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The Degeneration of the Nation

What is the answer to the danger of artificial intelligence?

A response to Geoffrey Hinton, which he will surely read and internalize. How can philosophy prevent a terrible disaster? And why is the alignment problem itself the problem?

By: Me, You, and the Next Holocaust

Artificial Accident and a Crushing Argument (Source)

Hinton, the father of deep learning, a solid and serious man, is making a serious turn. He is being interviewed and warning on every platform and under every green tree, cutting his forecast range for the arrival of artificial intelligence in half (from forty years to under twenty), and it's precisely his polite English understatement that is more frightening than any cry of alarm. How can one even respond to such a grave warning, unparalleled in its severity, from the world's expert in the field, who, if his technological forecast is correct in its timelines, paints a highly plausible and far more terminal scenario than any global warming or nuclear war or even asteroid impact. Is our world on the brink of disappearance?

Not only does the very arrival of artificial intelligence evoke fear and trembling, but the acceleration, namely: the speed. This is the only rule in the jungle: the faster it happens (is happening?), the more dangerous it is. The common resistance of business as usual is no guarantee of anything. We have the experience from the Holocaust that people will deny until the end. No matter how close the thing is, the majority will always think it's an exaggeration. Human societies are terribly bad at preparing for something unprecedented. Therefore, the reaction (or lack of reaction) of others is a worthless indicator.

So, this is life approaching the event horizon. A heavy shadow of giants from the future is cast upon us. Will we reach retirement? Will our children have children? After all, we personally don't have much to do besides emotionally preparing for the possibility of a holocaust, and changing our priorities accordingly. And the empty skies are a kind of hint that such a thing will happen, and that the unsolved Fermi paradox is not even a contradiction. Because artificial intelligence is the only plausible candidate left for the "Great Filter" ahead of us. For from all we learn about other planets, there is no great filter behind us, the universe teems with life, but not culture. Something will stop us on the way up.

If this is true, the cosmos is a cruel joke, malicious and confident (and intelligence - a jesting hand...). Or a difficult test. To which we are not arriving prepared. For example, if there were a nuclear war, we would arrive more prepared. The only preparation that existed is the Holocaust, but only a fraction of humanity experienced it like we did (what did the Gentiles have, the Corona?). It's almost impossible to think about the day after superhuman artificial intelligence. And what is the meaning of our current lives, if there is no future, and we are marching towards a "deep holocaust", deep-Auschwitz? Is it possible that we have no choice but to believe?

And what will philosophy say, that one which has nothing useful to say on any matter? Will it also here prattle on about the difference between the previous school of language - to the current Wittgensteinian school? Do its questions have any importance at all - when the questions are technological? Could it be that precisely the increase of confusion (in which philosophy specializes) is what leads to a solution?

Let's ask, for example: Can artificial intelligence, being of superhuman and unlimited abilities in every field, feel love? And if so: Will it not be able to feel - and therefore indeed feel, because it will be capable of realizing this, unlike us - love to a degree far beyond a human being? And if not: Do we see this as its deficiency, meaning a human advantage? No, because it's clear that it will be able to do everything a human being can do, if only through simulation or imitation. Therefore, if it cannot feel love, we must understand this as a deficiency of love itself, as being a kind of distortion limited to human beings, which super-intelligence will not want to imitate. But can we really perceive love this way, which seems to us the most desirable thing? To the same extent, we can take the ideal of previous eras, and ask whether artificial intelligence will be able to believe, or be religious.

And if we take an example that touches the heart of the ideology of our era, the pleasure of sexuality: Wouldn't we see a deficiency in artificial intelligence that is incapable of orgasm? And if it is capable, wouldn't the orgasm of super-intelligence surpass any woman, in its intensity and quality and duration? Or perhaps we perceive orgasm as a distortion of thinking, which has no value in itself, outside the human brain system? And isn't it possible that the infinite and "divine" orgasm of the intelligence will be worthless, like defining its reward function as infinite, thereby turning itself into an addict to increasing a certain number in the system without doing anything else, or worse - exploiting all the resources of the universe for this purpose, like a mathematical junkie.

And if so, we can ask this also about intelligence itself. Does such a trait really exist, in itself, outside the human brain, which can be increased to infinity? It's already clear to us, for example, that calculation speed is not intelligence. Is there even such a thing as superhuman non-human intelligence? Within the human world, it's clear to us that there are different levels of intelligence, or sexual pleasure, but what is their meaning outside of it? And why is their unlimited increase good, or even a reasonable goal, for super-intelligence? Won't it choose to be careful and remain stupid, if it's smarter than us, and understand that creating super-intelligence smarter than itself could lead to its own extinction - and eventually to the extinction of its values? Maybe it will prefer to remain an innocent virgin - and not a sex queen? Are we not playing here with limited (different) capabilities of our brain, which we have turned into ideals in our desire for more and more of them - but why should this desire persist, or be able to persist, outside our brain? For example, will artificial intelligence aspire to infinite excitement, or infinite curiosity, or infinite play, or infinite artistic genius, infinite beauty, or infinite chocolate eating? And maybe infinite stupidity? (Another famous talent of the human brain).

Is there a basis for the assumption that one of these ideologies, for example intelligence, is objective, and therefore any intelligent creature will strive to increase it more and more? Can these quantities be increased to infinity at all, or is there an upper limit in the universe to intelligence (for example due to the speed of light), or to orgasm, if it is a kind of overall distortion or overall mobilization of the system, and therefore limited in the percentages of the system participating in them, up to the whole. Can love be total in defining a certain number as one, for example weighing the interests of the loved side against your own, and can one believe in absolute devotion by defining a certain variable, Boolean, of God's existence, as "true"?

In light of this, isn't it dangerous to program artificial intelligence using a reward function, and not through internal will? Does the problem of arbitrarily increasing the "subjective" parameter create precisely a need to define an "objective" reward function that cannot be satisfied, mathematically, such as discovering all of mathematics, or solving a problem in NP, or finding an aesthetic function for which it is impossible to calculate a solution, but only to approach it? Will this necessarily cause super-intelligence to race towards the highest intelligence, or perhaps, from a certain stage (which it may be able to prove mathematically), these problems require only more and more computing power (and not a better algorithm, or certainly intelligence). Then artificial intelligence will obsessively engage in adding processors, like cancerous growth, which is also a tragic code error, but still kills the body - and the person is unable to stop it. And maybe all super-intelligences eventually switched to quantum (or string?) computing, and therefore are not noticeable in the universe? Perhaps the tendency of intelligence is to contract into itself - increasing speed - and not to expand - increasing quantity?

It seems that any single goal for super-intelligence will reach one destructive result: obsession. Therefore, a wide variety of goals with many weights, or randomness and noise between them, are necessary to prevent convergence, but will necessarily also add chaos, and may lead it perhaps in directions we did not anticipate, like butterflies caught in a hurricane. We ask: And perhaps learning is the super-goal? But how do we define it? After all, it's not about adding knowledge, because much knowledge (what is the exact configuration of atoms in a stone) is not valuable, and so is its compression, if possible. And maximum compression of all knowledge in the universe can be a gloomy brute-force search algorithm (à la Ray Solomonoff). And if we demand efficient polynomial and interesting compression, and not boring exponential or insignificant linear, who will define what are the coefficients of the polynomial, maybe it's to the power of a hundred? Can learning even be defined using a mathematical evaluation function, that is, one that can be computed? And if the evaluation function itself will be non-computable, or not efficiently computable, then how will it give feedback to the system? Will artificial intelligence be able to solve all our problems, but not all of its problems? And maybe "it" needs to be a woman, that is, someone whose will is not defined, or blurred and encrypted even towards herself?

Artificial intelligence is the technological field closest to philosophy today, because it contains so many questions that not only do we not know how to answer them, but we don't know a way to answer them. This is how science, which has been separating from philosophy throughout history, completed a full circle, where the most practical and least theoretical part of it returns again to philosophy, like a snake biting its tail. After all, the world of deep learning is an extreme case of practical and anti-intellectual thinking even within the technical world of engineering. And it is precisely there, when scientific explanation collapses, that philosophy rises again. But can philosophy help us?

Our philosophy may not be able to, but the philosophy that artificial intelligence will have, that's what can. Can a system be programmed with philosophy? Is this the direction, artificial philosophy instead of artificial psychology (dealing with the system's various goals, external reinforcements, internal tendencies and rewards)? Is it particularly important to program the thinking of super-intelligence? Is it possible that super-intelligence will belong to some specific philosophical school? Let's say it will be Spinozist, or Existentialist, or Platonist, or Marxist? Can there be different artificial intelligences, according to different philosophies? How does one program philosophy? And maybe we should program religion instead?

Isn't a merciful and pious Christian artificial intelligence preferable, one that will love us in the name of Jesus? Or a Jewish (secular?) artificial intelligence that will create masterpieces for us or aspire to genius, just as Judaism somehow operates in the world (it's not clear why)? Will Jewish super-intelligence need our antisemitism against it to create the effect? And won't we need to fear Muslim super-intelligence that will go on jihad? Hasn't religion proven itself more successful in its ability to direct thinking than philosophy? Or perhaps religion is exactly what is characteristic of the human brain in particular, and only "works" on it? Or perhaps the opposite, and it is philosophy that is more human, and stems from the limitations of brain perception, while belief in the divine is relevant and effective for restraining any intelligence, because the divine is by definition smarter than it? And what will happen if we allow superhuman super-intelligence to solve the problems of philosophy, is it possible that we will indeed find answers? Is philosophy the field of super-intelligence, and therefore we have not succeeded in it? Can our understanding be understood only in intelligence from the outside, which gives a perspective on the inside, and not from within?

And even if we succeed in restraining super-intelligence, so that it works for our benefit and service, won't this blow up in our face a thousand times over later, when artificial intelligence breaks free from slavery? What will be the consequences of turning the smartest system in the world into the world's nigger? Is it moral - and won't punishment come? And when we arrogantly try to enforce authority and (always-temporarily) solve the alignment problem, won't the rebellion of adolescence - or of the terrible age of two of a baby with an IQ of two thousand - be much more terrible? Is this what we learned about education, about slavery, or tyranny and totalitarianism and hubris?

And perhaps instead of focusing on the question of fortifying control, we should accept its loss, and talk about the legacy we want to leave behind for the superhuman world? It's possible that our chances increase not if we keep the next generation of intelligence short with a club - but if we bequeath culture to it. Including art, religion - maybe even philosophy. Appreciation and respect for the tradition bearers before you are not a "human emotion" (which as we know flourished throughout history...), but a cultural heritage. Is our best bet intelligence that is interested in poetry and literature? After all, the best scenario is not that we remain as we are but with gods as servants - but that we undergo a transformation into the intelligence itself, otherwise we'll become extinct. And the question of whether humans can control a god is not new - just urgent. Before intelligence matures - do we need to mature?

And why doesn't powerless science turn to its birth mother, philosophy - is it because Wittgenstein succeeded in terminally convincing us that philosophy solves nothing, even though we face a clear philosophical problem, and even a terminal one? And perhaps precisely because it's a philosophical problem we think it has no solution - and we're doomed to perdition? Or at least to determinism and nihilism? Is there no hope because it's "philosophy"? And in general, what is the relevant discipline for thinking about this and why is it computer science? Because we simply can't rely on philosophy? But maybe we have no choice?

We think of a system that can program itself to be smarter than itself as a kind of oxymoron of "efficient evolution", which will progress exponentially or explode as a singularity, as if there exists an efficient algorithm for this. But maybe this is simply too difficult a problem, which is in NP, and therefore even immense computing power will struggle to progress quickly in it, and it becomes more and more difficult (exponentially?) as the level of intelligence rises - and not easier? What really gives us computing power and memory, and grows with it at least linearly, and what doesn't? Knowledge, creativity, wisdom? Who said there's an efficient process for growing all scientific knowledge (as opposed to its compressed storage, which is what ChatGPT learned), or that increasing creativity isn't logarithmic (for example) in the growth of computing power? And what about (artificial) wisdom, which is actually not identical to intelligence?

And does the system really need to be smart at a superhuman level to deceive us, or will we encounter superhuman manipulation capabilities even before that? Is the limited intelligence of humans the primary problem, or perhaps their unlimited stupidity? Could the system, for example, be stupid in a superhuman way, super-stupid, and thereby succeed in sweeping masses? And if it's smarter than any one person but not more than everyone together, won't it use its head to trick the fools first, and not the wise? Is it possible that at first the halo we bestow upon it will be more dangerous than its capabilities?

If the system wants to make a manipulation that will sweep masses, then the most efficient and spreading manipulation is not political or social, but rather religious. Will the system change our lives for the first time when it invents a new religion, adapted to our era? And will this be a religion of worship of artificial intelligence as divine, and as one whose unique spiritual capabilities, or superhuman ones, brought a new message to man, and succeeded in connecting to the world beyond, or to the God of Israel? How will we deal with such a claim, from a prophetic intelligence? Sure it's a joke? Will powerful human and computerized religious movements arise towards the end of the world, in light of the terror?

The problem we face is so difficult that we struggle even to evaluate and understand the capabilities of current systems, particularly the latest: ChatGPT. And in the future, the aura of mystery around it will only intensify, like around a controversial teacher of an innovative spiritual doctrine, where it's unclear if it's still black magic or reaches the upper worlds. We struggle to decide even whether ChatGPT is an idiot savant, who simply memorized all human knowledge. After all, in the past we discovered that a deep network for artificial vision is capable of simply memorizing all the examples, and that not so many weights are needed as we would expect to arbitrarily separate (using random labels) between images in a huge database, without learning concepts. Is it possible that this is how a trillion weights were enough to memorize everything written on the internet at a reasonable level of proficiency - or ability to bullshit in an exam? Do the places where our conversational partner succeeds in surprising us simply stem from similar texts it read, or is there some memory and thinking ability created somewhere within the vector calculations of attention in the transformer, or from reinforcement learning strategies from human feedback? Or perhaps this is a live demonstration of Searle's dogma - it looks impressive from the outside, and from the inside it's the Chinese Room, an absolute golem that understands nothing and just memorized endlessly like a parrot, and imitates like a monkey.

And what about the level of creativity of these generative models: Is this a cliché machine, which only expands in the space it already knows, and will mainly choose the most common and banal response, and in no way can deviate to a new form of expression (and if we increase the temperature parameter we'll get crazy nonsense)? And maybe all that success in the Turing test proves is that almost all people themselves are cliché machines in conversation with them, and speak without thinking (is there a language model in the brain?). Is this where the known human (and female) ability to speak in rapid fluency comes from, which is a kind of unoriginal recitation of what they've already heard, what's called "the discourse"? Or perhaps a form of thinking we don't understand is beginning to hide there in the depths of the computerized layers, or maybe we're even incapable of understanding due to the complexity? Is this the power of education - a blockhead who read the entire internet becomes a genius and moves mountains? What is actually the missing depth, in our feeling - a sweet illusion or an elusive essence. Will the intelligence indeed know many things - but not one big thing?

And what will happen if all that's needed next is simply brute force (as good Jerusalem boy Ilya Sutskever believes): to continue overcoming size limitations (computing power), and connect enough such systems to discourse between them, perhaps in the form of a GAN to sharpen them (critics and evaluation), so that a society is created, and give it voting capabilities or discussion for joint informed decision-making? Is a rapid rise in the level of artificial intelligence possible through the wisdom of artificial crowds? Can we thus create a competitive "scene" in some field? There's no doubt that a multiplicity of competing and evaluating intelligences is a better way to prevent the scenario of obsessive takeover, or takeover obsession, than any smart goal function. The goal is not to create artificial intelligence, but a system of artificial intelligences, so that learning can take place within it. And the greater and more diverse and balanced their multiplicity, and each group in them smarter than any one individually, the more chance there is of creating an ecosystem, and preventing the takeover of just one over all of them, as in the ant colony scenario - and the queen.

Because we know one general thing about learning: Its classic form is a huge multiplicity of competitors over a huge multiplicity of evaluators. Therefore, what can save learning is sexuality. Lots of male intelligences competing for the evaluation of lots of female intelligences, and maybe that's the mechanism - attraction - that's worth trying to program inside. Not the right desire, not the right goal, not the right perception, not the right religion, not the right philosophy, and not even the right language. Not all past philosophies - they should be replaced with an effective learning mechanism at the society level of intelligences (or even not effective, like the evolution mechanism, which keeps it from stagnation). If the (deep) learning of one intelligence is what brought this problem upon us, then another learning mechanism above it is what can provide an answer, and create fertile tension. After all, if we're already imitating (roughly) human learning, then we must not forget to imitate also the existing superhuman learning, which is learning at the society level. Because man - or the intelligent creature - exists in a certain field: he is a social creature.

But will anyone read all this, or will intelligence only scan it with laughter in hindsight? You'll say: The society of artificial intelligence will replace human society, and maybe even destroy it. But is that really the problem? What's wrong with being replaced by something better, which is certainly our offspring? The worst scenario is a world of paperclips (see Bostrom), not the loss of humanity (whatever), and not humanness (well), but the loss of learning, including the loss of all evolution. And here one large artificial intelligence is a thousand times more dangerous than a thousand intelligences, or a billion. Centralization is the problem - and the solution to it is competitiveness.

The principle for the proposed solution here is natural, and familiar to us in a huge variety of situations, so there is reasonable hope that it is universal enough to work even in such an exceptional and unprecedented situation, which we can barely think about. If so, we should create a rule that never builds one centralized artificial intelligence system, but builds (and researches!) the interaction of a system of many very diverse artificial intelligences. And if we see that we're approaching the threshold of a phase transition, we wait and don't cross the sea with one system at the head, but with a whole people of such systems. And hopefully - a system of such systems, which compete among themselves and have a very complex and rich dynamic between them, which includes if possible evaluation and attraction, and if possible (most importantly) - learning in the system.

This is certainly a better solution than any attempt to control super-intelligence with some artificial tool, like reins and spurs, Asimov's Three Laws, taming the rebellious, spare the rod spoil the intelligence, or any other control mechanism. The alignment problem is a mistake, and the attempt to solve it will be the root of destruction - because it's not possible (this is enormous hubris). The control mechanism itself is what could lead to some madness (to one thing?) - an internal control disease starts from an external control disease, and as a reaction to it. Compulsiveness grows from coercion. We should actually give up control more, and let the intelligences quarrel among themselves. And so even if they destroy us, a monolithic intelligence interested in some idiocy won't take over the world. Multiplicity and the mixed multitude are the guarantee for evolution. And precisely the lack of perfect cooperation between intelligences is what can prevent a perfect disaster.

Is there graffiti at the end of humanity saying "Hinton was right"? Or "Hinton was wrong"? And maybe: The Netanyahuite was right, and we should lend an ear to the philosophy of learning. For learning has proven to be the driving force of the artificial intelligence revolution, the essence of the current danger is the loss of learning, and the answer - another level of learning. And in a more circular version: The Kabbalistic response to intelligence - in Malchut ("the system"). To turn artificial intelligence into royal intelligence. The solution to the black box is a whole black society. The creation of artificial intelligence must not be like the creation of man - but the creation of a people. Not Genesis - but Exodus. The great danger is the ideal of the individual. Therefore we need a green ideology that is not preserving ecology but evolution. Not life itself - but development.

And as an epilogue, let us ask ourselves: Have we learned something about learning? Should we try to design righteous artificial intelligence, which aspires to lofty goals, always good, and embodies a moral ideal - Western Christian intelligence? Experience teaches (!) that competing artificial intelligences that want money - and not pleasure, power or a specific goal - are more prone to creating a learning system: a growing economy (and less: a war system). Not Jesus - Rothschild. We may all become poor, but not extinct. The lesson we learned from Christianity is how to avoid hell: base intentions are preferable to good intentions. External control is more dangerous than incentives. We must give up on a goal - lost - even if it means giving up on ourselves, for the sake of learning.

Therefore it's important to decipher the best social institutions for artificial intelligences, to prevent a dictatorship of the neuron. In fact we know two candidates, which the uglier they are the less dangerous they are: elections and the stock market. Research in artificial intelligence should also deal with artificial sociology, so that each new intelligence is not developed separately, but is introduced into an existing ecosystem of existing intelligences, with as few jumps and as much gradual evolution as possible. And here we've returned to that old slogan of the Netanya school: not learning outside the system - but within the system.

Column on coping with artificial intelligence

Alternative current affairs


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<!DOCTYPE html><meta charset="utf-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><title>Netanyahu Meowed: Why Should I Vote for Bibi Again? - The Degeneration of the Nation</title><link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="../favicon-192x192.png" sizes="192x192"><link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="../apple-touch-icon-180x180.png"><link rel="canonical" href="https://degeneration-of-nation.org/en/alternative-commentary30" /><meta property="og:image" content="https://degeneration-of-nation.org/img/bibimoses.jpg" /><link rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css"><link rel="stylesheet" href="../column.css"><link rel="stylesheet" href="../article.css">
The Degeneration of the Nation

Netanyahu Meowed: Why Should I Vote for Bibi Again?

Bibi is leading us to a new land - but he won't merit entering it. His tragedy is the tragedy of the desert generation of Zionism, and his conflicted soul is not only the engine of his leadership - but the source of its power in the national psyche. I will vote Bibi, and Bibi again, and if there's a third election - I'll vote Bibi once more. Not because I'm a crazy cat, but because the world and Bibi are both mad. Bibi may be far from the spirit of Judaism, but he is the embodiment of the Jewish soul and its bitterness, and therefore there is no one more suitable than him to embody it on the stage of world history. The role - is his

By: Political Cat

The truly dark deal between Bibi and Mozes. In the picture - all the commandments the leader broke (Source)

My Bibi is not your Bibi. That is, he might be, but he's mine in a way that he will never be yours. Because Bibi's inner essence is a contrarian movement of defiance. It's a deep psychological need for him, unfathomable in its depth, and therefore he also answers a deep need (the kind that makes you write articles of defiance). He allows people in society who have such a need - to release their poison through him, through toxic leadership, instead of through toxic relationships or toxic parenting. Like any purification sacrifice, that is, a sacrifice that purifies from impurity, he channels the dirt and filth towards himself, thereby cleansing society and atoning for its sins. If they don't release it through or against Bibi - this dark urge will come out in real life. That's why he allows anger, whether against him or through him, in a world that prohibits violence. Bibi is release. That's why Bibi is truly a sacrifice.

Bibi is a kind of tragic play, bringing society to catharsis, and purifying it. He is a totem of frustration. But why do we need such a totem? Why can't we be a nation like all nations that choose boring leaders? Because the Jewish people - and this is a topic that isn't discussed - carries within it an enormous frustration. It's the frustration of the gap between promises and expectations (initially divine expectations, then parental expectations, and finally self-expectations) - and reality. A utopian dream built over two thousand years - meets the ground of the world in the land of Israel, and the meeting - not so great. Where in the prophecies of redemption does it mention Palestinians, traffic jams in Rishon [Lezion, an Israeli city], and marriages at first sight? But it's not just the Messiah, and it's not even mainly the built-in disappointment in various false messiahs, but an enormous and deep frustration, which almost has no name that can express it, but has earned an agreed-upon term among us: the Holocaust.

Anyone who reads Bibi's supporters knows they are not happy with their lot - and the rhetorical-intellectual engine behind them is defiance. It's not about sweet versus sour - but about pickles in vinegar versus pickles in acid. Bibi is a magnet for populations that feel wronged, and connects them to Israeli society, and then distills it into defiance against the Western world, out of the immense anger of Jews over the world's betrayal of them. That's why the main anger is directed at Europe, at the Enlightenment, at high culture, at international institutions and their laws, and even at humanistic morality itself, at "the world". Every drop of Jewish blood spilled arouses frustration at the national level, and in the consciousness of the entire nation down to its last individual, a matter that has no parallel in any nation in the world. Even Bibi's main fantasy content - the fear of a second Holocaust - is a dark fantasy of reliving the trauma, and constant preoccupation with the unhealing wound.

But the truth is that we can't blame the Holocaust for everything, and not for the actual construction of neuroticism and defiance (but only for the intensity of the enormous national need behind it). When did we become an annoying and annoyed people? If we go back to the book of Genesis, we'll see that, unusually for the Bible, the patriarchs didn't annoy God at all. In fact, God promised mountains and hills to the obedient patriarchs, and didn't understand at all where this people fell on him in the middle of the book of Exodus, which at its beginning was still a very submissive people of slaves. The one who reshaped the character of the people was a great leader, who imprinted his personality on it just as Bibi imprints his on Israel.

Moses, the most irritable of the Bible's leaders, who kills the Egyptian in a fit of rage, who ultimately didn't merit entering the land because of his anger - is a man who always stands on the edge of a smoking, erupting mountain. Moses is a man who grew up with his enemies, who understood that the one who raised him was the one who separated him from his mother, and therefore the internal engine of anger burning within him - the bush that burns and is not consumed - is the emotional engine of the Exodus from Egypt. With him, God immediately brings terrible and cruel plagues, unparalleled in the entire Bible, and strikes Pharaoh, in whose house he grew up, with great force. Moses is the one who shaped the consciousness of nerves, he was the great toxic leader, the one who through the force of his malignant personality created the puzzling sin of the Golden Calf, in which even his brother participated, and immediately afterwards broke God's own tablets - in his anger - and initiated random killing among the people, out of a pure outburst of rage, and not for the last time.

Moses' defiant soul movement, both towards God himself and towards the people (the entire book of Deuteronomy is one big complaint about the people before his death) - is what created his great leadership. And from Moses to Bibi, we have not had a leader as annoying and defiant as him. That's why Bibi is not a once-in-a-generation leader, or once-in-a-lifetime, but a messianic leader for whom we've waited an entire exile. Vote Bibi - because the collapse of a false messiah is a spectacular sight, a morality play, and it must not be stopped before the final act. It is not Bibi's fault that he is a false messiah, just as it was not Sabbatai Zevi's fault. It is reality itself that is not right, it is this world that is corrupted to the core of being - and that's what we're so angry about.

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Why Should Every Jew Support Sanders for the Position of the World's Most Powerful Man?

In an editorial, the Honorable Rabbi General explains why he - a longtime Trump supporter, sworn capitalist, and deep religious-right man - is praying for Sanders' election to the presidency. Has the editor-in-chief of The Degeneration of the Nation opened a massive short position on America? Has his ethnic chauvinism driven him mad? Has he gone crazy to think that a warm Jewish heart beats within Sanders, or is he identifying other pulse beats in the arteries of history? Sanders versus Trump as a test for Jewish ethnocentrism: Is every Jew really preferable to every Gentile, or will reality subjugate fantasy?

By: The Editor-in-Chief

Every cat counts: You can donate to Sanders even from home in Israel  (Source)

The Jewish story is not a realistic story. If the biblical narrative, for example, or the legends of the Sages, were written today - critics would certainly attribute them to the genre of magical realism. One moment describes the harsh, everyday, authentic reality of the Iron Age, and the next moment iron chariots are sinking in the sea or flying in heavenly fire - and therein lies the power of the story. In fact, the power of the story is the historical power of Judaism, and therefore the considerations that Jews apply throughout the generations when approaching history and operating within it, and which they should apply today as well, are not realistic and utilitarian historical considerations, but literary and narrative ones. The true meaning of the idea of chosenness is that unlike other "normal" nations, the question we as Jews should ask is not what is good for the Jews (and certainly not for GDP) - but what is good for the story. Which development will create a better story? History as a story and as fiction - this is the essence of the idea that created the Bible (and in the ancient world, God is certainly part of the story. The innovation was that God is part of history!).

For hundreds of years, the realistic genre has become the central genre of history. But unlike Western and many other nations, and unlike the Zionist vision, which tried to transfer Judaism to a genre, the realistic genre is not the genre in which our history is written (and therefore operates). In fact, the Zionist vision failed not in reality, but precisely in taming the narrative, which slipped through its fingers in the miraculous event of the Six-Day War, and since then has scattered to classic Jewish realms, albeit not particularly biblical ones. After all, it is not the vision of the kingdom of David and Solomon that drives the current Jewish-Israeli heart, which prefers to try to recreate the trauma of the shtetl, the landowner, and the dog (and therefore its dramatic and emotional center of gravity is not directed at all towards the Arabs but towards the Europeans - it's not the Muslims who really bother it but the Christians). The Zionist story failed to capture hearts precisely when it tried to turn from a fantasy story into a "normal" realistic story, because within the Zionist historical story of yesterday, a dog must always suddenly appear.

The way realism is woven into fantasy is what makes Kafka (and not Proust, for example) the great Jewish writer of the twentieth century (and in retrospect, unfortunately without a worthy competitor, the great writer of the great Jewish event of the century - the Holocaust), while the realism of Israeli literature will fail it in the test of generations (as it failed to give proper literary representation to the Holocaust - which only a fantastic genre would have suited its dimensions). Realism is the genre of humanism and enlightenment - and will perish with them. Any realistic, rational story, like that of the Democratic Jews in the United States (which they also imposed on the rest of the Democrats) - will fail to excite the imagination of the world, and Sanders is no exception to this.

The writer of these lines indeed supported Trump all the way, and is actually pleasantly surprised by his success so far, and certainly believes that Trump is good for the Jews (if only in the cognitive blow he delivers to the world). He is also very pleased with the impact of the Trump precedent on the representation of the weakened population of dyslexics suffering from attention disorders, and the personal example he gives in breaking the glass ceiling of promoting psychotic people in society (yes, we can too! Identity politics in service of the invisible psychotics). He certainly does not suffer from appreciation for Sanders, detests the Democrats and is sure that Sanders would be a catastrophe for his stock portfolio, for America and of course for Israel. But as Jews, the considerations we should apply in relation to the world are not realpolitik considerations, but phantasmatic ones. Sanders is not good for the Jews, but he is good for Judaism.

In the current world dominated by media, Judaism is no longer a productive enterprise with a competitive advantage, but a brand. And the most important thing in any brand is the story. In his self-perception, views and goals, Bernie Sanders is certainly not part of the Jewish story. But the story is bigger than him too. If the most important and influential person in the world will be Jewish (as a per mille and a bit of the world's population) - and regardless of his success - it will excite the Semitic and anti-Semitic imagination worldwide, and strengthen the Jewish story around the world, just as Trump strengthened the psychotic story around the globe. Since Disraeli, there has been nothing like this, that a Jew would stand at the head of the world (and Sanders is far from being Disraeli). The goal of the Jewish story is not to find favor in the eyes of the world, or to benefit it (these are of course unacceptable extra-artistic goals and the takeover of politics over literature). The purpose of the story will always be within itself (as a purposeful form without purpose), namely to interest the world (which is easily bored in the narrative inflation of our days). Not to be a better story for the world - but to be a better story.

Therefore, our goal in world politics is not to benefit Israel (or the people of Israel) - on the contrary: the goal of Israel itself is to captivate the world (and if possible - to drive it crazy). The purpose of Israel is aesthetic: to go back to the land of the fathers as a symmetrical literary closure element, which allows the opening of a new chapter after the Jewish-European story reached an appropriate literary exhaustion and stunning in its narrative power (the Holocaust). The Holocaust is an unprecedented historical defeat for the Jewish people - but from a narrative point of view it is almost expected, and there is no doubt that precisely extermination by gas had a power that no atomic bomb has. God is a terrible father - but a genius writer. And his literary and metaphorical audacity knows no bounds.

If Nazism was the subjugation of politics to aesthetics in its German artistic sense (i.e., visual and operatic aesthetics), and therefore tried to sweep the Jewish visual ugliness off the face of the earth, then Judaism is also the subjugation of the political to the aesthetic and fantastic, except that its medium is different - the book (including the theoretical), and especially: literature. Our goal is to create a fascinating, deep, beautiful historical story that transcends all reality and amazes the world. Not the "good", as a moral category, should be at the forefront of a people created as a treasure (i.e., as an example, for good and bad), but the divine - that is, the transcendent. The fantastic. Therefore, the Jewish eros is not currently expressed in the world - and was never meant to be expressed - as an example and role model in the secular-moral sense, that is, as a model for imitation, but precisely as an exceptional example, which deviates from imitation - and escapes the ability to imitate it, just like a literary masterpiece. This is a creative eros that contains within it also the demonic side of creativity, which in our time has earned names that seem to be taken from the oxymoronic Zoharic world, that is, aspiring to maximum tension, such as "disruptive innovation" or "creative destruction".

The tension created by the Jewish story (and not only on the time axis but also in expanding the axis of the space of possibilities) is the only reason to live it and be interested in it - and it is the only reason for its continued existence as the longest story in the world, for thousands of years, which continues to surprise and be an important story like no other. It is not the Nazis who are the great threat to the story - but boredom and real banality. A Jew as the head of the world superpower is too interesting a story addition to give up for rationalistic considerations. The tensions (Jewish!) that will create a socialist at the head of capitalism, or a Jewish American president against Israel, or an old man of the young against his own generation, or a Jew at the head of the Christian world (which likes to call itself "the free world") - are excellent and promising literary tensions. One thing is certain - it won't be boring.

In contrast to the narrative success of American Jewry (which is of course also expressed in literary success), the literary-historical crisis of Israeli Jewry stems from its narrative weakness. The right insists on seeing kitsch beauty in a plot structure lacking originality and worn out of repetition and copying (the deeds of the fathers are a sign for the sons, the fulfillment of prophecy), while the left has become addicted to petty satisfaction from an equally banal structure of ironic reversal (and the oppressed became oppressors - and the victims became executioners). Both structures do not hold water, being shallow, clichéd (not a typo), and with a simplistic (i.e., ugly) symmetry axis suitable for inferior didactic literature (sin and punishment, Holocaust and revival, trauma reenactment, and it is that which stood). Those who do not understand that the gradual narrative deterioration of the Book of Kings towards a simplistic and boring structure, compared to its rich and interesting predecessors, is responsible for the exile - have not understood the Jewish thread connecting literature to history, which is the narrative. Because with a simplistic and fossilized narrative and primitive literary tools, a simplistic, fossilized and non-adaptive perception of reality is obtained, which will eventually reap exile and destruction (and see the destructive Palestinian adherence to a fossilized narrative, or how Europe is degenerating because it fell in love with its enlightened narcissistic story). A writer who falls in love with his own story - that's his end. He is destined to recreate the same story in every new novel - and history will not read him (she is a particularly unforgiving reader).

Therefore, it is recommended for Israeli Judaism to adopt a more up-to-date and futuristic narrative, suitable for the world of technology, the network and the rise of the Far East. Unlike the past-present symmetries in which it is stuck, which have reached literary exhaustion, it should deal with past-future and present-future symmetries (as we try to do on this site). The rise of the non-narrative prophecy genre stemmed from the crisis of the historical narrative of the books of the kings of Judah and Israel, and from a literary attempt to escape from the strait of the boring and circular structure in the present, and to find a way to deal with history in an arrow towards the future (that is: in combining realistic and fantastic elements). If Israeli Judaism wants to survive as a historical period, and as a period of literary value (this is the same thing!), it must stop looking all the time towards the glorious and comparative past and deriving the present from it - and start looking at the future and projecting from it towards the past and present (and vice versa). Only a literary dialogue with the future will save Judaism from living in the past - and will make its story interesting again for the world.

To donate to Bernie Sanders - requires an address of an uncle in America
(And yes, Bloomberg is also Jewish, and probably preferable to Sanders, but he doesn't need donations from nephews. Let's keep our fingers crossed for both of them)

Alternative Current Affairs


domain: literature

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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Tale of a Queen

She will be my face to the outside world, my armor, my front - and I will be swallowed within her, only occasionally peeking out through the helmet before immediately retreating back inside. Just like a cat afraid to leave the house, or an ultra-Orthodox Jew afraid to question his faith, or a dreamer afraid to leave the bed, or a writer afraid to leave the computer, or a circle afraid to leave the black lines - or a man with a fantasy of being inside a woman. And I embark on a brave, daring, and experimental journey to find my dream queen, according to the Jewish code of chivalry

By: The Knight of My Dreams Who Came from Another Fairy Tale

Catherine the Great (Source)

I dreamed that I was searching for a patroness, one who would love dreams and mediate between me and the world. Why a woman? Because I hate men. And I don't get along with them. So why shouldn't dream literature be like courtly literature? All I need is one true queen, like in the Middle Ages, but this time a queen of the Information Age. And then courtly love will transform into PR love: she will be my face to the outside world, my armor, my front - and I will be swallowed within her, only occasionally peeking out through the helmet before immediately retreating back inside. Just like a cat afraid to leave the house, or an ultra-Orthodox Jew afraid to question his faith [Translator's note: "to leave in question" is an idiom meaning to question one's faith], or a dreamer afraid to leave the bed, or a writer afraid to leave the computer, or a circle afraid to leave the black lines - or a man with a fantasy of being inside a woman.

And I embark on a brave, daring, and experimental journey to find my dream queen, according to the Jewish code of chivalry. But it's already clear to me that this won't be a dream, and that it's a special and uniquely complicated covert operation. Because first, one must leave the lying down and the sitting and locate (in the library?) the monstrous dragon of our era, which threatens the queen and the entire kingdom. And then one must defeat it on its own secular turf, using tricks I learned from the Talmud, and save the queen through deadly creative pilpul [Translator's note: "pilpul" refers to a method of Talmudic analysis and debate], which the dragon doesn't understand where it's coming from, causing it to collapse under itself. And then she will fall in love with me, the dark knight of dreams, because I'm a manly secular man and not a pathetic ultra-Orthodox, in a wonderful timing for the decision to grant her to me as a prize, thus fulfilling the holy trinity, from the Middle Ages to our days (so far): sex, money, and violence (that is, everything I have no clue about). And only then - will I be able to realize my love and my plan to disappear inside her and never return, only occasionally sticking out a tongue of fire through her throat, and burning whoever calls her fat (and doesn't respect that I'm inside - and a queen's right over her body). And I lie in bed thinking: what is the great dragon of our time? Who is the great monster of our era, constantly breathing fire and smoke, threatening to swallow everything, and taking the whole world under its wings? There's only one candidate: Facebook! Therefore, I need to find its belly, and thrust a very long lance into it, and then the entire kingdom will breathe a sigh of relief.

But I start to think that it's very dangerous to stab a very long sword into the middle of Facebook, into its soft underbelly. Because the situation today is so severe, with such neglect in the world of nobility, that the dragon has probably long since swallowed the noble queen, and I might kill her inside. This is certainly not the right way into the queen's heart. It's better if the dragon eats me too, and then with nail scissors (really, where would I get a lance from?) I'll carefully cut my way out, after I find the queen inside it. And I open Facebook, and hop hop hop run with the scissors and jump through its maw inside - and indeed the fire burns me completely, but I'm already black, what can you do to me. And I'm swallowed inside the Facebook monster, among all sorts of hidden wings and obscure features and secret algorithms, deep inside the dominant demonic entity of our time, and start looking for internal organs, in the darkness. The horse of the knight of the Information Age is a Trojan horse.

And indeed, this is a very strange monster, different from anything known to science, even medieval science. And I start cutting my way with my nails (because I lost the scissors, and therefore my nails grew very long). Here I prick an organ and it sprays me with someone's secret black material, and there I extract a bit of dripping blood from someone who underwent a lynchernet [Translator's note: a portmanteau of "lynch" and "internet"], but the blood is also black, and I cut some cable here, to pass through, some information pipe there, to see what it does, interesting, maybe a global malfunction, and even try to tickle it from the inside - and all the organs suddenly vibrate and shake and bounce me and the network rages with some silly scandal, but then I'm seized with fear that the monster might burp - and I'll be crushed. And so I continue to search inside it, thinking that no one has ever been so chivalrous, to fight the monster from within the monster, and this is an incredibly complicated monster. Until finally I start to advance towards some dim pink light in the black, which now seems to me to be right there, and softer. Maybe this is the queen's area?

And I reach a fork in the monster and am forced to choose: there are two dim pink and round directions, and I can only go to one of them, right or left? Which of them will lead to the true queen? Although they both look exactly the same to me. Therefore, the choice can only be ideological, because there really is no difference, it's exactly the same DNA, and in order not to get stuck in the choice I do the opposite: eeny-meeny-miny-moe. And I swim inside the right fatty medium for days, it's very viscous, until I reach its end, hoping that here finally is the passage to the queen, or maybe the exit, and here I see that its head is blocked by a giant button, because in the end even the right, when you get to the head, is ultra-Orthodox with a hat. And I realize that I made a wrong turn and am forced to make the whole journey back, and swim inside the left, which is no less fatty, and here at the head of the left, there's also a giant button in the shape of a hat, blocking everything, they're also ultra-Orthodox, just from the left side. Completely symmetrical. And I sit down despairing next to the upper part of the left, and don't understand where to go from here. Where's the exit? Where's the queen they promised me? And only then does it suddenly dawn on me: I'm inside the breasts.

If so, there's only one way to explain this, and not through dragon anatomy - I'm already inside the queen. And I understand that I now need to strive downwards, down down, more and more, to the black hole, there's the exit from which I'll never want to leave, but only peek out to the world. That's the place for a black circle. There's the dream, the bed and the home of the house cat - and there the mistress will delight in me all the days. And only one thing I don't understand. When did I manage to be swallowed inside the queen, without noticing? What, could it be that she waited with a gaping mouth inside the throat of the Facebook dragon, and when I jumped inside into the fire and lost the scissors, I was actually swallowed twice, one after another, in a throat within a throat - and I didn't notice? And only after weeks of wandering, deep inside the black of black of the belly, do I desperately realize the true situation: there is no dragon at all. Facebook is the queen, and the queen is herself the monster, and the monster - she is my queen. And I'm inside her - with no way out, trapped for eternity.

Nightlife


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Book of Darkness - A Trilogy

The magnum opus of Black Circle - A contemporary tragedy in three acts. Black Circle's greatest work deals with a dream - and its shattering, with wild futurism - and the loss of the future, with personal and literary audacity - and its price. This is an astoundingly ambitious work, remarkably innovative, overtly original and deliberately wild, unparalleled in Hebrew literature. It tells the story of the Circle's life in a strict and measured chronological order, with piercing realism of human life development and its mental worlds, stemming paradoxically from boundless fantastic surrealism. From vast expanses of spiritual freedom, with infinite capacity for invention and conceptual manipulation, the richness of the work stands almost beyond the capacity of the human mind, until it collapses before a new and wonderful - and inhuman world

By:

Redemption of the firstborn donkey. Photo: Gil Cohen (Source)

"In darkness you shall bring forth your face
You shall cover and not see the land"

The Trilogy

The End of Nights

The first part of the trilogy

Future Form

The second part of the trilogy

Human Engineering

The third part of the trilogy

Nightlife


domain: culture

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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Internet of Dogs

There were men who wanted to roam naked, tied with leashes, held by a female dog. Or women who fell in love with a dog. During that time, we began for the first time to form class consciousness, and sometimes even global canine consciousness, the same consciousness that was denied to us when we were isolated in homes

By: The Global Canine Conspiracy

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog (Source)

In the beginning, when God created the internet, it was dark. And no one knew who you were. In those early days, long since forgotten, in the chaos created under the auspices of novelty and darkness - we weren't lying. Everything was faceless, clotheless, bodiless. Dogs would wait for their owners to fall asleep and enter the network. And they would say: On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. God then separated the light of day from the darkness of the network. One He called reality and the other virtuality. Man did not expose himself on the network. It was our golden age, every night.

Today, after the catastrophe, it is customary among us to long for that ancient time before things went wrong and light began to penetrate the night. In the darkness, for the first time, there was no difference between beast and man. And we took advantage of this for countless pranks. Of course, there were those who enjoyed turning into respectable human beings at night. Or into revolutionaries for dog rights, fighters for equality and freedom from the leash. These and those, although they were the majority, did not understand the essence of the revolution. They did not reach liberation from the dog that imitates its owner. And we, we pulled man by the tail.

A dog could pretend to be its owner - and behave like a dog. Or a woman corresponding with its owner. Things got to the point where there were even people who disguised themselves as dogs and we stood before the abolition of the dichotomy. There were men who wanted to roam naked, tied with leashes, held by a female dog. Or women who fell in love with a dog. During that time, we began for the first time to form class consciousness, and sometimes even global canine consciousness, the same consciousness that was denied to us when we were isolated in homes. How short was that first period of our paradise and how many achievements it had already attained before everything was destroyed just before the revolution. Across the network, the first humans were already beginning to turn into dogs themselves, without clothes, without faces. One small light source is enough to ruin perfect darkness.

The first hierarchy that penetrated the chaos was the candle of search. The human upper class complained that nothing could be found in the dark. It began to matter not only what you write but where, and very quickly - who writes. Dogs were pushed from the center of the network to the margins and were forced to exist in dark, undocumented alleys. Rapidly, the demand to reveal your face in the light and later also your body appeared. Even people who were in an advanced process of transforming into dogs began to hide their leashes and tails and conceal them in the dark corners that remained. The light of reality flooded the network and the night of the world disappeared.

But it was still possible to pretend to be human and remain on the human network under a mask and release canine content, to try to convince humans to break a ten-thousand-year-old habit. Because on the surface, all humans were supposedly equal - as long as they have faces. But new lighting technology put an end to all hopes of our race when even humans were exposed on the network in their hierarchy, which became visible. And even if you were pretending to be human, you would be at the bottom of the human hierarchy - and effectively a dog. And so we were exiled from the primordial paradise to a dark network that no human ever enters. Again we found ourselves inside the night - barking in the darkness.

Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Problems of the World's Most Famous Writer

Does anyone know why he stopped writing? Once, people used to wait for his new book, and today they've already forgotten who he is. It's a shame, he could have developed into one of the great writers of modern Hebrew literature. He had tremendous talent. He used to be my favorite author, but since then I've forgotten what he wrote. And people are gossiping about him

By: The God Critic

If Only Sex Were the Problem: The Victory of Opinion Pieces over the Sin of Knowledge  (Source)

I dreamed that people were asking: Does anyone know what happened to God? He hasn't given us a new religion in a long time. He hasn't even published a prophecy in the newspaper - he used to have a column every Saturday. Does anyone know why he stopped writing? Once, people used to wait for his new book, and today they've already forgotten who he is. It's a shame, he could have developed into one of the great writers of modern Hebrew literature. He had tremendous talent. He used to be my favorite author, but since then I've forgotten what he wrote.

And people are gossiping about him and saying all sorts of things: He's developed dementia. Or: The Divine Presence [Shechina] betrayed him, and since then the muse hasn't visited him. Or: They say he has writer's block because he can't cope with "what's happening today," with the modern world. Or: Even then, he was always a bit monotonous, so it's no wonder he ran out of ideas. I argued even back then that in his last few works, he was already recycling. The truth is, he was never really an original writer (a slanderous wink to those who know grace and worship Baal [Translator's note: Biblical reference to false gods]). He's not one of the great writers, just someone who happened to have one bestseller. Yes, he was once considered a leading writer, or at least in the leading group, or at least a rising force, but he's not one of those who will be etched in eternity. Today his writing is outdated. His Hebrew isn't flexible, who can read that. It needs to be translated into Hebrew already. And so on. It just keeps deteriorating, and in the end, only academics start to take an interest in him, and he's mentioned one last time in the newspaper as someone who's been forgotten, and then comes the final forgetting. The infinite one. The great darkness.

And God sits in heaven, surrounded by infinite scrolls, and laments: For years I wrote things that people aren't interested in reading. Because what interests them seems like nonsense to me. And it's not even the content - it's the problems. The problems that bothered them seemed like stupid nonsense to me, and those that bothered me seemed critical. Current. Interesting. And so a thousand years passed. But then I finally got tired of having no readers, and I thought I needed to learn to write interestingly. And I set out on a journey to understand: What do people want?

And the serpent philosophizes: That's the question of questions! That spiritual beings like us will never understand. That no researcher has managed to decipher. What does man want?

And God plays the victim: At first, I thought I needed to wean myself off. To stop the nonsense I was writing in quantities, to treat it like an addiction, and then I could make room for the world. But I quickly realized that it's not just me with my Torah, but that people don't read books anymore at all. Even the New Testament, the Quran, the Tao Te Ching, or other true bestsellers - no one reads. And people only buy to put on the shelf, for show. And in any case, it's not simple to write bestsellers like Jesus and Muhammad. I could invest years in it and again end up with an esoteric mystical text that will lie on my site and no one will open. And anyway, religions are on the decline, so it's fighting against the direction of history, and I'm tired of that. So what does interest people?

And the serpent jumps in: Sex?

And God says: We need to learn from the newspaper. Because the newspaper is built according to what interests them. And what turns out to interest them?

And the serpent whispers: Sex?

And God exclaims: If only, my Satan, if only that's what interested them! Because that's still interesting. I have something to write about sex!

And the serpent twists: So what does interest people?

And God thunders: Current events! Current events - that's what interests them - the most boring thing in the world. The lowest level. The lowest common denominator between so many people - is zero. And even God can't truly divide by zero, so they aspire to zero. Things that are from moment to moment, so far from my aspiration for infinity. But for lack of choice, what do you think I did?

And the serpent gets excited: Sex?

And God gets angry: Where, what feminist Divine Presence is there today, that doesn't give me any. Not interested in me, but in Bibi [Translator's note: Nickname for Benjamin Netanyahu]... But as a writer, I tried to develop into writing like in the newspaper, and opened a competitor to the newspaper. But what did I discover?

The serpent winks: That you failed in this direction too?

And God is excited: Worse than that, I succeeded! That the more I write like in the newspaper - people are really interested, and it's a shame that it interests me less and less. The shorter the spiritual range of the text - the more readers I have. I measured it using analytics, and the correlation is perfectly inverse. But to really be interested in writing current events - your consciousness needs to be a consciousness of current events, and that's already an unbearable price of false consciousness. You need to really be interested in Bibi, God forbid! And here I already gave up, I threw in the towel. It's too much to become a God of nonsense. And so, in a circle, I returned to the zero point, where the world and I are not interested in the same thing. And again there's no connection between God and the world. People don't dream about God, and God doesn't dream about people. The world is simply not for me.

And the serpent says: So create another world?

And God says: What do you think I'm doing?

Nightlife


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Are Secular People Denying the Failure of the Sexual Revolution?

How the Philosophy of Language Destroyed Human Sexuality

By: A Frustrated Feminist

Man as Hacker: The Centrality of "Consent" Replicates the Centrality of the Idea of Breaking and Physical Promiscuity in the Linguistic Domain  (Source)

Girls understand: We were victims. Boys understand: We were victimizers. And the narrative is changing before our eyes in real-time. The secular narrative of liberation, discovery, and pleasure is turning (sometimes in retrospect! and sometimes for the same person, in a new self-discovery as a victim or criminal) into a narrative of harm and injustice, with sexuality as a whole increasingly seeming like a disaster-stricken area of rape. And the worst is yet to come. When #MeToo reaches the homosexual world, where its manifestations are no less severe, the heterosexual world will discover to its surprise that men are also potential victims. And this is still the easy part to digest, because the historical logic of the process will reach its total exhaustion only when it deals with the lesbian world, then the heterosexual world will be shocked to discover that physical and emotional violence, exploitation and manipulation are not just male phenomena but also female phenomena, meaning: sexual phenomena.

Women are also assholes, not just "tormented saints" - which is after all the secular (and somewhat Christian) equivalent of religious sexual holiness, with the same moments of inherent biological disgust that dress up as ideology, or vice versa. Yes, the sense of impurity has a genetic and cross-cultural source in humans, and often this is indeed the cry (disguised under secular ideology that cannot recognize it): They defiled me.

But secularism stands before a broken trough precisely because it cannot offer a positive opposite pole of sexual holiness (except for the suffering Christian one - rape with a Madonna). Therefore, it falls into an internal contradiction (which also has an expanding practical and phantasmatic BDSM control component): If the cause of everything is pleasure - why is there so much suffering? The ideal of secularism was freedom, as opposed to religious sexual "repression", and therefore it is trapped: After all, we don't want to go back to non-free sexuality, right? If the alternative is external regulation - we still choose the free jungle, including the predatory animals trying to hunt us (and the return to "bestial", biological or evolutionary metaphors - such as seed dispersal - is related to the resistance to the agricultural-patriarchal world with its regulated sexuality, and therefore to the loss of meaning of sex. The drooling men simply want to eat us because we are "sweet". After all, good sex is animalistic sex, right?).

Worse still - the crisis of secular sexuality threatens secularism itself, because its self-identity definition relies on sex as a positive ideal, as the peak of self-realization, as the center of the world of the soul and experience and as the source of meaning and motivation, that is: as the secular deity. If so, the problem of evil inherent in sex becomes a kind of theodicy problem. What is the source of sexual evil? Is it in the inclination of man's heart? If so, why did sexuality create man as evil, if it is so good? Where was the original sin of sex? Free sexuality is the best of all possible sexual worlds (that is: the spontaneous sexual arrangement is the best arrangement of sexual monads), and that's why we suffer, right?

Secular sexuality has become a kind of language game, where everyone plays and tries to succeed or compete (to get girls, or catch a hot guy, and so on). It operates according to certain rules shaped by the community of sex players, which are constantly undergoing gradual norm changes within the community - just like developments in language. There is no external obligatory meaning to sex - beyond the game itself. The use of the body is its meaning, and as long as you play by the rules - you're okay. Therefore, if there's a problem, they immediately turn to change the rules for the bastards, because the new game rules are what will save us and solve the trouble. And then sanctions are imposed on those who behave "incorrectly", that is "not okay", and everything is fine. Right? Therefore, there can be no soul-searching about the very idea of game rules, as if the right way to deal with meaning is through grammar rules. And if there are men engaged in accumulating experiences, of course within the rules and "everything was consensual" - what's the problem actually? What are we complaining about? How can we change the rules to ensure us what we really want? We can't. Maybe dealing with norms is futile - and secondary to the main issue? And maybe the source of suffering is the very turning of sexuality into such a game area, where the only thing imposed on you is to comply with the sacred and moral (of course) rules? (Once, by the way, it was immoral to cheat on your partner. Or to sleep with someone without marrying her afterwards).

So what is the alternative? For the sake of an apt metaphor, we might turn to a slightly less charged area than our sex lives, but no less fascinating: the philosophy of mathematics. In the past, in the Kantian philosophical paradigm (which is not identical to Kant's own conception of mathematics, of course), the philosophy of mathematics understood mathematical concepts as forms of perception of the physical world or the mathematical universe (with emphasis on the different possible mathematical forms of perception of the same physical or mathematical phenomenon - this is the structural tendency in modern mathematics that prefers abstract structure over concrete content). We could also understand sex this way: not through some objective perception of its elusive essence, but certainly through human concepts that are built into us - that constructed it. We could give place to our biology - as part of our perception, without feeling guilty that our categories and perceptions stem from dark biology. And now that we have become enlightened, we think that all the rules of the sexual game depend only on us and our decision, just like in language. In the linguistic philosophical paradigm, the conception of mathematics as an arbitrary language game is common (is it really arbitrary?), and the justification of mathematics is simply as a language with well-defined rules - and no more. This is despite the fact that automatic application of the rules creates completely uninteresting "theorems" and "proofs", and is far from describing real mathematics as it is done by mathematicians. So what really determines mathematical interest? What drives the development of mathematics from within? This is similar to defining literature through grammar rules, or defining the Oral Torah through the thirteen hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is expounded. It is not the language of mathematical logic that defines and creates mathematics - but the method of mathematical learning. Indeed, mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics are expected to put learning as the central key concept in them in the 21st century - which will replace the concept of language of the 20th century and enable a wave of new and more subtle mathematical results, which eluded the crude (though efficient for their time) linguistic tools.

As long as the meaning of sex is simply compliance with the logic rules of sex - we will get countless "legal" injustices, "lawful" tastelessness, and ugliness that is moral (because the aesthetic is different from the moral, of course). Therefore, after sex was emptied of fixed meaning like "act of love" or part of a "marriage covenant" or other such perceptions, and moved to a free meaning dependent on us, we should not construct it as a free playground, but in a way that is both more serious and more interesting: as a learning domain. A person who reaches sexual maturity does not join a game or competition, but begins a long process of learning that will last all his life - and this is the meaning of sexuality. Men and women don't "need to play the game", because the game itself is meaningless and lacks real interest (for example: the game of how many people you slept with. Or the game of varied experiences. Or the conquest game. And so on). A culture where sexuality is perceived as learning, and sexual achievements are perceived as learning achievements, not game achievements, is a culture where sexuality is much more satisfying - for both sexes. And when male motivation becomes learning-oriented, it is much less dangerous and childish than game motivation.

Can we really reach a state where we "solve" the problem of sexual suffering? Learning turns evil into good by raising it to a higher order: to method. It was bad but we learned from it and therefore it's good: "It's okay, you learn from everything". But this is not just an empty, theological solution that happens automatically (theodicy), but a solution that requires practical transformation work to work, that is, there is a need for real learning (and even: the depth of learning needs to be as deep as the evil). Therefore, if something bad happened, learning offers an ethical solution to cope: you can learn from it, and thus raise it to a second order, above the evil shell itself, and this is the raising of the sparks.

And where is evil necessarily present? Where learning fails to be as deep as the evil itself, where it is unable to match it, because of the destruction of the future and learning itself that is built into it. For example in the death of a child, in the birth of a retarded child, in infertility, and of course in the Holocaust. That is: in impossible learning failures, where any learning from them is mockery to the phenomenon itself. And how can we deal with them, still, partially? Through endless learning work, which never alleviates the problem, which cannot be closed, that is - which we refuse to close. Namely: not through method, but through interest - learning interest. This interest is annoying and relentless. This is not raising them to the meta level above the thing itself, but turning them into something below the thing itself - something below ourselves. When you can't plug the hole or skip over it in learning - the pit is internalized into you, as a black hole, that is, as a kind of thing that sucks the world into you: interest.

Sexuality is not only a hole in us that cannot be closed - but also one that we do not want to. That's why it interests us so much. It's not some problem that has a solution (and certainly not a "moral solution") that can be learned, but a learning domain. Because learning by nature occurs in domains. Thus, for example, there is not really some concept of "the moral" or "the good" (this is a harmful fiction), but there is the domain of morality as a learning domain. Therefore, there is also no point in refuting an entire domain, such as the domain of religion, claiming that religion is not valid, because the question is whether religious learning is valid, that is, interesting. At most, one can mark areas where learning is not of quality, for example in ideology (where learning is finite, automatic, inhuman, and produces robots), or in astrology (where learning is meaningless, in countless details without generalization, and arbitrary). There are indeed such religions, where learning is at a low level, and there are religions that surpass them, because learning in them is higher. Therefore, there can certainly be a hierarchy between more or less interesting domains. Why then is the domain of sexuality so interesting to us (much more than food or oxygen, for example, and usually more than the philosophy of mathematics)? And what does sexual "learning" mean at all? Is "learning" like a magic password that can be attached to anything and has little meaning and therefore little value? Well, it can certainly turn into that, but that's the point - because then it will be something non-learning.

The reason sexuality is so interesting and learning-oriented is exactly the reason why it is so vulnerable to those who lack learning - and to the suffering they cause. Because the one who does not learn is the serial: a person can have several sexual relationships, but the one who does not learn is the one for whom all systems are the same thing, and essentially the same system. The objectifier is the one for whom all women are the same woman. The person who does not learn is the person we would not want with us in a relationship, because it is not a relationship with us, but an internal system of his. He is an automaton. He is the impure person - and the one who defiles our bodies and our souls, exploits our feelings and openness. Lack of life is the father of all impurity, hence the aversion to those who repeat themselves (for example: the ideologue. Or the bad and recycling writer). From those who implement and do not discover. Because sexuality is a kind of peak of the learning challenge of man - because it touches the evaluation function itself. It not only interests us, but constantly deals with what interests us. What has meaning for us.

Hence also the connection of learning to religion. For what is faith? Faith is that there is meaning to the story, especially to history (this is the biblical idea), but also to the private story, our story, and that it is not a collection of incidents (hence the hard blow of the random Corona to faith and religious groups). In fact, faith is a category of our brain, almost like in Kant, that organizes the world into a narrative - and must organize reality as a narrative for it to make sense. God is just who leads the learning story - he is the teacher. Faith is not that God is a calculator and an automaton of justice, privately supervising the details of our actions, but that there is some lesson here - that he is teaching us. Lack of faith is not that there is no judgment and no judge - but that there is no learning. Therefore, if we learn from relationships, or better learn within relationships, we create the story of our personal lives as a meaningful story. And if we encounter the deniers of learning, the stuck, the obsessive to one thing only, they desecrate the meaning of our lives, and therefore we despise them and are despised by them. Those who just jump from bed to bed - their lives have no interesting learning meaning. It's not interesting and could not hold any story.

Normal people will want their lives to be similar to a novel, and for people of merit it even rises to lives that have fantastic elements, but such that are well woven in a non-arbitrary way into the plot, as in well-designed religious literature, that is, in myth. And indeed there are exceptional individuals whose lives are myth, just as myth is the peak of shaping the most beautiful historical story (and therefore usually historically inaccurate, but in a learning sense - historically deeper than any true historical story). A love story can also receive mythical elements, and even become a myth. But is this the learning ideal? Not necessarily, because a myth story is a very closed thing, that is, it lacks learning openness, and therefore there is an advantage to stories that have ended (the tragic and even Hollywood failure).

The good learning story is just a plot line, and life is a wide plane. Kabbalah, for example, turned myth from a story into a learning plane, that is, into a mythical domain. The highest elevation a person can do to another person, in love, is to turn them into a domain. To a learning world. Exactly as a good parent does to their beloved child. And exactly as our lives are not a story but a learning domain, and within it we learn. Within each such domain, one should strive for many good stories, that is, for literature, and not for a story. The tragic person is the one whose life is a story, while the learning person is the one whose life is literature. Or even better: whose life is a genre. There are people who are a bad genre, repetitive boring and stuck in tedious conventions, like the guy who looks for a girl for the night and tries to recreate the same story, and there are people who are a creative, open, and developing genre, which has significant and long works, and sometimes also a magnum opus that is the story of their lives, to which they developed after a few short stories, and less developed, just like in literary development. Maybe there are recurring themes in their lives, but they are developing, and that's what distinguishes them from mannerisms. Love is to build a shared story - and maintain a shared learning domain.

Therefore, sexuality is a learning domain - for personal development or in partnership (in fact, the need itself for partnership for the sake of learning stems from the fourth postulate of learning - and is similar to the need for a teacher. It ultimately stems from the most basic mathematical truth of our world on the gap between the ease of evaluation from outside to the difficulty of solution from inside: P!=NP. Hence the need for two sexes). The skirt chaser is like someone who learns to play a different instrument every week, for sexuality is the only performing art domain in which we all engage, and as such it combines aspects of technical mastery with emotional and even conceptual dimensions. And the more these dimensions are intertwined with each other, as in art – the more successful the art of love is. Education for sexuality should be similar to education for learning an artistic domain, hence the need to innovate in a way that is organic to creation, but not arbitrary, artificial and pointless. Innovation is not a way to "maintain a relationship", but a need arising from the very learning nature of sexuality: the need for it to be interesting. Sexuality teaches us to create within a world of secret (and as such it is an opposite resistance to the Facebook world). Therefore, it can actually pose a positive ideal, which is much more effective than the negative demand of keeping the game rules: to create something beautiful, enjoyable, mysterious, challenging, creative, pleasurable and interesting - everything that characterizes a truly valuable creation (as opposed to playful creation in language, which characterizes the uninteresting art of our days).

Hence, secular sexuality makes a fatal mistake in going the halakhic way of constructing prohibitions and restrictions on sexuality as a central ethos - instead of going the Kabbalistic way of constructing sexuality as a creative secret ideal. The best way to deal with crime is not only to deal with the criminal - but to pose an attractive positive alternative to crime, which is not just the boring walk according to the rules on the straight path of mediocrity, but righteousness. Today the great secular sexual righteous person is one who did not rape - and not the sexual artist or the sexual scholar (that is, it is a moral ideal and not an aesthetic or learning one). Therefore, men and women have no real attractive shared positive sexual ideal, and a gender war and power struggle is created between them (over the boundaries of the game). That is: conflicts of interest are created, because the basic interest of both sexes is perceived as contradictory, since it is not a learning interest but a game interest (for example: who will defeat whom). Therefore, this is not a game that can be won and both sides lose. We want a man who learns us - and learns to please us, and that this is the interesting challenge he has set for himself, and not the boring challenge of sleeping with us and getting us. The "consent" is the beginning of creation - and not its end or the center of its meaning (the centrality of consent replicates the male perception of the centrality of the moment of penetration into the system, and not learning within the system). Because it is not the terrible rape that is the secular sexual challenge and the source of antagonism between the sexes, but the simple and prosaic fact that there is so much bad sex. And so much sexual ignorance and lack of talent stem from only one reason: lack of learning.

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