An ongoing theme in these articles has been the transformative effects of the increasing use of modern technological devices to make human life more and more frictionless. It becomes like an addiction. Particularly for people in an advanced technological country like the United States, the main purpose in life seems to be to make life easier. There is one fundamental way of doing this. Make a lot of money, in order to acquire all the latest advances in modern technology. After working hard, and saving a lot of money, one can acquire a home with all the modern conveniences on a sunny beach somewhere and lay back and sip a pina colada or a margarita and close his eyes and float off into space and live in a sweet numbness forevermore. Or he can use one of his many different consumer devices – watch movies on his smartphone, listen to music on Spotify or You Tube, or play video games. He can get involved in other people’s life narratives without having to suffer any consequences for his actions the way he would if he were participating directly in someone else’s life narrative, someone who is living in the external world in primary experience.
This is what people in modern technological America aspire to. Floating in a vacuumous womb. An environment filled with the infinite numbing stimuli of a vacuum as well as the floating blendable continual stimuli of grounding mixed together. In other words, a dreamy environment. An environment where, the whole world becomes a solipsistic extension of oneself. Where there is little definition of figures around one, and so few surfaces upon which to make and preserve imprints in preparation for death. Few surfaces within one’s mind upon which one can lay the foundation for building a surrogate immortality.
So, living as they do in a mediated experience bubble, many Americans lose their capacity to absorb psychologically acts of violence in the external world. Now I am not saying that a person should absorb acts of violence in the sense of embracing them. Rather, I am talking about absorbing acts of violence in the sense of acknowledging their reality and realizing that something has to be done to contain them. But if a person is constantly living in a vacuumous womb, he loses his capacity to acknowledge danger when it presents itself and to defend himself accordingly. So, when Israel bombs Iran this time, taking advantage of the Iranians’ relative weakness, it is doing so because Iran has carried out so many acts of violence against Israel primarily through Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and other smaller terrorist groups and, furthermore, wants to totally destroy Israel and the Jewish people worldwide. And yet, there are so many Americans today, many of them American Jews, who feel that all violence is bad, and that Israelis have become mass murderers arbitrarily in their attempts to destroy Hamas. We must remember that a poll was taken around the time of October 7 of the attitudes of the Gazans towards what Hamas had done to Israel, and two thirds to three fourths of the Gazans approved of what Hamas had done to the Israelis. Which means that if the majority of the Gazans weren’t direct participants in the massacre, they were certainly fellow travelers. I remember seeing a clip of an Israeli woman who had been raped multiple times and then had been led onto the street with blood coming out of her private parts and as she was led down the street by her captors, people laughed at her and spit on her. Very simply, they acted like ghouls. So, when newscasters on MSNBC and CNN talk about the innocent Gazans, I have to laugh. The general Gazan population hates the Israelis as implacably as do the members of Hamas. Their saying is, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” Translated it means, Israeli, get out of Israel. Finally, many Gazan families have allowed Hamas to store Israeli hostages in their homes. So, they, in effect, cooperated with Hamas in their dastardly deeds against the Israelis. One can only assume that the lack of defiance on the part of the Gazans towards Hamas is at least in part due to an identification with Hamas and its cause.
But it seems that for many Americans, to have to read about this or watch it on television is excruciating. It is so much easier to focus on the violence that the Israelis commit, because deep down, Americans know that the Israelis are not ghouls, and the only reason that the Israelis are committing their acts of violence is out of self-defense. If the Gazans would lay down their arms, there would be no more war. As Americans become number and dumber, their ability to acknowledge what the Gazans and other enemies of Israel have done will continue to diminish. And Israelis will be more and more marked as the culprit in all their many conflicts.
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