The End of Current Affairs vs. The End of History
A summary of the column - and a summary of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. The cat responds once and for all to all posts and all comments in her feed since time immemorial.
TL;DR: Too short, didn't read
"Because he excluded himself from the community - he denied the fundamental principle"
The Ethiopian protest. The rape of the girl. Bibi. Effi Naveh's phone. The rape on the island. Rabbi Peretz's statement on conversion therapy. Bibi. Barak's return. Trump's tweet. The statement about the Halachic state (whose?). Feiglin's rise. The Russian plane. Bibi. Feiglin's crash. Some nonsense from Benny Ziffer. Ayelet Shaked as the new promise of the New Right. Gantz's sexual harassment. Lieberman looking for a Chief of Staff. Bibi. Ari Shavit resigns/apologizes/whines that his apology didn't receive due respect (replace with the harasser of the day). Occasionally: something with Gaza. The surrogacy storm. The earthquake. Bibi (already mentioned?). The Druze protest. A new book by Yuval Noah Harari. The housing crisis. Climate denial. Something else with gays. Something else with sex (Gantz's phone?). Bibi.
Think it'll be better here after Bibi? Think again. The public arena has become in recent years an echo chamber for professional noisemakers (Bibi and Trump are just Facebook and Twitter imitators of Chávez and Berlusconi, the inventors of the format in the television era). The quiet won't return to our lives with the replacement of the noisemaker - because the echo chamber has changed. Now - it echoes much shorter frequencies. That is: Bibi isn't to blame. You are to blame. Bibi is a (talented, obsessive) noisemaker who adapts himself to your internal frequency. And you've long since stopped listening to the bass, let alone developments in harmony. Current affairs have replaced history.
What caused the change in external frequencies? First and foremost - your internal world. Facebook, like Bibi, is a (talented, obsessive) noisemaker that adapts itself to the frequency of the masses (what's called in sanitized and supposedly individualistic language - the user). And it turns out that this frequency is about a day long, or sometimes an hour - the time it takes for a post to be pushed from the wall to eternal oblivion. If Facebook were built so that the half-life of a post was a week or a month (or a year!) - public and cultural discourse would look completely different, and different voices would spread much further within society, allowing for a more effective, multi-voiced, much higher quality discussion, and perhaps even with harmony and internal development. When each post lasts for a minimal time, the result is cacophony and a simian shouting competition - not a choir. Again and again/the urgent/defeats the important.
Just as being creates consciousness - the architecture of media creates public consciousness. The specific contents are already a result of the medium's structure - and they are not to blame for the collapse of the Western order. Democracy and its culture as a story, as a multi-character and complex novel (and ideological depth!), have regressed to a picaresque and even episodic and changing structure, which is an especially inferior and primitive type of plot: the yellow scandal of the day that excites you (until tomorrow morning). When the king didn't change (in principle), the story frequencies were much longer and there was stability and therefore meaning. Therefore, the legacy of democracy - and an unexpected result of it - is material prosperity at the cost of spiritual pollution. The most inferior current affairs ("news") have taken over the consciousness of many good people (the feed, the public, and not a few people you simply wonder about), at the expense of culture, science and art. That's why in Germany and Russia unique culturalism grew - because they were late in the processes of democracy. And today, news has been adopted as glasses giving meaning to the world - and therefore in a Kantian inversion - as categories of thought. And what a miserable thought this is (and what miserable art it produces!).
Turning current affairs into "morality" (what's called "ideology") also allows even the most refined and intelligent intellectual to become addicted to this garbage (because morality is "important"). As is known, the most important trick of the evil inclination is to disguise itself as the good inclination. The immensely powerful complex of state-democracy-press-current affairs-morality is the greatest enemy of human consciousness and culture in our time - and strangles them with intensity. Hence the enormous hostility that this monster - the embodiment of the [Translator's note: Sitra Achra, a Kabbalistic term for the "other side" or forces of evil] in our era - arouses in the writer of this column. In fact, I'm usually helpless in the face of my feed and the spiritual world reflected in it (not to mention mass media). The newspaper has migrated from its proper place - the cat's litter box - to the first breakfast bowl of the morning, when the brain wakes up fresh from sleep.
The important question today is not whether we can go back, but whether we can enjoy the democratic material prosperity, which allows the creation of ideological universes (like "The Degeneration of the Nation" for example), without the spiritual pollution that exterminates such universes. This column was a feline experiment in writing in the enemy's genre, namely in the newspaper genre. The cacophonous world, lacking in low and deep frequencies, a world of jarring noise, namely your world - was never our world, the world of cats. Current affairs and journalistic writing don't interest us - the purpose of this writing experiment was to understand you, to go with the flow of the Facebook feed, and to pull survivors out of the hollow daily storm. But it's hard to persist in engaging in a field that isn't interesting, and in cynical writing in the publicistic genre. For that, you have Bibi, who has an inexhaustible internal engine to interest you, to excite you, to stir you up. What will you do without him? You'll find a new Bibi. I promise. Therefore: don't worry. Bibi is a metaphor, he is the inner void at the center of the storm - and the inner void isn't going anywhere. A scandal goes and a whirlwind comes - and Bibi forever stands.
My personal recommendation is to read the press half a year after the events occur, as a noise filter. It would also be preferable to read Facebook half a year after the posts were written, if it were technically possible. What has no value after half a year - also has no value in real time, and life is too short for it, and also too short for writing about Bibi (what's its relevance in another half year, except as a symbol of an era?). Meanwhile, until the world changes, one can enjoy the rare period of material abundance in which we happen to live, and engage in eternal life instead of hourly life. To curl up in the cat basket - and delve into
the writings of the great Netanya philosopher
, which are the last word in the field of human thought, or into the writing of the Circle, which is the last word in the field of prose. The amount of content on this site is equivalent to a thick book. Your law is better to me than thousands of likes and posts.