It reminded me first of my friend Gary Kash's explanations of antisemitism: (in part) it's not racism against Jews, it's rather jealousy of other people's success, plus paranoia over possible secret conspiracies. There have been plenty of undeserved successes and secret conspiracies in history. We can all wonder about them, just as we can buy lottery tickets and fantasize about how to spend a couple hundred million dollars. But the exceptional stories never really explain and don't change our real circumstances now, in present time. We only make things better for ourselves or anyone else by creating and organizing, i.e., by what we think of as work.
When ideas inspire human action, it's because there is some truth in them. The truth in antisemitism and anti-Western or anti-American agitation is the natural objection to bad conditions in the world. People don't like the ugly deaths of innocents, or starvation, or disease, too much heat or too much cold, too much or too little rain. The Abrahamic tradition has postulated for millenia that these bad things happen because people disobey God or because we have not attained sufficient scientific understanding. That explanation (btw, it's not two different ones!) arguably enabled our species to progress all the way from an animalistic existence to an ability to reach the stars or wipe out God's creation on earth. So judging by such a result there was at least some truth in the foundations of the West.
But we have apparently stagnated. At least that's what the anti-American, antisemitic agitators must believe. There's truth in that, too, most of us feel it. The worst stagnation is in mental health, and that stagnation relates critically to all the others, though it's rarely recognized except by groups lobbying for more money for peculiar versions. Those groups repeat useless shibboleths like (IDHS's), "There's no health without mental health," while doing nothing to improve mental health. In fact these days they habitually use the term "mental health" to mean mental illness (e.g., "She suffered from mental health..."), which is totally, amazingly stupid, beyond Orwellian newspeak.
An example of this useless stupid-speak was heard this morning in the wake of sickening circumstances, a mass shooting in midtown Manhattan. Fox News featured analysis by former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker, who seemed to speak of some presumed psychiatric diagnosis of the shooter when he said, "This type of mental illness is the most dangerous kind because they can act with purpose, and almost, you know, r-rationality... they can plan. But yet, obviously there's some type of mental illness involved here."
Swecker is an FBI expert in protecting the public, not a medical expert in mental illness. Thus he gets away with implying that some specific type of mental illness ("this type") has been defined and identified, perhaps by someone more knowledgable than himself; but then in the next sentence he can step back to reality ("obviously there's some type") by acknowledging it's really just the glib, popular presumption of laypeople, aka myth. Fox's audience doesn't even notice that this guy has no clue what he's talking about. He almost certainly has no solid evidence, at this early stage of investigation, that the dead shooter had an identifiable purpose or any level of general ability to plan.
Why does the FBI talk that way, and why do we all just buy it?
There is a widespread feeling that we are at the end of some road. Our elite universities, the highest symbol of rationality and rule by human reason, are going nuts. The world suddenly hates Jews again, as if that can be a new solution. Nobody knows whether there is a difference between evil and brain disease. We don't want to work, we just want to get lucky.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last...
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