Recreating Jews
(in the bad way)
I’m a city boy. I don’t think I looked up at the moon three nights in a row my entire life. The first time I went to Burning Man I was struck by how legible and regular the progression of the moon’s phases was. On my fifth night, as I marveled at how it had gone from half to nearly full I thought to myself…
“You know what… I bet you could use that like a big multi-day clock, tracking the progression of the days.”
It struck me about five seconds later that, yeah duh, I had stumbled upon the lunar calendar—an idea so basic that it was the first thing proto-humans did after looking at the sky a few nights in a row. My startling insight predated the stone age, and only someone completely divorced from the natural world they live in would have found it novel to first understand this in his 30s.
A lot of people have this same relationship with socially-sanctioned hatred.
The US healthcare system is complex enough that most people simply do not understand it (and many are literally incapable of understanding it). But they know that it is bad and they are angry. (To be clear—it IS bad.)
Fortunately there is a group that everyone loves to hate. Everyone has been taught to hate them since early childhood by the news media, by entertainment media, by the schools we were forced to attend for 12 endless years, and by every one of our peers. Rich corporate interests.
Corporations are evil. CEOs, as the heads of corporations, are leaders of evil. Billionaires are so evil they should be guillotined in the streets. Society has told everyone “this group is why the system you can't understand is bad, you should focus all your hate of the bad outcomes on them.”
It doesn’t matter that the failures of the last hundred years that brought us to where we are today aren’t a creation of the health insurance companies. Those companies are the designated sin-eaters. When the price of care is too high for society to bear it is the job of these companies to take the blame for that.
For centuries this was the role dumped on the Jews within a population. Just like today, back then it didn’t matter who was actually at fault because a normal citizen couldn’t understand anyway. There just had to be someone to blame.
We managed to rederive the notion of having a scapegoat eat the sins of a complex system so it can keep functioning. Once you see this it’s impossible to stop seeing it. Every popular argument comes down to how it’s actually OK to hate the JewCEO in this case. “No but really, the healthcare system is really really awful.” Yes, agreed. What does that have to do with killing a CEO? “Well it’s their fault.”
As long as everyone agrees who’s to blame then nothing has to change, which is really fortunate because change is impossible without a total collapse.
The stereotypes haven’t even been updated. They’re greedy, selfish people who are happy to destroy as many lives as they can if it’ll get them even a few extra pennies. They control the politicians. They get away with it all because they scheme in secret and protect each other. They don’t have human emotions like the rest of us.
“But CEO isn’t an ethnicity! You can’t choose to be Jewish, you can choose to not be a CEO, so this is different.”
It doesn't matter why the target is hated. It only matters that it IS hated. Of course no one today would be as gauche as to suggest that you hate due to ethnicity! We have actually good reasons for our hate in the modern day! Notice that this argument is again “it’s actually OK to hate the Jew CEO.” This is not a coincidence.
To be angry when one is hurting and confused is normal. To have society direct that anger at the minority they’ve already been trained to hate for their entire lives is the most normal thing imaginable. You just have to look up five nights in a row to see it.1
good luck
Moritz Schlick was the founder of the Vienna Circle, one of the 4 major groups of empirical philosophy in Germany and Austria. In 1936 he was assassinated at the University of Vienna by Johann Nelböck, a former student of his who despised the Circle's opposition to metaphysics.
The case appeared to be open-and-shut. According to Karl Sigmund's book *Exact Thinking in Demented Times*, after shooting Schlick 4 times, Nelböck waited to be arrested, then confessed. He was found guilty of murder and of illegal ownership of a firearm and sentenced to ten years in prison.
What happened next was, in my opinion (and probably no one else's), one of the great turning points of history.
German and Austrian philosophers were divided in a great contest between the reactionary, spiritualist, generally Luddite and 100% batshit crazy metaphysicians; and the empiricists, who sought to reform philosophy after the manner of science. Schlick, one of the most-prominent empiricists, was hated by the metaphysicians, and after Nelböck assassinated his body, they set to assassinating his character. They united with Nelböck in calling not just Schlick, but all empiricists, deniers of objective morality and babblers of purely logical constructs devoid of any reference to the eternal sources of meaning. They called his anti-metaphysical views anti-spiritual (which they were) and thus immoral (which they were not), and said Nelböck had been driven insane by "the radically devastating philosophy professed by Dr. Schlick."
This wasn't the first attack on empiricism under the Nazis; the Ernst Mach Society had already been outlawed and its doctrines prohibited "because they corrupted the people and the culture".
The empiricist circles included a large number of Jews. Though Schlick wasn't Jewish, he was nonetheless damned by public opinion after death for associating with Jews, and Nelböck was hailed by many as a hero of the people. Metaphysicians called for all philosophy chairs at the U of Vienna to be filled by Christians.
I call this a turning point in history because it marked the creation of continental philosophy as we know it today. Yes, there were "continental philosophers" before the Nazis. But "continental philosophy" became the monolithic block of lunatics that it is today only after the great purge of empiricists from the continent, which the Nazis had already begun, and which attained its full force from this incident. Just a few years later, metaphysicians and phenomenologists stood unchallenged across Germany and Austria, as they would soon stand unchallenged everywhere the Nazi armies went. Under the Nazis, students were taught social constructivism and a phenomenological epistemology which together taught people to scorn "cold" data and objective observations, and "awaken" to the "authenticity" of their "lived experience", to define their identity by their race, and to take "racial truths" as foundational rather than seeking objective truths.
18 months after the assassination, the public sympathy for the assassin was so great that Nelböck was released, which helped bring in the next phase of Nazism, in which the law was to follow Nazi principles rather than legal codes. The Nazi view was that that laws and human rights were obstructions in the path to "social justice" (which meant not a just society, but race-based justice), because they protected evil-doers from quick retribution by the will of the people. Hitler said that the Jews introduced law to protect themselves from social justice.
After the war, the Allies occupied the continent, but nobody ever brought back the empiricist philosophers. Nelböck's conviction for murder was expunged from the penal record in 1947 under the Soviets. Nazi philosophy continued to be taught all across Europe, and French students of Nazi teachers spelled out some of the consequences of these Nazi doctrines in the philosophy we now call "post-modernism".
But that was 90 years ago. Surely it has nothing to do with today.
I've been trying to express... basically this, but with more disclaimers and caveats which I now suspect weren't necessary.
Thank you. I'm going to send this to my mom and maybe my dad, and... I don't expect them to *agree*, but I think it'll at least help them understand.
The more of your stuff I read, the more I like it. I haven't found a new rat blog I liked this much in the last... idk, five years maybe?