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With their dashboard, you just create an account, grant Incogni the right to work for you and sit back and watch them work. They'll even handle any objections for you. Incogni goes above and beyond to give you back control of your personal information. For my fans, they're offering you a 60% off an annual plan for anyone who clicks the link below@incogni.com wouldafaltist and uses the code whatifalthist, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. There is no reason to not click the link and start using incogni today. Part 1 Abraham's people I mentioned this in the other video, but one of the coolest facts we've discovered recently is that from analyzing the Y chromosomes of people who claim his descent, we have effectively proven the existence of Abraham, the biblical father of both the Jews and Arabs, given they share an ancestor in that place. And this leads to an acronym I've developed or tawi, which means the ancients weren't idiots. When I say this, it speaks to the trend we keep on finding that ancient myths that we used to not take seriously as we gather more evidence are consistently more accurate than we originally thought. Easy examples of this are Troy and the Biblical flood. And I talk about this more in the text wall in front of you. According to the Jewish tradition, they started out in the area around modern Iraq where Abraham was flee the moral corruption of the Mesopotamian city state of Uruk around 2000 BC. This shows an opening for two different important points of Jewish history. The first being that the Jews were a sort of scavenger people along the edges of the older Fertile Crescent civilizations. The second being that the Jews were a reaction to the collapsing sociological institutions to the end of civilizational cycle. 1. There had already been pre established civilizations for thousands of years in a territory stretching in an arc from Egypt to the bottom of Iraq called the Fertile Crescent. According to the biblical myth, the Jews started in Iraq following the edge of the desert to reach modern Israel and the frontiers of Egypt, where we have the first records of a people who could be the Jews or the Hapiru. For from Egyptian records the Jews existed in this weird place between barbarism, civilization being a social class, an ethnicity or a religious group. There are two groups in America which I think are useful proxies for the Jews, the first being the Mormons and the latter being the desert trash. Oftentimes you'll find that areas with similar climates will develop comparable cultural traits, even if they don't have much else in common. So it's not super strange to draw parallels between the desert climate of the American west and the Middle East. The Mormons are an American religious group originally ceded from the Yankee diaspora in places like Vermont or upstate New York and Ohio. They were founded during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century and migrated west, populating the area around Utah and the neighboring states where they formed a sort of distinct ethnic identity. The Mormon Church acted as a centrally planned theocracy which strategically populated the American west on purpose. The similarities between the Jews and Mormons are that they both unified into very strong degrees of in group cooperation by holding strange religious beliefs. The Mormons were known for a very distinct theology, practicing polygamy at the start, being ruled by a central church theocratic hierarchy, banning alcohol and ritual prescriptions. The Mormons are known for being simultaneously very strange, being seen as a cult by many Americans, but also admired by other Americans for their moral character. Between having very high social trust, birth rates, social cooperation and good values, the Jews were seen in a very similar light by the neighboring Middle Eastern peoples. A funny element to this is that because the Bible has colored so much of our understanding of the ancient Middle East's history and total, it would be as if 3,000 to 4,000 years in the future. The only main narrative that people would study modern American history through would be through the history of the Mormons. And that's just one of the ironic things that you'll see over history a few different places and times. And it's hard to see this now given we live in a world where Jewish religion won on such a global scale. But in the ancient world of kings and gods, the Jews were seen as strange as we would see the Mormons today. The Jews were the most religious people of the ancient world, even in time periods like Greco Roman classical dominance in which secularism was very powerful and the Jews even had one of the highest birth rates. In some ways, the religiosity combined with militarism during the that Hellenistic time period is reminiscent of Islamic radicals like the Taliban today. On top of this, the Jews had lots of ritual prescriptions which over the course of Jewish history became completely encumbering in every single aspect of life. For its entire history, the Jews were a theocracy where the religious ruling class constantly made the religion more complex and autistic. There was a very long time when, when the Jewish practice of monotheism was seen as insane in a world dominated by polytheism. On top of this, the dietary restrictions like no pork consumption, denial of other gods, circumcision, never taking the Lord's name in vain, sexual prudery, among others, were seen as very strange. This was seen as trying too hard by every other ancient people. In the same way the moderns look at the Mormons or Islamic religious fundamentalists thinking why did they have to do all of those weird things? However, this was partly by design. In the same way the Mormons were purposely trying to isolate from the broader American society by moving across the great American desert to Utah. The Jews were using all of these ritual prescriptions as a sort of shit test or a term from dating discourse in which a girl will purposely insult you as a way to test your confidence in order to establish insanely high in group cooperation and sense of community. If you were willing to sacrifice this much for the religion, it meant you really cared and could be trusted. Part of the reason for this is that Israel was stuck in the middle of the map. I literally calculated it. And the Levant is the region that has faced the most invasions over world history. The Jews were a tiny group surrounded by greater powers on all sides, whether the Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks or Romans. Thus the Jews started to look at different strategies for survival which were more subtle in other terms. Under the constant pressure of constant external threats, the Jews turned to religion partly to hold their community together under the threat of constant foreign conquest. At the very same time, religion was a way of sort of hacking the game that was placed on extra hard mode against their consent. One of the Jew's most admirable traits is an insane level of introspection on the part of an ancient society. When you look at the ancient world, you see an era in which the Assyrians bragging about publicly torturing their enemies for state propaganda being relatively normal, or where every great power tried to glorify their own power as much as possible, normally to ridiculous improbable degrees. The Jews have an incredibly strong educational tradition which stems from this priest class's emphasis on introspection and wisdom. As I said before, the Jews were a theocracy for almost all of their history and for much of it a hereditary rabbi ruling class which practiced polygamy. What this did was create a cultural and genetic selection pressure for high verbal intelligence and analysis abilities. Which is why the Jews are per capit, highest achieving demographic in the world. Intellectually, it's part of the reason why Jews can make up 40% of Nobel Prize winners in physics or economics while being 0.1% of the total population. The Jews are literally the only group besides Northwest Europeans which have generated innovation in the modern world. Meanwhile with the Jews, they used religion as a sort of playthrough system in which they could corroborate millennia of evidence to see what would and would not work. The Old Testament is a historic record of the Jewish nation from roughly 2000 B.C. to 400 B.C. in which the Jews wrote about what did and did not work for them as a nation. Part of the reason the Bible has become the most important book in history is that the Jews faced nearly every single thing a nation can face since it was written over such a long time period. The Jews faced conquering a local population, being in turn conquered by foreigners, empire being slaves, decadence, barbarism, golden age and dark ages. What the Jews consistently found was that in each situation, loyalty to God was the trait that worked for atheists. This makes sense if you contextualize God as the objective laws of the universe. Thus, by following God, they were following universal positive principles. The reason the Jews have survived so long while practically everyone else from that era of history has fallen apart since, is partly that the Jews have a very strong inbuilt introspective mechanism that allows them to adjust after failure. Failure has made the Jews stronger over history, which is the marker of a healthy nation. Healthy nations use struggle to improve and weak nations are destroyed by struggles. The second reason the Jews survived was their incredibly high in group cohesion. These shared history, rituals, specific customs and the like that the Jews had gave them a very strong sense of identity. The Jews made themselves strange on purpose, purposely isolating themselves and pushing away outsiders in a way to create a large enough gulf between Jew and Gentile so that the Jews would always stick together when times got tough. With the tradition of Jewish prophets, you're seeing the Jewish priest class speaking out against the forces of entropy that had killed the other Asian civilizations. This included debt, slavery, rising inequality, family breakdown, private quarrels, moral degeneracy, pagan gods and weakness. The Ten Commandments is an incredibly advanced behavioral, psychological understanding. And we don't realize it since this breakthrough occurred 3,000 years ago. The Jews, although they were a primitive desert herder people, were centuries to millennia more advanced mentally than the neighboring peoples. This was since the Jews had forms to avoid the failings of the neighboring older civilizations. The Jews were created in the rubble of the Bronze Age collapse. This was a time period in the 12th century BC in which a majority of civilization in the world collapsed in a 20 year period. This was due to a series of complex factors relating to the barbarian invasions, plague, climate change, military technological advancements, social structures and other stuff. Watch my wonderful second podcast, History 102 if you're interested in hearing more about the Bronze Age collapse or early Jewish history. Fun the Philistines in the Bible were the Sea People which destroyed much of the civilization in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age collapse. The Sea Peoples were also heavily ethnically intermixed with the Greeks, and thus it's not unimaginable that Goliath's grandfather fought at Troy. It's also funny that the term Philistine has become synonymous with someone who is aesthetically or artistically tasteless. The irony there is that the Philistines controlled the wealthy coastal cities of the Levant, while the Jews were barely literate hill tribes in the interior. The Philistines saw the Jews as savages. The second population in the American West I'm comparing to the Jews are the desert trash. I apologize if this is offensive to people who are part of this group. I'm from Pennsylvania and I don't know this stuff since redneck is a term of pride. When I was driving from California to Texas, I kept running into this demographic of people I had no idea existed, since back home every social group is practically centuries old. The desert trash are people who live in trailer parks out in the desert, or kind of low class people who are really into guns or aliens. In places like Arizona, Nevada, California or New Mexico, I see similarities to Florida which have their own variants. They have their own subculture which is highly libertarian but also degenerate at the same time. The desert trash people are often really interesting as individuals. If you talk to them, they'll have weird hobbies, are from all over the country and normally have a story or two. The desert trash end up being in the desert since in the urban culture of America it's becoming too inhospitable for human procreation and thriving. The desert trash people tend to not be stupid in many cases, but rather people who couldn't handle the eight to seven work schedule, the loneliness and soullessness, so they snapped and moved out to the desert. It wouldn't surprise me if as the cities get sicker if the desert trash form their own Distinct subculture that over the course of centuries perhaps repopulates the American West. If something goes really bad, these are the sorts of things that are happening in the Bronze Age. As the old civilizations decayed and collapsed. The first potential records for a people who could be the Jews is from the Egyptian records who wrote about a people called the Hapiru, who were a social class of bandits on the edge of Egypt who existed as a sort of subjugated nation. Egypt at this point was a multicultural society in which the lower Nile delta was filled with dozens of somewhat assimilated, conquered or immigrant peoples. The Hapiru were a sort of Semitic desert trash population which accumulated people who didn't fit in the Bronze Age aristocratic extractive social structure. Over time they formed as a distinct ethnic identity. And then my guess is that Moses took the helm establishing a very strange religion to unify this population that didn't have much else. Abraham fled Uruk due to the idol worship there. And I think that's symbolic of how the Middle east had been taken over by a bureau democratic, sclerotic and unimaginative religion which stifled any innovation or progress. Lots of temples actively pushed prostitution for religious reasons. The priests held enormous wealth, keeping a lot of the population as slaves. Every action required a magical bribe for the priests to keep evil spirits away. And creativity or innovation was impossible under a mess of religious regulations. This was the greatest reason the old civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia went into decline to later be conquered by the Persians and the Greeks. Although the Jews did get pretty autistic on religion later on, they were careful that it wasn't enough to genuinely stifle their national character and vitality. The thing the Jews were able to do is to take up the advanced religious ideas these older civilizations had developed, but were incapable of putting into action. The Jews were a desert herder people from the fringes of Egypt who had none of the hangups that the older temple societies had. There's been a long standing battle in the Middle east between the farmers and herders. The farmers have established urban societies that were more cultured, urbane, degenerate and peaceful. Christianity became a religion of the city people. Then there were the herders who were more tough, patriarchal, taboo oriented and monotheistic. Judaism followed by Islam were manifestations of this. In the long term, the culture of the herders won out. And when you read the Bible, a lot of what they were doing was a herder people who had recently settled into an urban society who were trying to avoid the degeneracy they saw. In previous or other urban societies. One of the facts which took me a lot of time to figure out, but became very useful for me once I did, is that in the same way you'll hear about Mesopotamian or Egyptian or Hittite or Persian civilization, there was a Syrian Aramean civilization that stretched across the entire Levant and included the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. And it's why Aramean was the language a lot of the Bible was spoken in or written in initially where Christ spoke Aramean. And this Aramean Syrian culture was quite important to the ancient world. It became the dominant language of both Assyria and the Persian Empire, I believe. And the Jews were a fringe group from the Aramean civilization where or the Syrian civilization where they were on the edges with the Arabian Desert, having a lot of nomadic cultural influences. And in this fringe position, they established a new religion pulling elements from the older Syrian civilization, which was both a part and also incredibly distinct from said Syrian civilization. And so when the Jews conquered the Canaanites, they were an iteration of the same civilization as the Canaanites, who had an enormous religious breakthrough which they tried to and succeeded at enforcing upon the Canaanites. Judaism became a sponge for lots of other religious ideas in that region in that era. Monotheism was originally an Egyptian religious concept in which Egypt went through a brief period of government enforced monotheism before sliding back into the worship of the old gods. If Moses grew up in the court of Egypt, as the Bible suggests, and keep in mind the pharaoh of Egypt probably had thousands of harem girls. So it makes sense that Moses incorporated a failed concept in Egypt. On top of this, the idea of God and the devil fighting each other or angels and demons is from Persian Zoroastrianism, a concept of hell. And a lot of the later theological concepts about reaching heaven and metaphysical stuff stem from the Greeks. And most of the myths in the Book of Genesis have very strong parallels in Mesopotamian mythology. Jewish monotheism formed gradually over the course of thousands of years. And in that in the first chapters of the Bible, which were written around 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, while modern Judaism reached its current form around 500 BC with the axial Age. Keep in mind, at the very same time around the world in 500 BC, you saw Socrates, Buddha, Confucius and Lao Tzu living around that era with a huge religious breakthrough called the Axial Age. Over time, the Jews gradually purged their pagan gods and worship of local spirits called Baals until they only venerated one God Part two God's Chosen People in the other video I spoke about a concept I invented called the master key, which is another term for a skeleton key. Where the master key is once you've studied a complex topic enough and you can simplify the soul of that topic into a single sentence which can explain incredible complexity about it. The master key for the Jews is that they believe they are God's chosen people without understanding that none of the Jews actions will make sense. The Greek genre of tragedy is predicated upon the idea that for the great, their greatest strength is also their downfall. This is foundational to Aristotle's entire philosophy and you can see it play out with the Jews as well, that their greatest strengths and their greatest issues comes from their belief that they are God's chosen people. The Jews have historically believed themselves to be superior to other peoples. The problem with this is that it was true enough in that the Jews were gradually able to excel in nearly every field, whether economics, family life, community, religion, science and philosophy, that it fed into the Jews delusions while filling other nations with murderous envy. If the Albanians said they were God's chosen people, we'd just say that was adorable, with contempt mixed in. But when a population says they're God's chosen people and then their tiny religion becomes world conquering, with now a majority of the world's population following the Jewish God, it gets more arguable. The will of God is a dangerous and chaotic thing. God is a reflection of all things and thus the ability to draw from it is both incredibly powerful and dangerous. I think that a lot of the ritual prescriptions and obsessive taboos of Jewish culture come from having some desire for psychological stability with the knowledge that they are this nuclear reactor for divine inspiration in their worldview. One of the things the Jews have a tendency to do is call the bluff on civilizational cycles. To explain this, I have a system based off Spengler in which we are at the end of the Third Age, much like Lord of the Rings, with each age lasting a little bit over 2,000 years. The first cycle that we know of at least started with the rise of the river valley civilizations in 3000 BC and ended with the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century BC. The second cycle, which formed out of the rubble of that Dark Age, involved the Indian, Chinese, Greco Roman, Persian, Jewish and Phoenician civilizations. These are the Axial Age civilizations concentrated around 40 degrees north. And they fell apart with the collapse around the time of the fall of Rome or the Han Dynasty. Finally, the third cycle Is the West Orthodox Islam, Japan and Southeast Asian civilization in which they formed in the Dark Ages. While they'll probably get wiped out by mouse utopia or nuclear war or genetically engineered diseases, I dunno, man. In the end of the first cycle, Judaism formed as a reaction to the degeneracy of the Bronze Age world. As we spoke about before, in the second cycle, the Jews formed Christianity as a reaction to the issues with the decaying classical civilization. People might be triggered by me saying this, but the Jews invented Christianity because it's obviously true. Christ was ethnically Jewish, as were all the apostles, and they worshipped the Jewish God through a Jewish religious structure. Christ saw himself as repairing Judaism to return it to its old roots which had been forgotten. The majority of the Jewish community rejected Christianity, but Christianity is an extension of Judaism in one form or another. Watch the video I made explaining early Christianity or classical civilization if you're interested. But Christianity was a rejection of the brutality of the Greco Roman classical civilization. At the same time, Christianity is theologically as indebted to the Greeks as it is to Judaism, since so much of Christianity is from Greek philosophic or religious concepts. The biggest demographic for developing Christianity were Greek speaking diaspora Jews. In a society in which one quarter of the population were slaves without legal rights, where men were slaughtered in the gladiatorial games for entertainment, and where Rome held the world under its boot, Christianity stood for universal love, a society based off morality and not extraction. Christianity ultimately destroyed the classical world, replacing it. So the Romans were right to fear the Christians and see them as dangerous radicals. There were a huge amount of Jews in the Arabian peninsula at the time of the prophet Muhammad, and Muhammad was a merchant, so he dealt with a lot of Jews. And if you look at the theological structure of Islam, it's closer to Judaism than it is to Christianity, since they were both developed by Semitic herder peoples. And there was a lot of cross mixing between Jews and Muslims in the first few centuries because they had mutual respect for the others. So on top of this, as Islam worships Yahweh or the God of Abraham. Out of the three largest religions in the world, Islam, Christianity and Marxism, they all ultimately stem from Judaism. Meanwhile, for the third cycle, the one which is operating today, the Jews invented Marxism, which is to our society what Christianity was to the classical world. Although I'm not insinuating that Marxism and Christianity are equally virtuous, the Jews have a tendency of making cultural movements greater than they themselves, which later turn on them, which was true for both Christianity and communism. Then it became Taboo to say that the Jews developed them. However, Marxism was developed by an ethnic Jew from a family of rabbis. Marxism was made by a Jew, but leftism as a whole was not, since most of modern leftism stems back to France. At the time of the French Revolution, however, Jews were also vastly disproportionately communist, and especially in certain contexts like the Russian revolution, postmodernism or mid 20th century American leftism. Communism stems from how the vast depersonalization, urbanization, feminization and loss of religion caused by the Industrial Revolution created these enormous dissatisfied populations which could be easily manipulated to destroy society. Communism, much like the early Christians, weren't seen as being religions at the time period they formed, but rather atheism since they're formulated so differently to the previously understood religions. But both Communism and Christianity really are religions at the same time. Communism, like early Christianity, acted as a force of social anarchy, poking in the pain point of the older society. I've also said this before, but I want to point it out again, is that you can't draw a one to one relationship between the Jews and communism or the left in the same way you can't for Christians either. In the same way, the Christians became mostly non Jewish fairly quickly and then persecuted the Jews. The communists did the same. Stalin horrifically oppressed the Jews and was about to genocide them before he died. The modern left is horrifically anti Semitic now, regularly justifying genociding the Jews. I find it crazy that when I went to school we had years of anti Holocaust programming and now those very same people or leftists are now actively supporting the Intifada. It's just the mental disjoint. But back on topic at the same time, the Jews are incredibly overrepresented in literally everything, not just left wing politics. The Jews are like other groups, but more, I like to joke, it's a struggle to find anyone who's neither Jewish nor gay on the far right today. The degree of wisdom Judaism selected for as well as their distance from other cultures, provides a degree of objectivity through which the Jews could analyze other societies in order to have the ability to create these enormous sociological breakthroughs. I don't think it's a coincidence that the intellectual innovations which broke down the high modernist Victorian, mechanistic rational model of the world were Jewish. Freud showed a subconscious psychology motivated by sex, while Einstein showed a universe where space and time were the same, which could get ripped up. Both of them demonstrate a mental flexibility you could see from their ancestors wielding the Kabbalic mysticism rather than the Northwest European philosophy, which had become highly mechanical. Part of the reason the Nazis, an entire lifetime of German philosophy hated the Jews was that the Germans realized that the only actual competitors for the direction of the future of thought or intellectualism against the Nordic peoples were the Jews. On the highest level of practically religious abstract thought, which determines your entire worldview, you had either Nordic or Jewish thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's a certain dualistic irony that after the Nazis killed the Jews in the Holocaust, Nordic philosophy and vitality died as much as the Jews did. The Greeks and Romans had a similar feeling in the ancient world with the Jews. However, there are several cognitive traits you see in Jewish philosophy due to believing they are God's chosen people. One is messianism, which leads to delusion. In the centuries after classical civilization's rule, the Jewish religious leadership were constantly embroiled in religious experiences that the current world was about to end. They had these prophecies that a new Messiah would arise and result in the Jews conquering the Roman Empire, which was true, just not how they thought. However, this resulted in the Jews launching hopeless revolts against far greater colonial empires which the Jews had zero chance of ever winning. Except when it worked out under the Seleucid. This was since they believed if they followed God, he would grant them victory. This is the origin of why Jews face so many depredations under foreign conquerors, including multiple mass expulsions out of Israel, including under the Babylonians and Romans. Past a certain threshold, the foreign conquerors just got tired of the fifth revolt and genocided the Jews. I'm Irish and so I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff. Since we also have a thing for hopeless revolts against foreign conquerors. However, it made the Jews seen as incredibly intolerable and practically insane at the time. On top of this, the Jewish belief that they were God's chosen people with their God being the one true God was intolerable for foreign conquerors. The Romans were incredibly tolerant as ancient empires went, While the Jews and Christians were practically the only religions the Romans persecuted. Since the Romans could tolerate anything except those who could not tolerate the Roman gods. Judaism is possibly the most feminine of the major world religions. And in that its emphasis on submission to an irrational God. It follows lots of ritual prescriptions and it values family and community above all else. On top of this, the idea that if you follow the religious rules, things will work out. Not prizing independence or strength as much as other cultures. When you look at Jewish history, they normally utilize feminine, indirect evolutionary strategies to survive since they've been so physically threatened for their history that they play into feminine strategies which were developed in order to counterbalance women's physical weakness versus men. Once you get further into the world, the Jews indirectly made that of the huge monotheistic religions. You see a similar dichotomy in an era in which every major religion waged religious wars. The Jews were just too easy a target. They were wealthy, couldn't militarily defend themselves, were spread out all over, were universally disliked, had high in group loyalty, have actively made themselves different from other cultures, are an easy out group to scapegoat, and were quite openly arrogant about stating their superiority. The brutal answer for why the Jews have faced so much discrimination in so many lands has been there's historically been every reason to hurt the Jews and very few not to. Over the course of centuries, cultures default back onto antisemitism when times get tough. Part of me muses for literary purposes, if Abraham in The Arabian desert 4,000 years ago saw some semblance of the future of his people when he signed that contract with God. I wonder if he stared into the future knowing his people by saying they were God's chosen people would open themselves up to a world of hurt, that this would create a cycle in which the Jews would face suffering. It would bind them closer to God and their community, only to be batted onwards for the cycle to restart. In this musing, perhaps God makes these knots or consistent patterns of behavior which he can reliably use to reach certain ends. Depth and spirituality stem from suffering. In that suffering is the burning away of weakness which allows one to reach the divine. Perhaps the deal is something like that the Jews, by putting themselves in such a vulnerable position, ended up in an incentive in which they faced enormous suffering. Perhaps said suffering also allowed the Jews to tap into enormous spiritual depths, which made them a vessel for religious breakthroughs. Part 3 the Ghetto I'm not really part of the whole leftism is Judaism argument, which, as I explain in my video on the anthropology of the left, you see a wide variety of different groups also pivotal in the left's development. Between the French, Calvinists, bureaucracy and women. However, the Jews are still disproportionate and even more so in certain subsections of leftism, such as postmodernism. Most American Jews are now more culturally leftist than Jewish, since Jews for the most part have assimilated into the urban monoculture which is experiencing cultural and demographic collapse now. I think this is a useful way to look at an interesting anthropological Analysis of Diaspora Judaism. What does this show about how the Jews lived that gives them this modern political preference? In the period after the Roman expulsion in which Jews were forced out of Palestine, they then scattered across the whole world. There were Jewish populations hugging the Mediterranean basin alongside many in Iraq or even further east. Later on they migrated to Europe and America. If you're more interested, watch the previous video I released on the different Jewish Diasporas. I've read enough histories of the Jews that I'm starting to notice patterns in how they're written. After the ancient period, which you have lots of battles and emperors in the period after the forced Roman expulsion and before the Industrial revolution, you struggle to find anything going on in Judaism besides religion. I call it the boring middle. When the Jews were living in isolated ghetto communities, holding onto their old religion with all their force, the Jews lived in shtetls or ghettos, a word stemming from the Jewish ghetto in Rome or self enclosed communities of Jews who lived completely isolated from the local gentile populations, normally walled off, so there's as little intercourse as possible. The ghettos were self governing, operating under their own law. And for the life of an average Jew, practically nothing of importance occurred outside the ghetto. After the Diaspora, the Jews became an almost entirely urban culture, almost never owning land. Urban populations were never sustainable in the pre industrial period. And it's kind of a mystery how the Jews were able to maintain a stable population as an almost entirely urban nation. Every city in the pre industrial world was a demographic sink. And it's still true today for different reasons. But in the pre industrial era it was because the amount of diseases concentrated in cities killed people off faster than they had children, especially given how crowded cities were. And it's a mystery how the Jews were able to maintain their stable population, not gradually going extinct while almost being entirely urban. And you wonder how many of the Jewish religious, dietary and health obsessions stemmed from trying to lower the disease death rate. To not face the normal population decline seen in cities. The Jews were more connected to their continent spanning ghetto networks than the local populations a mile away. This created mutual suspicion between the Jewish and gentile populations. There's a few interesting elements of ghetto life. One was that they were these sort of strange artificial cultures that stemmed from never having to govern or protect the regions they were in. And with no connection to the land. Other cultures developed strong hierarchies, aggressive warrior cultures based off honor aristocracies or peasant cultures rooted in the earth. The Jews didn't. And much of the current issues of the delusion of many Jewish thinkers in the modern world is their subconsciously projecting the social structure of the Jewish ghetto, which existed in a very specific historic context that can't be replicated elsewhere. There's an interesting book called the Ordeal of Civility which looks at how Jewish thinkers from the early industrial era, such as Marx, Freud or Leo Strauss, were trying to square assimilating into modern culture. On top of this, how many of the theories they were developing were themselves attempts to recreate the ghetto culture on an international scale. The ghetto was a society without pronounced social class, a theocracy with no military, no privacy or politeness. They had enormous welfare to take care of the poorer members, while everyone belonged to a highly constrictive society which controlled their every action with enormous mutual social trust. In the ghetto things worked since it was such a small cohesive community bound together by a strong religion. Look, we just described communism and you could see Marxism as an attempt to turn the entire world into a Jewish style ghetto community. The Jews were frequently perturbed by the idea of civility or the politeness that West Europeans prized so deeply a century ago. They were all convinced it was some kind of lie or sham, and they faced enormous neuroses about not fitting in with the society. What they fail to realize is that European culture is fundamentally aristocratic in which politeness stemmed from a culture of heroic individualism in which you had courtesy so you wouldn't get murdered for insulting someone's honor. Jewish culture had no concept of martial honor and so always writes it up as repression, with Freud being the most notable example. Fun fact, the Ordeal of Civility likes to say that Freud's ID was similar to the Yid. To show how much like the mind, the average recently assimilated Jew would put up a mask of civility before making a mistake that showed his ghetto roots. These thinkers, although this doesn't include all Jews, never understood Western concepts of individualism, honor, heroism, nationalism, freedom, private property and duty. Since the Jews hadn't had enough military experience to cultivate these. When you're looking at mismatches between things, anti Semites criticize Jews doing it's normally a disjoint relating to this. Jewish culture tends to be built around following ideological principles, irrespective of actual world conditions, Whether or not they make sense. For leftists of Jewish ancestry, they see this as furthering their religion of leftism. Well, for Western nationalists, it's the destruction of their nations. One wonders how the establishment of the first Jewish state in 2000 years with Israel will change these dynamics. The Jews have spent so long wandering the world as a minority that now that they have to defend their own borders, as they've been very successful at doing, if Jewish thought and culture will see a profound shift towards those cultural traits which exist in other cultures. The Industrial Revolution was both the best and worst thing to happen to the Jews. Firstly, it pulled them out of the ghettos of Eastern Europe to global predominance. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, almost all Jews in the world lived in small Eastern European communities, practically stuck in medieval theocracy. And over a period of decades, they were vaulted into the center of and the greatest level of global predominance for modern civilization. And that shift is so rapid, it has to be traumatic up to a certain point. At the same time, as I alluded to before, it caused a psychological collapse in their own sense of self. It's kind of sad to see what happened to so many Jews with the Industrial Revolution. The industrial world itself is nihilistic, but for the Jews it was more pronounced. Since they were so heavily psychologically dependent on a combination of religion and community. Jewish culture had accumulated an enormous amount of trauma from their history. For obvious reasons. Culture and history affects people in a very profound way, etching itself into their bodies, minds and souls. Thus, when both the all consuming religious and community structure fell apart, these very intelligent Jewish thinkers were stuck as strangers in a alien gentile world apart from the old Jewish worldview and with an enormous amount of cultural trauma. This is why you're looking at so many of the proponents of nihilism. It's frequently secular Jews. While you practically never see this behavior from religious Jews. On top of this, the Jews had faced so many centuries of discrimination at the hands of oppressive nationalistic religious governments, you could see why it would be inside their self interest to deconstruct those cultural and national institutions. In the last century, the industrial world is seeing social collapse for complex reasons. And the Jews were at the forefront of this trend due to reasons I explained in this text wall. Lots of modern leftist theory and philosophy were made by neurotic Jews in the mid 20th century who experienced all of these sociological trends that would slam modernity earlier than other people, so they were able to articulate it for everyone else. What this means is that the Jews were some of the spokespeople involved for the issues of modernity, but they themselves were not the drivers. The problem is that too many of modernity's issues are seen in contexts that have no Jews at all, like China, Japan or Eastern Europe. Today this is not PC to say, but so many of the issues today are so overtly caused by toxic femininity, and they openly claim that too, that blaming the Jews as the underlying driver feels silly. It feels like we're trying to deflect responsibility for the collapse of our own civilization to some group that's not even 1,000th of the world's population. Part of me wonders if the Jews aren't going to make it through the current era. Most American Jews today are only loosely Jewish and they have one of the lowest birth rates of any group in the world. In America, will modernity swallow Judaism in the way Hellenism tried to and failed? However, at the same time, I know that the Jews are going to make it. Israel is one of the highest birth rates in religiosity of anywhere in the industrialized world. On top of that, they've already made it 4,000 years so far. They can't afford to lose here. I think the best thing the Jews could do is go back to God. The thing is that Jewish people are so married to the Jewish religion that I don't think they can survive without it. The Jews have a long history and if they give up now, the game's gonna get less interesting. The ones who are destroying society are the seculars. And so I've joked that putting pretty girls in Torah school could be a taxpayer service for societal psychological stability. Gotta grab some popcorn. For the next 4,000 years, who knows, maybe the Jews will make it to Alpha Cantare.
