Introduction

How do we know if we are on “the right side of history”? One unmistakable sign that a movement is on the wrong side is a pattern that continually resurfaces across time, often called “The Horseshoe Theory.”

Traditionally, in the United States, we conceptualize political thought as a linear spectrum with a left and a right side. The right is conservative, naturally skeptical of rapid social change; the left is progressive, generally more open to social change and inclined to challenge established structures. Throughout history, however, a recurring pattern emerges where people on these supposedly opposite ends of the spectrum suddenly converge. When they do come together, it is never a harmonious moment of unity, but rather a joint targeting of a specific population framed as the ultimate source of society’s problems.

Today, that target is the Jewish people. Those on the extreme right have long vilified Jews as an overly powerful group that actively undermines the interests of the white majority. Meanwhile, the extreme left has forced the Jewish community into an ideological framework that, completely devoid of nuance, views the world as a zero-sum game where different ethnic groups constantly jockey for dominance over one another.

The convergence of the extreme left and extreme right around modern antisemitism is not a historical coincidence, but the inevitable result of ideological radicalization. When individuals reach the terminal tips of the political horseshoe, they abandon human dignity and pluralism in favor of conspiratorial scapegoating—making this ideological meeting point a definitive sign that a person has found themselves on the wrong side of history.

Different Roots, Same Destination

How do two groups that are typically at each other’s throats end up parroting the exact same talking points? Why are they aligning to target Jewish people?

Much like the Nazis of World War II, the modern extreme right envisions a utopian nation built entirely on racial purity. They view Jews as a direct threat to that vision precisely because they are a resilient minority group that consistently punches above its weight class—a tiny population whose success is seen as a challenge to the coherence of white supremacy.

Concurrently, sections of the progressive left have re-engineered traditional anti-capitalist and anti-colonial frameworks to focus heavily on the Jewish community.

In this worldview, Jews are categorized as an exceptionally successful minority within the broader white power structure (ignoring the historical reality that Jews are fundamentally non-European). Because Jewish people have succeeded within democratic and capitalist systems, they are treated as an embodiment of those systems. For some on the far-left, turning the focus toward anti-Zionism provides an easy psychological escape; it allows individuals who were deeply preoccupied with “white guilt” to redirect the target off their own backs onto someone else. This mimics the classic strategy of Middle Eastern dictators who intentionally scapegoat Israel to distract from the poverty and repression of their own citizens.

For both of these extremes, the individual humanity of Jewish people is stripped away and replaced by a cabal-driven conspiracy theory built on false narratives of total political and social control. This is explicitly visible in the language used to describe Israel during the war in Gaza.

While innocent civilians tragically die in any armed conflict, the absolute insistence on labeling Israel’s military campaign a “genocide” shifts the discourse away from standard critiques of warfare into a demonization of Israeli intentions. Similarly, branding Israel an “apartheid state” is a deliberate attempt to reframe the complex ethnic and geopolitical tensions of a pluralistic democracy into intentional, systemic racism, thereby painting ordinary Israeli citizens as willing participants in an evil system. It is a purposeful double standard aimed at demonizing an entire people rather than offering a measured critique of individual or collective military actions.

This demonization quickly bleeds beyond geopolitics, as evidenced by the targeting of non-Israeli Jews worldwide for the actions of a foreign country they do not live in and may have never visited. When “Pro-Palestine” marches specifically target synagogues in Brooklyn and march through historically Jewish neighborhoods, they are holding local citizens responsible for a war halfway across the world. Once an entire ethnicity is effectively demonized, geographical boundaries cease to matter; the people themselves are treated as inherently malevolent.

The Grammar of the Horseshoe

An absolute villain is mathematically necessary for ideologies that rely on a total lack of nuance, and a common language highlights this reality on both sides of the horseshoe. It is a binary language of isolation, exclusion, and blame.

On the left, activists routinely deploy terms that they themselves would instantly label as dangerous dog-whistles if used against any other minority group. Anti-capitalists focus their animus on the “globalist elite” or “the 1%.” Meanwhile, those focused on anti-colonialism rely heavily on the term “Zionist”—a label that, given that roughly 95% of the world’s Jewish population supports the right of Israel to exist, functions simply as a proxy for “Jew.”

As with any entrenched conspiracy theory, any evidence that counters this narrative is twisted into “proof” of the cabal’s immense control. It does not matter that political spending by organizations like AIPAC is routinely dwarfed by domestic teachers’ unions or foreign funding from nations like Qatar. Nor does it matter that AIPAC frequently fails to secure its preferred policy outcomes. Within the logic of the extreme, those facts are merely viewed as proof that the cabal is exceptionally skilled at hiding its true influence.

Why the Convergence is the “Wrong Side of History”

The foundational element that places both of these extremes on the wrong side of history is their rejection of the individual. True human progress has historically been defined by the expansion of individual human rights, the protection of vulnerable minorities, a commitment to pluralism, and the enforcement of the rule of law. All of these legal and moral concepts rest entirely on the premise that every single human being possesses inherent, intrinsic value.

What these extreme ideologies do instead is strip individuals of that intrinsic worth in order to collectivize them into a faceless group—reducing the human being to a mere cog in an ideological machine. This is precisely why a Jewish person in New York can be assaulted for actions taken by a government in the Middle East; in the eyes of the radicalized mob, individual identity does not exist. There are only members of the group.

Humanitarian progress is built squarely on individual accountability as a replacement for collective guilt. By asserting collective guilt, this pair of extremes proves itself to be thoroughly illiberal and the exact opposite of progress. If a person finds themselves treating an individual as a mere representative of a collective rather than a unique human being responsible only for their own actions—and if they are locking arms with their formal political enemies to say the exact same things—the likelihood that they are on the wrong side of history is absolute.

Historical Parallels

Modern culture frequently forgets—likely because the United States allied with the Soviet Union during World War II—that Stalinism and Nazism successfully set aside their bitter ideological differences to target Jewish people. Both regimes actively utilized vicious anti-Jewish purges and propaganda to provide their populations with a unifying scapegoat. This structural convergence ultimately led to the horror of the Holocaust in Germany and millions of state-sponsored murders in the Soviet Union, leaving both societies historically disgraced.

Decades later, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the horseshoe effect re-emerged during debates over global trade, international intervention, and organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The far-left opposed globalization on the grounds that it represented neo-imperialism and the corporate exploitation of the working class. The far-right opposed globalization because they viewed it as a direct threat to national sovereignty, traditional culture, and domestic workers. The rhetoric differed, but the isolationist policies they marched for were identical.

Even during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, extremes from opposite sides of the spectrum converged to overthrow a nation. It is often overlooked that left-wing students—who literally wore Che Guevara shirts and championed Marxist ideals—marched alongside and explicitly supported fundamentalist Islamic clerics. Once the revolution succeeded and the clerics consolidated power, those very same left-wing students were promptly rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the totalitarian regime they helped install.

Conclusion

The ultimate irony of the horseshoe effect is that the individuals occupying the extremes see absolutely no issue with echoing the exact sentiments of their supposed enemies. Recognizing this requires a familiarity with the recurring patterns of history, as well as a rejection of the moral inversion and narcissism that characterizes modern radicalism.

History will never judge these people or their movements by their self-proclaimed noble intentions; it will judge them strictly by the tangible effects of their actions. It will judge them by whether they protected individual liberty and upheld basic human dignity.

The only reliable way to ensure you remain on the right side of history is to lean heavily and consistently toward the protection of the individual, and to steer clear of any mass movement that targets a single group of people as the sole source of human suffering. Succumbing to that tribal impulse is intoxicatingly easy, but it is also the definitive mark of historic moral failure.

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On May 11, in the Midwood and Flatbush sections of New York City, a demonstration focused on geopolitics took a dark turn.

Protesters broke away from a rally outside a synagogue and marched down the residential streets of a Jewish neighborhood. Waving the flags of Hezbollah—an internationally recognized terrorist organization—they chanted genocidal slurs at the residents. The targets of this intimidation were not politicians, military strategists, or foreign diplomats; they were families and children.

What do Jewish families in Brooklyn have to do with the actions of a government an ocean away?

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the world was rightfully outraged. But, there were no mass protests marching through Brighton Beach or other Russian-American neighborhoods. Protesters didn’t gather outside Russian Orthodox churches to hurl slurs at children for the actions of Vladimir Putin. Society collectively understood that Russian-Americans are not a proxy for the Kremlin. Why, then, is that same baseline of decency and logic denied to Jewish Americans?

This feels like a double standard.

On January 8 of 2019, a short video clip went viral showing students from Covington Catholic High School in a confrontation with a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial. Almost instantly, the internet and major media outlets accused the teenagers of various racialized affronts. When the full, unedited video was released days later, the truth emerged: a group of Black Israelites had been hurling vicious slurs at the boys for nearly an hour, and the students had simply stood their ground, diffusing tension by singing their school anthem.

Both the Covington incident and the Midwood march involved children being aggressively, and to an extent physically, confronted. But the contrast in public reaction is deafening. Those who were quickest to condemn and dox teenagers based on a context-free video clip have been entirely silent when Jewish children are actively terrorized in their own front yards by supporters of a terrorist group.

But how does this cultural acceptance of such a massive double standard come to be?

Consider the editorial choices of The New York Times, long revered as America’s “paper of record.” The paper chose to largely ignore or downplay extensive, meticulously documented reports concerning the systematic weaponization of sexual violence on October 7th, 2023—despite the existence of forensic evidence, photographic proof, and hours of testimony. Conversely, the paper saw fit to publish a highly inflammatory opinion piece based on anonymous Hamas sources claiming the IDF was using dogs to commit atrocities—a claim that is biologically impossible. It’s not a coincidence that the NYT published their opinion piece just a day prior to the extensive report on the October 7th atrocities.

When a pillar of journalism engages in this level of asymmetrical reporting, the consequences extend far beyond the immediate news cycle. It effectively bends the cultural curve toward antisemitism, even among people who do not consider themselves prejudiced.

Because millions of readers tie their worldview and intellect to the moral authority of The New York Times, admitting the paper is pushing unverified, biased narratives creates an uncomfortable psychological state. To avoid this cognitive dissonance, individuals will actively defend absurd or harmful stories. They do this not necessarily out of a conscious desire to demean Jews, but to protect their own egos from the realization that the institution they trust is deeply compromised.

Do you remember the story about an immigrant community in Ohio supposedly eating cats? Weren’t people saying that stories like that are harmful to communities?

When the media manipulates the truth, public outrage becomes weaponized. Until we confront the cognitive dissonance that allows us to tolerate the intimidation of Jewish children while manufacturing outrage elsewhere, the double standard will continue to thrive—and the truth will remain the ultimate casualty.

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Sitting at a table with family and friends, almost everyone would raise their hand if you asked whether they agree that slavery is wrong. It is rarely a point of debate; rather, it is accepted as a basic, objective fact. But why?

Asking someone to articulate the “why” behind their agreement usually elicits blank stares or incredulity at the perceived silliness of the question. But if it is so silly to ask, why is the consensus so universal? Where does this agreement come from? Furthermore, who cares to understand the “why” if we already agree on the “what”? Shouldn’t we just shake hands and move on?

It is my contention that if you do not understand why slavery is wrong, you do not understand the Declaration of Independence, you do not understand the Constitution, and you do not understand Western Civilization.

If you do not understand this gift of liberal society to humanity, you will not recognize when it is at risk of destruction.

All Men Are Created Equal

Says who? We are obviously not “the same.” We have two different genders, skin colors that exist on an unending spectrum, varying heights and weights, and innumerable differences that could never be fully categorized. So, in what way are we equal? On what grounds is this true, and why is it “self-evident”?

The American Founders were so confident in their assertion of equality that they labeled it “self-evident,” meaning they felt no need to explain something so obvious—much like our friends and family today. However, these two ideas—the wrongness of slavery and human equality—are deeply linked. To be exact, slavery is wrong because we are all presumed to be equal. It is no coincidence that slavery became illegal first in societies that presumed human equality, particularly those that codified that presumption in their founding documents. Eventually, those societies ran out of room to argue in favor of it.

The Source of the “Why”

There are two primary frameworks for this rejection:

• The Theological: This view is rooted in Imago Dei—the belief that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. Because each person is “owned” by the Creator and endowed with inherent, sacred dignity, no human has the authority to claim ownership over another. To do so is a form of theft against God.

• The Secular: This view is rooted in the principle of Universal Self-Ownership and the Social Contract. It posits that as rational, sentient beings, individuals have an exclusive right to their own bodies and labor. Therefore, slavery is an objective violation of the logical consistency and mutual reciprocity required for a flourishing society.

While there are merits to both, my own bias leans toward the theological. Rational humans can rationalize almost anything in a moment of practical survival. In a society where “too much food” is the problem, it is easy to make high-minded arguments. It’s easy to be a good person when you’ve never been hungry. I worry about what happens when people miss a few meals. What happens when our wills are tested, as observed by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning?

The Project at Risk

We must recognize that our societies are built upon these specific presumptions. This understanding allows us to see when our foundations are at risk of collapsing. When I evaluate modern social movements, I look through this lens: Is the action a consequence of everyday human fallibility, or is there something deeper at play?

A politician falling prey to the pull of power—taking money and being influenced by that transaction—is a result of human fallibility. It is a part of the human heart that can only be mitigated by laws; it will never be eliminated, only managed.

However, introducing policies that treat people differently based on gender, race, or sexual orientation presumes a fundamental inequality. This normalizes an idea that counters the very founding of the societies that allow those same people to experience equality before the law.

Both are ills that must be addressed. But when a politician is found to be corrupt, I expect us to manage it, knowing the impulse will never truly go away. When the latter—the presumption of inequality—is introduced, I see people taking an axe to the entire project. This project has produced the greatest amount of material wealth, equal opportunity, and prosperity in the history of humanity.

Am I biased? Absolutely.

I am biased in favor of the roots of the ideas that gave me, and so many others, the opportunity to live in the greatest nation our species has ever produced. We can be upset about poor behavior and manage those actions, but I will always be more concerned about movements that aim to chop down the tree that produces the fruit in the first place.

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At what point do grains of sand become a mound? If we all agree that there is a mound of sand but I remove one grain, it is likely we would all still agree that it is still a mound. So, at what point is it no longer a mound of sand? Or we could move in the opposite direction. Two grains of sand do not make a mound, but at what point do we get to call it one?

This specific puzzle is known as the Sorites Paradox (from the Greek word soros, meaning “heap”) and is attributed to the ancient philosopher Eubulides of Miletus. Eubulides was not simply trying to be annoying—though as a contemporary of Aristotle, he often aimed his logic specifically at him. His point was that language, and specifically our categories, are not hard and fast or completely objective. There is a “betweenness” among our categories that is not, and can never truly be, accounted for.

In a world dominated by scientific truth, which requires a removal from context and time, it can be easy to forget that nothing in reality exists outside of a larger framework. Only our ideas and the language we use to express them possess the sharp definitions that can survive outside the context of reality.

When I hear conservative commentators like Matt Walsh declare that no nation has a right to exist and that only individuals have that right, I cannot help but see the fallacy of the Sorites Paradox. There is no clean line where the individual ends and the collective begins. If an individual person has the right to exist, then a family has a right to exist. If a family has a right to exist, then a group of families does as well. That group of families can be called a neighborhood, which can grow into a town, a city, a state, and eventually, a nation.

If not, then at what point between the individual and the nation do we no longer recognize that right? This is the logical game being played when people are asked if Israel has a right to exist.

Mohammed Hijab used this framing on Piers Morgan Uncensored, and more recently, Yanis Varoufakis did as well. They posit that governments or nations are merely political entities which do not have the “right” to exist because that right applies only to human beings. But they are attempting to create a distinction between a group and the individuals that compose it as if those two things are separable. You cannot violate a group’s rights without violating the rights of the individuals within that group. To deny the “mound” its status is to eventually deny the “grains” the very structure that ensures their survival.

In the case of Israel, the right of those individuals to exist is the reason the state exists in the first place. Its existence is a physical manifestation of the declaration that these individuals have a right to life, and with that right comes the inherent right to self-defense.

This defense is not merely a political choice, but a response to a recurring psychological pattern in history. What irks people to the point that they focus so much on Israel is the fact that this national manifestation of human rights is an admission of the flawed nature of humanity. Israel has to exist because humanity as a whole cannot move beyond the pattern of resentment that comes with being flawed—a pattern that requires a scapegoat to preserve our collective egos and lash out at the fallen nature of our world.

Hitler, in Mein Kampf, claimed the problem with Jews was that they were not “idealists.” For Utopians on both the left and the right, realist ideas and realist people are what stand in the way of their “perfect” world. It is a world that has never existed, and never will, without the destruction of human nature itself.

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Scapegoating is not a modern problem. As we discussed in Thomas Sowell’s writing on “middle-men minorities” the successful minority is often seen as the source of all societal ills, often persecuted, and societies that persecute them pay a hefty price. Something so common points to a truism about humanity and is a pattern which reveals our nature. We’re not now looking to understand the fact of the pattern but instead the particulars of the modern pattern.

What is it about today’s antisemitism in the West that makes it particular to our times and possibly more (or less) dangerous?

Dr. Iain McGilchrist might say that it has the potential to become worse because of the manner in which we have allowed - or even encouraged - the view of our brain’s left hemisphere (LH) to dominate our language and negatively affect our outlook on life.

McGilchrist posits that the right hemisphere (RH) is our connection to reality: it sees the world as a living, breathing, tragic whole. The left hemisphere (LH), by contrast, is a tool for manipulation: it sees the world as a collection of static, decontextualized parts—a machine.

1. The Language of the Machine

We can detect the LH takeover in the very way we describe ourselves and our society. In a healthy civilization, language is relational and embodied (RH). In a decaying one, it becomes technocratic and modular (LH). Consider how often we now use machine metaphors to describe human life:

• Human Capital: We no longer speak of “neighbors” or “craftsmen,” but of “units” or “assets” to be optimized.

• Bandwidth: We treat our emotional and intellectual capacity as a digital throughput rather than a lived experience. -“I don’t have the bandwidth for that.”

• Social Engineering: We speak of society as something with drivers and levers that can be re-engineered to produce a guaranteed output. -"What are the drivers of this behavior?"

This language devitalizes the human. When a person is reduced to a metric or a data point, it becomes logical to treat them as a part to be replaced or a bug to be fixed.

2. The Puppet Master and the Machine

The LH is deeply uncomfortable with the Tragic Vision, which accepts that the world is messy and un-steerable. The LH demands a linear cause-and-effect for every frustration. If the LH’s utopian machine is not producing the desired results (e.g., total equity or total unity), it concludes that there must be a singular and specific thing sabotaging the gears.

This is the birth of the conspiracy theory. The LH cannot accept the RH’s reality (that life involves trade-offs and complexity). Instead, it projects its own need for control onto the other. The Jew becomes the imagined mechanic of the machine, the secret hand pulling the strings. This mirrors the influencing machine delusion found in schizophrenic thought, where the patient believes invisible forces are controlling reality.

3. From Covenant to System

As we have explored, the Covenant is the primary relational foundation of Western civilization. The Covenant is a RH concept; it is based on relationships, nuance, and sacred bonds. A society in decline moves from the RH’s Covenant to the LH’s System.

In a system, there is no sacred honor—there are only incentives and outputs. When a society views its citizens as components of a machine, the canary is the first to be discarded as a faulty part. The horseshoe convergence of the Left and Right is a convergence of two LH-dominant worldviews that have both lost the depth of the RH to see life and humanity as a sacred whole consisting not of things but of processes.

4. Conclusion: The Return to the Whole

The path back to the Tragic Vision is a return to RH Realism. It is the courage to see the world not as a machine to be fixed, but as a life to be lived. It is the rejection of the schizophrenic puppet master myth in favor of complicated reality. To protect the canary is to insist on the living, breathing humanity of the realist, and to refuse to let Nietzsche’s tarantulas of the LH turn our civilization into a schizophrenic nightmare.

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Once we accept that antisemitism is simply a symptom of societal resentment aimed at a scapegoat - a canary in the coal mine - we must then decide how to combat it. The current surge in resentment across the political divide can be tied to economic insecurity and anxiety around our future, but it is also tied to an underlying vision of humanity that does not align with reality. The Right’s vision of societal success through purity and the Left’s vision of societal success through utopian equity both misjudge the nature of reality.

Human beings are flawed creatures in an imperfect world. There will never be and never has been anything close to what either side of this flawed vision imagines: a utopian world that embodies their vision of a humanity unconstrained by reality. Especially not through blaming or eliminating any one race of people. What must be done is the reclaiming of a proper outlook on humanity that accepts its past, present, and future with the warts of its past, present, and future. A “tragic vision” that expects imperfection and does not see imperfection as evidence of total failure. A realistic expectation of trade-offs and not final solutions.

1. Reclaim the Constrained Vision - The first step back is the humble admission that human nature is flawed and that perfect justice is not a political destination. Like the separation of powers that presumes imperfection, we need to presume humanity’s flaws and accept systems to not eliminate them but mitigate them. We must stop viewing success as theft and start viewing it as a trade-off. We must reject the zero-sum fallacy that tells us one group’s achievement is another’s loss. This requires a move towards the Constrained Vision, which understands that because resources and wisdom are finite, we must prioritize processes that work over visions that feel good. To save the canary, we must re-learn how to celebrate the "Realist" virtues of discipline, education, and delayed gratification.

2. Restore the Covenant - We must move away from the transactional, social contract view of our neighbors. A contract is easily broken when resentment peaks; a covenant is a permanent commitment to the other because we recognize they are made in the image as ourselves. Restoring the Covenant means protecting the rights of the particular minority—the Jew, the dissenter, the individual—even when the mob demands their silence. We must recognize that our neighbor’s success is a victory for the community, not a grievance to be litigated.

3. Defend Our Institutions (in principle) - We must fiercely defend the fences the Founders built: the Separation of Powers, Due Process, and the sanctity of private property. These are not obstacles to progress; they are the Hebraic shields that prevent idealists from turning their dreams into our nightmares. These institutions were designed with the Tragic Vision in mind—acknowledging that power is a corrupting force and that the mob is often wrong. When we hear calls to dismantle these constraints to achieve a utopian end, we must recognize it as what it is: the destruction of Western Civilization.

4. Say “Yes” to Reality - Ultimately, the path back requires what Nietzsche called “Yes-saying” to life. It is the courage to face a tragic, complex, and unfair world without reaching for a scapegoat. Anti-Semitism is the easy way out for a mind that is too weak to handle complexity. To reject it is to choose the hard way—the way of the Realist, the way of the Covenant, and the way of the American experiment. We must stop trying to smash the mirror of others’ success and instead start doing the hard work of self-improvement that the mirror should inspire.

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   To protect the realist - to protect the canary and heed its warning - is to protect the only vision of humanity—the Tragic, Constrained, and Covenantal vision—that has ever successfully produced societies in which we live and thrive. Societies that even with their flaws, attract masses of people escaping the alternative. The air in the mine is growing thin, but the mine is not yet lost. By choosing realism over resentment, even on an individual level, we become a light that guides others, through our example, towards maintaining the attractive glow of liberty.

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Our modern world, through internet algorithms we do not understand, where money is “earned” by complex mechanisms that are not always tangible, has become too complex for most of us to comprehend. We may understand pieces of it that we are directly involved in, but not the whole. And with social media putting versions of that whole in our faces 24/7, we are even more aware that this complexity exists outside of our grasp. Confusion surrounding the manner in which the world works can lead to a personal and societal need to reduce that complexity, and when a simple answer to a complex world shaped by ideas of mechanistic cause and effects presents itself, and its out there instead of being our own fault, we grasp onto it.

Those overly-simplified explanations reduce complexity and save our own egos, but are ingredients to a recipe of societal collapse. Inevitably those simplistic explanations, which usually have a simple scapegoat, come up against evidence to the contrary. Instead of adjusting our outlook, we dismiss the evidence, explain it away, and start a chain of events that leads to a mind and thus a society more schizophrenic than sane.

1. The Loss of Agency in the Intangible World

For most of human history, wealth and power were tangible: a field of grain, a stack of gold, a factory floor. In the “Digital Mine,” however, value has become invisible. It exists in the form of algorithms, high-frequency trading, and intellectual property. As Thomas Sowell noted, the majority has always distrusted “middlemen” because their contribution to the economy is intellectual rather than physical.

In the modern era, this distrust has turned into a sense of powerlessness. When the average person feels they can no longer understand how the world works, they experience a profound loss of agency. The Left Hemisphere of the brain, as McGilchrist describes, cannot tolerate this ambiguity. It demands a “System” with a “Puppet Master.” Because the Jewish community has historically navigated—and thrived within—these intangible systems of law, finance, and information, they become the perfect proxy for the “invisible forces” that the modern individual fears.

Above is The Maze, by William Kurelek, a schizophrenic. This representation of his mind being compartmentalized is a great way to understand the schizophrenic mind. Notice on the middle left, people are socializing but connected to strings as if controlled by a puppet master.

2. The Envy of Particularity

We are living in what sociologists call the “Lonely Crowd.” Hannah Arendt pointed this out in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, noting the need of totalitarian systems for individual isolation. As traditional American institutions—churches, civic groups, and extended families—dissolve, the individual is left atomized and disconnected. This creates a vacuum of belonging that the utopian mind tries to fill with mass movements or digital echo chambers.

In this landscape, the Jewish community’s continued emphasis on particularism—strong families, religious continuity, and mutual aid—is viewed with a toxic mix of envy and suspicion. The atomized individual does not want to do the hard realist work of building their own community; they find it easier to demand the destruction of the clannish group that still possesses what they have lost. Nietzsche’s tarantula hates the bond it cannot replicate. The demand for total equality on the Left and total unity on the Right is, at its root, a demand that no one be allowed to have a private, particular strength that the collective cannot control.

3. The Proxy for Realism

Ultimately, the resentment building in America today is a rebellion against reality itself. The Jewish realist represents the “Constrained” truth that life is not fair, that excellence is not evenly distributed, and that success requires specific cultural and individual trade-offs.

• The Left wants to eliminate the “Realist” to achieve a state of total equality, where no group’s success can act as a mirror to another’s failure.

• The Right wants to eliminate the realist to achieve total national unity, where no particular identity can challenge the monolithic power of the State.

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Both sides have decided that the tragic complexities of the 21st century are the fault of a specific other. They are trying to clean the toxic air of the mine by gassing the canary, unaware that the canary is the only thing telling them that their utopian fantasies are suffocating the very reason and liberty that allow a civilization to survive.

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Antisemitism is less about the Jews than it is about the societies in which they live. Or, to say it universally, a society is best judged not only on how it treats its minorities, but how it treats its successful minorities. Anytime a minority group within a society outpaces the success of the majority population, it naturally holds a mirror up to the majority. They can respond with interest and ask why, but usually they simply respond with resentment.

This is what I referred to in Never Again is Now (Section One) as the middleman minority phenomenon. Thomas Sowell writes about it here: Are Jews Generic? We just happen to live in Western Societies where the Jew is the most common, but not the only, victim of this resentment which is endemic to humanity’s psychology.

To understand why anti-Semitism serves as the "canary in the coal mine," we must recognize that it is the first symptom of a society succumbing to an atmosphere of irrationality fueled by resentment. Just as a canary dies when the oxygen in a mine is replaced by toxic gases, a civilization begins to perish when the tragic vision - humanity is forever flawed and imperfect able - is replaced by the utopian delusion -humanity is perfectible and any imperfection is the fault of a system or a people. The good thing about these fumes is that you can “smell” them if you know what to look for.

The Healthy Society and the Tragic Vision

A healthy society operates on the tragic (constrained) vision as outlined by Thomas Sowell in his book, A Conflict of Visions. It is a society that accepts the world as a place of complexity and inherent limitations. In this state, people accept responsibility for their own failures and understand that progress is incremental, requiring trade-offs and discipline. This realism acts as a structural integrity for the state, allowing for the rule of law and the protection of the particular individual. This inherent flaw in humanity is best reflected structurally by the separation of powers in the United States’ Constitution. It assumes human beings are flawed and too much power in one set of hands would be tragic.

However, as a society decays, it enters what Nietzsche called a state of “soul-dizziness.” This dizziness is the disorientation that occurs when the tragic vision is abandoned in favor of the unconstrained vision—the belief that all human suffering can be eliminated if only the right system is implemented or the right enemy is removed. When the air of reality becomes too heavy to breathe, society begins to look for a singular, simplified cause for all its collective woes.

This is why we see a schizophrenic like shift in what frustrated people are shouting: one day they are waving BLM flags, another they are chanting F$%K ICE, then they are all wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags while wearing masks to avoid a pandemic which ended years ago. The aim of their single reason for society’s problems keep shifting, constantly looking for the one answer. Always looking for the one scapegoat whether it be an ideology or a person.

The Toxic Gas of Resentment

To continue with the canary in the coal mine analogy, resentment is the gas that fills the vacuum left by the departure of reason. It is the psychological rebellion of the Nietzsche’s tarantula against the realist. Because the Jewish people represent the most historically successful middleman minority—thriving through the very intellectual and economic realism that the utopian mind finds offensive—they are always the first to be detected by the canary.

This is why my ears perk up so much when I hear tropes about Israel or Jews in general having undue influence over our nation or specific politicians. The common accusation of being paid every time a person stands up to antisemitism or criticism of a Jew is a modern version of this. I experienced this specifically when pointing out how Arabs in Israel live freer than Arabs in Muslim nations, and then was flooded in the comments with accusations of receiving $7,000.

Anti-Semitism is the ultimate simplification of a complex world. It transforms the tragic difficulties of global economics, cultural shifts, and political failure into a manageable narrative: a conspiracy of the few against the many. To punish the Jew is to purify the air by removing the toxic element. But this is the fatal error of the miners. The Jew is not the toxin; the Jew is the sensor. When a society abandons reason and law to silence the canary, it is not cleaning the air—it is simply breaking the instrument that warns them the air is fatal.

The Onset of Total Decay

Once the canary is dead, the decay accelerates. History shows that no society that has indulged in anti-Semitism has remained a free or stable society for long. This is because the same irrationality required to believe in the “Zionist Puppet Master” or the “Globalist Cabal” is an irrationality that eventually consumes all other thinking.

This is what worries me the most - ideas do not stay in their lanes. When I have friends casually use these antisemitic tropes, I don’t think that they specifically hate Jewish people. But the ideas they propose are unwittingly tied to antisemitic tropes and they end up defending their ideas to defend their egos. Eventually, they end up surrounded by people who have done the same thing as defending their egos is more important than understanding the truth, if it requires self-reflection.

The tarantulas of the Left and Right, having found success in their zero-sum attack on the Jewish realist, do not stop there. Once they have tasted the intoxicating power of scapegoating, once they have finished with the Jew, they inevitably turn on the rest of the populace. The same unconstrained power used to seize the property of the middleman is soon used to seize the property of anyone else who represents a challenge to utopia. The same utopian zeal used to purge the clannish minority is soon used to purge the unfaithful majority.

The death of the Canary is a signal that the society has lost the ability to govern itself. It has traded the covenant—the sacred, particular bond between individuals—for the system—the mechanical, devitalized control of the mob. By the time the rest of the miners realize they are suffocating, the air is already too thin to support them. To defend the canary is to defend the very oxygen of the Western mind: the belief that truth matters more than resentment, and that the tragic realist of any ethnicity or religion is the only one who can lead us safely out of the depths.

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In the first two sections of this series, I established that there is a difference in two major camps of thought on human nature. The two camps are best summarized by Thomas Sowell’s concept which he describes in his book, A Conflict of Visions. The Unconstrained Vision (utopian, progressive and idealistic) and the Constrained Vision (tragic and realistic).

One may well ask, “Ok, so what? Maybe I am an idealist. What’s wrong with that?”

Well, the “So What?” is that this utopian and idealistic concept fundamentally conflicts with the American vision. The vision of mankind utilized to inspire the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution is deeply rooted in a tragic vision of humanity. There is a presumption that mankind is fallen and needs guardrails against which to maintain direction towards the good, not just until he reaches utopia, but forever.

The American experiment was not built on the idealism of Nietzsche’s tarantula, but on Hebraic Realism. Even if you are a secular atheist, you can recognize that there is a philosophy the Founders followed that can be rationalized without revelation, and that philosophy is not idealistic in reference to humanity. Simply the assumption that man is imperfect and needs laws to check our irrationality is enough.

The Founding Fathers—Adams, Madison, and Jefferson—looked to the Hebraic Republic of the Old Testament as a primary model because it recognized that men are not angels, and power must be checked. This was not a mere philosophical preference; the Founders explicitly identified the Hebraic model as the indispensable blueprint for a stable society through these five pillars:

1. The Source of the Law

John Adams insisted that the Hebrews “have given us the law we ought to live by” and served as the primary force in civilizing the world. For Adams, the Constrained Vision required a moral anchor that only the Mosaic tradition provided.

2. The Fallibility of Man

James Madison argued that government is the “greatest reflection on human nature,” which is a concept found in Jeremiah 17:9 - The heart is deceitful above all things. Madison viewed human nature as fallen and fixed. This led to the necessity of checks and balance. If no man is a saint, the law must be built to withstand the weight of sinners.

3. The Mosaic Model of Republic

Thomas Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict the children of Israel led through the wilderness by a pillar of fire. He saw the American Revolution as a restoration of the Hebraic Republic. This ideas come from Deuteronomy 17, which mandated that even a ruler must be subject to the Law.

4. Covenant vs. Contract

The Founders replaced the fragile social contract of the Enlightenment with a covenant—a concept outlined throughout the Bible that frames up the entire narrative. In chronological order:

1. The Noahic Covenant (The Universal Law)

2. The Abrahamic Covenant (The National Promise)

3. The Mosaic Covenant (The Rule of Law)

4. The Davidic Covenant (The Eternal Kingdom)

5. The New Covenant (The Internalized Law)

A contract is like a dead formality whereas a covenant is a relationship, not only with a higher power, but with each other. Unlike a contract, which is a transaction of interests, a covenant is a sacred, permanent obligation. As Benjamin Rush argued, the Bible was the only foundation for a republic because it provided the virtue necessary to maintain the covenantal spirit without the need for a king’s whip.

5. The Defense of the Minority

This covenantal structure is the only thing that protects a minority from the tarantulas. the Bible in Exodus 23:2—“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil”—is the moral origin of the protection of the individual against the mob. It asserts that justice is an objective standard to be upheld, even when the consensus or the mob insists.

Conclusion

When anti-Semitism rises, it signals that this covenantal structure is being dismantled in favor of tribalism. Each tribe is being primed to take power and enforce their own idea of utopianism. Because the Jewish tradition introduced the concept of a transcendent law that checks earthly power, the proponents of the unconstrained vision must destroy the Jew to achieve total control.

An aspect of anti-semitism is an attack on the very idea of limited power. It is an attempt to challenge the tragic vision that retains us from utopian visions on both the right and the left.

The unconstrained vision is not merely another idea on the table, it is the very antithesis of the American vision and cannot exist within it without destroying it.

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Introduction

Again, Thomas Sowell wrote about something incredibly important when it comes to understanding anti-semitism. His book, A Conflict of Visions, was his favorite book, I believe, because he loved the history of ideas. And this book outlines dealing world views baed on something at the core of almost all other ideas: human nature.

Here I explore the fundamental views of human nature that Sowell describes and how they relate to Jewish thought, and how they conflict with utopian visions on the right and the left. Understanding this framework has gone a long way for me in understanding the roots of so many ideological conflicts that show up as political and social fights.

The Conflict of Visions and the War on Particularity

The reason the Jewish people function as a “canary in the coal mine” for the decline of Western civilization is not merely historical or economic; it is deeply philosophical. At its core, the friction between Jewish existence and its detractors is a clash of two irreconcilable worldviews described by Thomas Sowell: the Tragic (Constrained) Vision and the Utopian (Unconstrained) Vision.

Jewish thought is fundamentally a tragic philosophy. Hebraic ideas are not idealist, but realist.

It begins with the premise that human nature is flawed, fixed, and far from perfectible. In the Hebraic tradition, there is no “New Man” to be engineered by the State or a revolutionary movement. Instead, there is the Halakha—a framework of Law designed not to transform human nature into something angelic, but to manage a flawed humanity through discipline, boundaries, and ethical constraints. It is a worldview that prioritizes the real over the Ideal, acknowledging that life is a series of difficult trade-offs rather than a path to a friction-less paradise.

This realism is expressed most powerfully through particularity. The Jewish experience is rooted in the specific: a specific tribe, a specific family structure, and a specific covenant with the land. This insistence on the particular puts the Jew at direct odds with the two great idealisms of the modern world, both of which seek to dissolve the individual and the tribe into a monolithic, unconstrained mass.

The Utopian Left: The War of Equity

On the far-eft, the utopian vision is driven by the ideal of total equity and a borderless, classless world. To this “Unconstrained” mind, any group that maintains a distinct identity and achieves disproportionate success is not a testament to merit, but an irregularity that proves systemic injustice.

The Jewish realist is the ultimate obstacle to this dream. By succeeding within the existing tragic world through education, family stability, and professional excellence, the Jew provides a counter-narrative to the idea that the system is the sole arbiter of fate. Furthermore, the particularity of Zionism—the insistence on a specific national home for a specific people—is viewed as an affront to the left’s universalist fantasy. In this worldview, the Jew is cast as the oppressor simply because they refuse to disappear into a generic, universal humanity. They are the canary whose very existence signals that the left’s utopian equity cannot be achieved without the forced erasure of distinct success.

The Utopian Right: The War on Purity

Conversely, the utopian vision of the Far-Right is driven by the ideal of “National or Racial Purity. Their “Unconstrained” dream is one of organic, monolithic unity—a society where everyone is the same and loyalty is absolute to a single bloodline or soil.

To this mind, the Jewish Realist—with a history of internationalism, adaptability, and an identity that transcends borders—is viewed as a globalist and a danger to that view. The Jew represents a particularity that the Right cannot control or assimilate into its dream of total unity. The Right-wing utopian views the world as a machine that would work perfectly if only it weren’t for the outsider gumming up the gears. Just as the Left attacks the Jew for being “too successful” (an affront to equity), the Right attacks the Jew for being “too different” (an affront to purity).

The Horseshoe of Resentment

Ultimately, both the Left and the Right are “Tarantulas” in the Nietzschean sense. They use high-minded language—”Justice” on the Left, “Heritage” on the Right—to mask a deep resentment toward the Realist who lives outside their fantasies.

When a society begins to target the Jewish realist, it is a signal that the society has traded its tragic grip on reality for a utopian hallucination. It means the “Preachers of Equity” and the “Guardians of Purity” have joined forces to kill the Canary. They do this because the Canary’s song is a reminder that the world is complex, that excellence is individual, and that their utopian dreams are, in fact, abstract dreams of a world that never has nor ever will exist.

INTRODUCTION

Why is this so important? Why isn’t anti-semitism simply chalked up to another type of racism in a world that has been permeated with racism to one extent or another for all of history? Why does it occupy so much space in my mind? And it’s not as if I am simply reacting to the social media algorithm.

People I know very well, people who are educated and have letters after their names, have discussed this with me directly. They use terms like “apartheid state”, “genocide”, “ethno-state”, and insist that Jews get DNA tests to prove they are Jewish. They are the most difficult people to reach as their egos, fed by their educational attainment, will not allow them to believe that they have been manipulated by their own human flaws.

That’s what I’m exploring here.

The short answer: Anti-semitism is a symptom of a fatal flaw in human nature. It’s a psychological universal expressed as scapegoat targeting, described in socio-economic terms to hide its evil. It is a flaw that, if not addressed and guarded against, will destroy societies. It will, and has, caused the murder of millions while the guilty parties end up collapsing their own civilizations.

That fatal flaw is resentment.

This is the resentment Nietzsche named in his seminal work, Thus Spake Zarathustra in the section on tarantulas. It’s the hatred of “middleman minorities” Thomas Sowell described. It’s a universal reaction to the mirror in our faces which reveals our own inadequacies, if we see the reflection as a threat instead of a revelation of truth.

In the West, the Jew is the eternal canary in the coal mine. Their presence and success are the ultimate test of a society’s commitment to Sowell’s tragic vision—the belief that the world is flawed and must be managed by laws rather than transformed by ideals. When a society begins to gas the canary, it is signaling that it has abandoned the idea central to Western civilization: that humanity is inherently flawed and not capable of perfection. It is a signal that practical realism is giving way to idealism and utopian visions which ignore the nature of humanity. The death of the canary - the elimination of the scapegoat - is never the end of the tragedy; it is merely the signal that the oxygen of liberty has run out for everyone.

The true test of a society is not simply how it treats its minority populations, but specifically how it treats is successful minority populations.

What follow is part one of seven aspects of this issue I explore:

• Part I: The Universal Toxin - How this issue applies universally throughout human societies

• Part II: The Conflict of Visions - How utopian visions on the left and the right express this hatred

• Part III: The Hebraic Shield - The Founders’ vision and how it depends on Hebraic realism

• Part IV: The Dying Canary - What happens to societies as they reject reality for utopian visions

• Part V: The Stress of the Digital Mine - Some reasons why this is happening now

• Conclusion: The Path Back to the Tragic Vision - How we get back on the realistic track

• Addendum: The Schizophrenia of Civilization - The left-right lateralization of our brains and how that imbalance contributes to modern anti-semitism’s popularity via Iain McGilchrist’s theories

PART 1: The Logic of the Middleman Minority and the Mirror of Merit

Anti-Semitism is rarely understood for what it actually is: a specific manifestation of a global phenomenon. To see it clearly, one must strip away the local grievances of the moment and look at the underlying economic and psychological architecture. Thomas Sowell’s extensive research into “middleman minorities” provides the key. He argues that anti-Semitism is not a historical fluke, but rather the Western “flavor” of a universal human toxin—a predictable, recurring reaction to any minority group that thrives by navigating the complexities of the “Tragic Vision.”

The “middleman minority” is a category that includes the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Lebanese in West Africa, and the Ibos in Nigeria. These groups rarely own the land or the raw materials; instead, they provide “intangible” services. They are the financiers, the retailers, the wholesalers, and the brokers. They exist in the space between the producer and the consumer. In doing so, they perform a vital economic function, but one that is often invisible to the untrained eye. Because their work does not involve the physical “sweat of the brow” associated with farming or manufacturing, it is easily characterized by the majority as “unproductive” or “parasitic.”

(Here is Thomas Sowell’s original essay on middlemen minorities.)

The success of these groups is rooted in Economic Realism. They operate within the “Tragic Vision” of the world—a worldview that accepts that resources are scarce, that human nature is fixed, and that progress requires agonizing trade-offs. While the majority population may indulge in the “Unconstrained Vision”—believing that wealth is a natural state or that they are entitled to prosperity by virtue of being native to the soil—the middleman minority knows that survival depends on discipline. They save where others spend; they invest in education where others invest in consumption; they work sixteen-hour days to manage the risks that others ignore.

It is this very success that triggers the toxin of resentment. When a minority group arrives with nothing and, within a generation, outpaces the majority, they become a psychological mirror. Their achievement proves that the majority’s lack of success is not due to “the system” or fate, but often to a difference in behavior, culture, and trade-offs. For the majority, looking into this mirror is unbearable. To admit that the minority earned their success through merit is to admit one’s own relative failure.

To avoid the pain of this reflection, the majority retreats into the Utopian Vision. They begin to weave what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “web of the tarantula.” If the middleman has more than the native, the tarantula argues, it must be because they have stolen it. Wealth is viewed as a zero-sum pie; if the minority has a large slice, they must have taken it from the majority’s plate. This turns economic success into a moral crime. The realist virtues of the middleman—thrift, foresight, and adaptability—are reinterpreted as clannishness, greed, and shrewdness.

Anti-Semitism is the most persistent and sophisticated version of this reaction. Because the Jewish people have been the quintessential middleman minority in Western civilization for two millennia, the tropes developed to target them have become the blueprint for all such resentments. The conspiracy is the ultimate tool of the tarantula: it explains away the realist success of the minority as the result of a hidden, malicious ideal. It transforms the hardworking broker into a puppet Master.

In the end, this resentment is a rebellion against reality itself. It is a refusal to accept the tragic nature of the world, where some individuals and groups will always be more successful, more disciplined, or more adaptable than others. Anti-Semitism, and the broader hatred of middleman minorities, is the universal toxin because it is the ego’s way of murdering the truth. It is the attempt of the mediocre to pull down the exceptional, ensuring that everyone is equally “equal”—even if that equality means collective ruin in a mine where the air has grown too thin to breathe.

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In his seminal work The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist argues that our modern world is increasingly trapped in the “hall of mirrors” of the Left Hemisphere. This cognitive shift, “flattens reality into one single plane,” where the observer and the observed are treated as parallel, disconnected data points. This phenomenon isn’t just an academic observation; it manifests in how we argue about the most important human conflicts of our time, most notably in a recent debate between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray regarding the conflict in Israel.

The Debate: Calculation vs. Presence

The friction between Smith and Murray centered on a fundamental question: how do we actually know what is happening in a war zone? Dave Smith’s position represented the triumph of the flattened reality. From his perspective, the world is a series of propositions, historical data points, and logical deductions. To Smith, the calculation—the weighing of abstract rights, wrongs, and geopolitical theories—is sufficient. In this framework, physically being in a location is a variable that adds little to the final sum; if the logic is sound, the conclusion should hold regardless of where the observer stands.

Douglas Murray argued for the primacy of contextual embodiment. His insistence that visiting the region changed the quality of understanding aligns with McGilchrist’s view that reality consists of “inseparable facets of the single experience of a living subject.” For Murray, the intuitively understood cannot be captured in a white paper or a tweet thread. It is found in the atmosphere, the tension, the geography, and the interpersonal nuances that exist only in the living experience.

The Hemispheric Divide

To understand why these two men were talking past one another, we must look at the biological divide McGilchrist outlines. The two hemispheres of the brain aren’t just doing different things; they are envisioning different worlds.

The Left Hemisphere: The World as a “Map”

The Left Hemisphere’s primary function is to manipulate the world. To do this, it must simplify, decontextualize, and categorize. It prefers the abstract calculation that Smith championed. For the Left Hemisphere, a conflict is a series of if/then propositions. It thrives on:

• Linearity: Cause and effect laid out on a grid.

• Representation: A mental model or map that stands in for the actual thing.

• The Static: Treating a living, breathing history as a finished set of facts to be weighed.

When Smith argued that he could reach a reasonable conclusion through calculation alone, he was operating from a purely represented world. In this state, what should be intuitive becomes a matter of calculation. The Left Hemisphere believes the map is the territory, and therefore, visiting the territory is redundant—perhaps even a distraction from the purity of the data.

The Right Hemisphere: The World as Presence

The Right Hemisphere is concerned with understanding the world in its entirety. It handles context, metaphor, and betweenness—the relationships that cannot be reduced to bits of information. When Murray insisted on the value of being on the ground, he was defending the Right Hemisphere’s domain:

• Presence: The quality of a thing that can only be grasped when you are in its presence.

• Context: The realization that a fact changes its meaning depending on the atmosphere in which it is uttered.

• The Living Subject: The understanding that the observer is inseparable from the experience.

The Schizophrenic Flattening

The schizophrenic mind McGilchrist references is one where the Right Hemisphere’s grounding has been lost, leaving the Left Hemisphere to run its programs in a vacuum. This is the flattening Smith’s argument risks. By removing the living subject from the equation, the human element—the fear, the ancestral tie, the physical reality of the borders—is forced out of its context and accessed at “one remove only.”

As McGilchrist warns, this leads to reality being completely mis-understood. You can have all the correct data points and still be entirely wrong about the reality of the situation because you have lost the intuitive grasp of the whole.

Conclusion

The friction between Smith and Murray reflects the broader struggle of our age: the tension between a rationalistic world of calculations and a living world of context. If we believe that we can understand the most complex human tragedies purely through the flattened plane of the Left Hemisphere, we aren’t just being logical—we are, in McGilchrist’s view, suffering from a profound cognitive disconnection. Truth requires the calculation, but it demands the context.

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Did you only care about Iranian girls when you thought Israel or the U.S. killed them? Now that evidence is pointing to it being a misfired Iranian missile—that the regime killed its own citizens yet again—has your concern evaporated? It forces a difficult question: Do you have principles, or do you just have political preferences?

This isn’t an isolated observation; it’s a pattern of selective silence that I first felt personally during the January 6th Capitol riots. Several people close to me sent frantic text messages alerting me to the incursion at our nation’s Capitol. What struck me wasn’t the outreach itself, but the silence that had preceded it. These same individuals never once reached out during the numerous riots throughout the summer of 2020. There was no outreach when city blocks were seized, when police stations were burned, or when billions of dollars in damage and theft occurred across the nation. I found myself asking: Why now?

This dynamic is not restricted to domestic politics; it repeats on the global stage. I received direct messages the moment the United States began bombing targets in Iran. Yet, those same inboxes were silent when the regime being bombed murdered thousands of unarmed protesters in its own streets. Friends who decry “escalation” or “war” seemed entirely unfazed when tens of thousands of Iranian citizens were being slaughtered by their own government.

We see a similar pattern regarding Gaza and Israel. Countless voices decry the war in Gaza, citing the tragic loss of innocent lives. However, when ceasefires go into effect, the concern for those same civilians often evaporates. When Hamas—in an effort to re-establish power—was filmed killing “collaborators” among their own people, I never saw any of these same people criticizing Hamas for killing innocent civilians.

These inconsistencies suggest that the grievance isn’t actually about what these people claim it is. If the core principle were an opposition to political violence, then all political violence would be a cause for concern. If the principle were the protection of innocent civilians, then all innocent lives would be mourned, regardless of who pulled the trigger. The common thread tying this selective outrage together appears to be a redirected hostility towards the West or Western Civilization.

A curious clue emerged as I scrolled through footage of recent events.

In the celebrations following the confirmed death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the people in the streets were the Iranians themselves—both inside and outside the country. They were jubilant, dancing, and passing out flowers to police. They flew the flags of Iran, the United States, and even Israel. Conversely, the counter-protests against these actions consisted largely of a different demographic: older, Western individuals carrying professionally printed signs, but notably, no flags at all. Their movement was defined entirely by what they were against, rather than what they were for.

To be fair, I don’t believe these individuals consciously think they hate Western civilization. They are likely victims of modern algorithms that curate their reality. If asked, they would never claim a hatred of the West as their motivation. However, actions speak louder than words. If an individual only protests when the West or Israel act, but remains silent when atrocities are being committed against the very people they are claiming to want freedom for, their outrage is not based on a strictly held principle. It is a political preference.

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I remember the moment I realized this. While opening up a squash I grew, preparing it to roast in the oven along with salt, pepper, and the necessary spices and oil, I had trouble throwing away the seeds. I no longer saw the seeds as dispensable because I knew that throwing them away was akin to throwing away hundreds of potential new plants and thus new fruits. My vision of these seeds saw beyond time into the potential these seeds carried.

To a mind trained by the modern world, the seeds inside are a byproduct—matter to be discarded. But for those who have spent time with their hands in the earth, the act of throwing them away feels like a betrayal. This hesitation is a profound Right Hemisphere (RH) breakthrough. It is the moment we stop seeing the world as a collection of “things” and start seeing it as a field of potential.

There is nothing more human than that vision.

The Tyranny of the Snapshot

As I’m reading through The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist, my memories of his earlier book on this are sparking a lot of ideas and connections. In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist describes the Left Hemisphere (LH) as a “map-maker.” To create a map, the LH must decontextualize reality; it must freeze the flow of life into static snapshots.

For example, when an embryo or fetus is described as a “clump of cells,” we are witnessing the LH at its most efficient and most dangerous. By stripping away time, the LH reduces a living process to a static object. It asks, “What is this right now?” and, seeing only matter, concludes there is no inherent meaning. This is the essence of reductionism: the belief that the clump is the truth, and the potential is a fantasy. What’s most dangerous is the bit of truth in that vision, as there are of course a grouping of cells, but it’s what we omit from the truth that usually clouds our vision.

The Profane vs. The Sacred

This reductionist view is what Mircea Eliade calls the profane mode of existence. In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade argues that modern, secular man lives in a world of “linear time”— a series of accidental, meaningless moments. In this state, a seed is just a seed, and a body is just a machine.

Conversely, the sacred (an inherently RH function) recognizes that certain things act as portals to a deeper reality. To see a seed as potential is to see it as Sacred. It is to acknowledge that the object participates in an eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth. When we reduce life to clumps of cells, we are desacralizing the world, turning the life into a warehouse of disposable parts.

The Search for a Soul

This desacralization leads directly to the spiritual crisis Carl Jung describes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung noted that as we perfected our scientific mastery of the material world, we simultaneously suffered a starvation of the soul. By explaining everything as “just a” (just a cell, just a chemical, just a clump), we have stripped the world of its sacred nature. By specialization in the parts, we start to forget the context of the whole.

My experience in the garden—seeing the seed not for its current, literal mass, but for its potential—is exactly the kind of soul-searching Jung advocated. It is a refusal to let the LH’s literalism be the final word. It is an intuitive recognition that the “Who” (the person) is present within the “What” (the cells) from the very beginning.

Potential as a Shield Against Totalitarianism

The danger of the “Profane” snapshot view is not just spiritual; it’s social too. In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet describes how “Mass Formation” requires a scapegoat. To scapegoat a human being, the system must first de-personalize them.

The LH logic of “clumps” makes this easy. If a person is just a “variable” or a “set of cells,” they can be managed, used, or discarded according to the current institutional map. However, you cannot easily scapegoat a person whose potential you recognize. By seeing beyond the present to the entire arc of a life you make it impossible to treat the individual as a disposable object.

The Human Vocation

To stay human in an age of machines and bureaucracy, we must be careful and avoid living in the “Profane” snapshot. We must insist on the “Sacred” flow. Whether we are holding a squash seed or contemplating the mystery of a new life, our duty is to see time in its entirety. I can’t help but to think of the recent movie Arrival that saw the ability to see the world without time as the next step in human evolution, which was a gift from an alien world.

As Jung and Eliade suggested, we find our souls only when we reconnect with the archetypal and the eternal. By seeing and valuing potential, we protect the world from the “Emissary” (LH) who would turn it into a dead map. We ensure that our children grow up in a world where things aren’t just what they are, but what they have the divine capacity to become.

We are the only creatures on Earth who can look at a seed and see a forest; that vision is the very thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. To discard that vision is to discard not only humanity, but actual humans.

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Why would anyone take the time to read an old poem like Dante’s Divine Comedy?

Like many old books, I find the reward in how it transforms the way I view the world—the world of humanity or the nature of humanity, which are possibly one and the same.

What Dante does is take you on a trip through a dream; a dream of Hell, that rises up into Purgatory, and ends in Heaven. Throughout the dream, he has three guides: Virgil is the voice of Reason, Beatrice of Divine Revelation, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who represents Mystical Intuition. Three levels of Truth. Three levels of Justice. A dream that lays out—in Biblical style and prose—Biblical Justice and Biblical Truth.

What we can do is ask that question of Dante himself because he tells us very directly why this poem is so important:

“Happy are you, who here within our borders have entered now, to die a better man!”(Purgatorio, Canto 26)

As Dante travels beyond Hell and into Purgatory, there is a shift from eternal damnation toward hope—a hope that the human soul can bend toward the light of the good. To “die a better man” is Dante’s hope for himself and for his readers. By mapping out the territory of good and bad, he is providing a moral framework for us to understand ourselves, and to avoid the bad while aiming toward the good.

Modern people may simply say that there is no need for such an in-depth examination of humanity. “Just be kind” is a popular euphemism that people like to put on their t-shirts. And if you are lucky enough to live in a modern, Western nation, created by ideas that stem from great ideas like the ones Dante describes, then that is usually enough. Being kind is easy when you’ve never been hungry. But luckily for humanity—and tragically as well—life is much more complicated, and thus beautiful, than that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up and paint the picture of what this poem describes, which is a journey from Hell to Heaven, and from Reason to Revelation and beyond.

The Architecture of the Soul: A Blueprint of Dante’s Divine Comedy

Dante’s Divine Comedy is broken up into three sections, and each section—bar one for an introduction—has thirty-three Cantos, for a total of one hundred Cantos. A Canto is like a chapter but for extended poems. Here are the three sections and a short description of what they represent:

• Inferno (The Dead Will): A descent into an inverted funnel beneath the earth. It represents Justice without Mercy, where sins are categorized from simple lack of control (Incontinence) to the cold, calculated perversion of the mind (Fraud).

• Purgatorio (The Reforming Will): An ascent up a mountain on an island. It represents Justice with Mercy, where souls are not punished for their acts but are purged of the disordered desires that led to them.

• Paradiso (The Perfected Will): An ascent through the celestial spheres. It represents Grace, where the individual soul is harmonized with the universal order, moving from reason to revelation to direct vision.

Notice how each section, each place in the journey, is a representation of a type of human will. It presumes that humans have free will, at least to an extent, and have aimed that will in a specific direction. How we aim our will and attention—and really our love—is directly related to where our souls end up.

Just as there are three sections, there are also three guides. Those three guides represent different levels of Truth:

• Virgil – Human Reason: Virgil leads Dante through the Inferno and up the mountain of Purgatorio. As a pagan poet, he represents the highest level of wisdom a human can achieve through logic, ethics, and philosophy alone. Once Dante reaches Paradiso (Heaven), Virgil vanishes, as human reason has its limits.

• Beatrice – Divine Revelation: Beatrice represents theology and grace, guiding Dante through the celestial realms of Heaven. She helps to correct his intellectual errors because reason has its limits, and Truth requires more.

• St. Bernard of Clairvaux – Mystical Intuition: Even humanity open to revelation has its limits, and in order for Dante to see the final blinding light of God—to see the Trinity—St. Bernard helps him to make that jump and see the pinpoint of light at the center of the universe that contains all Truth. St. Bernard helps Dante to see what is beyond both reason and revelation and can only be seen by a divine being.

Lessons

There are so many things I learned from reading Dante’s Divine Comedy that I can understand why just one section could be the source of immense scholarship. Not only is it a map of the human soul, but the references Dante uses to describe the journey include historical figures that lay out the political and historical landscape of fourteenth-century Italy. Which brings me to my technique in reading this otherwise difficult book. What I did, and would recommend to anyone diving into this book, is use AI for a summary of each Canto prior to reading it. Specifically, I used Gemini.

This was probably one of my top use cases for the benefits of AI. Each Canto that it summarized for me included a description of who it was that Dante was referring to, which was incredibly helpful because, without some context, it would have made no sense to me. There are, of course, some historical figures I recognized like Achilles and Odysseus, but the particulars of the Popes and different rulers of the time, along with their political leanings and characters, would have been lost on me otherwise.

There is also the language barrier. Even though it’s translated into English, the style is reminiscent of the Bible in that it’s like reading Psalms. Put the historical references together with a bunch of “thous” and “thees” and it gets really confusing really quickly. Having an AI summary of what to expect made that a lot easier to navigate.

As far as specific theological or philosophical lessons, here are a few lines that stood out to me and the corresponding ideas they sparked:

The Psychology of the Raw Truth

As Dante moves higher, he encounters the reason for his journey. Beatrice explains that when he was lost, she tried to reach him through his own internal faculties, but his conscious mind had become too hardened to listen:

“So little, did he care, that even the visions with which in dreams I tried to call him back availed may not at all; he fell so low, that every means of working his salvation... had proven that they were of no avail.” (Purgatorio, Canto 30)

This highlights a profound psychological lesson: the unconscious mind—the realm of visions and dreams—functions as a raw exposition of our truth. It does not have the ability to lie. When we ignore these internal warnings, we fall “so low” that only a confrontation with the “lost in Hell” (the reality of our worst impulses) can save us.

The Limits of the Intellect

As Dante enters Paradiso, his guide Virgil (Reason) vanishes, replaced by Beatrice (Revelation). This transition addresses the narcissism of assuming that human logic is the only tool needed to understand the universe. Beatrice explains why the divine must be described using human metaphors:

“For only through the senses, can it grasp what later it makes fit for the intellect. Therefore, the holy scripture condescends to meet your faculties, and speaks of God as having hands and feet, but means it not.” (Paradiso, Canto 4)

This lesson in humility reminds us that we evolved for survival within a specific environment, not for understanding the entirety of all things. Our senses provide the “raw material” that the intellect later processes, but we must recognize that truths exist far outside our ability to sense or comprehend them.

The Foundation of Nature and Society

Dante’s framework then turns to the “Founding” of a just society. In Paradiso, Canto 8, he discusses the diversity of human nature, echoing what Thomas Sowell calls the “Constrained Vision”:

“And if the world below would fix its mind upon the true foundation, nature laid, its population would be virtuous. But ye will force him into a cloistered life... Thus do your footsteps leave the proper road.” (Paradiso, Canto 8)

Dante argues that civilizations fail when we force people out of their nature. A soldier forced to be a priest, or a leader forced into a cloistered life, creates a “disordered” society. A virtuous population is one where nature is allowed to flourish in its diverse forms, aligning individual purpose with the common good.

The Trap of Tribalism and Haste

In Paradiso, Canto 13, Dante provides a warning that feels remarkably modern, touching on the “self-love” that fuels political and social tribalism:

“It happens often times that one’s opinion, if formed in haste, will bend toward the false, and then self-love will bind the intellect.” (Paradiso, Canto 13)

When we rush to a conclusion to confirm what we already believe, our ego—our self-love—binds our ability to be rational. We grab onto false opinions like life preservers and would rather drown with them than admit we were wrong. Dante’s lesson is one of patience: assume incompetence or ignorance before malice, and wait for evidence before letting the intellect be “bound.”

The Ultimate Synthesis: Light and Love

The journey concludes in the Empyrean, the highest heaven. Here, the struggle of the will and the limitations of the senses are resolved in a state of “Transhumanizing” (Trasumanar):

“Light intellectual, with love transfused; Love of true good, transfused throughout with joy; Joy that surpasses every sweet delight.” (Paradiso, Canto 30)

This final lesson teaches us that while the intellect is a high human faculty, it is not an end in itself. Its best direction is not the manipulation of the world, but the understanding of “the good.” When intellect is transfused with love, it ceases to be a cold tool of logic and becomes a source of joy.

Conclusion

Much like the lessons of the Bible, or any book focused on the nature of humanity and how to navigate the world, these lessons are incredibly important. It did take a lot of work reading through the AI summaries and then each Canto, going back and forth with the book and Gemini, then asking additional questions when people show up whom I didn’t know. But it’s like getting a peek at the underlying code of Western civilization. I often feel that way after reading something so fundamental to the nature of our world. It’s like Neo in The Matrix when he is finally reborn and sees the code of the Matrix behind the structure of the world.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is part of that code.

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The Silence of the Campuses

As students return from winter break in early 2026, a strange silence hangs over American college campuses. Why are these spaces not erupting in protest against the slaughter of innocent civilians by an oppressive Iranian regime? What is the functional difference between the tragedies in Gaza and those in Iran?

For decades, we have been told that the protests spilling across Western cultures are fundamentally about fighting oppression. Yet, despite estimates of deaths in Iran ranging from thousands to tens of thousands since December 2025, the “outrage machine” remains silent. This discrepancy is a clue into the true aims of modern protest culture. While there is a target of oppression, it is a very specific type: Western Civilization.

The Selective Lens of Oppression

Protests in Iran target Islamic oppression, not the “Western, white supremacist, or patriarchal” structures that modern activists are trained to fight. Because certain Islamist movements position themselves against Western nations and ideals, they are often viewed as a “friend” through the logic of a common enemy.

This pattern of selective outrage repeats across the major social movements of the past decades:

• Domestic Discrepancy: The Black Lives Matter movement focused on police brutality specifically when the victim was Black. While George Floyd’s death sparked a global movement, Tony Timpa—who died with a knee on his neck in a nearly identical manner—remains unknown. The outrage was not triggered by the act of brutality itself, but by the identity of the actors involved.

• The Timing of Anti-Israel Protests: Protests erupted against Israel the day after they were invaded, long before they had a chance to militarily respond. Because Israel is viewed as an outpost of Western values, it is reflexively cast as the antagonist, regardless of the scale of the threats it faces.

• Institutional Bias: We see this in the media’s “verification” standards. NPR shares the numbers of dead in Iran but reminds its audience they are “unverified,” yet they rarely qualify the numbers produced by Hamas in Gaza. Similarly, the New York Times has highlighted children in Gaza with cerebral palsy as victims of starvation without investigating why their siblings appear healthy.

The Moral Audit: Reclaiming “Whataboutism”

In modern debate, “whataboutism” is treated like a conversational ejector seat—a way to end a discussion the moment a contradiction is exposed. But we need to stop viewing it as a fallacy and start seeing it for what it truly is: the ultimate diagnostic tool.

Consistency is the tax you pay for moral authority. If your outrage is conditional, it isn’t based on a principle; it’s based on a preference. When we ask “What about Iran?”, we aren’t deflecting from Gaza; we are auditing the integrity of the protester’s value system.

The Hierarchy of Silence

Values do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in a hierarchy. If an individual is incensed by one tragedy but indifferent to another of equal or greater scale, they have revealed their “hidden settings.”

The hard truth: If you only care about oppression when the “Western world” is the perpetrator, you don’t actually hate oppression—you just hate the West.

By using the “whataboutism” lens, we force a confrontation with the “Why?”

• Why does a life in Tehran weigh less than a life in Gaza?

• Why is a death at the hands of a Western police officer a global emergency, while a death at the hands of an Islamist regime is a “complex local issue”?

The Algorithmic Void

One reason we avoid these comparisons is that they reveal a hollow core. Most people aren’t operating from a reasoned moral philosophy. Instead, they are operating from a reactive, bottom-up algorithm.

Human beings like to believe their views are the result of logic, but most of what we think is a product of our environment and personality types. Reason is often used only after the fact to justify views we already hold. Truly reasoned stances require the grueling work of identifying a flaw in your own logic and having the courage to adjust.

The vast majority of us don’t do that work. If you asked most people, “What is at the core of your views on human nature?”, they would have no answer. Until we address that void, our protests will continue to be more about tribal identity than universal human rights.

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What if someone asked me to describe you? What would you like me to say?

I could say that you are a collection of organic systems surviving on water, oxygen, and a daily intake of calories. I could say you are a mammal, specifically of the Homo sapiens lineage that originated in East Africa. But how helpful would that be? If I were setting you up on a blind date, that description would likely only frustrate the person I was describing you to.

The reason that description is so annoying is that it describes all humans. There is nothing unique about it that distinguishes you as an individual. The same applies to how we describe groups of people, societies, or nations.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, celebrations have—rightfully—already begun. This nation has produced ideas and material realities that our Founders could never have imagined. Along with those celebrations come descriptions of our history that help frame our successes and our failures.

Famed economist Thomas Sowell argues that our political and moral disagreements often stem from two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world: the Unconstrained Vision and the Constrained Vision.

The popular trend of focusing solely on America’s “warts” is a product of the Unconstrained Vision. This view assumes that human nature is perfectible and that evils like poverty or prejudice are “problems” with specific “solutions.” From this perspective, the existence of slavery or genocide is seen as a unique, avoidable failure to meet a moral ideal. It compares the reality of 1776 to a perfect world that has never actually existed.

In contrast, Sowell’s Constrained Vision—which he also calls the “Tragic Vision”—assumes that human nature is inherently flawed and limited. In this view, there are no “solutions,” only trade-offs. If you view the world through this lens, you realize that for most of human history, the “default settings” for our species were poverty, tribalism, and forced labor.

When we ask, “Compared to what?” we are shifting from the Unconstrained Vision to the Constrained one. We stop comparing the Founders to a modern, idealized utopia and start comparing them to the actual world they lived in.

Slavery, genocide, and supremacy were not unique failures of the United States; they were the global norms. What was unique—what was the “miracle”—was the creation of a system specifically designed to restrain human nature’s worst impulses. It was a system that provided the tools to eventually dismantle the very evils it inherited.

What I find interesting is what makes the United States unique—in the same way I would want to know what makes you, dear reader, stand out from a crowd. In the case of the United States, what was it about our founding that produced a place where slavery, genocide, and supremacy became unacceptable? Why are those ideas, when held by an individual or group, now used as slurs instead of simple descriptions of reality?

What was it about our founding that created a nation that spent so much treasure and spilled so much blood to end slavery, and then moved to stop it in other nations? Why do we now presume slavery is an inherent evil when we were founded at a time when it was a worldwide expectation?

Why did we evolve from a place where only land-owning men could vote to a society that debates the voting rights of non-citizens? How did “white supremacy” shift from a presumed fact of the era to a devastating slur?

What, in particular, was it about our founding ideas that took us from being on par with other nations to leading the way? That is the truly interesting question.

When discussions about our founding arise, remember to ask: “Compared to what?” The beauty of human beings and their societies is not found in a static snapshot of any one time, but in the evolution of those conditions, the direction of that growth, and the seeds that sprout such profound change.

Likely in part because I just finished reading Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, this line in Northrop Frye’s The Great Code particularly stood out to me:

“but though Moses makes human mistakes, the voice of prophecy in itself is conventionally regarded as infallible...they [prophets] are rather people with what seems to be an open channel of communication between the conscious and the unconscious.” - The Great Code, Northrop Frye

Two specific, interconnected ideas emerge from this passage. The first is that prophecy is infallible; the second is that it comes from the unconscious mind.

The infallibility of messages from the unconscious mind is precisely how Jung treats visions and dreams. In his book on the unconscious, he frames his study by dissecting the numerous visions of Miss Frank Miller. Jung did not know Miller, an American writer, directly; he based his study entirely on her writings. What Jung does is take these visions as products of the unconscious to be understood on their own merit, assuming they point in a direction that helps explain the function of the unconscious mind.

This is similar to seeking to understand any other part of the body, or its function, rather than dismissing it. Everything has a meaning that points to some truth about us. We would never take a patient’s blood pressure and dismiss it as meaningless. Nor would we dismiss any other measurement or observation of the body. Jung does the same with visions and dreams, treating them as signals that point to a greater truth about the whole.

What the unconscious mind produces is free of the interpretive framework of our conscious mind, which seeks to explain the world in relation to us and often in our favor. Looking at the contents of the unconscious mind allows us to see the nature of humanity without that narcissistic filter.

This is why prophecies are infallible. It’s like saying that blood pressure, bodily temperature, and oxygen saturation are infallible. The only fallible thing is our interpretation of them.

Imagine being a physician taking a patient’s measurements: blood pressure, temperature, and SPo2 (oxygen blood saturation). You wouldn’t say any of these readings are “wrong” unless the tool used to measure them was malfunctioning. Pain is another measurement we now take, but its interpretive framework is the patient’s, just as the framework for blood pressure, temperature, and SPo2 belongs to the diagnostic tools. We never say the things we are measuring are themselves wrong; it is our interpretive framework that we question.

Jung treats the visions and dreams of humanity as signals no different than blood pressure or any other diagnostic measurement. It is our job to understand what these signals are telling us and place them in a context applicable to all of humanity. As Frye mentioned, Jung is facilitating a conversation between the conscious and the unconscious. The mistakes Moses makes come not from the fallibility of the prophecy—the product of his unconscious mind—but from his interpretation and application of those truths.

Modern, secular individuals no longer receive prophecies because we no longer listen to the products of our unconscious, dismissing them as noise instead of seeing them as signal.

“In the post-Biblical period both Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism seem to have accepted the principle that the age of prophecy had ceased, and to have accepted it with a good deal of relief.” - The Great Code, Northrop Frye

This is likely why we no longer live in an age of prophecy. We are still receiving the signals, but we no longer value them.

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I just finished Northrop Frye’s book on the Bible, The Great Code. In it were several lines he wrote that connected with other great authors and their deeply interesting ideas. When I see similar ideas coming from different brilliant people from different angles, it makes me think they are putting together something we should all pay attention to.

Introspection

“The same U-narrative is found outside the historical sections also, in the account of the disasters and restoration of Job and in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. This last, incidentally, is the only version in which the redemption takes place as the result of a voluntary decision on the part of the protagonist (Luke 15:18)” - Northrop Frye, The Great Code

Pay extra attention to that last line. Out of all the narratives of a fall and subsequent rise—hence the U-shape of the narrative describing a fall and then a rise—the only rise that comes from a decision by the protagonist is that of the prodigal son. Here is the verse from Luke:

“I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” (Luke 15:18)

Okay, well so what? Why is that significant? Because a huge portion of what Julian Jaynes describes as consciousness in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, is introspection: a reflective looking inward: an examination of one’s own thoughts and feelings. That means, according to Frye, the only case of introspection in the Bible’s main narratives occurs in the New Testament, and none of the previous stories of a fall then a rise occur because of individual thought or self-examination.

For example, the story of Noah’s flood happens without Noah looking internally to figure out whether or not to follow the command of God. He just does what the voice of God tells him. There is no discussion about Noah and his thoughts on the matter, as if he is wrestling with what to do and his own temptations to do otherwise.

It’s worth your time (five minutes) to read it from Genesis, chapter five through eight, and think about that very fact. Try to find something that Noah thought, or even said. It isn’t there. Throughout the entire story, Noah is somewhat of an automaton that simply follows the dictates of the voice of God and then relays it to his family, who follows Noah’s directions. There is absolutely no indication of introspection.

That’s an important difference compared to Luke 15:18, which starts with the word “I” and goes on to discuss a young man admitting his fault and deciding to make a change.

Introspection is Consciousness

Okay, so what? Why is that important and why should you care?

It’s important if you care to know what consciousness is or to understand when and how it arose and continues to develop. If you want to understand the disparities of progress across the world, this is part of the puzzle. If you care to understand how literacy changes our brain structures and how that maps across the world and throughout human development, this matters.

Jaynes’s theory of consciousness first describes what consciousness is not so we can understand how a complicated society of humans can exist without introspection. Here is a quick list (and I describe them in more detail in my review of Jaynes’s book here):

• Consciousness is not a copy of experience

• Consciousness is not necessary for concepts

• Consciousness is not necessary for learning

• Consciousness is not necessary for thinking

• Consciousness is not necessary for reason

• Consciousness is not located in your head

A quick summary of what consciousness is for Jaynes would be the space between behavior and stimulus. It’s the reflective part of us that views and rationalizes our behavior. It’s what narrates our behavior and at times, perhaps, can intervene between stimulus and behavior.

An animal like a hound dog that reacts to the scent of a raccoon and immediately changes its behavior doesn’t have a thought process that includes introspection. And many of our own behaviors are just like that. I don’t purposefully increase my heart rate when I am in the woods and hear the sound of deer moving among the brush, crunching leaves. But there is a post-hoc rationalization that occurs with humans where we look back at ourselves and rationalize and/or explain our own behaviors. But who is it that is looking back at ourselves? To look at yourself, there has to be a separate “you” to do the looking.

This is introspection. It’s the idea that there is an abstraction of your own self outside of your physical self that can observe your own actions as if you were a separate being. Hopefully, that abstracted self can also intervene between stimulus and behavior to change our own reactions in real time. This isn’t always necessary nor would it be possible for all behaviors, but for major decisions, it would be great if we could sometimes choose something based on the best long-term outcome.

What Jaynes describes is a stark difference between the literature of our past and more recent literature that gradually increases in the amount of introspection, much like the difference between Noah and the prodigal son. His explanation for this is in part due to our use of metaphorical language and the written word. The written word specifically takes our language—which is our thought—and puts it outside of our bodies as a type of literal abstraction. Could this be the key to how consciousness developed?

Developing “I”

Dr. Joseph Henrich, in his book, The WEIRDest People in theWorld: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, describes a similar process. According to Dr. Henrich, the spread of literacy—through a need and duty to read the Bible sparked by the Protestant Reformation—increased literacy rates that map directly onto the spread of Protestantism. Catholicism also had this effect but to a lesser extent.

There are many measurable differences in how people in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies exist as compared to others. This maps directly onto the spread of literacy and has also shown differences in brain structure, to include, most notably, a thickening of the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is a dense network of neural tissue that separates our left and right hemispheres and allows transmission across but also inhibits transmission.

Jaynes’s concept is that this inhibition, which may be a function of a thicker corpus callosum, is what helps to separate stimulus from behavior and create a mental space between stimulus and behavior.

Conclusion

After reading Jaynes’s book and the subsequent books written based on his theories by authors in the Julian Jaynes Society, it was incredibly interesting to come upon a much more mainstream author describing some of the same ideas.

When several brilliant people come to similar conclusions from varying angles, it makes me think that they are on the right path. And that path is pointing to something revolutionary. The work of Frye, Jaynes, and Henrich, taken together, suggests that our most intimate possession—our own consciousness—is not a timeless gift, but a learned skill, developed through the power of abstract language and literacy, that literally reshaped our brains.

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The Bible’s Enduring Influence

A friend of ours recently asked me why I was interested in visiting the Museum of the Bible during our trip to Washington D. C. I tried to explain my interest in Western civilization and how it is fundamentally tied to the ideas put forth in the Bible, so visiting a museum that chronicles the basis for those ideas was exciting for me. I’m not sure if it made sense, because most non-church-going, modern, secular people don’t understand how much their worldviews are shaped by the Bible. So for them, it’s not interesting because they see no relevance to their lives. But Frye gets it, and that is in part why he wrote this book.

“I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads.”

This realization led Frye to start a course on the English Bible where he taught at the University of Toronto as a bridge to understanding, in a fundamental way, English literature and Western civilization. He taught a version of this class there for forty-four years. I can’t imagine what it would be like to take a course like this from someone so knowledgeable and passionate. Well, maybe it would be like taking Dr. Jordan Peterson’s course on Maps of Meaning.

“the course turned into a presentation of a unified structure of narrative and imagery in the Bible, and this forms the core of the present book.”

This is what Frye’s book has become: a way to understand the Bible as a coherent group of myths that form a shape and cadence which have both a beginning and an end. The beginning is a type and what are called antitypes which fill the subsequent pages, making the Bible extremely referential to itself and its own ideas. Adam is a type, and Christ is the antitype. The Exodus is a type, and the passion of Christ is the antitype. I’ll explain this in more detail shortly.

The fundamental theme of what the Bible considers human nature and its cycles is presented in multiple narrative forms that move through time and culminate in the Revelation at the end of time. Creation is the fall, and the Revelation is the rise of humanity that happens as a whole and for each individual throughout their life, and also describes the totality of each individual life arc.

I’d like to present a couple of the core ideas in Frye’s book that helped me understand the Bible in its structure and cadence, then discuss something very specific I picked up that made me think deeply about the development of consciousness itself and how the Bible describes it. The discussion of the development of consciousness will be in a follow-up essay for the sake of brevity.

Myth as Analogy

“As a god is a metaphor identifying a personality and an element of nature, solar myths or star myths or vegetation myths may suggest something of a primitive form of science. But the real interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature.”

This (page 37) reminds me of my thoughts while reading The Origins of the Unconscious by Jung. It’s not that our myths explain nature; it’s that our myths explain us. As we become able to abstract, we can look back at ourselves and use our language to describe the contents of our unconscious and creative narratives to explain what it means to be human.

Rational materialists (modern-day scientifically minded people) keep interpreting myths as a means for man to understand nature because rational materialists seek out an explanation for nature. They are imposing their interests on the minds of ancient humans instead of figuring out what interested those ancient humans.

Flood myths are not created to explain floods. They explain something about the human mind and only use floods as an analogy for ourselves. Seeking out ancient flooding that destroyed cities or villages or even entire civilizations is not the means to understand what a flood myth is about, at least not on its own. The real flood can be used as an analogy for the fall of man and then the subsequent rise and recalibration of an entire society or an individual. But the flood itself is not the core interest or why stories of deluge are so popular.

Continuous Fall and Rise

Progressive ideas assume that there is some better version of our world that we should be striving for. But why? Where does this assumption come from? Maybe this is as good as it gets. Don’t dare say that in front of a progressive, as this is antithetical to their entire worldview. But why? Where does this idea come from? Why do they assume there is something better than what currently exists?

“For believers in progress in the democracies, contemporary events are proceeding toward their own antitypes in the future, toward a state of human existence that will make what is now happening intelligible as a series of signposts pointing in that direction. For Marxist and other revolutionaries, a worldwide revolution is the central future event that will constitute the antitype of history as a whole.”

This is a great example of how even those who are unfamiliar with the Bible or outright reject it still frame the world in a way shaped by the very book and concepts they reject.

What Frye does is outline the “U-shape” of salvation history throughout the Bible as a means to understand the individual myths as well as the entire narrative structure. The overall structure starts with the fall, where Adam and Eve become aware of themselves and no longer live in the bliss of the Garden of Eden. The Exodus naturally follows as humanity is lost in the desert, no longer having a structure to follow and seeking direction. The gospel is a movement back upwards towards the original state culminating in Revelation, which is a place of renewed Eden—a new Jerusalem.

Within this entire narrative structure of a fall, being lost in the desert, and then a rise back up, are several versions of a fall and rise within the larger narrative.

This is what is meant by the idea of a fall and rise for individual people that applies to their lives in numerous situations throughout, to their lives as a whole, and to our societies as a whole. This one movement of a fall and rise describes every story in the Bible and the Bible as a whole, which ties it together as one concept applicable to any human situation. Recognizing that pattern is what helps us tie ourselves into the arc of humanity as a whole, and brings to us the wisdom of the ages.

“Wisdom, as noted, is not knowledge: knowledge is of the particular and actual, and wisdom is rather a sense of the potential, of the way to deal with the kind of thing that may happen.”

Typology

Arguably the most important concept, typology is what links multiple events in the Old and New Testaments. It tells the story of the entire Bible as the same underlying story told in numerous different occurrences throughout the complete narrative.

There are two categories in typology: type and antitype. A type is an event, person, or object from the Old Testament. An antitype is a corresponding fulfillment of that type in the New Testament. Several examples abound throughout the Bible and this quote from Frye’s book is worthy of examining in full:

“Moses organizes the twelve tribes of Israel; Jesus gathers twelve disciples. Israel crossed the Red Sea and achieves its identity as a nation on the other side; Jesus is baptized in the Jordan and is recognized as the Son of God...Israel wanders forty years in the wilderness; Jesus, forty days. Miraculous food is provided for Israel and by Jesus for those gathered around him...The law is given from Mount Sinai and the gospel preached in the Sermon on the Mount. A brazen serpent is placed on a pole by Moses as preservation against the fatal bites of ‘fiery serpents’; this brazen serpent was accepted by Jesus as a type of his crucifixion...Moses dies just outside the Promised Land...and the Promised Land is conquered by Joshua. The hidden link here is that Jesus and Joshua are the same word“

Understanding this concept also helps us to understand why Frye thought it so important for his students to understand Biblical stories in order to understand English literature. English literature is then created by people who were raised on a worldview shaped by these narratives and structure, so they too use those ideas in their own writings.

The tragic story of King Saul, who fell into madness and ended up consulting the Witch of Endor, reminds us “that Shakespeare must have studied the account of Saul with considerable care before writing Macbeth.” Frye examines numerous styles and stories that hark back to Biblical themes.

Conclusion

And how could it be any other way for any of our stories? A civilization that evolved because of literacy, which grew from a need to read the Bible, could hardly be anything but shaped by the Bible. Not just its individual stories, but the worldview that comes from it and the manner of communication it deploys.

Now this is not the first book I have read that examines some of these themes, but it has been the most technical. It took me more than a month to read it because it is so dense. But, I took a lot from it and have a much better handle on the technical and deeper aspects of the Bible’s connection to our civilization.

Would I recommend it? Yes, but only to someone who has already explored some of these concepts and is wide open to these ideas.

For a lighter version of the effect of the Bible and its ideas, I would recommend Vishal Mangalwadi’s books, The Book That Made Your World and This Book Changed Everything. Mathieu Pageau has written about this with a book that is somewhere in-between Frye and Mangalwadi’s called The Language of Creation. Pageau’s book would be a great way to ease into some of these concepts and open up the reader to a new way of thinking necessary to understand human mythology and narratives.

There was an interesting link to how the prophets in the Bible are explained that ties into some of the ideas of Dr. Julian Jaynes that I will flesh out in the next essay. Basically the idea of prophecy as a means to communicate with the unconscious really reminded me of Jaynes’ theories and fit in with Fryes’ concepts as well.

Thanks for reading and I’ll post the video version in our Substack notes shortly. Cheers!

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