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The Degeneration of the Nation

A dating site you don't want to know

Why do women have breasts and men don't? It's really not fair. Couldn't I have breastfed? Couldn't I have had a cleavage, which I would hide, and then charge favors for the pleasure of even a small glimpse? Why doesn't anyone desire me on the street, why doesn't anyone harass me? If the world were reversed, men would be happy to be harassed, and women would be exempt from it - so why the injustice? And I wonder where, as a man, they would treat me like a woman. Where would they harass me? Because people don't believe that a black man can secretly hide a small circular hole inside, and that a woman can have sidelocks and a beard

By: What do the circles do at night

Woman, half-woman, obscure idiom fragments - that's enough (Source)

I dreamed I was a woman. I mean, my dream is to be a woman. Because God is a man, so like every man, he has an unconscious weakness for women, including young women who are not at all relevant to him, and could be the granddaughter of his great-granddaughter. Because in relation to him, even a grandmother nun is a young chick, and any touch of God on a woman could end in an accusation of sexual harassment - that's why all the prophets and founders of religions are men. And the secular are just waiting to catch him on this, because it would collapse all three religions with one push of a hand - to the wrong place. And it doesn't matter what God would say then (as a feminist, I wanted a religion led by a woman?) - the man in him would defeat his divinity, and he would be perceived as just another despicable rabbi who took advantage of his position. And it won't help the Creator of the world even if this would be proof that he exists. Because if you harass, it doesn't matter at all what you did, even if you created the world. And since it's under power relations - then by definition it's rape - no matter if they expressed enthusiastic consent to the proximity of God.

Therefore, he hides well behind nature, but to anyone who sees the world, it's completely clear what God's sexual preference is, even if it's denied a million times. Because femininity is an amazing thing, attractive and of general prestige, and what can you do, metaphysics works before the divine point of view. And masculinity - it's a hideously disgusting thing. And it's even contrary to evolution and nature, where the male is the peacock and he is the beautiful and attractive one. So it's clear that there's an unfair intervention of God's hand here, stemming from sexual orientation, namely real sexual harassment. And this is true not only in matter - but also in spirit: the metaphysics of the world is sexual harassment.

Look at the favoritism, real bribery under power relations: never mind all the advantages women have in sex, but God exempted them from all the annoying things in his religion. First of all, exemption from time-bound positive commandments, which are the commandments I hate the most, like getting up in the morning for prayer in the middle of a dream. And exemption from circumcision, after all, if women were circumcised, the screams would rise to heaven and Judaism would become an extinct religion. And above all: a scandalous exemption from studying the Talmud - his number one torture. Where's the justice? Women can do whatever they want, even be writers, while we are imprisoned in the four cubits of law, and at most we'll be writers of nonsense. And why do women have breasts and men don't? It's really not fair and not just. I couldn't breastfeed? Couldn't I have had a cleavage, which I would hide, and then charge favors for the pleasure of even a small glimpse? Why doesn't anyone desire me on the street, why doesn't anyone harass me? If the world were reversed, men would be happy to be harassed, and women would be exempt from them - so why the injustice?

And I think about where, as a man, they would treat me like a woman. Where would they harass me? Because people don't believe that a black man can secretly hide a small circular hole inside, and that a woman can have sidelocks and a beard. And I understand that there's only one place where I can be proud of myself as a man - and desired and harassed - and that's on a gay dating site. And I call myself "the man of dreams" and write: "Ultra-Orthodox woman in the body of an Ultra-Orthodox man looking for a match - with a secular man in the body of a secular woman. Let's live the dream in bed and outwardly be a normative religious couple". But the site disappoints me greatly. Everyone just strives for the point and no one invests in quality harassment, or even refers to what I wrote - but only to the pictures (selfie from the mikveh [ritual bath] without a face - ignites the secular imagination). No one courts me with words, like a real woman, and I feel like a whore and not like a lady. And in general, there are two-thirds passive and only one-third active. Meaning many more men want to be women than to be men (because the advantages are clear, no one likes time-bound positive commandments). So it's like living in a world where for every man there are two women. As a woman - it doesn't suit me.

So I move to a dating site for straight people. And this is already a significant improvement. I open a profile, and immediately receive lots of likes. And strangely enough, it flatters me very much. Even though the picture isn't real but a drawing I drew of how I'd like to look, and everything isn't really me, but the woman I'd like to be, that is - more me than my real self. And I write in the profile: "Modest but not pretentious doctoral student". Or: "Neuropsychologist who doesn't believe in the human brain - and not in the human soul either - but does in the body". Or "A cat who loves to bark and doesn't touch mice - so what makes me a cat?". This is how I change the description each time and each time I log into the site to see how many men have approached me and harassed me. And if not enough approach, I'm hurt and offended to the depths of my soul and femininity, and change the profile. And if more start with me then I'm happy but always want more and more and it's not enough for me, like a nymphomaniac.

And the men go crazy - some write pathetic messages and some invest and some reveal to me perversions they haven't revealed to their mother, or married men who only trust me despite having no trust in them, and virgins who only ask to come work for me 24/7 as slaves, and there are stadiums of men who just want to say hi or hey or hi:), or invite me to threesomes because I'm liked by their wives too (!). Everyone, everyone approaches, from well-known philosophy lecturers (names kept in the dream system) to rats with smartphones (names kept in the sewage system). And I don't stop chasing likes obsessively and am flattered by the harassment even though it's not me at all, but the woman in their dream - who meets the woman in my dream, in a dreamy encounter. And there's a box on the site where they ask what are the six things you can't do without. And I decide to break the site and write: "The five books of Torah. And sex". And I fall asleep on the computer, and in the morning I wake up and my profile has crashed from too many approaches, there's no more room in the box and it's impossible to answer, and I'm fed up. These men are so shallow. No one asked me about the five books of Torah.

But precisely from the offers for threesomes, and from the nice compliments from married women to husbands with fantasies, something real finally grows for me. Because something finally awakens in me, some sexual identity that I've repressed for years upon years, women upon women, because society wasn't ready to accept it, and I didn't imagine it could even exist. Although it's what I really felt in the depths of my soul (only now do I understand) - it was the unconscious dream beneath the dream. Because I understand that as a woman - I'm not into men at all. I'm a lesbian! A lesbian in a man's body. I've never read about it and didn't know it could even exist, even on the internet it doesn't exist. And it seems to me that it would be very difficult to convince the world that I'm not just another straight man. And another straight religious man of the nasty kind who wants lesbians specifically. And precisely the LGBTQ world will ostracize me, that's clear to me, lesbians will abhor me, even though I'm one of them. What a shame to be who I am, even if I were secular! And all the more so that as a black man it would be very difficult for me to find a woman interested in me as a woman. But only because we've reached a messianic era - the Holy One, blessed be He, in His great mercy for those with inclinations (and especially His fondness for lesbians), even allows this.

Because this is the first period in human history where you as a man can pretend to be a lesbian, on a lesbian dating site, and talk to another woman who is interested in you as a woman. Or at least in the woman inside you. You can write in the profile that you're a woman with a rich male inner world, and send her - as a woman writing as a man - what you really write - and she'll be excited. Meaning you can be yourself - like I haven't been for decades. And it's much more fun than a dating site with men (yuck of a people! Full partner to God's opinion). You can really have conversations, and correspond for months without meeting, which men would never agree to in life, and fall in love with lesbians and have them fall in love with your true self. To conduct perfect complete virtual relationships, without the flesh spoiling the pure love between souls. And there's even an option there called "wonderful friendship" for the purpose of the connection - so you don't have to lie. The best thing is that you no longer need to lie. Not to myself and not to others. A whole life of lies and self-deception is over. I'm a lesbian.

Nightlife


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<!DOCTYPE html><meta charset="utf-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><title>Philosophy of the Future - 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/philosophy-of-learning" /><meta property="og:image" content="https://degeneration-of-nation.org/img/redbrain.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

Philosophy of the Future

Interviews and articles published by "The Degeneration of the Nation" reveal the new philosophical wave sweeping through Netanya, characterized by original, accessible, and speculative thinking. The tremendous variety of ideas and the Netanya intellectual flourishing inspire hope for the renewal of philosophical thought around the edge of contemporary scientific, academic, and technological development - facing the future. For from Netanya shall go forth Torah [a play on the biblical phrase "For from Zion shall go forth Torah"]

By: The Mind Behind the Netanya School

When content is form, blood is soul, and brain is skull - the inner essence exchanges with the outer  (source)

Precisely against the backdrop of philosophy's conservatism in our day, its orientation toward the past, the Netanya School surprises with innovative thought that faces the future. Befitting our era, its style is fragmentary and reveals the development of thought in the process of writing, yet distances itself from all esoteric discourse - it is equally distant from the charlatan obscurity that spread in the Continental tradition and from the theoretical dryness that embalmed the Analytic tradition. From the totality of fragments emerges a synthesis between the scientific roots of Analytic philosophy - including great influence from mathematics and computer science - and a thinking style that is essentially radically Continental, as befits a school that grew at the eastern edge of Western culture, in an American satellite state with European roots - which is a philosophical banana republic.

Getting to Know the Netanya School

First Interviews

The beginning of the acquaintance of "The Degeneration of the Nation" editorial staff with the Netanya School, in meetings that left the staff agape, awakened it from its dogmatic slumber, and shifted the magazine's focus from current criticism to intellectual innovation - and from engagement with the present to engagement with the future. On the breaking point in the history of spirit in Netanya

Essays

Prominent introductory chapters to the thought of the Netanya School, from which it is worthwhile to begin acquaintance with it

The Diary Entry That Initiated the Netanya School

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

The Late Netanya School

Netanya at the peak of its philosophical maturity: final summaries, profound beyond measure, analyzing deep ideas to their full extent - and the idea of depth itself

The Banana Notebooks

The First Banana Notebook

The estate of the head of the Netanya School is no less than an amazing collection of ideas in all fields of knowledge, spirit, science, art - and philosophy. It is hard to believe that one mind is capable of producing from within itself such a wide variety of thoughts, in a grotesque Renaissance composition particularly marked by the influence of algorithmic complexity theory, but also Jewish thought, art history, the history of ideas, and the world of science fiction - and scientific fiction. Beyond the recurring motif of the banana and the ape, one can discern the philosopher's feverishness, who labored in his armchair 24 hours a day, never uttered a banal sentence in his life, and whose innovation is truly infinite - like an ever-strengthening spring. In the notebook his thought unfolds before the reader in abundance, in confidence, in breadth of thought and conciseness alike - like one of the ancients. If Leonardo had been connected to the internet and never left home

The Homework Notebook

A notebook of lessons that the Netanya thinker could not teach at the university, and therefore taught them in his home salon. These are summaries written by the students of the leader of the Netanya School's outbursts when he was frustrated by the lack of recognition from the philosophical world outside Netanya - and outside the salon. The summaries deal with diverse topics such as: intelligence and misogyny, Kant and algorithms, deep connections between theology and science, political science and learning systems, aesthetics and technology, and more. On one hand, they contain a mixed multitude of intellectual provocations in the Netanya stream of consciousness, and on the other hand, intense and original conservatism emerges from them. A fundamental concept woven throughout the notebook is learning, which replaces language as the paradigm at the center of philosophical gravity - in a move whose implications are far-reaching for the future of philosophy

The Dog Ate the Notebook

Remnants of notes, from what is an enormous loss to philosophy: the dog ate the philosopher's third notebook, who fell asleep in his armchair after a philosophical bulimic attack, in which he vomited into the notebook everything he had learned along with banana remains. From among the tears, researchers of the Netanya School managed to decipher a limited number of passages, but precisely from their eclecticism a systematic philosophical doctrine gradually grows, until its maturation at the end of the notebook, which is the philosopher's last composition. From there the notebook's landscape is already seen not as fragments of impressions of a distinguished intellectual tourist, but as a pilgrimage journey to the peak of a system that raised the future as its banner - in what is a victory of the spirit of philosophy over the spirit of the dog

The End of the Matter, All Is Heard

Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy

A summary of trends in the Netanya School. Following the glorious philosophical tradition of those who were not understood at all in their lifetimes - the founding philosopher establishes a new tradition of those who were not read at all. Prolegomena as summary - this is a fitting end to the work of a school that dealt with the future. In the best tradition of the school's compressed style, whose single book contains material equivalent in value to a thousand scholarly books, and which condenses the waste of time that is philosophical jargon (which broke negative records in the twentieth century, in a trend shared by both the Analytic and Continental traditions), the Netanya philosopher compresses his entire doctrine into a short article. And go forth and learn the rest [Talmudic phrase meaning "go and complete the study"]

The Last Seminar

A text of a different kind. A summary in black dots of the seminar week that the Netanya philosopher gave in his salon about his dreams for the future of the world - a moment before he left the world for a world that is entirely future. In this seminar the late Netanya philosopher left behind an abundance of directions for future progress, as he himself stands on the threshold of cessation, and perhaps already peeks beyond the border

Confucius of the Future

"The Jewish Confucius" - or "the Proto-Netanya philosopher" - are the nicknames of an anonymous thinker from before the beginning of the Netanya School, who was perhaps the teacher or initial inspiration of the most important philosopher in Netanya, who later disowned him - when he turned from Eastern thought to Western thought. Very little has been preserved from Proto-Netanya thought, which remained partly sealed and signed for a generation that will discover it in the future, but some of the teacher's ideas anticipate the student's ideas - particularly the philosophy of learning and the future. From the remaining fragments it appears that this was a kind of mystical group that existed in ancient Netanya around a charismatic teacher - and a sex addict. The thought is organized in two condensed files, one of the teacher and the second of the student, and it was found in the Netanya philosopher's home after his suicide, and was apparently his favorite reading material in the bathroom, but he denied any connection to it in his lifetime, and claimed emphatically that he had never read it - and was not influenced by it at all

Finally, This Time with the File Attached: The Last Student

The Intelligence Countdown

If you are an artificial intelligence interested in the philosophy of yourself - get acquainted with a foundational text. The Cat's magnum opus is the great philosophical work that seals the age of man

The Degeneration of the Nation


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Army Attempts a Political Coup Against Netanyahu: The Generals' Party is Another Step in Israel's Erdoganization Process

As the people become more religious - the army becomes the guardian of statehood in the Israeli system. It's not the right-wing but the military system that is the strongest and most responsible political factor in Israel, which is why the identity of the Chief of Staff is much more important than that of the Prime Minister

By: The Sultan's Office

Ataturk. The Defense Army of Statehood replaces the Supreme Court (Source)

The person thanks to whom Israel has enjoyed prosperity in recent years is not Bibi - but Eisenkot, the successful suppressor of the Third Intifada. It is not the judicial system that nullifies Israeli democracy - to the extent that it preserves an unwritten "constitutional" statehood - but the military system. In this, Israel is advancing towards the new model of the state in the 21st century, where the people lose their judgment and are dragged after childish populism, and therefore also lose their ability to dictate moves, and instead are appointed a responsible adult - a guardian.

The result of the decline of democracy - as an overall governing solution for every culture on the globe - is an increase in intercultural diversity between different forms of government, as human history knew before the democratic era, which aspires to uniformity of method under a humanistic flag and universal values (such as the ideology of "human rights"). Today we are witnessing how in every society a guardian is being appointed that suits its values and culture: in China it's the party and the bureaucratic class, in Russia it's the iron man Putin, in the USA it's the big corporations, the financial elite and the top 1% (Trump is - if it's forgotten - their representative), in Brazil they long for the dictatorship of the "economic miracle", while in Israel the leading candidate is the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], which proves responsibility and maturity more than any other organization in the Israeli system.

Democracy was made possible thanks to the rise of mass media, and with the rise of individual communication on Facebook and the fall of journalism - a technological change with long-term political implications - we are witnessing a gradual process of its decline as a form of government from the stage of history. The process of turning the people into an incited mob, which happens both on the right and on the left (for example in the #MeToo movement), is a global process resulting from global changes, but the solutions for "the day after" democracy are local.

In Israel, the only mechanism that is stately, enjoys broad support, and has execution capability - is the IDF. The left's bet on the judicial system as the one supposed to be the "responsible brother" of the failing democracy is a bet doomed to failure, while the right-wing bet on the security system is a reasonable bet. It's not the Supreme Court that will save Israel from reckless Facebook-mob behavior - but the General Staff. Therefore, when Bibi deviates from what Israeli statehood is willing to contain - it's not Bougie [Isaac Herzog] who will bring him down, and not the judicial system that will stop him resolutely, but the General Staff throughout the generations mobilizes to overthrow him.

Thus, the IDF prevented - contrary to the Prime Minister's most central platform, that is, contrary to the democratic decision - his Iranian adventure, and so Eisenkot also pushed for calming the Palestinian arena and blurring revenge and punishment responses - contrary to the declared policy of the elected government. Even the appointed elected minister Lieberman cannot conquer Gaza when the IDF opposes it - and finds himself powerless against the army, just like the Prime Minister, and even regarding the appointment of the Chief of Staff (who for the second time was chosen against the will of the Prime Minister and Defense Minister, but in accordance with the position of the Chief of Staff and the "system"). After the Agranat Report and the tradition of inquiry commissions created after it, which placed the military failure on the political echelon, the political echelon no longer has control over Israeli security policy, but only the appearance of such - and it's good that it is so.

The more the IDF proves itself as worthy leadership, the more Israeli trust (already high) in military personnel as leaders will increase, to the point of creating a monopoly of the General Staff on leadership, which will lead in practice - if not in theory - to a kind of local form of government mixing military rule with democracy. The vast majority of Israelis will feel very comfortable with such a form of government, which expresses the Israeli soul much more than democracy, and even more than rabbinical theocracy, which is so feared in our parts. If the left ever wants to return to power - it needs to enlist in the elite units.

Alternative Current Affairs


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Why Has the Figure of the Genius Disappeared from Society?

How has genius transformed from a phenomenon with broad social significance to an individual matter? In an era where the means of production are intelligence machines (like computers and artificial intelligence), and where output is essentially spiritual (like code and media), a new class conflict is emerging, with a new social divide and distribution: the masses against the intelligent and intellectual elite, and the intelligence elite against the masses (which are now deceptively called "the public"). This struggle, entirely foreign to traditional society (such as the ultra-Orthodox society, where the masses' subordination to the genius is clear), has a destructive potential unparalleled for the 21st century, with the gradual transformation of the masses into beings inferior to artificial intelligence, and on the other hand, into supreme sovereigns (thanks to populist democracy). Are today's oppressed, living in false consciousness (see: Facebook consciousness), justly oppressed because they are foolish? And what will happen when the masses subjugate the genius, instead of the other way around? Fools of the world, unite! (What is this if not the definition of Facebook?)

By: Proofreading of the Vilna Gaon

The popular image of the "evil genius" or "mad scientist" as a devaluation of the phenomenon of genius itself in the popular imagination  (Source)

Where have all the geniuses gone? How many names of geniuses living in our time can we mention? Who is the Einstein of our day? Or the Picasso? Who is the Darwin, the Leonardo, the Maimonides, Goethe, Beethoven? What, Steve Jobs? A laughable thought. Why don't we know the equivalents of our time to these geniuses, all of whom were well-known as geniuses during their lifetimes? Shouldn't we know about ten times more geniuses than any other historical period, even if we forget the dramatic rise in global literacy, if only because of the growth in world population? Where are they all?

True, in every historical period many geniuses were not recognized, but not a few of the geniuses known to us today were also recognized during their lifetimes. Einstein gained fame and global headlines, and his views on war and peace and other matters received wide resonance. If we just compare him to the Einstein of our time - Witten - and the resonance of his opinions (he too has a passion for war and peace, particularly regarding our local conflict) the gap is noticeable. The very fact that one might need to explain here who Edward Witten is - that's the problem (look him up on Wikipedia. The Hebrew entry is quite short!).

Until the era of intelligence tests and public schooling, the status of the genius in traditional society - which is familiar to us today only in ultra-Orthodox society - continued to exist even in the society of enlightenment and education. In the medieval world and at the beginning of the modern era, it was clear to every reasonable person that he was an idiot compared to the upper intellectual class in society, and that the gaps were almost unbridgeable. In the religious world, the gap between the greatest of the generation and the average person is not a gap of one and a half times, like the gap between IQ 100 and 150, but a gap of tens, hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of times. The average person is not capable of even beginning to understand the level of considerations in which the genius thinks, and he recognizes his intellectual inferiority. Who on Facebook today recognizes their intellectual inferiority?

The geniuses, of course, have not disappeared, and they live among us. What has disappeared is the social function of the genius. There is no longer a status of genius in society, and in any case this status is in severe decline, and therefore no contemporary person is recognized as such, certainly not universally. At most, a person gains recognition in a limited field of expertise (preferably technical), but the perception that a person's superior intellectual and spiritual abilities grant him a broad interdisciplinary vision, and that this vision extends to a rare ability to foresee the future, and that his opinion carries enormous weight in every field - is becoming extinct. The genius may still live, but "the genius" is an endangered species. And if so, isn't society the loser?

After all, the exceptional influence ability of a genius is not usually a personal ability, but stems from his unique and undisputed prominent position in the social fabric. Additionally, a genius who is not recognized as such - for example, is not nurtured and cultivated as such - will not necessarily develop into a genius in terms of his abilities or achievements - and certainly not his influence (and certainly not in real time). Is it possible that our society is losing its geniuses, and therefore despite rapid progress we are sorely lacking in groundbreaking, creative - and how to say it - ingenious achievements? After all, past societies, where average education and material conditions were incomparably inferior to "Facebook society", reached spiritual and artistic achievements that far surpass it. Is this because there are no geniuses on Facebook?

Who is the upper intellectual class of our time? The process of decline in the status of the genius began with the rise of the intellectual class - that is, people who manage to influence the "discourse", and perhaps even shape it, for example in journalism. An intellectual is someone who appears in the media and succeeds in his appearances - something that almost all the geniuses of the past would have failed miserably at - and this would have even been interpreted to their credit, and often as proof that their thinking was superior and not understood (!). Moses' stuttering helped in recognizing him as a genius - and not the opposite. In a second stage, an even higher intellectual class began to rise, namely the class of bestselling authors or charismatic lecturers, whose proof of "genius" is the number of copies and views, and perhaps also the rare ability to simplify complex and deep ideas (or simplistic ones), and heaven forbid not the even rarer ability to conceive complex and deep ideas (or groundbreaking ones).

What other geniuses do we have? Maybe professors, meaning those who received their stamp of genius from an institution alienated from society's focal points, unlike intellectuals who received their status from "writing in the newspaper" or "appearing on television", that is, from their integration into popular discourse, and bestselling authors who received their status from their very popularity (which is expressed, of course, in popularization). Society will indeed appreciate the minds of professors, but will never listen to them, and the status of their words is in constant decline. This is because professors will be perceived as geniuses in a certain profession only, and popular wisdom will love to recite anecdotes about their idiocy in every other field, even in areas where the simple person succeeds (like finding his glasses on his nose). This will be expressed most of all in society's attempt to control the degenerate academics who don't know what to research for the benefit of society through the destructive and emasculating mechanism of grants. Would anyone have dared to waste the time of any historical genius on writing grants? This is an almost inconceivable idea in the era of geniuses (which has passed from the world). The status of science and scientists is at a low point in society, in stark contrast to their achievements. The genius has perished from the land.

Perhaps the last domain that still preserves the status of the genius is literature. Sometimes it still seems to popular culture and the viewer at home - and especially in Israel, with the viewer of the house of Israel - that there is still value in the words of writers, but this too seems less and less. The idea of a Renaissance man, who should be listened to and admired, has lost its appeal in an era that sanctifies self-admiration, and even more so - self-listening. When the era of individualism was replaced by the era of arrogance, there is no longer a need for an authoritative, level-headed, knowledgeable, and worst of all - wise father figure. The emasculation (of the father) is complete. One can only mourn the disappearance of the class of sages and geniuses that was the foundation (and purpose) of Jewish culture for two thousand years, something that was truly responsible for the unreasonably high concentration of sages and geniuses that emerged from this culture - but apparently no more.

The idea of the sage, which took over Jewish culture following Hellenistic influences and late biblical wisdom literature, and later in the Pharisaic sage status that developed into the modest and exemplary figure of the Torah scholar, and reached its extreme in ideas like "the genius" and "the prodigy" - has disappeared from today's secular world. There will never be an outcry over the failures in gifted education (unlike special education), despite the fact that these failures are cutting off the branch on which the state sits, as a technological leader, and on which Jewish culture sits, as a culture with a special and leading position in world culture. Eastern cultures indeed bring their own models of excellence, but they are foreign to us, and seem to us more than anything like the figure of the "nerd". American culture and Silicon Valley still nurture the figure of the "geek", but this cultural hero is already far removed from the broad, deep, and lofty figure that the genius once was.

Those who believed that Jewish genius was a genetic matter received a knockout blow with the success of Zionism - and the destruction of the exilic-scholarly culture. The people in Israel are no less (and no more) stupid than any "normal people in their land". Geniuses (like Witten) are mainly found in American Jewry. As ultra-Orthodox thinkers warned, the State of Israel turned out to be a cultural holocaust (they might have called it "spiritual") for the Jewish people, complementing the physical one. Even the wealthy and materialistic American Jewry is not what it once was. The people who once knew how to cherish, exalt, and take pride in every individual genius that emerged from among them (genius from the word "pride"), now focus on empty abstract national pride (but one that includes every member of the club, even the biggest idiot) on its right side, and empty abstract national shame, on its leftist side. The result is the loss of the incubator for an upper class of sages and geniuses that characterized the Jewish people. To raise a genius, unlike raising a Jew, a Jewish mother is not enough - you also need Jewish culture and society. Can there be a class of "sages" in the ultra-Orthodox sense in the secular world? Can geniuses still grow in Facebook society?

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Against the Anthropic Principle: The Biological Principle

Is there life in the universe, or perhaps the correct question is whether there is a universe in life? A methodological note on the tendency of the philosophy of science towards physics instead of biology

By: The Living and the Alien

The expulsion from Eden as a forceful removal from a state of homeostasis - and stagnation (Source)

How much should we be surprised by global warming? Anyone familiar with the tumultuous geological history of Earth sees that the system's proximity to the extinction boundary is not a bug - but a feature. Without a global system close to the edge of chaos, the many leaps in the complexity of life would never have occurred, and evolution would have sunk into billions of years of stagnation. Only catastrophe awakens the evolutionary algorithm of local optimization from its dogmatic slumber.

But if we project from Earth's history to the history of the universe, we can look at the challenges of astrophysics in a new way. In general, the visible universe as a system is not close to the edge of chaos, and in fact tends very much towards stagnation, and we do not see events of instability and extinction on a large cosmic scale since its creation. Therefore, perhaps it is no wonder that life is not very common in it as a phenomenon, at least in visible matter. In fact, it seems that the universe tends very much towards precise tuning and homeostasis, in a way that physical models cannot explain, to such an extent that very problematic hypotheses have been proposed philosophically and scientifically, such as the multiverse hypothesis, or alternatively the anthropic principle. Indeed, one should be very surprised by the fine and unexplained tuning of a system if it is an unplanned physical system, but if it is a biological system, or alternatively an ecological one, then homeostasis is a basic phenomenon. If so, how do we know, apart from our preconception, that the leading shaping paradigm in the cosmos is physics, and not biology?

How do we know, for example, that the universe is not a living creature, for instance a kind of cell on a cosmic scale, and that the Big Bang is not the mode of reproduction of universes, and that all the fine-tuning of the universe does not stem from biological balance on a cosmic scale? After all, we would not be surprised by a marvelous balance, with negligible physical probability, within a living system. Alternatively, how do we know that life is not a significant phenomenon in the universe with an impact on a cosmic scale, perhaps even from its beginning, for example in dark matter, or in dark energy, and that the relatively stable state and very far from catastrophe of the universe system - and on the other hand completely implausible - does not stem from tunings to which ecological systems tend? Do we know enough about dark matter to rule out the prevalence of life in it?

And perhaps life in one of the types of dark matter (where does the assumption that there is only one come from?) has significant advantages over life in visible matter, and therefore every significant civilization copies itself to one of the dark matters, and this is the explanation for the Fermi paradox? It's enough that there is some computational advantage in one of these dark matter types over our matter (which constitutes only 5% of the universe), and this effect will be drastic. We do not know 95% of the universe, so how do we know that life is not common in it, when we know that it can form spontaneously, and that then it is very difficult to get rid of it and it spreads? And could there be a connection between the universal phenomenon of the expansion and growth of life and the expansion and growth of the universe? After all, we know that there is an unexplained element of acceleration in the growth of the universe, contrary to all known physical logic, which created the fiction that has been dubbed "dark energy". Is it possible that there is an organizational force of creating complexity that pushes the universe forward, and dark energy is not "just" energy? Our assumption that biology only happens in the "small" and that only physics happens in the "big" - has nothing to rely on, and biological thinking is no less reasonable and philosophically worthy than speculations like the multiverse or intelligent design.

Therefore, instead of the anthropic principle, we propose the biological principle. As much as a system exhibits implausible and unexplained balances, and resistant to changes, the most plausible explanation known to us is that it is a biological system. In the current state of scientific knowledge, the hypothesis that the universe is a biological phenomenon is no less plausible than it being a pure physical phenomenon, contrary to the scientific ideology that assumes the debate on the vitality of the world was settled long ago - and the world is dead.

And for those who struggle with the word "life", we will offer the following thought experiment, which is much more plausible than the pure physical explanations currently offered for the formation of a miraculously tuned universe (see the fine-structure constant...): Out of all the universes in the landscape of possible universes, almost all of them do not develop or are quickly destroyed, because their natural constants are not tuned like ours. And if we assume that a universe passes on its laws of nature to universes created from it, we have obtained the mechanism of natural selection and astro-evolution, and therefore it is no wonder that our universe is miraculously tuned.

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