- If in Nazism the individual is the agent of the group, in Jewish life the group is the agent of the individual. The group is the storehouse of the rules, is the tool the individual uses to remember. But the individual makes his deal directly with god, not with the group. The Holocaust isn't special as a mass killing, mass killing is the characteristic of human beings. But it is special as a model, a paradigm of evil.
- Why?
- Because the Jews, acting as Jews, are logically incapable of evil. In Jewish life the group is the tool of the individual. Evil requires the reverse, the individual lowering himself to being the tool of the group, forgetting what he knows is good, getting in exchange rewards of group conformity.*
- We were talking then about group violence, group evil, the holocaust, what was special about it if anything. What about hatred of Jews in relations between individuals? Do you experience it?
- Lately, yes. Two people I know just from Ralphs Supermarket late night shopping: One, a stock speculator, has taken to shouting "Zionist!" when he sees me ride by on my bike. Another, a down and out real estate agent, made a point of telling me that Jews were parasites and deserved to be eradicated.
- He wasn't serious. You like to joke with people. He was joking back, probably.
- Whatever. The point is, the answer to your question, is that previously experiencing anti-Jewish sentiment was rare to non-existent in my life.
- And this novelty is due to Trump.
- Certainly.
- You don't think, do you, the relation between you and these people is a relation between groups?
- No.
- So what is going on?
- What if we talk about instead of relation to group, relation to self? Self relation in the sense of continuity of meaning or not. What if, and this is what I propose, the Jews' relation to their group allows continuity, and genociders relation to their group is discontinuous.
- Go on.
- If one has a passive relation to the world, one forgets oneself in fear or hatred while in the grips of passionate emotion one acts, in reality or imagination, to recover lost state of security. Contrast this with creative action, in which one's relation to the world is in question and is experimented with, looking for explanation, for the rule of the relation, from which creative activity one rests in contemplation, of the beauty of the world, of the truth of ideas, of love of people.
- You argue then that this relation too is a paradigm, that the reliance on fear and hatred to recover a sense of security, confronted with the creative relation to the world, feels a provocation to attack because like in the relation between groups there is a natural antipathy?
- Yes.
- Since we are all creative at some moments, if only in the use of language, we know intimately that these two relations to the self, self continuity, are opposed to one another. The Trump supporter wants to imagine his resentments assuaged in the ascension of Trump, instead of which he is presented with someone who is a wrench thrown in the works, who brings to mind experiment instead of passion, truth, beauty, and goodness in place of the security of a vain sense of power in one's re-established place in the world.
- In conclusion: Jew-hatred starts as a kind of self-hatred, in which one fundamental sort of behavior is an obstacle to and substitutes for another, and therefore it can exist without any contact with a person other than oneself. I don't see how this is particularly anti-Jewish, since any creative person can be an obstacle to continued practice of uncreative, vain behavior.
- Lately, yes. Two people I know just from Ralphs Supermarket late night shopping: One, a stock speculator, has taken to shouting "Zionist!" when he sees me ride by on my bike. Another, a down and out real estate agent, made a point of telling me that Jews were parasites and deserved to be eradicated.
- He wasn't serious. You like to joke with people. He was joking back, probably.
- Whatever. The point is, the answer to your question, is that previously experiencing anti-Jewish sentiment was rare to non-existent in my life.
- And this novelty is due to Trump.
- Certainly.
- You don't think, do you, the relation between you and these people is a relation between groups?
- No.
- So what is going on?
- What if we talk about instead of relation to group, relation to self? Self relation in the sense of continuity of meaning or not. What if, and this is what I propose, the Jews' relation to their group allows continuity, and genociders relation to their group is discontinuous.
- Go on.
- If one has a passive relation to the world, one forgets oneself in fear or hatred while in the grips of passionate emotion one acts, in reality or imagination, to recover lost state of security. Contrast this with creative action, in which one's relation to the world is in question and is experimented with, looking for explanation, for the rule of the relation, from which creative activity one rests in contemplation, of the beauty of the world, of the truth of ideas, of love of people.
- You argue then that this relation too is a paradigm, that the reliance on fear and hatred to recover a sense of security, confronted with the creative relation to the world, feels a provocation to attack because like in the relation between groups there is a natural antipathy?
- Yes.
- Since we are all creative at some moments, if only in the use of language, we know intimately that these two relations to the self, self continuity, are opposed to one another. The Trump supporter wants to imagine his resentments assuaged in the ascension of Trump, instead of which he is presented with someone who is a wrench thrown in the works, who brings to mind experiment instead of passion, truth, beauty, and goodness in place of the security of a vain sense of power in one's re-established place in the world.
- In conclusion: Jew-hatred starts as a kind of self-hatred, in which one fundamental sort of behavior is an obstacle to and substitutes for another, and therefore it can exist without any contact with a person other than oneself. I don't see how this is particularly anti-Jewish, since any creative person can be an obstacle to continued practice of uncreative, vain behavior.
- But not ever creative person has a relation to his group that urges him to keep all of life a continuity of experiment and beauty.
- Perhaps the conspiracy theories about the Jews grow out of the sense the vain person has that his repetitively fragmented life of rebirth, weakness returned to power, could just as well have been one of continuity, and the lost possibility of continuity, a sense inborn and instinctual, gets projected outwards as a disturbing possibility.
- Perhaps the conspiracy theories about the Jews grow out of the sense the vain person has that his repetitively fragmented life of rebirth, weakness returned to power, could just as well have been one of continuity, and the lost possibility of continuity, a sense inborn and instinctual, gets projected outwards as a disturbing possibility.
Further Reading:
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