Good post. At least in my experience many secular right wing jews have the same personality profile (neuroticism, obsessively analytic) as their left wing counterparts
Sure, look at Stephen Miller, David Horowitz, or some comedians. Well, I've mastered this domain at least.
I don't know. I'm only a halfie and wasn't really (((raised))) but had a bad experience with big-city crime growing up (and idiotic overidealistic leftist responses to it) that kinda pushed me to the right. That and I used to wander around the supermarket reading Commentary and National Review before putting them back. (I was a weird kid.)
If I'm understanding correctly, you're suggesting that higher intelligence is associated with a greater vulnerability to mental illness (which appears to be true, at least as you approach "genius" IQ levels). You also point out that mixed-race individuals seem to have higher rates of mental illness (I haven't seen data on this, but anecdotally, this rings true to me too, and I can think of many sociological reasons why this would be). In the comments on one of your previous articles, I said that I thought that mixed race people had a slight average advantage when it came to intelligence and you -- successfully -- convinced me that I was wrong / that I was confusing correlation with causation, but wouldn't your observations here suggest that there's something to this?
Higher intelligence is associated with higher sensitivity, which suggests that people with higher intelligence (loosely speaking) would be more vulnerable to environmental toxins, nurture etc. So it could be that in an unhealthy society, people who are more intelligent / sensitive are more vulnerable to mental illness for environmental and cultural reasons, but we wouldn't necessarily see this effect (or it would be weaker) in a healthy society.
As well, one of the trends that's popped up consistently in my research is that geniuses (both male and female) are, on average, less nurturing parents than people with average or above-average intelligence, and that there seems to be a relationship between childhood emotional neglect (with physical needs met) in childhood and over-achievement (I have an essay, "The Drama of the Gifted Children", that gets into this).
Okay, but you're suggesting a curvilinear relationship, correct? Ie intelligence is protective against mental illness up until a certain point, and then at the highest levels it becomes associated with increased risk?
Looking at this quote:
According to Kierkegaard,
“historical geniuses… have elevated rates of mental illness, both in themselves and in their relatives.”
Maybe liberals have higher levels of mental illness, not because they are spiteful mutants or dysgenic freaks, but because they are a population which selects highly for genius, and this selection process has associated comorbidities.
More to add but will have to come back later, I have a crying baby to attend to!
I don't take the term "genius" to be equivalent with "intelligence." Genius, as I define it, is related to the production of a particular work, or set of works, which stands out. Geniuses tend to be disagreeable. If they conformed to their surroundings, they wouldn't be geniuses, they would be company men. Genius has more to do with personality traits than intelligence. Creativity=/=intelligence.
Ahh, okay, I gotcha. Yes, I like that distinction, and agree with you. The pattern of cold parenting and mental illness in families I've found in my research is definitely associated with "genius" as you define it here (and with childhood giftedness, which does not necessarily translate to higher intelligence in adulthood), not "intelligence" per se.
“These provide alternatives to the antisemitic theory that Jewish wokeness is motivated by Jewish ethnocentrism.”
Yes, a possible alternative but it does not seem to rule out that Jews might prefer multi-ethnic coalitions/demographics for safety. Should we not expect highly intelligent, financially powerful Jews to be proactive in the face of danger? It seems more unrealistic that they would be passive.
I, an Ashkenazi religious Jew (Conservative) and older-Gen Z center-left Democrat, want to be included in such a survey of Jews! (Lol don’t @ me for how intersectional/woke that sounds) Also, I’d say that Jews—at least those brought up with even a tenuous relationship to shul life (ie, made to become b’mitzvah by Abba v’Imma but only bc Shoah-survivor Zaide was still alive)—are placed into the milieu of Torah and the self-cultivation that studying and talking about it is *supposed* to bring about very early on. And it turns out that Torah, even stilted Torah, works its way into one’s worldview—the result being a default mode of ‘education/study = good”.
Wokeness, as I understand it, is about sacralizing racial and sexual minorities. Woke Israelis are anti-Zionists. Obviously, Zionism and White Nationalists both engage in identity politics, but so did the Nazis and the KKK. Calling these groups "woke" is a perverse semantic trick, which obscures more than it reveals. Being obsessed with race is a historical phenomenon which developed alongside secular nationalism, and clearly, wokism is derived in part from strains of leftism which were originally also derived on secular national-populist grounds. Rousseau, for example, is a good starting point for this kind of analysis.
But if we are to equate Nazis and "woke," we should also equate Nazis and Democracy, because these three political theologies originate from the same secular nationalist source. This is why I reject the centrist classical liberal horseshoe framing. I think it's polemical, and doesn't increase understanding. It's just a cheap rhetorical ad hominem to associate wokism with gas chambers. Jordan Peterson is the king of this trick, and I don't appreciate it, because unless you are a Radical Traditionalist, or a primitivist like Ted Kaszynski, classical liberalism can be just as easily smeared in this "guilt by association." Americans began eugenics before the Nazis did. And the communists who pushed Roosevelt into WWII to stop Hitler were the "woke" of their time.
I don't think calling Zionists "woke" is an objective attempt to understand Zionism, but a moralistic assault on Zionism. You may think Zionism is evil because it is ethnonationalist, but ethnonationalism predates "wokism." By this standard, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee were "woke." This is a meaningless statement, like saying, "Nazis were leftists because they were socialists!"
Understanding ethnocentrism as a feature of a right-wing warrior class is a more useful way to understand the world than lumping in racists and anti-racists into the label of "woke." I expand on the warrior roots of the right in this article:
As Salty Drank points out below, there are right-wing religious Zionists, right-wing secular Zionists (Revisionist), and left-wing secular Zionists (Herzlian and Labor). Basically nationalism was rising in the 19th century, and lots of Jews were like, "Well, everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?" (As the Cranberries would title their album much later.) You could argue it was a form of colonialism too.
The Revisionists were driving the train - the Labor Zionists weren’t realistic about what was actually going on and when reality hit them in the face they had to h Revisionists for muscle. The Revisionists, for being extreme, were also honest, so I can sort of respect them. They pretty much said “You Labor Zionists are hypocrites - we are here to conquer this place and disinherit the people who currently live here, the sooner you admit that out loud the better”. I can respect that as it is realistic about what is being done, to whom and why and doesn’t indulge mythical nonsense about “homeland” and all this crap. Too bad their modern counterparts have lost their realist honesty. There might be some basis to talk if Zionism didn’t feel this need to pretend it wasn’t a conquest. People get conquered all the time, Nothing new here. What is new is the need to pretend the conquest was accidental and motives were pure. (“Oopsie - somehow we ended up with a complete contiguous majority Jewish well armed state when all we wanted was a homeland and had no significant presence in the country 30 years ago? What a head scratcher! The mean anti-semites who had no other reason to be mad than just irrational Jew-hatred forced us to reluctantly build the machinery of a state and expel people for 30 years when all we wanted was to settle in and live quietly unnoticed”)
I think the problem is for a very long time they depended on the support of the American Jewish community, which was always predominantly left-wing and loved all the old liberal pieties. They couldn't think too closely about what their relatives were doing. Until very recently admitting you were taking land by conquest was a big no-no. Hitler's extreme antisemitism helped push Jews further left--there had always been anticlerical component to it but after that there's more of a 'the right is an existential threat and must be defeated'. So if you want liberal Jews to support you, well, gotta come up with all kinds of weird doubletalk.
Nowadays the right-wing Jewish contingent is somewhat larger and the left-wing Jewish contingent is more openly pro-Palestine, so you might as well just keep the American right happy (especially when the president has Jewish grandkids).
As a fairly unwoke Mischling it's kind of fun to think about an alternate timeline where Mussolini is still happily bonking Margherita Sarfatti while Bundeskanzler Rathenau nukes Stalin with the bombs developed for him by Jewish scientists. Of course, it's just a fantasy.
No, it wasn't. Perhaps you are confusing Labor Zionism with the Germanophile coded Zionism of Theodor Herzl and the Revisionist Zionists who sought an ally in Mussolini.
Herzlian Zionism wasn't Right Wing, it was liberal centrist, with eclectic elements. Indeed, part of the brand of 'Political Zionism' was that it was above political affiliation. This was also Jabotinsky's original view, though he drifted to the Right. Herzl himself was center-right by French or British standards, and center-left by German standards.
Pre-Herzlian חובבי ציון Zionism was moderately left-coded.
In any case, Labour Zionism is the only form of Zionism that ever worked at all, and has the best claim to being authentic Zionism.
Political affiliation and certain propogandistic works don't always speak to the spirit or geist of an ideology, the former being the result of opportunistic decisions. Did Herzl honestly believe that the Muslims would be delighted to live in the utopian, racially harmonious state that was the gift of the Jews to the world? And to let the Jews rebuilt the 3rd Temple on the site of Al Aqsa, as he wrote in "Altneuland?" Of course not. Maybe some people thought he was serious, but Ze'ev Jabotinsky was the one who properly grasped the geist of Zionism and it's ultimate direction.
I think that Herzl's belief that Zionism would only succeed by gaining the assent and assistance of the Ottoman empire was genuine, and all of his actions until death confirm that. Arguably Jabotinsky was the most authentic heir of Herzlian Zionism adapted to new circumstances (that's certainly what he argued!), but then Jabotinsky was not all that Right Wing himself. In any case, the Revisionists were a small fraction of the Zionist movement, and those who actually built the state were an alliance of liberals and leftists.
Yes. You should read Theodor Herzl and Ze'ev Jabotinsky lol. If you think these people were religious Jews like you, then you don't know your own history.
Excellent post!
Good post. At least in my experience many secular right wing jews have the same personality profile (neuroticism, obsessively analytic) as their left wing counterparts
Sure, look at Stephen Miller, David Horowitz, or some comedians. Well, I've mastered this domain at least.
I don't know. I'm only a halfie and wasn't really (((raised))) but had a bad experience with big-city crime growing up (and idiotic overidealistic leftist responses to it) that kinda pushed me to the right. That and I used to wander around the supermarket reading Commentary and National Review before putting them back. (I was a weird kid.)
If I'm understanding correctly, you're suggesting that higher intelligence is associated with a greater vulnerability to mental illness (which appears to be true, at least as you approach "genius" IQ levels). You also point out that mixed-race individuals seem to have higher rates of mental illness (I haven't seen data on this, but anecdotally, this rings true to me too, and I can think of many sociological reasons why this would be). In the comments on one of your previous articles, I said that I thought that mixed race people had a slight average advantage when it came to intelligence and you -- successfully -- convinced me that I was wrong / that I was confusing correlation with causation, but wouldn't your observations here suggest that there's something to this?
Higher intelligence is associated with higher sensitivity, which suggests that people with higher intelligence (loosely speaking) would be more vulnerable to environmental toxins, nurture etc. So it could be that in an unhealthy society, people who are more intelligent / sensitive are more vulnerable to mental illness for environmental and cultural reasons, but we wouldn't necessarily see this effect (or it would be weaker) in a healthy society.
As well, one of the trends that's popped up consistently in my research is that geniuses (both male and female) are, on average, less nurturing parents than people with average or above-average intelligence, and that there seems to be a relationship between childhood emotional neglect (with physical needs met) in childhood and over-achievement (I have an essay, "The Drama of the Gifted Children", that gets into this).
No, I am not suggesting a general correlation between mental illness and intelligence. I thoroughly argue against that in this article:
https://deepleft.substack.com/p/is-intelligence-a-curse
Okay, but you're suggesting a curvilinear relationship, correct? Ie intelligence is protective against mental illness up until a certain point, and then at the highest levels it becomes associated with increased risk?
Looking at this quote:
According to Kierkegaard,
“historical geniuses… have elevated rates of mental illness, both in themselves and in their relatives.”
Maybe liberals have higher levels of mental illness, not because they are spiteful mutants or dysgenic freaks, but because they are a population which selects highly for genius, and this selection process has associated comorbidities.
More to add but will have to come back later, I have a crying baby to attend to!
I don't take the term "genius" to be equivalent with "intelligence." Genius, as I define it, is related to the production of a particular work, or set of works, which stands out. Geniuses tend to be disagreeable. If they conformed to their surroundings, they wouldn't be geniuses, they would be company men. Genius has more to do with personality traits than intelligence. Creativity=/=intelligence.
Ahh, okay, I gotcha. Yes, I like that distinction, and agree with you. The pattern of cold parenting and mental illness in families I've found in my research is definitely associated with "genius" as you define it here (and with childhood giftedness, which does not necessarily translate to higher intelligence in adulthood), not "intelligence" per se.
Cool, an excuse not to have kids. ;)
Seriously I also think more intelligent people would be more able to complain about problems (real or imagined) persuasively.
“These provide alternatives to the antisemitic theory that Jewish wokeness is motivated by Jewish ethnocentrism.”
Yes, a possible alternative but it does not seem to rule out that Jews might prefer multi-ethnic coalitions/demographics for safety. Should we not expect highly intelligent, financially powerful Jews to be proactive in the face of danger? It seems more unrealistic that they would be passive.
I, an Ashkenazi religious Jew (Conservative) and older-Gen Z center-left Democrat, want to be included in such a survey of Jews! (Lol don’t @ me for how intersectional/woke that sounds) Also, I’d say that Jews—at least those brought up with even a tenuous relationship to shul life (ie, made to become b’mitzvah by Abba v’Imma but only bc Shoah-survivor Zaide was still alive)—are placed into the milieu of Torah and the self-cultivation that studying and talking about it is *supposed* to bring about very early on. And it turns out that Torah, even stilted Torah, works its way into one’s worldview—the result being a default mode of ‘education/study = good”.
Do we not include Zionism as a woke sacred victimhood identity politics? If not, why not? It has all the key ingredients including anti-colonialism.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154980745
Wokeness, as I understand it, is about sacralizing racial and sexual minorities. Woke Israelis are anti-Zionists. Obviously, Zionism and White Nationalists both engage in identity politics, but so did the Nazis and the KKK. Calling these groups "woke" is a perverse semantic trick, which obscures more than it reveals. Being obsessed with race is a historical phenomenon which developed alongside secular nationalism, and clearly, wokism is derived in part from strains of leftism which were originally also derived on secular national-populist grounds. Rousseau, for example, is a good starting point for this kind of analysis.
But if we are to equate Nazis and "woke," we should also equate Nazis and Democracy, because these three political theologies originate from the same secular nationalist source. This is why I reject the centrist classical liberal horseshoe framing. I think it's polemical, and doesn't increase understanding. It's just a cheap rhetorical ad hominem to associate wokism with gas chambers. Jordan Peterson is the king of this trick, and I don't appreciate it, because unless you are a Radical Traditionalist, or a primitivist like Ted Kaszynski, classical liberalism can be just as easily smeared in this "guilt by association." Americans began eugenics before the Nazis did. And the communists who pushed Roosevelt into WWII to stop Hitler were the "woke" of their time.
I don't think calling Zionists "woke" is an objective attempt to understand Zionism, but a moralistic assault on Zionism. You may think Zionism is evil because it is ethnonationalist, but ethnonationalism predates "wokism." By this standard, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee were "woke." This is a meaningless statement, like saying, "Nazis were leftists because they were socialists!"
Understanding ethnocentrism as a feature of a right-wing warrior class is a more useful way to understand the world than lumping in racists and anti-racists into the label of "woke." I expand on the warrior roots of the right in this article:
https://deepleft.substack.com/p/deep-fascism-and-deep-democracy
Top comment.
As Salty Drank points out below, there are right-wing religious Zionists, right-wing secular Zionists (Revisionist), and left-wing secular Zionists (Herzlian and Labor). Basically nationalism was rising in the 19th century, and lots of Jews were like, "Well, everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?" (As the Cranberries would title their album much later.) You could argue it was a form of colonialism too.
The Revisionists were driving the train - the Labor Zionists weren’t realistic about what was actually going on and when reality hit them in the face they had to h Revisionists for muscle. The Revisionists, for being extreme, were also honest, so I can sort of respect them. They pretty much said “You Labor Zionists are hypocrites - we are here to conquer this place and disinherit the people who currently live here, the sooner you admit that out loud the better”. I can respect that as it is realistic about what is being done, to whom and why and doesn’t indulge mythical nonsense about “homeland” and all this crap. Too bad their modern counterparts have lost their realist honesty. There might be some basis to talk if Zionism didn’t feel this need to pretend it wasn’t a conquest. People get conquered all the time, Nothing new here. What is new is the need to pretend the conquest was accidental and motives were pure. (“Oopsie - somehow we ended up with a complete contiguous majority Jewish well armed state when all we wanted was a homeland and had no significant presence in the country 30 years ago? What a head scratcher! The mean anti-semites who had no other reason to be mad than just irrational Jew-hatred forced us to reluctantly build the machinery of a state and expel people for 30 years when all we wanted was to settle in and live quietly unnoticed”)
I think the problem is for a very long time they depended on the support of the American Jewish community, which was always predominantly left-wing and loved all the old liberal pieties. They couldn't think too closely about what their relatives were doing. Until very recently admitting you were taking land by conquest was a big no-no. Hitler's extreme antisemitism helped push Jews further left--there had always been anticlerical component to it but after that there's more of a 'the right is an existential threat and must be defeated'. So if you want liberal Jews to support you, well, gotta come up with all kinds of weird doubletalk.
Nowadays the right-wing Jewish contingent is somewhat larger and the left-wing Jewish contingent is more openly pro-Palestine, so you might as well just keep the American right happy (especially when the president has Jewish grandkids).
As a fairly unwoke Mischling it's kind of fun to think about an alternate timeline where Mussolini is still happily bonking Margherita Sarfatti while Bundeskanzler Rathenau nukes Stalin with the bombs developed for him by Jewish scientists. Of course, it's just a fantasy.
You're wrong. Zionism originated as a right wing ideology that sought to establish a Judeo European state modelled on Germany in Palestine.
It seems right wing now from our post-war consensus frame of mind, but it was coded as left wing relative to its time.
No, it wasn't. Perhaps you are confusing Labor Zionism with the Germanophile coded Zionism of Theodor Herzl and the Revisionist Zionists who sought an ally in Mussolini.
Herzlian Zionism wasn't Right Wing, it was liberal centrist, with eclectic elements. Indeed, part of the brand of 'Political Zionism' was that it was above political affiliation. This was also Jabotinsky's original view, though he drifted to the Right. Herzl himself was center-right by French or British standards, and center-left by German standards.
Pre-Herzlian חובבי ציון Zionism was moderately left-coded.
In any case, Labour Zionism is the only form of Zionism that ever worked at all, and has the best claim to being authentic Zionism.
Political affiliation and certain propogandistic works don't always speak to the spirit or geist of an ideology, the former being the result of opportunistic decisions. Did Herzl honestly believe that the Muslims would be delighted to live in the utopian, racially harmonious state that was the gift of the Jews to the world? And to let the Jews rebuilt the 3rd Temple on the site of Al Aqsa, as he wrote in "Altneuland?" Of course not. Maybe some people thought he was serious, but Ze'ev Jabotinsky was the one who properly grasped the geist of Zionism and it's ultimate direction.
I think that Herzl's belief that Zionism would only succeed by gaining the assent and assistance of the Ottoman empire was genuine, and all of his actions until death confirm that. Arguably Jabotinsky was the most authentic heir of Herzlian Zionism adapted to new circumstances (that's certainly what he argued!), but then Jabotinsky was not all that Right Wing himself. In any case, the Revisionists were a small fraction of the Zionist movement, and those who actually built the state were an alliance of liberals and leftists.
Herzl was suuuuper dead by the time the revisionists came around tho lol
Is that really your point?
I mean I’m not super interested a 2015-style debate with a “Salty Drank”, so I guess lmao
You sure bout that?
Yes. You should read Theodor Herzl and Ze'ev Jabotinsky lol. If you think these people were religious Jews like you, then you don't know your own history.