Discussion on Paranoia and Identity

Lot of people wouldn't have supported it to begin with

and so when you have this edifice that is built

on some on the kind of brutality and requires really the

Not just the hard things to be done in war,

but really to keep it going over time requires

The population to take on a persistent mentality of paranoia

and hostility the way we've seen taken root over there

Something like that becomes, you know, it goes back to what

you're saying about the effect that it has even on the corruptor

I mean It it that becomes oppressive on people and it

becomes something that people are not as interested in defending

But it turns them into monsters. I mean the more

you think you're hated the more you hate other people, right?

Yeah, it always happens that way. I think I do it for all of us George Kennan

When talking about the Soviet Union, he said something like

I won't be as eloquent as he was but that

it's the the privilege of every paranoid man to eventually prove himself, correct, and it's because when you

Believe everybody's out to get you you interact with Everybody

as if they're out to get you and then eventually they get tired of it and they're out to get you

That happens with every cult every honestly every like nascent nationalist movement

We saw this after the First World War to go back to that you

saw a lot of these emergent Countries the Polish for example the

Czechs you see it with the Ukrainians now, especially since 2004 when you have this newly birthed sense of nationalism

You feel like you're under threat, you know, you were just under an empire for centuries

You might be under an empire again, if you're not ready for that threat, and there's this real real

sense of paranoia and hostility toward outsiders that kind of holds the national community together

and Most of those other countries stabilized to a point that that

you know It didn't become it wasn't necessary any longer and the kids were raised differently

But in Israel, they've been in a state of conflict for their entire existence

So that it's really just it's it's become the identity of the state, you know the and Unfortunately,

this is one of the saddest things about the whole project

and there were there were a lot of prominent religious Jews back in The early days of Zionism

who feared exactly this that Zionism was just gonna swallow Judaism whole

and it really has done that and

What that means in practice is that for so many Jews not just in Israel, but in the Diaspora

The definition, oh, here's a perfect example of it Actually, there was a Gallup poll or a Pew poll

a few years back where they polled American Jews and asked them. What is the

Most important aspect of Jewish identity and it was you know belief in the Torah affinity for the State of Israel

Various valid moral values and things far and away the number one answer like 70%

was remembering the Holocaust

Which is another way of saying, you know, when you when you when you consider like the Jewish understanding of the Holocaust. It's

not The way the Armenians understand the Armenian genocide where this is something that the Ottoman Empire the Turks did to us

This is the culmination of what mankind has been doing to us for thousands of years

since you know The Pharaoh and all the way on up through and then it culminated in this thing So

when you say remembering the Holocaust what it really means is remembering what they have done to us

And when that becomes,

when 70-something percent of, you know, your entire population are answering that as the primary fact that is constitutive of their identity,

there are going to be consequences to that and how that identity develops and how you relate to the rest of the world.

And you know, it's something... Well, how do you feel about people who hate and persecute you?

Well, I mean, I know how I'm supposed to feel and how I do feel.

No, but how do human beings... Right. Right. No, Christianity offers us a way out of this,

which is a true blessing.

But human instinct, all human, not just Jews or Israelis or Ottoman Turks or Armenians, like everybody feels,

I think, instinctively, if someone hates me and threatens me, I hate them back. I'm going to hurt them. Yeah.

Hatred and anger, they make you... I want to shoot the home invader.

They make you strong when you feel weak. They make you feel brave when you feel vulnerable.

You know, they're useful emotions, but when they become,

again, constitutive of your identity and the basic building block of your relationship with other peoples,

then things become sort of self-reinforcing, you know, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy over time.

And when you have... Like, look, I mean, when you look at what happened to the Jews in World War II,

it's easy to understand why there's a lot of collective trauma that has been passed down.

You wouldn't expect people to be just over it, right? Just because a couple of generations... I agree with that.

But that also doesn't mean that it's healthy for them or anybody else.

You know, you can say, like, they say, you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. And it's like, well,

the thing is, like, no, you still can be pathologically paranoid, even if there is something worth fearing out there.

Being pathologically paranoid is still bad for you,

still has really negative effects on yourself and your relationship to the rest of the world.