We Must Not Surrender to Corona Terrorism

For years, the left claimed that terrorism couldn't be defeated - and yet we defeated terrorism. Now they're saying again that we can't defeat corona and that there's no solution through force, but that eventually we'll reach the negotiating table. But unfortunately, there's no escaping the bitter truth, even if it's less prettified and attractive than the naked truth: We must not negotiate with a terrorist organization. Yes, it's time we stop underestimating the corona organization and understand that they're not patients - they're terrorists

We must end the occupation because the occupation corrupts Bibi and what will we do without Bibi  (Source)

It's all because of the occupation. At first, Bibi treated corona like Iran, and then the worst thing happened: he started treating corona like the Palestinians. Because corona transformed from an external threat, namely an existential threat, to an internal terrorist threat, namely a routine and way of life. And who better than Mr. Terror (married to Mrs. Terror) knows that one must not surrender to terror - life must go on as usual. Therefore, Bibi is stalling, buying time, and not giving in to pressure (only if he absolutely must). But where is Bibi really leading us? What will be the final outcome? A bi-national state.

Yes, there are still those who deny that this is another nation that has grown here, and they call them confirmed cases or patients - just as they called the previous nation that grew here terrorists - instead of freedom fighters. Corona deniers continue with the same old ostrich method, back then they claimed: there is no Palestinian people. But since the Coronians multiply faster than Jews, or even Arabs, or even Bedouins, the day is not far when the developing demographic threat will turn us into an apartheid state if we don't have the wisdom to give corona a state or at least autonomy. Already today, one can identify processes: social distancing, banning entry to restaurants, separate buses, arrests without trial, sanctions, international isolation, and Banksy kitsch. And all because of the occupation - which corrupted Bibi.

Because everything begins and ends with the occupation. The occupation left only two categories in Bibi's brain: A. Existential threat, or in its literary name: Iran (Bibi speaks against corona at the UN!). B. Terrorism, or in its former name: Palestinians (UN-shmen!). And Kant already showed that we have no access to the thing-in-itself - except through categories. Corona is just the Fourth Intifada, the next logical stage after the individualism of lone-wolf terrorism, following a further privatization of the human: into cells. Because we can never truly know corona - only the phenomenon. Therefore, it's important to accelerate the pace of phenomenological investigations of the confirmed cases, to understand what we're facing, not to be naive and not to be cruel to the merciful but to live in coexistence with the threat (but only after we teach them a lesson they won't forget!), and most importantly - to win through explanation. Because one thing is already clear: Corona is terrorism.

True, at first corona tried to choke us like in Auschwitz, and death by suffocation is the most terrible death of all deaths, from personal experience (once I had an allergy to house dust mites and then I understood what grandma went through and that we must not forgive the Germans). But very quickly it became clear that since Saddam Hussein's flying gas chambers there hasn't been such overkill, and that corona actually resembles more than anything our local Arabs: a fifth column and cancer in the heart of the nation, characterized by infection attacks in crowded places. So we put a security guard at the entrance - and hope for the best. Why should we make difficult decisions that will tear the nation apart? Why try to strive for a solution when there is no solution and there will be no peace and corona doesn't want peace at all and it's just an illusion that doesn't recognize its genetic code and culture of death and spring will turn to winter and the sea is the same sea and corona is the same corona and it will never give up the dream of our destruction and if only they would let it, it would choke us all like in Auschwitz. And therefore, life must go on.

So we ask: Is our problem in the categories? Are there simply better categories that need to be replaced (for example: a European, proper, enlightened category system)? Is learning just flexibility in categories, and are we doomed to always replace an unsuitable category with a more suitable one? Or is the problem the structure of our categories - the very binarity of Israeli categories (Bibi particle meets anti-Bibi particle and much energy is released while both are annihilated)? Or perhaps the problem is actually the lack of awareness of categories, and the thought that there really are such essences in reality, like right and leeeeft, and Bibi's great success is the very establishment of categories and their monopoly on space (therefore there must not be a center in Israel)? Is all that's left a parodic play with categories, as we did above, which ridicules the automaticity and clichéd nature (and therefore lack of sophistication and wisdom) of Israeli thinking? But is there even such a thing as "wisdom"? After all, we're trapped in categories anyway, right? Can there possibly be something that can replace categories (or paradigms, or discourse in language)? Yes, ladies and gentlemen - methods.

The method is not a conceptualization of reality (although conceptualization can be a method). There is life after Kant. There's even life after the philosophy of language. Not everything is wrapped in concepts and words. Even if it's impossible to know "truly" (what does that even mean?), or to conceptualize in language without bias, or to think without constructs - one can simply learn. And this is the root of the Israeli failure. Simply an inability to learn. No one asked you for some ideal (or egalitarian and liberal) system of concepts (one of the funny results: political correctness). This is not at all a correct picture of learning creatures (what they once loved to call: rational, or today: intelligent). But while you (that is, not you, of course, but only confirmed Facebook patients) are babbling yourselves to death in arguments made of words, or thinking in stupid concepts (that Bibi invented for you!), the real problem is that you simply don't learn. So when a new challenge comes - it becomes a Yom Kippur [War]. Philosophy has created for you an irrelevant picture as if the gap is epistemic and as if society is an epistemic system, when what is really needed is not correct conceptualization, correct knowledge, or correct discourse - but correct learning.

Methods don't make claims about reality. They also don't pretend to represent it or talk about it, or even understand it - just to learn from it. They don't have all this Western complex of the intellectual abyss between man and world, which is the source of all evil in the world. A method is simply a practical way of adaptive coping with the world. Evolution, for example, doesn't make claims about the world, doesn't conceptualize it, doesn't think about it in categories, doesn't talk about it - but it learns (and therefore intellectuals can't cope with it, and invent "post-human" conceptualizations). The economy also doesn't make claims, isn't busy with conceptualization, isn't "trapped" in categories or talks about the world (and therefore intellectuals can't cope with it, and call it "capitalism") - the economy is simply a learning system, and hence its enormous power. The power of science and technology? Not epistemic power, folks - but learning power. It's not thanks to open scientific discourse (there's open discourse in politics, media, Facebook... so?), or scientific knowledge (which changes every generation, and so you decided to call it a "paradigm") - but the scientific-technological learning system (yes, technology often preceded and caused the development of science - and the opposite picture is a product of epistemic bias). Because everything that learns in the world - is a strong system, and everything that babbles - is an irrelevant system. That's why Israeli politics is so failing - because there's no learning in it (but how much discourse there is!). It's not the discourse or concepts that need fixing - but the method.

The stale epistemological complex that identifies the gap between man and world as an intellectual-perceptual gap (and as a kind of spatial barrier that blocks direct access) covers and distracts from the real and realistic problem: the gap between us and the world is learning-based (that is, one that is created and exists precisely in time) - because we need to learn and adapt all the time. Therefore, there's no ideal system that will solve the problem, and therefore there's no ideal justification, that is, an "ideal method". There are only methods (in plural) - and that's a lot. If we stopped thinking about systems like society as a person - and went the opposite way: thinking about the individual person as a society, that is, as a developing system - that would already be a big step towards liberation from the complex. Because the image of a person knowing the world has taken root in us, but the image of a society knowing the world shows how ridiculous it is. Paradoxically, non-human systems are better metaphors for learning, even though humans are actually the ultimate learning system - and this is exactly his strength and source of success (his abilities of knowledge and understanding and conceptualization are pitiful compared to his learning abilities). And why did this strange situation occur, in which we need a non-human metaphor for a learning system? Because perhaps the greatest damage that epistemology has done to learning is the conceptualization of learning itself as epistemology, and only if we free ourselves from this thinking (with examples like evolution or economy or literature or Talmud) will we understand what learning is. So what do we do? We build a learning system. Bibi is blocking learning, and growing from the learning blockage of Israeli society - this is his damage and this is his meaning.

What, for example, should have been done against corona? Quickly build a l-e-a-r-n-i-n-g system to deal with it (what the learner aggregator No. 1 we have wanted - Rabbi Potato Ret. Eisenkot), or convert some functioning learning system to deal with corona. Military Intelligence + Planning Directorate? The National Security Council? Or one of the intelligence services (the aggressive Research Department...)? A successful private company like Google Israel, Check Point or Teva? A broad, independent and interdisciplinary university scientific council of outstanding professors? Or just choose a leading university like Technion/Weizmann Institute/Hebrew University as responsible...? All these options are preferable to the current situation - after all, the learning capabilities of the Israeli governmental and political system are nil. And learning can certainly also be aided by conceptualization (what are we doing now?), but this is by nature flexible and changing and adaptive and searching conceptualization, as opposed to the Israeli entrenchment in categories as if it were Masada. Because learning requires first and foremost an ethos of learning - an understanding that Torah study is equal to all.

So what is really the proper place of conceptualization (in language/perception)? Conceptualization is just another learning tool (and not particularly central), among many other tools: learning from examples, from demonstration, practice, play, thought experiments and alternative reality and experiments in reality, thinking the opposite, branching and creative thinking, connecting different content worlds to create a match, sexuality as an evaluation system for innovations (or mutations), and of course - dreaming. Conceptualization is therefore one learning aid among many - which today, due to the infatuation of both left and right with their concepts - has become a huge learning barrier. The political struggle in Israel has turned into a sterile conceptual and anti-learning struggle, of who is right or was right in their concepts ("in reality"), and whose concepts are winning, while imposing concepts on reality. An even more severe result was the loss of the learning ethos, which stemmed from the childishness that we are "right" and our conception is "correct" and we are doing the "right" thing and therefore also the "just" thing - that is, from some anti-learning epistemological arrogance, which the Agranat Commission called: "the conception". In Israel, everyone knows - so no one needs to learn. You will never hear a leader talking about the need to learn or promoting learning in the system. He knows, after all. He is a certified epistemologist.

If so, what is the number one quality of a leader, which will never be required of him in Israel? That he be a learner, and that he build a learning system under him, and enable learning in the system. This is the justification for representative democracy - we don't choose an automaton that will represent or implement some predetermined fixed position (ideology), but a person, that is, a learning system. We choose a method. And indeed there can be different competing methods - but here we are still stuck in political "positions" (static by nature) and world "views", without any learning culture (and therefore the struggle is a trench warfare). A culture of learning doesn't deal with the question of who correctly grasped reality or speaks correctly about the world, and which conceptual system is the correct one, but what we learn from it and how we learn: how the system is built and how to create learning in the system. For example: what incentives are in it, and how to encourage innovation and adaptation and evaluation and feedback loops and responsible and reliable experimentation and statistical data analysis etc. This is a mature view of the giant systems in our world, which we have no way to control - except through their own learning. In contrast to the childish view that thinks it will "simply" succeed in telling them what to do. Why is Torah study the correction of the world? Because "tikkun olam" [repairing the world] is correcting the method.

Can one imagine a demonstration demanding the establishment of an independent and efficient learning system in some public issue or field? Can one even conceive in the land of the knowers and prime ministers an ethos of "I don't know (and therefore always learning)"? Well, philosophical ideas seep in slowly, but in the end just as the philosophy of language took over society with demands for language and discourse and representation and by making communication and media the center of meaning, so one day in the future learning demands will be raised from fixed and stuck systems, and method will become the center of meaning of every system - thanks to the philosophy of learning. Until then we will fight corona as if there is no peace - and make peace with corona as if there is no war.