The Abdication of Reason

Antisemitism and the Crisis of Stupidity

(The Blind leading the Blind, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568)

Antisemitism is the opiate of little minds. No reasonable person could believe that a group of 15 million people could run all of the nefarious machinations of our world.

There are too few Jews to be that powerful, and too many Jews to be that united.

Antisemitism is as intellectually weak as it is civilizationally catastrophic.

It anesthetizes the mind in a painless and pleasant fog, one in which the believer bears no responsibility for understanding the world as it is – all things in life are caused by the Jews.

However, no mind wants to conceive of itself as weak. No one wants to believe that he has fallen for such a foolish proposition.

So the mind never admits to its foolishness; it soothes itself with all manner of rationalizations and explanations.

“It is not antisemitism – it’s antizionism.”

“I’m just noticing things.”

“Well, why do they have so much influence?”

The rapid rise of antisemitism in the West, on both the right and the left, reflects the rapid decline of our reason more than anything else.

In the 20th century, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching remedial English in universities.

In the 21st century, we have all but forsaken learning altogether.

Our schools were failing decades before Covid; the state they are in now is beyond the capabilities of the English language.

Our children cannot read, they cannot write, and they cannot even spell—should we be surprised that so many fall for something as intellectually empty as antisemitism?

For decades, we have turned a blind eye to the degradation of education, and now we are reaping the consequences.

We lowered one standard after another, until we eventually abandoned the concept of standards altogether.

(The Village School, Jan Steen, 1670)

Without the ability to read, our children cannot reason.

They cannot distinguish the literal from the figurative – how could they tell the difference between logic and deception?

The goal of education is to cultivate adults who can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. That is why we divide education into four major subjects, language, history, math, and science: all teach a different discipline for understanding truth.

By letting our standards for passing students slide into nothingness, we have let their cognitive abilities slip into nothingness as well.

The rise of antisemitism bodes ominous.

Not only because of what it means for the Jews, but for what it means for the West.

It means that the West has lost its reason.

Whether by accident or by choice, the West abdicated its responsibility to teach its children. It pretended to do so, issuing diplomas amid pomp and circumstance as though nothing had changed, but it had.

Every Jew hater is yet another fool for the circus, a man whose mind exists to entertain and be entertained, not to understand and be understood.

Education and antisemitism are twin issues, two heads of the same beast. Ignorance is sweet at the first sip but deadly at the last drop. There are wolves among the sheep, yet our young are not sheep, for at least sheep have the ability to know a wolf when they see one.

Every day, new leaders cower to the masses and drink from this ignorant draft.

Civilizations that give in to their ignorant impulses, from the Babylonians to the Nazis, collapsed in short order.

The religious mind looks at that fact and surmises that it was God’s eternal promise.

The logical mind looks at it, sees the absurdity of antisemitism, and concludes that any civilization taken in by such an absurdity was doomed to collapse from the start.

Both minds look at the West and tremble.

There may be time yet to save the West, but only if we can take a critical look at how we educate ourselves and our children. We do not need new modes of education; we need to return to the standards of the old. The West abdicated reason long ago. Unless we return to it, we are doomed to an unreasonable fate.

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Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai