Liberals break cultural values under the guise of encouraging tolerance to deviations. Civil unions offer homosexuals excellent tolerance: they are tolerated in the sense that they are not being persecuted or discriminated against. But calling their partnerships “families” imposes their values on society, which has to adapt its own understanding of families to the deviants. The difference is not merely semantic, but whether a family serves the societal interest of procreation or is irrelevant to the society, and is just a vehicle for pleasure. Tolerance lessons in schools inevitably turn into propaganda for homosexuality because it is elevated to a norm rather than tolerated as a harmless deviation. Libertarianism means a cultural blank slate, and leaves societies with no reason to ban other harmless behavior such as bestiality, adult incest, or public urination. All-permissiveness quickly turns into arbitrary prohibitions: societies that tolerate pornography crack down on vaguely defined hate speech. Criticizing the liberal policies becomes the most prohibited thing of all: who would dare to defend racism in the private sphere

Values are commonly connected to restrictions. Since values cannot be justified rationally, courts often strike down the restrictions. When pro-lifers could not prove the divine origin of the human soul in courts, the judicial establishment renounced anti-abortion laws as unreasonable restrictions. In the world of formal justice, liberals always win. Then, they repress the people of values for seeking to impose restrictions. In a twist, traditionalists become anti-social elements and even criminals because violence is all that is left to them.

Societies can never be value-less—on the contrary, societies are defined through their values. Democracy and liberalism are no less arbitrary values than religion or the ban on homosexuality. Ancient societies were somewhat permissive toward homosexuality but had other firm values, whether religious or chauvinistic.

States further break the societal fabric through welfare. Social welfare breaks families by making them economically irrelevant. Parents no longer depend on their children for retirement, and can afford to alienate their children through divorce.

Municipal projects, welfare, and access to government institutions encourage the development of large cities where the bonds of neighborhood are broken. Residents maintain ties neither to family nor to neighbors. Instead, they build ad hoc, artificial ties: to government institutions, sports teams, African recipients of their charity, or internet communities. More often, they suffer from incredible loneliness among millions of residents of the same city.

This unnatural absence of horizontal, cultural ties spells the end of nation-states and a return to small communities. People of such neighborhoods share the same values and live in moral comfort. Incidentally, such small, dispersed communities are the only ones militarily viable in the age of nuclear proliferation.

Three questions distinguish religion from science: does God exist, how was the universe created, and what is the nature of life?

The first proposition cannot be disproved. It cannot be proved, either, but at least it passes the Occam’s Razor test as the simplest explanation of observed phenomena.

Scientific explanations of how the universe appeared border on religion because they are inherently unverifiable and use transcendent notions. Scientists declare that matter is eternal, thus sidestepping the issue of creation. Curiously, Genesis employs a similar approach when it says that the world was bara, ‘formed’ rather than ‘created.’ The scientific concept of eternal matter is just as otherworldly and improvable the religious one. Just like religion, science postulates that before the Big Bang, time stopped (there was no day and night in the Torah), the universe was shapeless (just as the world in the opening chapter), and all the matter was transformed into energy (Torah specifies carefully that spirit—a field—had been moving before the Creation).

Human understanding of life amounts to tautology: life is that which has DNA. But we have not the slightest understanding of the processes which bring inorganic molecules into a rigid DNA structure or build three-dimensional organisms from two-dimensional DNA.

Human knowledge is increasingly confused with observation. Thanks to science, we have observed wondrous facts: limited universes, time-space fabrics, the consequences of the Big Bang, and DNA. But just like the Bronze Age Hebrews standing before Mount Sinai, we have no idea of the moment before Creation, when time and matter did not exist.

And superstitions lurk from dark corners just as before.

Western democracies think that they don’t risk much by professing liberalism. In the worst case scenario for Sweden, Muslim immigrants would grow numerous enough to vote the cross off its flag. No big deal; it is just a symbol, bereft of substance. The tacit assumption is that immigrants cannot change the country’s face because it has none. That is a rationalist fallacy: every country has its face, though it cannot be defined or legally supported. In the Israeli case, Muslims can vote away not just symbols but the entire state: by legislating to allow Palestinian family reunions and inundating Israel with Arabs, abrogating border control with the PA, or decreasing the military budget.

Everything can be driven over the edge and turned into its opposite. Liberalism extends to selling oneself into slavery: the freedom to willingly accept un-freedom. Democracies practice such self-defeating marginal liberalism when they allow Muslim immigrants to practice sharia. Until the nineteenth century Jews were allowed significant legal autonomy in Europe, but for security reasons Muslim minorities cannot be allowed autonomy; they are not subservient members of local society as were the Jews. Muslims want to intermingle in European societies but remain legally distinct. Thus, they enforce the acceptance of their values on societies, just like the homosexuals do with their parades, marriages, and adoptions. The countries that pander to multiculturalism are doomed as single cultures—and eventually as single states. Israel allows her Arabs linguistic, cultural, administrative, and legal autonomy, a mix which guarantees their booming nationalism.

In France, Muslim immigrants riot here and there, but generally they are a law-abiding group. In their desire to assimilate into an admired culture they are quite patriotic toward their new motherland. The number of Muslims in France is statistically insignificant, they study in public schools, and already the second generation tends to be fairly assimilated. Things are very different in Israel. Here, Arabs are sufficiently numerous to interact in their own community and remain distinct, remember their grievances, and wait for the chance to vote away the Jewish state. A harsh assimilationist policy like the one in France might improve the situation: Arab pupils can be bused to faraway Jewish schools, Arab towns strangled by refusing them building permits so that the Arabs disperse to live among Jews, and army service can be imposed on them. Neither of those measures is acceptable to Jews. Why?

Muslim immigrants to France can easily become French people of Muslim faith: outside their mosques they are as French as any Gaul. They speak French, are proud of France, enjoy French cuisine, serve in the French army, and hate their new country’s European adversaries. Israeli Arabs can never be proud of Israel, whose Independence Day is their Day of Catastrophe. They can never wholeheartedly side with Israel against her Arabs adversaries. Groups are best defined through common adversaries, and Israeli Jews and Arabs have different adversaries.

Israeli Arabs are too numerous to assimilate and develop an Israeli identity after being split from the PA the way they developed a Palestinian identity after being split from Syria. Such behavior goes against their economic self-interest, but humans often prefer seemingly irrational values to material ones. That is another rationalist fallacy: unable to comprehend a complex event, leftists proclaim it irrational. It is, however, thoroughly rational for people to put their group values above personal interest because the group provides them with security and a societal framework to enjoy the personal interest. Israeli Arabs sense correctly that deep in their minds Jews would never cease harboring plans to evict them. Israeli Arabs will never become Israelis.

Originally, individual rights denoted a protected sphere. The State could intrude into private affairs only so far. That is sensible: though the majority is entitled to have its way, it need not repress individuals who do not infringe on that way but, closed in their homes, behave as bystanders. In some narrow situations, however, even such individual rights are unacceptable. Judaism, for example, prescribes moral purity for a tiny strip of land, and no one who lives here can be considered a non-participating bystander. No homes on this land are private from God. All inhabitants of the Land of Israel are mere tenants on God’s property and must follow his rules. Enjoying leavened bread on Pesach in the privacy of one’s home in Israel is a high crime. Except for such narrow exceptions, privacy triumphs over public interest—or, rather, privacy kicks in where public interest ends. Individual rights, therefore, are properly defined as freedom from public intrusion when the matter is truly irrelevant to the public.

Increasingly, individual rights turned from “freedom from” to “freedom to.” To illustrate: just decades ago, homosexuals claimed freedom from government repression on the grounds that their habits are private and are not a society’s business. After the turnaround, homosexuals claimed their habits are no longer private but a matter of public importance; thus homosexual propaganda (“tolerance lessons”) in schools. No longer content with protecting themselves from public interference, they interfere with the public by demanding marriage. They claim such benefits as immigration visas for foreign partners. They pursue entitlements, such as adoption, created specifically for the public interest of propagation they claimed an exemption from.

Every rule involves restrictions. This is easy to see: a rule must be defined; definitions create boundaries, and the boundaries are the restrictions. The above example of adoption involves plenty of restrictions: the act is performed in the child’s interest rather than for the adoptive parents’ benefit; adoption can be performed by a responsible and moral adult—not, for instance, a teenager. Every restriction infringes on someone’s freedom, in this case a teenager’s or an immoral adult’s. Thus, the notion of individual freedom can be used to overturn any law whatsoever.

The application of individual freedom against public interest allows judges complete control over legislation, as every law violates someone’s freedom. In one notorious case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the proprietors of a drive-in movie theater can screen R-rated movies without raising walls because visitors to a nearby church can adequately protect their sensitivities by turning away from the screen. The situation is still worse in Israel, were courts appoint their own members and have completely lost touch with political realities. After the unsuspecting Knesset passed a Basic Law: Dignity, judges received broad power to strike down any law if it violates someone’s vague dignity. The High Court sees checkpoints as a violation of the Arabs’ dignity, and routinely orders the government to move them.

One way to combat leftist activism is legislating a Basic Law that freedom can only be from arbitrary intrusion. As long as everyone who travels a certain road has to pass the same checkpoint, freedom is satisfied. That, however, subjects many people to unreasonable restrictions: indeed, there is no need to search Jews. Also, even such a restrictive definition of freedom is open to expanded reading by the courts: locating a checkpoint on the outskirts of Jerusalem rather than in the city center (senseless as that would be) discriminates against the residents of certain neighborhoods.

In order to see a solution, we must pinpoint the problem. Leftist activism both in Israel and America targets the central rather than local authorities. One explanation for this is that changing the codes in every locality is too cumbersome, but a more potent explanation is that local authorities are mostly commonsense individuals. In contrast, the Israeli Knesset and the Supreme Court, as well as their American counterparts, are removed from daily life of the country. Knesset members depend on advertizing for elections; whatever way they vote hardly bears on their election prospects. Judges are still more independent of public opinion—in fact, they are absolutely independent and can disregard it freely. Common sense ends at the town level.

The Supreme Court must not exist. Electable town judges must be the only judicial panel. There is no need to fear the resulting diversification of legal interpretation. In most matters the interpretations would be similar, as judges would look at each others’ opinions. The diversification would reflect community standards: naturally and properly, some towns would be more forthcoming to individual rights, others to traditional values. Uniform country-wide standards, in contrast, reflect the lowest common denominator; neither society nor the vast majority of individuals benefit from the resulting nihilism.

National emergencies tilt the balance away from individual rights toward community values. Israel amid the sea of Muslims is in a perpetual state of emergency. The propaganda of individual rights destroys national unity. Media convince the simple-minded that their personal security lies in peace treaties which only exist on paper, and their personal dignity opposes repressing the Arabs who incidentally want to kill them.

Individual rights only exist on the local level, and are properly exercised by moving to an accommodating locality.

Beauty is related to what may be termed, “positive rarity.” The things we consider beautiful are rare because they are top-of-the-line: we admire high mountains rather than every hill. Ugly things, too, are rare, so beauty is only about the traits we consider positive. Might is one such trait: we admire mighty mountains and open seas. Cost is another: we may like simple field flowers, but we admire expensive roses and orchids. Still another example is health. In Renaissance times, fat women were considered healthy because they were free from ailments and had sufficient food. So the fashion was for fat women. Today, exceptional health is demonstrated in slim females: they go to gym, they eat healthy diets, and they do not suffer from the ailments which lead to obesity. A hundred years ago, well-being was associated with pale skin: such people lived a good life and did not work in fields to the point of exhaustion. Today, well-being is demonstrated in darker skin: such people go to ski resorts in winter and beaches in summer; they have free time to sunbathe and money for indoor tanning.

Related to beauty is the sense of awe. Consider how that sense is evoked by well-staged mass rallies. Such rallies demonstrate physical might, great material resources, and social vitality.

Now we can understand why fashionable things are considered beautiful. They are relatively pricey, popular, top-of-the-line. They are associated with healthy female models.

Beauty can be described as an exceptionally strong manifestation of life force.

Evolution is based on the ability of the fittest to leave more numerous surviving offspring. Thus the ratio of efficient qualities increases in the population for the ultimate benefit of society. But exactly the opposite happens now. In civilized countries, governmental welfare discourages the more intellectually advanced segment of the population from bearing more children. The absurdly moralistic prohibition of polygamy prevents uniquely successful males from having more children. In a normal, natural society, highly successful males would marry the most attractive females in polygamous relationships and maximize their input, bettering the society’s genetic pool. Now, that may seem cruel, but it is evolution. Evolution is cruel―ask any extinct species.

Not only does the current political order limit the propagation of fitter traits, it also encourages the losers to breed. Consider how counterproductive international aid is in evolutionary terms: it promotes the very inefficiency which natural selection attempts to do away with. Inefficient African populations explode while European populations shrink. In modern society, intellect seems to be a more important evolutionary trait than brute force, but minimum-wage laws and lenient immigration policies promote primitive labor over intellect. The higher birth rate among primitive segments of the population ensures the propagation of anti-evolutionary traits.

Humanism is not a reason for such policies. From Plato to Rousseau to Lenin, leftists have been cruel rather than humane. What we see here is an urge for primitivism. Just as Plato and Pol Pot extolled patriarchal societies, so the Western leftists are made happy by hordes of immigrant barbarians and surging African populations. It is against the background of primitivism that radical minds shine.

There is no need to resort to appalling German eugenics programs, or to murdering imbeciles. But at least governments should not help inefficient persons to propagate their genes―such help not only burdens the public purse, but worsens society’s gene pool in the long run.

Behavioral evolution has suffered a setback. Throughout history, large societies have competed in different behavioral models; the Enlightenment has won, and today, the entire world subscribes to Hollywood’s values. In this sense, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither Christian nor Muslim. The globalization of mass media has stamped more or less a single behavioral type on all humans. The differentiation of social models is no longer there: all societies subscribe to consumerism and so tend toward welfare. The pool of social evolution has been drained, or at least relegated to society’sl fringes.

Through millions of years of evolution, human society―it seems, every group of animals―has distilled optimal behavioral patterns into automatic reactions. When we are uncertain, we look to others for an example. If we are offered a benefit, we reciprocate gratefully. Having chosen a path, we stick to it. Marketing has hijacked those automated reactions and now feeds on them. As a result, our oldest behavioral patterns are discredited.

Sexual selection has also seen major changes. For complex organisms―fish, birds, and mammals―the most common arrangement is males competing for females. It is only now and only in humans that the situation is reversed: emancipated females compete for economically attractive (thus smart, thus evolutionary competitive) males.

There is a distinct biological problem with evolution. As the complexity of organisms increases, individual mutations are less likely to propagate. As we know from cybernetics, the more complex and stable a system is, the more it tends to suppress deviation. Feathers provided a distinct survival advantage to small dinosaurs, but no amount of body hair would confer a significant advantage on modern humans. No single trait, particularly no physical trait, is important enough to confer evolutionary advantages on such complex creatures as ourselves. Speciation and natural selection seem to be bogged down in the tremendous complexity of modern organisms. Technology compensates for disadvantages: when eyeglasses are inexpensive and widely available, sharper vision is no longer evolutionarily beneficent. The brain could be an exception, but it is intellectual advantages which modern societies most severely punish with measures ranging from progressive taxation to the ban on polygamy.

Speciation has stopped. For all of evolutionary history, communities were largely isolated, and different traits propagated to perfection. Now that globalization has mixed them together, this is no longer the case. Urbanization, by which children quickly move away from their parents, precludes the transfer of rare skills; shamans and foretellers are dying out without leaving heirs.

Some evolutionary pressures are reversed. For the entire history of life on earth, natural selection favored genes which increased agility and procreation in young age and sharply reduced life expectancy after the age of procreation. As the childbearing age moves into the late thirties, natural selection will favor genetic mutations which allow procreation well into old age. Such mutations will necessarily come at the expense of the young. Life expectancy will keep rising, but people will be infantile into their early thirties.

Natural selection stops, or at least takes a sharp turn in the animal world, as well. Bison were very efficient creatures, adapted for cold and heat, but they nearly became extinct due to the invention of inexpensive rifles. For other living creatures, survival is no longer a matter of adaptation but of human benevolence: the beluga was loved to extinction, and the malaria mosquito was hated, to the same effect. No organism adapts betters than viruses do: biological simplicity and a very short life span makes them extremely prone to beneficial mutations; yet even they cannot withstand the onslaught of antiviral drugs.

Some evolutionary changes have become slower. Life expectancy has more than doubled in the past three centuries, and the childbearing age has moved forward accordingly, and family size has decreased. This has drastically reduced the frequency of mutations―though the effect can be offset by the exploding population size. The pressure of natural selection has shrunk to about zero, as humans are now protected against cold by clothes, against heat by air conditioners, against bacteria by drugs, and so on against virtually every natural threat.

Evolutionary changes take unusual paths. Throughout history, being smart conferred very little evolutionary advantage; strength was a more import factor. Today, the smartest people meet in the same universities and intermarry. If we were talking of dogs rather than humans, biologists would be allowed to conjecture that such natural selection will quickly build a genetic caste of smart people best adapted to technological economy; the population will be stratified based on intellect.

At the time, when the forces of natural selection fade, artificial biological improvement takes off. Premarital genetic tests, medical correction of inborn deficiencies, and the advent of genetic engineering have improved the human race far faster than slow-moving natural selection.

A century and a half ago, biologists proved the creationist story false. That may no longer be true.

Large states are not needed when any locale can install SAM batteries and nations grow affluent and unwarlike.

Politically, the entire civilized (weapons-owning) world has embraced democracy, a completely unsupportable system of governance which interest groups are busy breaking apart. The situation is unprecedented: history has seen rulers go down, and even states, but never the entire political order. Something similar happened in Europe when the Roman Empire slowly succumbed to barbarians.

Economically, the West has lost its work ethics. In America, speculation (which they call “financial services”) has replaced productive industries. In Europe, the four-day work-week and double-digit latent unemployment has become the norm. Everywhere, government debt and pension liabilities have soared to unrealistic levels.

Demographically, the welfare state killed the nuclear family. People rely on the government rather than on their siblings to support them in their old age. Globalization further wiped out families by dispersing parents and children. If children are a heavy economic burden when they are young and spiritually and economically irrelevant when grown up, there is little reason to bear them. Growing pensions and skyrocketing medical costs for retirees push the government to admit immigrants, and wrongheaded liberalism allows them to stay permanently. Muslim communities in Western Europe may not appear huge as a percentage of the population, but they exceed the Jewish presence in the 1930s, which exploded in Holocaust. And assimilation of the Muslims might not heal the wounds: Jews encountered the most hatred specifically when they tried to assimilate. Aliens living nearby are bad enough, but aliens who actively penetrate your society are worse still. Besides, assimilation lags a couple of generation behind immigration; Muslims will become a dangerously large group in Europe long before they begin to assimilate.

Talking of the decline of morals is not a particularly bright idea, since every generation does it. Still, modern institutional nihilism is different from private cynicism about societal values. Never in history have leading intellectuals urged the population to abandon its core values without replacing them.

Advances in transportation and communication make those influences truly global, with no safe haven left for opposite views. Dissenters are confined to the Internet and cannot stage a large-scale action. Propaganda makes people believe in these imposed values, and consumerism makes them unwilling to bother opposing them.

People have become irrational to an unprecedented degree: assured of sustenance by the government, pushed into virtual reality by Hollywood, educated in liberal idealism, and brainwashed by the media, they can afford false beliefs. Previously, false beliefs quickly broke down when tested by harsh realities, but massive economic cushions (such as welfare) and mental cushions (propaganda) allow the population to continue in their false beliefs for generations.

Governments need irrational subjects. In past ages, the most irrational human activity, war, was in a sense rational: soldiers risked their lives for pay and loot. Conscripted armies and liberalism made them endanger themselves for “ideals.” Conflicting ideals or ideologies are even less reconcilable than religions, and they produced the most violent clashes known to humanity, the world wars of the twentieth century. Add technology to that explosive mix, and Armageddon no longer seems remote.
Like economic crises, political crises are defused only to create a bubble of mega-crisis.

It never ceased to puzzle me how close the world came to annihilation during the Cold War. Soviet generals were stupid, militant, and subservient. A crazed secretary-general of the Communist party could easily have ordered an attack and the generals would have supported him. Muslim dictators so far have not acquired apocalyptic arsenals, but note that Pakistan manufactured more than fifty bombs with little effort. Iran and Egypt can do much better.

A common retort is that they lack the means of delivery. Very efficient ABM and laser interceptors can stop missiles flying from Muslim countries. They will not launch missiles, however, but deliver their warheads to enemy cities in cargo containers and detonate them through inconspicuous SMS broadcast. Every defense system has its cracks, and a determined enemy can always slip his nuclear charges through those cracks. In mathematical terms, we are talking of infinite destruction multiplied by a slightly-above-zero chance of breaking through defenses.

Technically, the destruction is not infinite: a typical nuclear bomb destroys only a few square miles. But targeting vital infrastructure allows for practically total destruction. That is not in itself apocalyptic: a few hundred Muslim nuclear weapons cannot destroy a country the size of America.

Such a war between Muslim countries and the West is fairly likely. Muslims will certainly obtain nuclear weapons, and within several decades some leader will certainly use them. Striking America is a chance he might or might not take, but there is an option closer to home: Israel. When biblical prophets predicted that Armageddon battles would take place in Israel, they did not know that their country would be located on the border of two hostile civilizations. History confirmed their prophecies.

Israel is a tempting target for the Muslims. They sense that the West won’t avenge Jews, just as it did not avenge the Holocaust. Muslim nuclear arsenals, inadequate against the West, are superfluous against Israel. ABM won’t work well in Israel because S-400 in Syria can easily down our interceptor missiles; Israel is too small to defend with ABM.

Our only hope is a highly credible threat to annihilate any Muslim country we suspect of developing nuclear weapons.

Years ago, I would have said that good Jews can withdraw into closed neighborhoods and settlements and let their enemies ravage the country. This is no longer possible. Even settlements as secluded as Yitzhar and Kfar Tapuach are embroiled in trouble with Arabs incited by Jewish leftists, and both the military administration and the courts side with the Palestinians. The Supreme Court opened a way for Arabs to buy property in Jewish communities, and now even the isolated Jewish villages in Galilee are trying to fend off the would-be Arab residents. Neither police in Galilee, nor the army in Judea and Samaria defend Jewish villages against Arab criminals and terrorists. Courts make sure that the villagers cannot defend themselves. Noah could bid farewell to the sinful earth and retreat to the ark; we lack that option.

Instead, our goodness has to be structured around hatred. People don’t unite to do good; the only common denominator for large groups is evil. That is normal and proper: the Torah enjoins Jews to hate idolaters among them, to execute those who betray Jewish values, and to hate and reproach the transgressors. The Hebrew word for “neighbor” is a cognate of “evil.” We bend our ways together with some, and against others. The only goodness that is actionable on a large scale is the one that hates its enemies. Joshua’s Jews hated the hostile natives, Maccabees hated Jewish liberal traitors who collaborated with Hellenists, and the original kibbutznik left hated the Arabs. Hatred is the only known form of mass passion sustainable over a long term, and dispassionate nations never win; British conquests were corporate wars.

The difference between right- and left-wing Jews was not their propensity to violence. Leftist Jews were incredibly violent by contemporary Israeli standards. Ben Gurion presided over hostilities that exceeded Irgun terrorism by orders of magnitude. The difference between the Left’s and the Right’s violence was related to the establishment: the left engaged in governmentally sanctioned violence while the right was traditionally anti-establishment. Not only kibbutzniks but also Jewish partisan guerrillas during the Holocaust engaged in sanctioned violence.

Israeli right-wingers, in contrast, employed violence with great hesitation, as if they were committing a crime. The scale of their violence was minuscule; the right-wingers killed an insignificant number of Arabs compared to the left-wingers’ score. Ben Gurion, practical at his best, objected to the Jewish terrorism of the 1940s for a single reason: it inflamed tensions with the British while yielding no corresponding military advantage. Contrary to the rightist myth, Irgun and Lehi played very little role in expelling the British—the Arabs were much more troublesome than all the Jews combined.

Famed Avraham Stern did little more than hide perpetually. In the absence of real results, Begin turned into a demagogue, and an unprincipled one at that. After fighting a full-blown Knesset war against German reparations, he accepted them on behalf of the state after he became prime minister. Finally, he gave away the Sinai. Right-wing politicians clamor for recognition: Begin, Shamir, and Sharon submitted to the leftists’ demands. Even the tough Israeli Jews preserve their traditional Jewish insecurity, and right-wingers are still more insecure, positioned against the establishment. When pressed by the international macro-establishment with any degree of politeness, they are ready to make staggering concessions.

We don’t need hysterical violence by fringe right-wingers. Attacking an Arab or two, burning a few dunams of their fields, or cutting down several olive trees solves nothing and irritates the majority of Jews. The only two types of acceptable—and necessary—violence are these: grassroots violence practiced by masses of Jews against Arab enemies, and violence tacitly sanctioned by the government. In practice, these two types are one. So the problem is not the Arabs, but the government. With a decent government, we can end the Arab problem in a matter of days. Evil governments inflate the problem of Arab terrorism in order to deflect attention from their own policies, which spell the end of the Jewish state.
Right-wingers consistently lose confrontations with government forces because of indecision. They cannot decide whether their opponents are fellow Jews or treacherous enemies. Thus the rejection of firearms and serious clashes generally. When one sides uses the police power of the state, and the other resists the evictions half-heartedly, the result is pretty much predetermined.
Hatred requires both hostility and practical means to realize it. Unlike Rabbi Kahane, I would never oppose a civil war among Jews; indeed, in specific situations such as the current one, a civil war is our duty.

The idea of psychoanalysis, going back in time, is not new. An Indian meditation technique called prati prasav employed the same approach thousands of years ago. The goals, however, were much more narrow: to partly understand one’s fear of meditation.

Take, for example, child psychology. There are myriad contradictory opinions. Some suggest to touch the child frequently, others warn that touching creates sexual complexes in him. Some suggest to attend him when crying, others warn that this will cause him to cry to get attention. In psychology, like in society or economics, all policies seem to be wrong because they are rigid and long-playing. In the natural order of things there are no policies, but mostly ad hoc solutions. They always occur on a micro-level, and always adapt to imperceptible changes. In the above example, normal parents distinguish between different modes and causes of crying, and their reaction varies from demonstrative indifference to urgent care, with all shades in between. Policies and prescriptions necessarily tend to be more schematic.

The historical norm is always the best policy. Evolution of behavior is no less plausible than in biology. For ages, billions of couples raised their children; they looked around for the best examples, and adopted the best practices. Whatever behavioral norms persisted for millennia are certainly the best. They evolved by the same invisible hand which drives markets. Only in the nineteenth century did the notion of romantic companionship develop. Psychoanalysis in the twentieth century substituted academic theories for proven practical solutions.

The idea that parents are somehow obligated to their children is ridiculous. They gave their child the greatest gift of all—the gift of life. Children exist solely for their parents’ joy and use, and reverse obligations are extremely basic. Very little care for children is not parental neglect, but the historical norm. Attitudes have changed in our time due to romantic propaganda, but also for other important reasons. Work has become less exhaustive, and parents have time to look for transcendent values; failing to find any, they sublimate their unrealized longings on their children. In large cities with broken bonds of neighborhood people feel lonely, and cling to their children in an attempt to create family-based mini-neighborhoods. Such hysterical attitudes contrast markedly with the dignity of patriarchal families. Tellingly, the Torah does not urge parents to love their children; rather, children are commanded to respect their parents.

The historical norm is a powerful solution to perceived deviations. Child hyperactivity is a common parental complaint. And why not? Biology makes children sufficiently active and able by the age of four, but modern society refuses them work. Naturally, they launch into hysteria and hyperactivity. They expect meaningful orders from their parents, and cease to respect them when they receive none. Throughout history children have worked at that age. I don’t argue for sending five-year-olds to work in mines, but they are perfectly capable of doing household work. Incidentally, active participation of children in household work would solve a major argument against bearing them: working women today are reluctant to have more children because of the additional workload at home. They reasonably want to rest after finishing with their daytime jobs. But in normal families children must decrease their mother’s workload, rather than increase it; they are a solution rather than the problem. The child’s work need not be exhausting, but it has to be meaningful: children are perfectly capable of distinguishing between silly, Cinderella-type work and substantial help to their parents. Personality is formed before the age of five, and it is important to start some kind of home work at four to imbue the child with work ethics, learning skills, proper behavior, and respect for the parents, who give commands and disburse bonuses.

The modern education scheme is counterproductive. It is exceedingly wrong to encourage infantilism in seven-year-olds with a school curriculum which is 90% play and 10% study. Rather, as Jews used to do for millennia, children must be subjected to rigid education from the age of three, and certainly from five. Just like meaningful work, real education from an early age would solve all common behavioral troubles. Children can play games in their leisure time as a reward for sensible, productive work or learning, which they must do most of the time.

In terms of behavior, humans have not changed since the Torah was written, or else we wouldn’t honor that book. Slavery was common a century ago, and a billion Africans would gladly move to South Carolina plantations as slaves today. Virtual reality has been common throughout the ages: Internet now, church before; cartoons in place of troubadours, sports instead of public executions.

But aren’t historical norms outdated? Throughout human history it was common to marry very young girls, which is now considered pedophilia. Hardly anyone objects to such relations on biological grounds, which do not exist. Rather, thirteen-year-old girls are considered immature. True, but the problem is their immaturity rather than their age per se. They remain as immature at eighteen at school and often at twenty-five in universities. Society makes them infantile by refusing them adult responsibilities. Many factors converge: the government wants more years of propaganda through education, the educational bureaucracy wants more classes, however useless, and parents, no longer expecting children to reside with them after they reach adulthood, want to prolong their infancy.

Modern states destroyed nuclear families by creating welfare nets so that parents no longer depend on their children for sustenance. To their parents, children have become a source of increased housework in their young age, an irresponsible and troublesome crowd at school, an absentee household member in adulthood, and economically irrelevant when the parents retire. Not surprisingly, fewer families want children, and those who do generally just follow the traditional behavioral mold, which is by now devoid of sense. The government can still turn the tide. Children can be made useful to their parents, who will thus bear more of them.

The proper solution would be to cancel retirement welfare provisions, but instead tax the children specifically for their parents’ benefit, and reduce the tax significantly if the children reside at or near the parents’ home and help them with the household. True, bad children could skip the tax by moving abroad, but it is parental responsibility to bring them up as wine rather than vinegar. If the parents fail to rear their children properly, so they must suffer, as is the case with any error. A simple tax reform would immediately induce people to bear more children, educate them properly, and imbue them with work ethics early.