Transhumanism: On the Advantages of Writing as a Man
Utterly erase the memory of Amalek
By: Reuven Bilhah
Gender Revolution: The Solution to Hebrew's Sexmaniacs
(Source)
I remember the first time I wrote in the masculine form. I thought it would be interesting to see the world from an opposite perspective, at a low cost, and I even opened a male profile in the ultimate battle of the sexes arena: a dating site. And what did I discover? That there is no transformation more liberating to consciousness than liberation from the gendered point of view (recommended exercise). For some reason, all the shackles imposed on us by man - as poor, as Mizrahi [Translator's note: Jews of Middle Eastern or North African descent], as Black, as women, as natives of Netanya, as underprivileged, as minorities (and sorry if I'm offending a victim group I didn't mention!) - are perceived as constraining and harmful, and even as prejudices and primitive social structures that must be overcome. But the shackles imposed on us by nature are perceived in the secular world as our identity, and are adopted without reservation, simply as who we are. I am a woman! I am Black! I am a cat! Not to mention, for example, the very fact of our having a body, or our existence in the present time. It is precisely the most radical possibilities of freedom that are never raised as a banner of struggle by freedom activists, but perhaps only by literary people, and in the age of realism and autofiction - even that less and less. And all this, precisely when technology allows us to free ourselves from our (random and unoriginal) identity more and more. We are becoming more and more concrete, exposed, documented, categorized (I'm an Eastern cat!) and photographed, exactly when we could disappear, dissolve, become a stream, words. Why?
Was it always like this? Once we had a soul (or nine), which could reincarnate in the opposite sex, in a dog, in a mouse, or even in an inanimate object. We were a complex structure of NRN ChY [Translator's note: Hebrew acronym for different levels of the soul in Kabbalah], not just a body. When we were still one of God's modes - we didn't feel the need to replace God either. Does the currently insatiable need for people to judge others on Facebook not stem from a desire for a substitute for the existence of a judge from above? After all, what are we demanding? Exactly what God once provided - justice. If possible in life, and if not - we'll settle for posthumous retribution, or for slaughtering cows (and bulls) and smashing idols, if we are idol worshippers. If there is historical justice - let it appear immediately! Because if there is no belief in the soul of man - then there is the name of man. There is verbal discourse, which is the judge.
This is not just a secular disease. The same righteousness privatized to the individual also causes religious people to judge others instead of God - and isn't this a sign of loss of trust and faith in the divine perspective itself? And if the divine, all-encompassing perspective is lost to us, instead of replacing it with the perspective of discourse, of what-will-they-say, of the language system and media chatter, everything called lashon hara [Translator's note: evil speech or gossip in Judaism], wouldn't we want to build a system of good rewards? After all, bad rewards are not so effective on humans, and they mainly create hostility and not learning. While good incentives are better even for eradicating bad behavior, the best way to deal with which is not to deal with it, but to distance oneself from it: Turn away from evil - and do good. In short, wouldn't we want to build a learning system?
What is the most important lesson for a teenager to learn, which we currently do not teach? It's called basic neurological education - and it goes something like this: The human brain is a very complex learning system, far from evolutionary optimization. It's not a dolphin's fin that has reached a perfect shape. Almost every person has different quirks in different parts of the system. It can be in facial recognition or a weak sense of smell, but it can be in any area and any neurotransmitter, including the most emotional and basic ones. Therefore, the first thing to know is that people can be very different from you even if you speak the same language - not only in their knowledge and understanding, but in their method. "The reasonable person" is a narcissistic fiction. Don't put yourself in anyone's place - even if you reach their place. About a third of the population suffers from a significant brain disorder that greatly affects their ability to realize potential, and about a tenth (not a few!) are really psychos (this is the statistic of personality disorder in the population). And at the extremes, although it's a phenomenon of one in a few dozen - people can be completely psychotic, off the scale. You really don't want to get close to these people. Not as partners, not as bosses, not as friends, not as in-laws, not as associates, not in business, and not as leaders. Marry a guy from the other two-thirds, otherwise you'll get it with the kids too. There's always a genetic component to this. On the other hand, there isn't always a gender component. If you just open a profile of the opposite sex on a site - your horizons are guaranteed to expand. Homework for building a home.
In addition, changes in the adult brain are really slow, relative, and tend to revert back to the same patterns. It's not really a flexible learning machine. It's built for intellectual flexibility, and a person can learn many new skills and knowledge, but not for emotional, personality, or processing ability flexibility: the brain's method changes little and very slowly. Intelligence is not a physical constant, but it is certainly more or less constant in a person's life. The software data will change, but the processor will change only a little, and so will the operating system. Don't believe in psychological treatment, in change, in love that conquers all - believe in the brain. In psychological compatibility from the start. Humans are capable of very little psychological learning, as their psychology is mostly built on pre-human programming in deep areas and circuits in the brain (all kinds of nuclei). A system is not built to change its own motivations, motives and impulses. Instead, take advantage of the human cortex's ability, especially the prefrontal, to learn. You don't have a more developed emotional world than an elephant or a whale. It's only your learning that's more developed.
In other words, what are humans? They're not people. They're variations on the human brain. We're all some kind of learning machine full of bugs, modes of that ancient evolutionary learning, and modes of man. It's not personal if someone is against you - that's how they are. Built. That's their brain. You're messed up in other ways, perhaps (hopefully?) less harmful to others. What has changed and developed over time? Not the brains. People are born with the same neurological variations and differences, again and again, generation after generation. Where does learning take place? Not in the person himself (he dies in the end), but in the primordial internet of man - in culture. As a human, evolution is not relevant to you. You got the brain you got. Generally speaking, it's a waste of your time to fight it, just as it's a waste to fight your body. You have a physiology of a fat person - so you're fat. You're dark-skinned - so you're Black. Born with a tail and whiskers? Maybe you're a cat. You can only free yourself from yourself in culture. Only in words. For example in literature. Only there can you be a dog. Or a man. And only there does significant learning take place. It's worth shifting the focus to what does change. It's not your brain that gives you freedom - it's culture. Only in it does real freedom exist, and real learning, and only in it (surprisingly) does even justice after death exist. This afterlife is called canon, and paradise - high culture.
And how do we promote cultural learning? Not by punishing the idiots. The conformists. The boring ones. It's a waste to deal with them - turn away from evil. But by positive reinforcement and incentive for cultural progress. Every time I mention Kant, I'm not just name-dropping, but choosing to admire him, to continue his soul (even in the very fact that I chose to mention Kant here, and not say Hegel). All the fools from history, the mediocre writers, the righteous bores - can simply be forgotten. No need to punish. What a liberation! No need to punish anyone. No need to criticize anyone. Learning will forget them on its own. Learning is God and it is the supreme judge. It's enough that we mention the great artists, and read the eminent writers, and thus ensure their afterlife. The mention of the souls of the wise and righteous - is the continuation of their souls. He who brings a matter in the name of its sayer - brings redemption to the world. Therefore, not everything is personal. In fact, nothing is personal. Because there are no people. There are only brains, some more successful, some less. The idea of the individual is a (cultural) fiction and therefore one can only refer to the cultural contribution. It doesn't matter if Kant fulfilled the categorical imperative - he invented it. One can bet that in the next thousand years, learning machines much more sophisticated than the messed up and uninstallable human brain will walk here. Then maybe we can talk about optimization. It's a waste to focus now on straightening a crooked tree, instead of planting a new tree, which will be a more successful mode of the learning god. Learning is Spinoza's updated god, and we are all modes of learning.
What should be done in literary or cultural criticism? Praise something that hasn't received the praise it deserves. If you've clarified a spark from the selection - tell the world. How do we know that the learning god works, and it's not an idol? Through the fact that the cultural canon works. Agreement, not disagreement, is the root of learning. The desire to cling to the personal is a primitive bias and a cognitive relic of hunter-gatherer society, where it was very important to get back at Moishe. In the verbal society of Facebook, everything will be forgotten anyway. It's a waste of energy to deal with Moishe. The moment there is no learning - nothing has long-term meaning. The philosophy of language may have known how to care for meaning, but not for meaningfulness, and when there is no future meaning, even the present meaning is worthless. All the literary-artistic discourse today is of zero value, because it is discourse and not a learning system (unlike the past, when the system was built differently. This is not related to the loss of the center but to the loss of the algorithm). And unlike all kinds of theories of reception and rejection and power and institutions - the value of all these in the long term, the learning term - is ridiculous.
Discourse is for the mediocre, as an intermediate mediating and averaging system, and its results are mediocrity, and all the thought about discourse as a power system is so disconnected from the zero power of language on reality and on the future. What influences? Methods. Innovations. Breakthroughs. Learning directions. Therefore, your level of interest in what doesn't interest you, that is, what you don't consider worthy of future engagement, should be non-existent. It's a waste to invest a single second in Bibi [Translator's note: nickname for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister]. He will fade. He is a distinct man of language, of discourse, and not of learning. His power is in his mouth, and not in leading a method or even a move, let alone any innovation, as opposed to a neologism (verbal). He sells pickles. Bibi is a distinct leader of the philosophy of language, and therefore he is entirely focused on what will be said in the media (to the point of madness and crime). That's why he's also so successful on Facebook, which is a distinct media of the philosophy of language. Even the hand got meaning in it only as a sign - like. And the resemblance to the Colosseum, with the instincts of watching blood amusing the bored masses, is not accidental. This is the archetype. We haven't seen ketchup!
So what am I doing on Facebook? The most common response I get on Facebook is: TL;DR [Too Long; Didn't Read]. There are people who just write TL;DR. And there are those who invest in a long response whose TL;DR is TL;DR, and there are quite a few who even invest in special TL;DR gifs. At first, the need to express the TL;DR seemed very strange to me. You didn't read - you didn't read. Why, actually, do you need to declare it? Does the very length of the text cognitively humiliate you? After all, the TL;DR argument is actually quite strange, since any non-Facebook text I read is much longer than any "Bilhah post" (well, okay. Most of them), and in fact the argument sounds more like its opposite: "I haven't read (a book in two years) - too long (for my poor brain)". The social and cultural hostility to long texts is certainly an issue here, as Facebook is the home turf of low culture, and it is not polite to dirty the living room with a text more complex than a carpet. But some of the TL;DR shouters still tag their friends to read the text and TL;DR it for them, as if the anxiety that they are unable to read grips them, and then if someone TL;DRs for them in a stupid sentence - they thank him wholeheartedly and are relieved. That is, as if the purpose of the TL;DR is broader than any specific text (which was not read of course): to find justification and alibi for the fact that one does not *need* to read, that there is no need for this thing called reading (and the anxiety is that there are indeed things that need to be read in the world). Funnier than them are those who ask me to shorten the text, or to TL;DR it for them. These responses are so common that I considered responding to stupid posts with "Too Short; Didn't Read" (but my time is too precious - I didn't respond).
The biggest (and strangest) mistake that the TL;DR people (formerly the People of the Book) make is the assumption that I wrote the text for them. As if someone would invest in writing such a text for "Facebook glory", discourse, or communication with another person. My interest in communication is zero, and the thinking that the purpose of a text is communication doesn't hold water, and probably doesn't produce particularly excellent texts either (although probably very short ones!). Just as a work of art is not visual communication, so I write my texts for myself, and it seems to me that this is true for the other writers on the site (which is closed to comments, and opposes the discourse of comments and talkbacks. Does anyone still believe in discourse after Facebook?). Writing is a way to develop ideas and evolve, that is, a learning method. And publication is an invitation to anyone interested, that is, to whom it is relevant to the root of their soul, to follow the internal development of ideas in Bilhah, that is, to learn a way of thinking, and perhaps develop it further in their own products. The publication is for the sake of general learning (or if we want a more pompous name - culture), and not for any specific person. It's really not personal and not an issue. And not discourse. It's learning.
And what do I get from Facebook? Like 90% of people (that is, like the normal person) I don't respond (what motivates people to respond when a post has a half-life of two hours?), and sometimes I clarify sparks. I edit the "Posts of the Week" section and upload quality content that came to me from Facebook (and sometimes instead of responding). And I wish every week even one post would come to me that's worth uploading to the pantheon of Posts of the Week. And like everyone else, I pray for the destruction of Facebook, and for the removal of the kingdom of evil from the earth speedily in our days, amen. Existence on Facebook is existence in exile, and as such it is from the outset a regrettable necessity, expected to suffer injuries, blockages, lynchings, pogroms, and confinement in a ghetto. And the real land, to which I always prefer to return, is The Degeneration of the Nation. Because the site is not a means of communication - but a means of learning. A home for the students of the late Netanyahite teacher, for cross-fertilization and development of ideas, forms of writing and learning theory. You are invited to follow the development of the school in real time, with developments over about two years already documented in it in hundreds of thousands of words, in every possible field of knowledge. Too long - didn't read.