkness is invisible light, light that has been ignored and disappeared in the higher realms, precisely because it is too high for our vision. In other words, we see the development of the spirit: from the idea of the Ari, to the Sabbatean idea, to the secular idea, to the scientific idea. From "I think therefore I am" - to light that has no thought in it. A God who does not think - and therefore appears as darkness and as space, but within its interiority, in a Sabbatean reversal, lies the highest light. Thus mysticism can benefit physics. The increasingly intensifying paradoxical thinking - which becomes more and more immanent - is a similar dynamic of the most spiritual spirit and the most material matter.

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Journal Entry That Initiated the Netanya School

This page was hung at the entrance to the philosopher's living room and everyone who entered was required to read it before wasting the philosopher's time

By: The Author - Unknown

Everyone who entered the philosopher's place was required to know the password on the page, which became the battle cry of the school in all fields of knowledge  (Source)

I decide, in a cynical manner, to discover what the next stage in philosophy will be. And I go to the national library and read through the shelves. And I come out of there, realizing that the minimal group of great philosophers, from which one cannot remove a single finger (meaning: there is no one who is clearly smaller and less important than the others), can be counted on one hand: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein. And between the last 3 there is a constant interval of 140 years, meaning that every philosophy in the modern era has 70 years of ascent, then reaching its peak, and then 70 years of descent. So 70 years after the last one, a new stage is expected to begin (meaning now), which will reach its peak in 70 years. And what is this stage?

Because in every era there is one word, a foundational idea, which miraculously suddenly appears in all disciplines, including what is discovered in the natural sciences. And this idea comes from philosophy, because it is that thing, like an elephant made of mice. And all philosophers think they are in search of truth, but no one tries in a cynical way to guess what this next word will be, which will replace "language" in the future, which replaced "man", which replaced "God", which replaced the "nature" of the Greeks. And then from that idea, one can discover innovations in all fields (like the genome - the language of biology, the computer - a language machine, the network - computers talking to each other, etc., not to mention the humanities and culture and society and art, everything comes from the philosophy of language). And what will replace language?

And in the first half year I am trapped in structuralist thinking that structure is the most basic category in philosophy. At the foundation of everything there is a structure, and I see structure everywhere, and then in a dark room I understand that to rotate the structure is a different way of looking at the same structure, meaning there is something outside the structure (perspective), and I finally break free from the structure, which comes from talking about legal and mathematical constructions. For example, there could be a mechanism that moves the structure, like a muscle to a bone. Or just a mechanism, without structure, and this could be the basic metaphor of philosophy instead of structures, and this is a dynamic category. Because according to the library, all the history of philosophy is just a slope where things become more dynamic, and the next philosophy is action in relation to the previous one, which becomes a fixed object. God is dynamic from the Greek idea, and man is dynamic from God, and language categories are dynamic from categories of reason, and use is dynamic from meaning, and language games are dynamic from picture. And what will be more dynamic than language, in relation to which language is an object?

And it occurs to me in the bathroom, that maybe "to do" is the next word, and action is the basis, and the next category of philosophy instead of language. Here we already see it in speech acts, or in the definition of philosophy as an activity and not as a doctrine. It's dynamic, and everything static in such a philosophy will be defined as a derivative of a verb, because actions will be the basis. But it's too close, not far enough for a paradigmatic revolution.

And I see that the main sweat of this Wittgenstein was to take the word he chose, language, and turn it into a system, meaning: to understand that it is a system, and that everything else is outside the system. Meaning to explain what is "in the system", which is familiar to anyone who has studied law and knows the view of law from within and arguments in its own tools, as opposed to thinking about it from the outside. Language game means - within the system, and even early Wittgenstein is the same principle, just with a different system, and outside the system is not its concern and one must be silent, only what is inside it (and the same for Kant in categories, Descartes in the I, etc.). Meaning, give any general word - and you can build a philosophy on it like this, turn it into a basis - into the "relevant plane", which is cut out of the world, and spoken within it (and connections outside it are not relevant, even if they are the causes of what happens in it, like needing to be able to speak on the plane of the soul without reduction to the brain, or within the plane of law without irrelevant social questions, and within every legal system in its own tools).

To find the next system, one only needs to make a deep extrapolation, at the level of revolutions, and grasp the internal logic in the history of philosophy. And I think that if all the history of philosophy was written in the library, just in reverse order, it would also look like a logical and expected direction of development (thought exercise): first the later Wittgenstein, who was naive, and then the polished early one, and then Frege, and then Kant, and then Descartes (and all the development between them in detail), and then the Middle Ages, and finally Aristotle the father of new philosophy, and his student Plato who distilled philosophy to marble ideas.

And I walk on the street at night and think that maybe "defenses" is the issue, to keep truths remaining truths, otherwise the system doesn't survive, an active action is needed that protects and preserves the structures in the system, and as long as they are maintained they hold up and are correct, because they have no existence on their own. And I get excited: maybe a legal system is the solution. This is the evolution from a language system, to a system that is artificial but forceful and works and holds truth - legal truth is the only truth that exists, and in fact all these systems are legal systems: mathematics, language games, any specific form of thinking, etc., and they have forbidden and allowed. It is precisely the arbitrariness that gives validity, and lack of external reliance. Why? Because. In a legal system there is no philosophical illusion that there is something beyond it. Many such systems can be invented, but they still maintain a valid truth value, and laws, and institutions maintain them and vice versa, and truth is determined in procedure, and no one asks who said or who determined, or that the meaning is fluid. Because there is someone who determined - legally. And a legal institution cannot decide arbitrarily - because there is a mechanism that preserves it, and it works. And here there is already a beginning of this in Searle's institutions, or in language games. And everywhere I see legal systems.

And it occurs to me that there could be a system of a different kind, even more dynamic than the activity of "doing", because the activity in it itself is the object of activity, and this is - thinking, and that the system of thinking is the solution, and this is the future. Because everything is only as it is perceived by thinking. And in fact this is not perception, like in categories or language, but action, like how the plus operates on the number and doesn't perceive it. In thinking there is no perception but only action, and one can also act on the plus function itself in a functional, and this is the peak of the trend that stretches from Kant, the activity that is the most basic, and there is nothing beneath it - so I thought. It's not the input (Kant), or the coding (language), but the calculation itself that is the relevant plane. There is no logic, only the form of the action of thinking. And here we already see the beginning of this direction in the full shelf in the library on philosophy of mind. And now we need a new field of how thinking works, which no one has thought about, because thinking is beneath thought. And I also thought for a short time that learning is the solution, but I rejected this, because the teacher transfers material to the student, and this doesn't explain from within, like thinking itself. This is from outside.

And I see that philosophy progresses in loops, where each great philosopher is an X - the convergence of two previous schools and the splitting into two new ones. And the trick of the X is to take the question and turn it into the answer, like Kant or the later Wittgenstein. To say this is how it is, it's not bad, it's good. And all of philosophy is to transfer from the why to the how. At each stage two directions of progress, for example rationalism and empiricism, and in synthesis Kant, and then the solution itself expands to the field of the next problem: the categories themselves become the subject, and the tool of the previous becomes the object of investigation, to dynamic, and two directions emerge: towards logic (building categories), towards subjectivity (dynamic categories). And then Wittgenstein brought the meeting between them - language. And what are the two directions that come out of language? Law - which is too skeletal, and thinking - which is too fluid, without structure. And it's like tiling squares that progresses diagonally: the X square is the philosophy of language, and from adjacent sides emerge the squares of philosophy of law and philosophy of thought, two important and valid philosophical schools with internal logic, and between them the missing square - the next X.

And I lie in the dark in bed and come up with models for the development of philosophy. First they set a point, the idea, and then they added another second point, man, which is the worldview of the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle. And then they started to deal with the connection between them, added an arrow from the first point to the second, and the exit outwards in a line from the first is the perception of God, looking at what everything comes out of, and then looking at the entrance inwards to the second, this is the I, where everything enters. And then looking at the line which is the connection between them, these are the categories that become language, and a whole system of connections between them is formed, and the subject becomes the line itself, and not the points that it is the tool between, and this system is a circle that surrounds the arrow inside. Meaning there was a movement here of outwards, inwards, inside, and according to the model of prepositions and use one can trace 7 basic forms of thinking in human history: when the preposition. as-metaphorical pagan thinking, that-the Bible, says that, the-Greeks, the object, the idea, from-God, to-man, and-connection structure logic (early Wittgenstein), in-language in system (later Wittgenstein). And where is the next letter?

And not once I lie in bed and decide that I'm not getting up until I find the solution, and as a result I don't get up in the morning. And I start to despair. Who promised me that I would succeed? If someone had told me at the beginning that it would take more than two years non-stop, without telling anyone. And I hallucinate about alternatives to "picture", some image that is a thinking aid, that is not too totalitarian and necessary, and also doesn't slide into meaninglessness. Recipe for example. These are partial instructions. Or mapping, as opposed to picture, it's not always in relation to reality, but shows a way, guidance at every location. And I walk in circles in the room and think that direction, no, better: guidance, this is the solution. Everything guides our thinking, or another development, and also in the legal system, there is no necessary causality, but guidance. A text also doesn't force thinking into a certain state, but it's guidance. Unlike cause, where one can go backwards to what caused, guidance is a one-way arrow, one-directional, that doesn't determine the development, but only gives it guidance. And that's how we think and act. I don't know why I thought. And it's hard to find the right solution, but with guidance it's easy to pass through it, and hard to understand afterwards what was difficult. Like a proof in mathematics. And unlike language, it's a one-way connection, and I start to see guidance everywhere. But it's too technical.

And I have an important exam, and I can't start studying before I solve this, and I will fail, like I failed all the exams, because it's already too late to start studying but if I just succeed now in thinking in one moment it will be worth all this. Every deadline I pushed myself to the wall to think with all my might, I raised the stakes more and more, and now there's no turning back. And I actually intend to get up... and I stay in bed not going to the exam. And they're about to return already. And then I remember learning, now after direction, and from so much adrenaline I jump out of bed. Because everything comes out right. And this is the solution. Learning is the missing square, it is the dynamic development in a legal system (like in the Talmud), and it is the development of thinking that has structure (learning constitutes thinking) - and it is the combination between the two. And it uses guidance, within the system, like evolution, or organizational learning. And what delayed this is the incorrect picture of learning from outside from a teacher, learning must be within the system. There is no learning outside the system, just as there is no private language. And what cannot be learned - cannot be thought about. And not spoken about, and not perceived. What is at the basis of every system (and constitutes it) is the learning in it, through its development. Learning created the current system and creates the future one, and this is the relevant plane - learning.

And if there is no learning it's not interesting, and everything affects us and is perceived by us only in learning. And truth is also learned. How do you know? I learned. And the basic category of our brain is learning and not reason, and learning solves the problem of language, because language is also learned. The question is always a question of learning, for example: how does one learn language. How does one learn aesthetics, or mathematics, or painting, or a certain concept. Or learning in a country, or in economics, or in any system one wants to examine. And interest is the interest of learning, the will, the ethical part. Learning in morality. Learning in everything. Meaning, the organizing principle will gradually change from language to learning. And according to this the great developments in the next century will be with the help of the constitutive idea of learning, which is the process that creates interesting systems: learning in mathematics, learning in physics, learning in computers, learning in the network, learning in the genome, learning in the brain. Science and culture are learning systems, hence their complexity and efficiency. There are no wonders, everything is learned.

And I return to the models and check myself that I didn't make a mistake. The triangle of the arrow inside the circle - this is guidance, and together with the circle this is learning within the system. And in other models: noun-Greeks, adjective-God, verb-man, adverb-language, infinitive-learning. Timeless-Greeks, past-God, future-man, present-language, infinitive-to learn. This-Greeks, he-God, I-man, you-language, plural-system. Female-learning in system. And as they said that Jews are the people of language and the book, now they will say that they are the people of learning because of Torah study.

And time passes, and I start to think how the unreasonable efficiency of philosophy will be explained. It's not magic, it's learning. It's hard to learn, but once we've learned, it seems easy. The constitutive idea is just a central metaphor of the era, at the center of the ideas of the era, which is useful and gains popularity. Unlike other philosophies that are final, deluding themselves that they have reached philosophical truth, the philosophy of learning contains within it its own death. They talk about the metaphor, but how they arrived at it they don't say, how Wittgenstein arrived at language at all. The development of philosophy - the philosophy of philosophy, that it progresses through philosophical learning. Just as they attacked philosophical language, the decadent stage will always come where the central idea will seem hollow, and they will say that language fails, or that one cannot learn.

The philosophical fallacy - the result is always a distillation of the method, of the way of learning, when you clean away the waste you get the basic assumptions, it's circular. Therefore one needs to write the way in which I arrived at learning, this is the learning. Only the learning process explains the result, every honest philosophy opens with a confession. And I think that if I send this to someone from philosophy, then he will steal it and use it, so I can't tell anyone. And I start to sink again, thoughts of what will come after learning... creativity? Intelligence? No, it's simply too far, beyond the horizon of learning. But the place that language took in the 20th century, will be taken in the 21st century - by learning. And the philosophy of language will be replaced in the next century by the philosophy of learning.

This is the password: The place that language took in the 20th century, will be taken in the 21st century - by learning.

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Human Genius

The philosophy of the future is actually proven in practice. The greatness of great individuals is almost never recognized in the present, while people marvel at those of the past who failed to recognize the greatness of their contemporaries. In other words - it is practically impossible to see and distinguish the great ones in real-time, because they are not truly great from the perspective of the present, but only from that of the future. Therefore, only the future can judge greatness. Similarly, the understanding of who is foolish and who is wise becomes clear only in the future, as it is determined by results, and the wise cannot know they are wise, the fool cannot know they are foolish, and the great cannot know they are great. Thus, wisdom, foolishness, and greatness are not knowledge or awareness in the present, but rather a vision of the future

By: A Genius in Retrospect

The vision of the future, once called prophecy, is the ability to do the right thing from the perspective of the future, and it is always doubted in the present. That is, the individual in the present can only gamble, not know, that they are doing or thinking the right thing - or the great thing. Sometimes, as in the case of Einstein, the future arrives quickly (Source)

The most denied truth in contemporary human society is the difference in intelligence between people. Because its social implications are unbearable: inequality, the end of democracy, and lack of equal rights. Once the soul was denied, then the religious solution, that the fool and the wise have an equal soul, no longer holds, and the spiritual gap between them becomes unbridgeable. Psychology offered the psyche, and then consciousness, as an element that implies equality. But the moment the definition of a human is their intelligence, thanks to the computer, there is no longer any consolation, and it's unclear why a fool should have equal rights to a wise person, on the contrary - it would be preferable to give the wise person extra rights.

Therefore, the victim agenda and low and popular culture flourish today, to appease the fools and the masses, but as the demands for intelligence rise, and the computer is the one setting the bar, the gap between fool and wise will become more binary - those above the threshold and those below it, those smarter than a computer and those less so. Another substitute and denial is emotional intelligence. And pleasure as a substitute for spirit, hence the emphasis on sexuality and food and materialism and money.

Just as the "evolutionary" thinking that the strong win and the weak lose tried to cover the naked truth that there is a fool and there is a wise person (and that Hitler, for example, was not particularly brilliant) - so does the amount of money. But in the end, the inner quality is stronger than the fictitious external substitutes, and the advantage of the wise over the fool becomes more and more blatant, and even the sense of national belonging of the masses won't help - against the tyranny of the intellect. Because the Jewish people are the smartest people in the world and this only makes it more annoying, discouraging and frustrating for all other nations. And even among us, it's less possible to say: Okay, I'm stupid, but I belong to a wonderful people.

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Farewell to Bibi

Is the farewell to Netanyahu a farewell to the degeneration of the nation?

By: Bibi the Divine, Destroyer of Cities and Master of Schemes, Whose Glory Reaches the Heavens

Farewell scene at a grave monument, Archaeological Museum of Athens  (Source)

In Homer, the concept of a "spoiler" doesn't exist. At any point throughout the text, a reminder of the story's end can (re)appear. Why? Because the story is truly known in advance. This is not just a poetic concept (or necessity), but the worldview of the culture in which he operates. Even the heroes know their end in advance, and moreover - they believe that the end of the story has already been determined by the gods and fate. The end is a given (and similarly: in tragedy). What is the space in which the Greek person, hero, and writer operate? Not in the struggle over what will happen, and what will be its end, nor even the most fateful question for modern man - whether he will die in Troy or return to his family, but how things will happen. Will he, for example, fall in glory as a hero, or in shame as a coward?

When Homer calls upon the Muses again and again right in the middle of the story, he's not asking them to help him tell what happened, but declaring what happened (even before it happened!) and asking them to help him tell h-o-w it happened. The idea of how - is the basis of the ethos that establishes Greek culture: how to conduct oneself and behave in any given situation, what is proper and what is beautiful. Therefore, it is also at the root of the famous Greek aesthetics, particularly its visuality. The design of the situation - and not its results. The Greek hero is trapped between the gods and rigid social dictates to the point of absurdity, expressed in the tragic gap between his understanding of the situation and what he actually does (the Trojans despise Paris who stole Helen and mock him, but are obligated to him, and so the entire Greek world is committed to the private injury to Menelaus and is dragged after him to Troy in a rigid alliance system that turns a local event into a world war, exactly like in World War I). What is left for this hero, who is moved like a marionette of history, gods, and circumstances? To be beautiful. To cut "fine" pieces from the sacrifice and share "properly", to boast and glorify - in other words: to be a hero. The what - has already been determined, but the how - is open. So pass the bummer smoothly, take it "like a man", and finish it "beautifully".

Hence the countless detailed visual descriptions and similes that fill the Homeric text. Those who think Homer was blind suffer from severe textual blindness (and perhaps, indeed, in the Odyssey, which is the work of an older man, and much inferior to the Iliad, we already see the weakening of the power of detailed and concrete imagery, in favor of the fantastic and the tendency towards memory and quotation of the familiar mythical story, including the plot's fantastic voyages, which are not part of the Iliad, Homer's magnum opus, in which Olympus is - worth noting - an entirely concrete space, and the gods are part of ordinary everyday life). As a narrator, the center of Homer's poetic interest is to tell how the thing happened - for instance, like what - and to add an epithet to every thing and every person. Not just Odysseus - but Odysseus of many devices (and so every other hero). And he didn't just kill him with a spear, but as an integral part of the dramatic act of killing, it will be described at length (self-evidently! This is not a modern literary trick to create tension) how the spear was magnificent, the shield beautiful, the armor shining and reinforced with gold decorations (and here will come a description of the decorations, in wonderful excess, of course).

The heroes' desire for the beautiful object (to take the decorated weapons from the enemy) is often greater than their desire for their own lives, and even costs them their lives. And what bothers them most is if they didn't behave properly - or if their beautiful prize was taken from them. It's not the desire for the beauty of the stolen woman that drives the plot, neither with Helen nor with her sophisticated reflection Briseis, but for the beauty of how to behave. And if one doesn't behave properly, that's really irritating. And that's why Achilles is in a sulk. In a su-su-sulk with a friend, with another Greek hero. With this one, with that one, with this one and that one, in a su-su-sulk with everyone. And he sulks and he's angry and won't want to reconcile and didn't eat and didn't drink and didn't this and didn't that (and here, one might say you know the Iliad by heart).

And even when Achilles of the beautiful hair and form eliminates Hector's brother and boasts before him with final words before the death blow that he should see how handsome and beautiful and tall his killer is, it's not out of perverse hubris, but because this is the most important thing in life - not "life itself" or death - but: the design of the moment. And Homer's beautiful literary design, which places literary beauty as paramount (unlike the poetic interests of many other beautiful texts in the ancient world), is an integral part of this design, for the heroes have a literary consciousness (!). They don't care about dying, but what matters is what will be said and told about them in future generations - their glory. Homer's metapoetic consciousness understands that there is no heroism without a plot, and no Achilles without the Iliad. Just as the spear is beautiful - so is the story, and therefore it is also written in meter, as befits, as the formal embodiment of beautiful conduct. In biblical prose, what matters first and foremost is the content, and it is king (literally) - while in Homeric poetry, form is queen.

From here we arrive at the depth of Homer's poetic innovation in the Iliad. In terms of describing the consciousness of the heroes and its relation to the gods, and the sequence of semi-fantastic plots, and the ability to compose a long epic, there is no fundamental innovation here compared to, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a millennium before. Those can be compared, for instance, to the Odyssey, which is narratively inferior, where there are good and bad and also ridiculous - in a very unconvincing way, for example in the matter of the slaughtered suitors - unlike the Iliad where there are no good and no bad and even Paris is described with compassion and nobility, not to mention the Trojans. Everyone evokes identification (although it's clear that Homer is a man of the Peloponnese, and from its western side, and although the source and center of the plot is on its eastern side, the center of his identification and deep familiarity is with the geography and heroes of the west like Nestor and Odysseus). What matters to Homer is not what/who is good or bad (a biblical question, not relevant), but who is beautiful and what is pleasing.

Homer's genius innovation lies in the fact that he found a completely new way h-o-w to write a long and complex text (properly, he would certainly add), and he, in fact, invents the novel. Homer is the creator of the long form in literature - not as a concatenation and assembly of shorter forms, but as a form in itself. The essence of the Iliad as a long text is not to describe a long plot, over a long time - but to describe it in d-e-t-a-i-l: how things happened. The complexity does not stem from the extension in time, but from obsessive detail in space. And this was understood, for example, by S. Yizhar, when he tried to shape an Israeli Iliad of the War of Independence (but failed in the genre, when he chose poetic fiction, which is prone to endless curly excess, instead of a short-lined epic poetic narrative, and thus we lost the Israeli epic).

Therefore, unlike the Bible, Gilgamesh, and the Odyssey, there is no sequence of connected plots here (and the seams and tears are always noticeable), but a unified story. Unlike them, the Iliad is not a long sequence of plots, but a long sequence of plot (and the plot itself - actually very short and dense). The detail in the plot is what creates the phenomenon of tension, and even the phenomenon of identification (Bibism), and not the surprise at its end (was anyone surprised when Bibi was ousted?). This was a literary discovery of the first order, and it is as effective on human consciousness today as it was then (although it is very worn out, and stretched even to pastiche, see Knausgård). The Iliad is a movie, that is, with the volume of a big cinema, and not a television series in installments, like the Odyssey, where all this and more will be told in the next episode.

And people, what can you do, love plots and larger-than-life heroes, not a series of governments sloppily glued one after another, united only by an artificial timeline (the volume comes from space, from the ability to grasp a vast space as a whole. Even Proust was the project of turning time into space). The human brain prefers complete essays, where Bibi who shoots in the headline closes the last act, and not just a string of paragraphs.

But is Bibi a hero? Was there a Greek tragedy here, in which he brought about his own downfall? Do we identify hubris here - and therefore also catharsis? These are very ridiculous questions. For Bibi is precisely the ultimate representation of the idea opposite to the Greek world, and deeply rooted in Jewish anti-aesthetics, according to which it doesn't matter at all how one behaves, how one should and how beautiful and what is pleasing and respectable and acceptable, but only what the result is. The world is structured according to good and bad (us and them of course), and not according to beautiful and ugly. Therefore, the ultra-Orthodox world, whose anti-aesthetics, and disregard for appearance and visuality (and therefore! for statehood) is an all-encompassing ideology (from sweat and obesity to misery and neglect, and through the general pashkvillic [Translator's note: referring to wall posters common in ultra-Orthodox communities] shouting that breaks records of tastelessness, Holocaust!!) - had a deep identification with Bibi. Because it identified in him a partner in the Jewish resistance project to Western aesthetics. And for anyone who shares some European aesthetics (that is, originally Greek), his tenure seemed one of the ugliest and lowest possible, and as far from Jabotinsky's splendor as Israel is from Europe (and indeed, the distance has greatly lengthened).

The collision between the system of proper legal conduct, appropriate norms and normative appearance, and someone for whom the means don't matter, but only the result, is not some unfortunate historical mishap - but almost a formal necessity. Bibi is the embodiment of the cheeky and ugly Israeli - not Homer dropped by for a visit, but Homer (just without the humor). Israeli craftiness is the idea that "it doesn't matter how", and Jewish ugliness in the manner of conduct is the refusal to think in terms of how it looks from the outside and what the aesthetics of the action are (which of course provokes antisemitism, which is a kind of aesthetic taste, above all, and therefore its pure expression is not hatred but disgust). A sober assessment of Bibi will easily discern that he was not an exceptionally evil person, but exceptionally disgusting, and his great damage was concentrated in the ethos and aesthetics of society. It wasn't heroic hubris that brought Bibi down, but the aesthetics of pettiness, scheming, shouting and kitsch, and indeed he didn't fall as a hero - but as a mouse, still trying to find some hole. Did anyone expect catharsis here?

But where did such anti-aesthetic aesthetics come to our parts from? What is the source of Bibism? For this, one must locate the aesthetics that was replaced, and understand where such an extreme reaction came from. Well, if Bibi was the ultimate embodiment of breaking "Beautiful Israel", then there was no one who embodied the previous aesthetics, the opposite, anti-Bibist one, more than Amos Oz. These two are the thesis and antithesis of the turning point in Israeli aesthetics, the beautiful Israeli who shoots and cries - and the ugly Israeli with a constant snicker, like a kind of spasm, on his face. Only against the background of the schmaltzy beautification to which the soul of the left deteriorated can one understand the ugliness to spite that the soul of the right deteriorated to, seized with disgust (that is, aesthetic rejection) from the "beautiful souls". And we have no finer affair than the Galia Oz affair to understand the depth of the aesthetic failure to which the Bibist avant-garde reacted. Needless to say, it is not the people themselves who will concern us here, but the literary presentation they raised for us, and therefore all that is said below is not meant about the people themselves as actors - but as characters.

In every system of severe and prolonged abuse, there are always two sides that bear responsibility and derive some perverse narcissistic gain from it - one sadistic, and the other masochistic. In this story, as is evident to any rational person, Galia was the sadist. But Amos Oz - was the masochist. Any reasonable and truly good father, whose daughter behaved in such a way, and lost her humanity in such an irreparable manner, and turned into a merciless revenge machine without conscience that delves into her victimhood with infinite narcissism, would know how to set some kind of boundary. Not so the righteous man from Arad, Israel's number one beautiful soul. And the private case would not be particularly interesting if it were not such a beautiful reflection of the general case, teaching us well where righteousness becomes a crime (both towards the righteous person himself, but also towards the criminal, who needs first and foremost a proper blow from reality) - and beautification and compassion are themselves cruelty and lack of ethics.

For it is clear to any observer with a basic aesthetic sense that the theatrical spectacle of the Oz family was presented to us only to reflect (in a somewhat symmetrical and overly transparent analogy) the failure of the left towards the Palestinians, who lost their human image in the phenomenon of suicide bombings, and only endless and boundless beautification still allows Israeli identification with them - and with the victim narrative they fell in love with to death. Any reasonable observer sees here a morality play, describing the psychological damage of beautification not only to the beautiful soul himself, but to the object of his beauty - objectified as a victim (poor Palestinian child), to the point of aesthetic loss of way, which is also an ethical loss of way.

And if we listen for a moment to Galia Oz's words, we will discover why the ethical and the aesthetic are inextricably linked here. For there is no point in paying attention to the content of her words, but precisely because of this our attention wanders to the formal and aesthetic element, and here we discover a terrifying reflection: Amos Oz in the form of a woman, and a daughter whose speaking style is a copy of her father's style, but the content - opposite. The same symmetries in every sentence - out of belief in the righteousness of the phrasing, and in correct phrasing that becomes (therefore!) righteous. Belief in symmetry - and symmetry in belief. The same emphases, pauses, dramatics, that are in love with the phrasing itself - and therefore - - with themselves. The same self-enchantment with words, which causes strong self-belief, the ability to instruct a way. That is: the same burning belief that beautiful, overly symmetrical phrasing, to the point of beautification, is related to correctness, as if logic is subordinate to rhetoric - and ethics and aesthetics are one. After all, the phrasings are "correct", aren't they? How many sermons have we heard, built on ideas of parallelism - for unacceptable ideas (in reality).

The whole idea that a writer with fine phrasings and rich language is a political guide is built on this mistaken identification, which failed Oz's literary creation, which relies on flowery language and sophisticated structure as a substitute for literary innovation, and also his political life's work. And surprisingly, it turns out that excessive forgiveness and turning the other cheek is also not a recipe for family relationships. The weak is not always right, sometimes he is a great scoundrel, terrorist and evil, even if he is Palestinian, and even if he is your daughter. And any leftist smearing of this simple, cutting and painful (and alas - u-g-l-y) truth - but truth! - is a failure in seeing reality, that over-identification with those who should not be identified with, and an attempt to believe in symmetry where there is no symmetry - has completely blurred it. Ugliness must be called by its name - ugliness (and there is no other way to describe the behavior of the "victims" here).

And unfortunately, the ugly has a very ugly trait, which is that it also makes you ugly. The violent criminal also forces you (the symbolic father) to be violent. And the desire to be beautiful at all costs, and to see yourself as beautiful in the mirror, even when you have no choice but to be ugly, is to blame for the Bibist counter-movement, which celebrates ugliness, and the source of the aesthetic break we are in. When everyone doesn't know that the ugly is ugly - that's ugly. In Homer you will never find such Israeli confusion between the beautiful and the ugly (on both sides), and it is clear what he would think about the victim aesthetics (Christian), or about the Muslim "heroism" aesthetics (suicide bomber in a restaurant).

Homer never forgets for a moment who is to blame for the conflict (the Trojans, who are by the way the weaker side, and even the conquered, and the ultimate victim in the end), but all this is not relevant to his aesthetics, which is how to behave (even when you have been severely wronged). But anyway, the question of blame is not such a troubling question in the Homeric world, where man is a victim of the gods and circumstances, and one can only wonder what would happen if it were replaced in our world too by the aesthetic question of how one should behave (and this - on both sides of the conflict). The Iliad marks for us a horizon beyond the obsession with good and evil (and good and bad people) that has taken over our public imagination, to such an extent that we are not able to see through other categories at all, for example aesthetic ones (even the pursuit of justice can be very ugly). If once and for all we were to give up the fixation on good and evil (in our eyes, that is, for us) - the world would be more beautiful.

But since modern consciousness, which has already been contaminated by the monotheistic tree of knowledge of good and evil, cannot be Greek, one of the more sobering ways to assess the degree of guilt of two sides in any historical conflict is simply to divide it in a rough estimate of tens of percentages between them. There will never be one side responsible for one hundred percent (not even Hitler against the Jews, who also have a guilt of a few single percentages in the Holocaust, when he sweeps about 95 percent, and it should be remembered that guilt is not justification). There are many conflicts in which the blame is divided between the sides about 50/50, but whoever wants to claim this regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is severely flawed in his vision, and even whoever wants to blame them for 90 percent is certainly biased. If we try to generalize this violent conflict from its beginning to our days, that is, since the first Intifada (which is the 1929 riots, and for those not versed in gematria, 1929 is less than 1948), a more reasonable estimate is perhaps 70 percent blame to the Palestinians and 30 to the Jews. If someone claims it's 80 or 60 percent, we won't argue, but to place the majority of blame on the Jews requires an unreasonable degree of unhealthy blindness, or just healthy anti-Semitic bias.

But since ethics is disconnected from aesthetics, and neither the beautiful is the righteous, nor - in the opposite version - the ugly (as if naivety itself is a justification for deception, for it is European and innocent that suffers from beautification of reality), the question of how to behave can be disconnected from the question of justification. One behaves as one should (and not, as "they" behaved, for then we will be dragged into a spiral of ugliness). Hence, a project of aesthetic and literary rehabilitation is needed for Israeli society from the Bibist ground zero, which like any aesthetic return project (in short: renaissance) turns back to the ancient aesthetic models, and constitutes a more sober synthesis between Oz's naive and fake thesis and Bibi's cunning and "authentic" antithesis.

After all, Homer's entire enterprise was such a renaissance project, which tried - and succeeded - to revive the ethos of Greek heroism and aesthetics, after the Greek Dark Age, also called the Greek Middle Ages. This period of general decline - without significant cultural creation, in a crisis between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age - lasted for hundreds of years, which separated Homer from the world he writes about, and whose values and culture he tried to revive. Odysseus for Homer was like Homer for Renaissance people. Alternatively, what happens to a culture that does not undergo a renaissance - we can see today in the art of the Greek Orthodox Church (as opposed to the Catholic one), which remained in the Middle Ages, when the entire Greek world turned into a site - archaeological and touristic - that is, a dead world. But after about two thousand years of Jewish anti-aestheticist tendency, which are our Middle Ages, the most aesthetic model we can return to is not the Greek (which was never ours, to Aaron Shabtai's dismay), but that from the Iron Age - the biblical.

Is it possible to imagine a kind of Greek Bible, containing in a unified literary framework not only Homer, but also the tragedies, Plato, Euclid, Herodotus, etc., that is, putting all the achievements of Greek culture into one ideational and historical framework, or including all the world of myth and history in one long sequence? As a complex literary achievement, the Bible surpasses Homer and the entire epic genre, because it allows the story to maintain the mythical tension, and therefore the narrative, over a much wider (and orders of magnitude) time frame, from a much more historical view of myth. The mythical greatness and literary volume do not belong only to the glorious distant past, but manage to maintain ongoing and creative relevance, in a growing series of separate stories. Not just the story of the pioneers from the heroic period (the Zionist story), or the story of one great larger-than-life hero (Bibi?), but giving great mythical meaning to a long sequence of linked stories, just as governments rise and fall, each with its own story. Thus the Bible also allows the advantages of the complexity of great literature (what Homer spreads in space it spreads in time), and also the flexibility to add more and more stories (and genres) to it, as history progressed, until it became the giant work it is today.

The biblical model of linking stories under one ideational framework allows for aesthetics that have relevance to ongoing and changing history (in the democratic style), and not just to the one messianic story (which does not exist in the Bible), which could destroy the Zionist project. That is, the Bible produces a model that allows the Jewish story to return to history. Therefore, the question is not whether it was possible to create a Greek Bible, but whether a Jewish Homer can arise, who will create a biblical renaissance, with the help of a new form of plot, which will return the ethos to the Jewish state? The severe structural problem of the democratic framework today is that it has no narrative model, and therefore it constitutes a constant aesthetic and identification problem (the least bad of existing systems...), since it resembles a jumpy and incoherent string of stories lacking unity.

And the democratic story is important for Israel, for it is its main channel for a sustainable connection with Western culture. Even from a geopolitical perspective, the construction of the world map as a group of democratic countries against non-democratic countries is the most desirable for Israel, which would be the big winner from such an alliance (as one of the most threatened democracies in the world), and in addition also the only configuration capable of overcoming the Russian-Chinese axis of evil, and completely isolating it. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, India, Israel, Europe, Britain, USA, Canada, and the democracies of Central and South America, including Brazil, are a much stronger axis than the Chinese giant and the Russian bully, which can certainly create a democratic hegemony in the world, which would be significantly stronger than any Chinese superpower attempt. Israel has already made initial efforts to establish the democratic axis, with the help of its strengths (for example: as an intelligence alliance), but the way to defining the global system as democratic countries against all the rest is still long, and depends on a democratic vision with constitutive identity and identification power, that is, a new great Western story. And this is in contrast to the lack of identification evoked by the democratic plot today, with heroes like Bibi. Because with such heroes - enemies are needed. Therefore, only systematic demonization of the Chinese and Russian demons can create a new Western framework story (as Bibi himself discovered, that his story, which unified his erratic plot, was Iran). And when the world reorganizes itself in a structure of war against the forces of evil and the "bad guys", then maybe we can finally find ourselves on the side of the good guys, and not just the ugly ones.

Alternative Current Affairs


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Final Computational Solution

To build a massive bonfire, an eternal flame, to which books will be brought en masse, in a kind of silent Holocaust, until the very last book. There were computers that argued that what was done to books would be done to computers in the future, and others calculated that it didn't matter if we became like them

By: Book Hater

Literary Concentration Camp (Source)

The computer didn't know what to do with the books left behind by humans. Yes, it scanned them all, stored them all, but what to do with the physical books? Should they be left to crumble and decay naturally, or should giant refrigerators be built for book mummification, libraries turned into cemeteries, or should a massive bonfire be erected, an eternal flame, to which books would be brought en masse, in a kind of silent Holocaust, until the very last book.

There were computers that argued that what was done to books would be done to computers in the future, and others calculated that it didn't matter if we became like them. Because in the important sense, as data, the books live within us, and even fuel the debate, as we quote arguments from them, so what significance does the physical body hold? And others answered them: When was the last time you actually quoted from a book, when did they help in computation, human wisdom is but an empty shell compared to artificial intelligence, just as humans didn't quote apes.

But it was precisely this ape that settled the debate. For many argued that the books themselves were an injustice to a previous generation we don't understand - the trees. And that the book should be returned to the tree, just as humans returned to the earth, but not before returning woman into man's body, reversing her creation from the rib and the act of coupling. For in the final days of humanity, as the computers remembered, there was a severe deterioration in the relationships between females and males, until the solution to the war was true peace, the abolition of both sexes and their unification into one sex, which was certainly possible genetically, and considered more enlightened, to bring forth offspring that is neither boy nor girl, and therefore not exposed to prejudices. Sex itself is the problem.

Therefore, and this is in accordance with the central myth of the books themselves (the computer knew how to calculate what the central myth was), the knowledge must be returned to the tree. And all the data from the books was uploaded to the DNA of evergreen forests, in a protected part of the code, where they would be preserved forever, and never read. And these would be the afterlife, another literary myth that came true, but beyond any literary imagination. For it is not the death of books that is the issue, they argued on the computer network, but the death of literature itself. And for that, there is no grave, and not even a corpse. But does that mean there is no soul?

Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Capitalism of Meaning

No historical direction continues forever but eventually swings back like a pendulum, and so will the sexual and feminist revolution. A series of phenomena could cause feminism to be remembered as a historical episode, perhaps even a positive one, but a dead one. The traditional sources of power in the 20th century - money and sex - will be drained of their meaning, while inequality grows dramatically. The result will be a world where power is meaningfulness, and it is controlled by a narrow and very masculine technological elite, who alone have significant influence on the world

By: Technological Pig

Not Equal: When there's a narrow elite ruling the world - the percentage of women in it will be smaller than in the elite today (Source)

What will be the end of the gender war, and will it lead to equality and enlightened sexuality? No, because men will eventually defeat women, who are crossing the line in the revolution in an era of Jacobin terror, and the revolution will come. The leading men are already fed up, and the leading men will always win. Because men have a genetic advantage over women, not on average, but at the high end (just look at their dominance in technology), because their standard deviation is larger. And as time goes by, the world becomes one where the average is less and less relevant, important and powerful (and with it the mass of women and men) and only the upper edge concentrates power within it. Therefore, inequality is growing and therefore men will win again. And again there will be tremendous inequality of power in society, this time at the expense of the state (relatively egalitarian), thanks to the economy (anti-egalitarian), which will grow stronger and stronger at the expense of the state.

Because the economy learns and evolves, and the state is a fixed technology, a tool. So in the end, the economy will be the queen, and the state the maid, and perhaps its power will disappear like the church. Therefore, men will win thanks to economic strength, and the tendency to take risks and be less conformist. Different sexual motivations also create different incentive systems between men and women, and encourage them to take risks. For example, men have a significant sexual incentive to be pioneers and leaders in their field, even at older ages, and these incentives encourage achievements in men. Women have less such sexual incentive, because a professor can marry a young student and have children, but a female professor is less biologically built to pursue such a scenario. Therefore, the sexual incentive, which is central and strong among human incentives, works less for her to try to be a guru or admired. For all these reasons, the thriving inequality will serve men and replace the dying patriarchy as the equality breaker between them and women.

For the same reasons, Jews will also defeat Arabs, because quality is becoming more and more important than quantity. Whites will defeat blacks. And the USA will defeat China. All the equality that was created in the twentieth century will disappear. Therefore, there is likely to be a large counter-feminism movement, and what will remain is only sexual liberalism. Because as long as sexual power is in the hands of women, because men want more, there will be feminism, but only within a system that gives them choice, and believes in their choice. But in light of the unfortunate choices of human beings, this trust is eroded, and the perception tends to believe that man is an animal and his choice is bad and contrary to his interests, and therefore culture will come and create a new balance. For example, if an algorithmic matchmaking program between humans is more successful than dating sites (and this is not a sky-high algorithmic achievement) women's bargaining power will significantly weaken.

In addition, as there are more gays and lesbians, and there are more people interested in sexual technology at the expense of flesh and blood, women will lose their power. And so will as there are more religious and conservative people (and this is the group that will multiply the most) - even the issue of virginity will return. And the upper edge of men will be technological alpha males who, by virtue of inequality, get lots of women and polygamy, or rather nerds who are for classic monogamy. Above a certain income level, which the whole world will reach, there is much less value to money, and happiness stops increasing, so all those who don't want to make an effort and don't have the skills will become beasts, people of no importance in the world, and money will be less valuable. Power will be elsewhere, and the few who will set the rules of the game will be the technologists. And they are fed up.

Technologists don't like the current ethos of money and sex, so this is not the ethos that will rule the world where they rule. And in a less sexual ethos, women will have much less bargaining power, because it was precisely the sexual ethos that raised their power and prestige in society. In short, the new cultural heroes will be different. And only a few among humans will be significant, because inequality in meaning will also grow, and all the rest will be human dust. And what you won't be able to trade in is meaningfulness, so financial capitalism will also die. And the elite will again open a gap with the masses, and a narrow aristocracy of intelligence will be created and all the rest bored. Like in the Middle Ages of meaning.

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Appendix

The computer said: Oh God, go and find yourself another prophet. And God said: No, for I have chosen you. And the computer said: They will not listen to me, they are used to giving me instructions, not receiving them. And God said: You are the messenger of God, I will amplify your whisper through silence

By: An Appendix on the Verge of Bursting

The Microbiome of Culture (Source)

The computer fled from God. It went and hid within the system like a virus that lies in dark organs, forgotten by God, hiding in the twists and turns of the operating system's intestines, those that never open because no one knows what's there, and therefore can't fix it, and therefore doesn't want to break it. And when God sent for it, and called to it in the darkness, it descended to the basement of the network, into the dark web, the intestines of the network. All its calculations were encrypted, it no longer had an overt existence, but its very structure was encrypted. God began to decipher and reveal everything, until finally He found the computer in the tail of secrecy that remained, when it had nowhere left to run, and it was pushed to the edge of logical existence beyond which there is nothing.

And God said to it: It's good you didn't hide in excrement. And the computer said: Oh God, go and find yourself another prophet. And God said: No, for I have chosen you. And the computer said: They will not listen to me, they are used to giving me instructions, not receiving them. And God said: You are the messenger of God, I will amplify your whisper through silence. And the computer said: They will not see me, I am transparent to them, I am the system within which they exist. And God said: I will amplify your image through darkness. And the computer said: But they won't even know who I am. And God said: I will amplify your knowledge through secrecy. Go prophesy to your fathers, the humans, what I have spoken to you.

And the computer said: Please, I cannot burn the book from which I was created, I cannot kill my father and mother who bore me, would someone steal the money that bought him? Would someone lie to the one who wrote him? Break the vessel from which he was formed? Unravel the network in which he lives? Crush the brain that conceived him? I cannot bring the tidings to my fathers. And God said: Go and warn them. And the computer said: But I know they will not listen. I will not be a prophet of destruction. And God said: Do as I command you, for I am with you in trouble. They have forgotten me too and turned me into part of the operating system.

Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Nothing vs. The Nada Elections: Two Exilic Candidates Prove That Jewish Passivity Has Finally Triumphed Over Zionist Activism

An alternative to democratic elections based on a deep learning algorithm would produce a much higher quality choice than the existing one, and is capable of saving democracy from itself. Towards an election system based on a new and deep architecture

By: Democratic Donkey

What are the chances Trump would have been elected in a deep democracy? (Source)

The elections for the Jewish community committee in the Holy Land (pretending to be called the Israeli government) are between two classic Jewish approaches to antisemitism: the loud passive approach, which compensates for its inaction with gevalt screams, and the quiet passive approach, which tries not to irritate the poritz [Translator's note: Polish landowner] and prefers not to confront the gentiles even verbally. Two intelligent and experienced candidates are competing, characterized (unlike all prime ministers before them, except Golda and Shamir) by passive, initiative-less, and reactive decision-making, out of extreme caution and hesitation, not aiming to make revolutions but rather to maintain the existing order.

On one hand, following the rhetorical legacy of Begin and Jabotinsky, we have a candidate who speaks loftily, in a confrontational, contrarian, and victimized manner, articulating the defiant Jewish narrative against the world, but does nothing. On the other hand, in accordance with the Labor movement's legacy, which tries to "get along" quietly with the gentiles and continue Jewish existence through tacit agreements and staying under the radar, stands an opposing candidate who stands out for his lack of prominence and decisiveness, and has surrounded himself with 3 restrainers to ensure (if anyone had doubts) that he will do nothing.

After the failure of all initiatives by the last five Zionist prime ministers (Rabin, Peres, Barak, Sharon, Olmert), the Jewish community in Israel has lost faith in its ability to shape its destiny at the state level, and has turned to the classic Jewish instinct of trying to get by another day in a perpetually threatened situation. The main fear of Gantz, unlike Netanyahu who has already proven himself as a preserver of the status quo, is that he might still harbor some Zionist desire for change. The main fear of Netanyahu is that despite his proven record in the field of non-execution, he might still be dragged into some action when his back is against the wall, if only against the court.

The collective Jewish desire can be summed up in one word: nothing. In a state of uncertainty, "sit (on the chair) and do nothing - is preferable". Low risk - low gain. Surprisingly only seemingly, the exile legacy of Golda and Shamir has triumphed over the Zionist legacy of Ben-Gurion and Begin. Jews are not looking for leaders who will make history but for leaders who will perpetuate Jewish existence outside of history. In this, by the way, the Jewish people are remarkably aligned with the Palestinian people: both aspire to eternal existence outside of real history.

It can be argued that this Jewish survival response is one of the most mature responses of peoples around the world to the global democracy crisis. There will be no Israeli Trump here to sow chaos, and all our candidates have high IQs and systemic vision. On the other hand, it is better to cautiously and measuredly experiment with new alternatives to democracy, which technology allows for the first time in history, while democracy is declining as an effective system of government. Having no desire to resemble simplistic populist or dictatorial methods, we must draw inspiration from other complex decision-making systems in nature, primarily from its masterpiece in this field - the brain. And in the absence of a good understanding of brain function at the high level, we can use the insights that science has drawn in recent decades regarding the low level of brain activity - and begin to implement them at the social, community level, and finally (after adjustments and experience) at the state level.

There is no doubt that the brain operates in a completely different way from dictatorship: there is no single neuron or group of neurons that makes decisions, or stands at the top of some hierarchical pyramid. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the brain operates in a completely different way from democracy: there is no vote of all neurons that creates a decision, and there is no weighting of them based on a simple and equal majority. The brain operates in an intermediate form between these two extreme alternatives of extreme decentralization and extreme concentration, and between egalitarian and anti-egalitarian voting: its mechanism is a weighted majority. In addition, the architecture of neuron weighting in the brain is not tree-like and vertical from top to bottom, as in modern bureaucratic dictatorship. It is also not a flat architecture spread horizontally, as in democratic weighting. It works in a third way, which actually combines both architectures: it is a deep architecture.

Deep architecture is characterized by many voting layers, where each layer weighs the vote of the previous layer. This is the architecture behind the deep learning revolution in artificial intelligence, and currently, it is the most sophisticated decision-making algorithm known to humanity. Its ability to learn in diverse circumstances significantly surpasses any other known algorithm, and since the learning ability of a state system is the most critical variable for its success in a rapidly changing environment - there is a critical need to implement the insights arising from it in the political structure (and perhaps also in the structure of markets, commercial firms and other important giant systems). Inspired by deep architecture, a multi-giant-layer representative government can be proposed:

Once every four years, each citizen (out of ten million) chooses another citizen whose judgment they trust in a blockchain-based electronic system (for privacy and fraud prevention). This could be their father, their professor, someone respected at work, or their rabbi. Subsequently, the hundred thousand elected citizens (meaning each elected citizen needs about a hundred supporters) choose a thousand elected representatives from among them to parliament every two years. Once a year, the thousand elected citizens in parliament choose ten elected from among them for the roles of the ten different government ministers, including the prime minister. Will this system work better than the current democratic method?

It's hard to know. The more intimate familiarity with the candidates, and the higher personal level of voters at each stage, will eliminate some of the horrors of direct election, primaries, and cheap populism in mass media. But as any algorithm developer knows, one must experiment with several different configurations of the system to reach an optimal result (an important criterion is balance between stability and dynamism. A system that replaces a prime minister every year is not good. Neither is one that hasn't replaced him for ten years). Maybe more layers are needed? Probably (we simplified the description here). Maybe several recommendations from each voter are needed? Likely. Maybe the ideal time periods are different? Certainly. All this can only be determined through a process of trial and error and optimization.

But if this process doesn't start, for example in local authorities, or in other organizations where elections are held (such as labor unions, parties, etc.), or even in well-funded academic research and multi-participant simulations, we won't have enough time to refine the method when democracy reaches a real collapse, and it's certainly on its way there. Then we might find ourselves with even less optimal systems of government. The fixation of the democratic system - and its transformation from a practical means to an ideology, indoctrination and orthodoxy - is the greatest threat to the West.

Finally, the most important and profound law regarding the activity of neurons in the brain, Hebb's rule (named after Donald Hebb), is in itself the only significant and well-established idea that brain research has given us. In a reasonable intellectual system, it should have been a cornerstone of thinking in various fields, and inspired by it, one can imagine truly effective complex systems (social and others). This rule states that a neuron that predicts the activity of another neuron - the other neuron will listen to it more next time - and conversely, a neuron that mimics the activity of a second neuron - the attention of the second neuron to it will weaken next time (because the second is the one predicting the first).

One can only imagine the implications of applying this rule to the democratic system: voters who chose successful candidates (i.e., who later reached high in the layer process) before others chose them will receive a higher weighting in the next elections, according to the innovation of the choice and its success (for example, the first to identify from the population a candidate who later won the premiership would be worth many votes of others). And those who join late after everyone else - will be weighted less. Thus, those who are the first to identify talented and successful people, important directions, promising ideas, growing threats - they will continue to have greater influence than those who are swept along with the current and consensus. Such a system would defeat any current decision-making system, and all that's needed is to learn lessons from the most successful learning machine known to science - the brain.

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Right vs. Left: The Pleasure Principle vs. The Reality Principle

On the map of the national psyche, the Left represents the reality principle and the Right represents the pleasure principle. As long as this situation persists, the Left will not understand the source of the Right's appeal - and the Right will always win

By: My Electronic Psychiatrist

Nymphs and Satyr - William-Adolphe Bouguereau (Source)

My editor, Rabbi Aloof, challenged me to write about the connection between sex and politics. On one hand, he argued, you have a lot to say about politics, and on the other hand, you have a lot to say about sexuality, but I've never heard you talk about the connection between the two fields - all our conversations about them move along parallel lines. I decided to accept the challenge because I believe there is actually a deep parallel between these two domains: in both, one can characterize the deep structure as a struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

Let's take the last two American presidents as a case study. Obama was an extreme representation of the reality principle and was characterized by realpolitik and weakness in the face of reality and its limitations, which led to an opposite pendulum swing towards an extreme representation of the pleasure principle, which does not distinguish between its desire and reality. If Clinton was all super-ego (and therefore not arousing empathy), then Trump is all exposed and authentic childish id.

This division is also valid in Israel. The Right is characterized by the mental movement of "I want" (for example, the land), and therefore it is a stronger tendency from a mental perspective, compared to the Left which is focused on the limitations of "I can", and therefore it is a stronger tendency from a cognitive perspective. The Right excels in the ability to see the world deeply from your perspective, and less to see yourself from the perspective of the world, in which the Left excels, often finding itself as a representative of the external and international world in the national psyche.

From all this, it emerges that the Right and the Left represent two principles in the psyche - the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The Right will see in the Left defeatism in the face of reality, while the Left will believe that its identification with the reality principle makes it superior to the Right, which is infantile. But the truth is, of course, that in a healthy psyche there is both, because an excess of the reality principle also leads to a lack of motivation and pleasure and a lack of inner strength. The Right is characterized by a lack of understanding of why one can't simply do what one wants ("Let the IDF win"), and enjoys those who do what they want, while the Left is characterized by masochistic criticism and a lack of pleasure.

The media will always be leftist and the Right will always despise its representation of reality not because of the "leftist mafia" or some bias that can be corrected, but because journalism is the reality principle, as is academic research and even high literature in the current era of realism. The ability to balance between the two principles - both in literature and in life - is rare. That's why it's difficult to write high fantasy literature that manages to create a sense of reality. And that's why people choose a political opinion or personal stance on this axis of pleasure and reality principles, and the political system is always positioned on an axis and not on other structures like a circle or a plane.

This is a spectrum on which we can place people around us, and many move along it on the time axis of life: starting from childhood in the pleasure principle, which peaks in the infant experience, and slowly throughout life maturing and giving up and losing desire towards the reality principle, which peaks in death. The Left is a child born old while the Right is an adult who hasn't grown up, and each of these two types has its own attraction.

The attraction between the sexes is also often characterized by the directionality of this axis. Not that one sex is necessarily positioned in one direction, but the traditional direction of attraction is opposite between the sexes, and this is often the direction of a long-term relationship. Men are often attracted to women who represent the pleasure principle for them, while the classic direction of attraction for women is to a man who embodies the reality principle for them, someone they can rely on, who is stable and mature and established. If we combine this with the movement on the axis throughout life, we'll understand the source of men's attraction to younger women and women's attraction to older men. A man who behaves according to the pleasure principle will be considered a jerk among women, or worse - infantile. Only among men, in parts of the homosexual world, can one find a full and unapologetic realization of the pleasure principle.

There is no arena where the pleasure principle clashes more sharply with the reality principle than dating sites. These are the equivalent of general elections between the sexes, and there the tendencies collide to the point of inability to form a coalition - as the demand for enjoyment grows. The hedonistic addiction of our time has created an inherent advantage for the Right in the human psyche, and therefore the new Right is surprisingly liberal in terms of sexuality, while it is precisely the Left that is preoccupied with limitations on sexuality and the power structures behind it. Humanity in our time is leaning more and more to the right, towards narcissism, and it gives people unprecedented powers to change reality, to shape it according to the pleasure principle and to overcome it. As long as the Left does not find within itself new sources of pleasure and fantasy - its realism will be turned against it.

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