Psychology, the End of Israel and the West
A mark engraved by exile and victimization, one of Israel’s greatest problems is the dominance over thought, feeling and action of the social sciences, especially psychology . Psychology is a symptom of the disintegration of the west which is marked, in all fields, by the resurgence of Hellenism dressed in pseudo-empirical garb and given the status of a belief system.
Psychology is yet another replacement theology in which bought consolation displaces repentance and genuine change. It is a triumph of fear over courage…
The term “psychology” and the beginning of its modern usage occurred during the intial heyday of Romanticism (c. 1770 - 1840). The first writer in English to use the term was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a French philosophe had used it about a decade earlier, in the 1790s). The romantic premise embedded in psychology, the secular religion of the Enlightenment was that fantasy and imagination, activated by transient feelings would nourish the essential goodness of human beings until it liberated them, via love, from the confines of reason, inherited wisdom and the competition that supposedly typified civilization as opposed to primitivism.
Do you “smell a fault?”
In the Romantic era which continues to our day, the “psychological perspective‿ deforms all categories of thought, impulse and life. It’s a mental and spiritual stance oriented toward pleasure and avoidance of pain. It is in fact a return of Epicureanism (beginning late 4th century BCE), a neo-pagan turning inward of the individual away form history, national life, land / nation and identity to neurotic self-scrutiny and needs. It is near kin to the de-contextualization of Judaism and effacement of the Jewish people that bred christianity which, like Romanticism, is a doctrine of salvation through love… and devil take the hindmost!
We do not have more love today than in centuries past: far from it. What we have, as most romantic writers confessed, is terror.
In fact, the Romantic deification of feeling, fantasy and imagination, of love, love, love seduced individuals, via the utopian promises of innovation and liberation into all and any modes of reform, into free love, and thence into pain, faithlessness, resentment, alienation, conflict, fear and despair. But without a transcendent and personal G-d there was no hope of mercy and no “rational” reason or context for repentance. Into that void rushed remorse. All the above-named conditions are the subjects of Romantic art that continue to dominate both the popular culture and the politics of our day, now herded under the rubric, ‘Post-modernism,’ an era of forgetting, an era in which education and the bond to the past is snapped… An era in which the ruling cadres exhort us “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, yesterday’s gone…”
This is the lie they want people to believe and in believing, dehumanize themselves by losing their roots and thus their identity.
The late, post-modern stage of Romanticism and the West is the era of cynicism and a-historical reflexes that have helped make politics a shabby and terrifying form of popular culture. Post-modern politics recapitulate the vicious paradoxes, the seductive lie of Romanticism: an unguent surface that promises happiness, love, peace and plenty while the manipulative, highly technological and statistical methods manipulate, depersonalize, control and betray, and which idolize andempower primitive and hostile cultures. The negation of love, our politics, like the culture of which it is an omnipresent form of neurotic entertainment, engrains the loneliness in which terror breeds monsters of the id…
And thus the romance of Romanticism, the end of the west is the love of death and the conflation of love and death, the longing for the primeval mud, for the end of all the terrors bred by rejection of the past. No wonder the west is committing suicide; no wonder its artists for nearly two centuries have been obsessed with apocalypse and collapse.
The past the West has rejected is Judaism. The tragedy for the Jewish people is that the culture of psychology which reflects the West’s diseased ideology has been embedded in it. Israel will free itself from this addiction or it too will die, grown too “in love with easeful death” as shown by successive governments mad obeisance to the ‘peace processes,’ the road map to the extinction of Israel.
Having created the problem, psychologists, new prophets of modern utopianism arrived with a religion in the form of pseudo-science claiming to remediate the spiritual illnesses that their own terms of art, self-centered assumptions and endless neurotic confessions reinforced. In due course they spawned not only the vast, voracious and de-humanizing industry of social work and “social services‿ but deformed law, education and the very comprehension of human nature and the divine.
To appreciate the chasm between the Jewish approach to full life, strength and humility, contrast the ‘declaration of faith” brought with the tithes as described in Deuteronomy 26 with the self-absorbed and anxious ‘couch confessions” of godless psychology.
Psychologists, psychologism, and the era of psychology is the last gasp of the west before it expires of the terrors that psychology feeds while pretending to redress them. The routine recourse to drugs in order to suppress the terrors that psychology multiplies reveal its morbidity and failure.
The psychological approach to human life and relationships leads to loneliness, fear, alienation, self-centeredness. Cultures do not survive this. The questions psychology prompts, toward which it disposes everyone by the “mind-forged manacles” it imposes are: “how can I help myself feel good?” and “why don’t they understand me?”
This is at the expense of history, memory, manliness and simplicity. The questions of a non-psychological consciousness, a soul not bound by psycho-babble would be:
“What is our honor and how can we defend and assert it?”
“What around us is ours and how can we build and strengthen it?”
“Who are our enemies and how do we destroy them?”
The relevance of healthy consciousness to events of our day is plain.
The lethal consequences of failing to orient one’s national, familial and individual being around these questions, the failure to be Jewish is painfully visible in Israel’s decades-long spiral toward extinction. It is writ large in its failure this past week, this past thirteen years, and since June 1967 to fight and secure the victory that is in its grasp, the victory alone that will bring peace; peace which thanks to the modern epicureans of pleasure and neurosis continues to recede the more they apply their incapacitating and terrified categories of thought to the fundamental facts of life.
It is no coincidence that the enemies of the psychological culture speak repeatedly in their guiding text (the Koran) of “terrifying their enemies.” The entire meta-cultural situation reflects the logic G-d embedded in the creation, including human relationships.
Even before the war of independence, Israel already was in dependency, a thrall to psychology and socialism, twin mis-readings of human nature and twin assaults on memory, history and the soul. It follows then that Israel’s socio-economic basis emphasizes dependency in many essential facets of life; in politics this dependency is based on its abasement before England, the “world community” and, increasingly since 1968, upon America. The State of Dependency that replaces the Holy One with psycho-therapeutic clichés, decayed remnants of shallow thoughts, and with the ‘holy writ’ of the State Department, is the same State of Dependency whose teachers fail to demand that Israel eradicate its enemies within and around it.
If a Jewish hitch-hiker is kidnapped and murdered, they tell Jews not to hitch-hike, in Israel. This is not life, teaching, or honor. This is pseudo-wisdom that displaces works, and works must exceed wisdom in order for both to endure (Pirke Avot 4).
Israel is sick of the West, and no wonder. Modern western consciousness is an infantilized consciousness; needy, consuming, without pride and requiring, as its complement a totally controlling ‘mother’ figure. For the west this reflects pagan Greek theology (see Hesiod’s Theogeny) and the goddess cults of the ancient middle east. For Judaism this pattern may reflect the fears of national extinction through slavery and rape by the Greco-Romans 1500 years ago (so different than the response of the nation in Egyptian bondage), and the decision to fend off a possible extinction by changing Judaism to a matrilineal culture. But matrilineal cultures over time become matriarchal and such cultures do not survive; they are in any case the antithesis of Judaism whose very identity, education, emphasis on memory, honor and national pride and the land itself is rooted in patriarchy and teaching by fathers, not female ‘school-teachers,’ social workers and psychologists, third-rate, scolding epicureans of comfort (you’re good) and discomfort (you’re naughty).
So deeply engrained is this aspect of Israel’s sickness that feminism, an integral aspect of Romanticism and the death of the west now is considered by many to be intrinsic (rather than antithetical) to Judaism. It is fashionable, among ‘nationalist’ as well as Hellenistic Jewish women, and men, too, to assert that “women will save Israel.‿ Alas, a culture whose women have been taught, have virtually inherited contempt for men is not a culture that will survive or that will leap to assert and defend its borders. How many Jewish husbands can defend the borders of their emotional, familial, social or spiritual lives against rebellious, domineering, excitable or belittling wives? Again, these conditions describe the national condition of Israel all too well.
Modern Israel, the Israel that cannot assert or defend its boundaries responds to every problem and hurt by applying psychologists and social workers to come and make the ‘boo-boo’ better, usually by pretending to make it go away. The desire for the mommy-goddess is one reason that crises and harms continue to be invited rather than avoided. After all, the ‘goddess’ must be kept in place of primacy and honored with wealth and law. Therefore problems must remain the way of being. It cannot endure…
The social-worker approach to suffering is worse than applying leeches ni part because it comes with the veneer of ‘rationality.’ Alas it leads to the waste of much national wealth, seized by the government in taxes with the promise that it is for the “welfare‿ of the people. A more pernicious or deadly form of national suicide can hardly be found; indeed, it is the flip-side of the peace process. And in the peace process and hitkansut we see how ‘rational’ the psychologocial approach to danger and conflict is. It is a form of suicide; the warm bath and averting of the eyes; the confessions of helplessness and harmlessness; the lies of faked compassion from the Knesset or the Beltway to which Israel of the psychological era is addicted. And whenever many of the people awake from the trance and cry out for identity and assertion, to the barbiturates of media bromides are added the many forms of oppression, — the night stick, the knock on the door, administrative detention, expulsion — the police state force that everywhere, in all cultures sooner or later characterizes the psychological state, the state of dependency and terror.
Psychology is a primary expression of the demonism, predatory economics and bureaucratic tyranny of modernism, the last stage of that dynamic and suicidal hybrid, western civilization. Why suicidal? The West, as we have shown, contains both the essentials of Judaism and an unremitting hatred of Jews. The suicide, the disintegration of this ‘foot’ of clay and iron is essential to the West, it is inevitable and now it draws very near. The fact that modern Israel and Israelis embrace this modern creed and its epistemology helps explain Israel’s long-term and increasing problems and the seeming inability of the culture to heal what is so obviously self-destructive in its national-political life. The Judaism of exile that dominates modern Israel offends, blinds and dis-empowers the Jew, by force when needed. Israel’s modern self-image is based largely on a disease intrinsic to a late stage of the Jew-hating culture in which it long has been trapped, the dominion of Esau.
The time to awaken grows very short; the whirlwind of terrors sown by socialists and the cult of psychology howls around our heads and land. Where are the shofar and the banner of David?
EN