Decoding insanity

So to the average American, there are some things that are insane.

As someone told me, “It makes no sense to me, that even if some police are criminals, what connection does that have with being a criminal? – burning down stores! beating up people! rioting! Looting?!”

You may extrapolate as well – even if we were to say that some Israelis (not that I have heard of any such cases) have maliciously hurt an Arab; does that allow Arabs to maliciously kill, rape, torture? – how about Muslims who aren’t even Arabs? how about maliciously killing, raping, torturing, burning alive one another?!

Decoding insanity is actually exceptionally simple:

But it is based on first changing the very paradigm with which we understand humanity.

You see, our view of humanity of course heralds back to the roman era which in fact was influenced by Greek philosophy, as well as Jewish perception (for Rome was literally “sandwiched between these centers of civilization.”)

The thing is, Greek and Jewish philosophy are diametrically opposed – having read Aristotle, Plato (mainly Aristotle, who is the best known and prolific Greek writer) we see two things – the first is obvious, the wisdom; but the second is the stupidity! – for example, Aristotle believed slaves were inferior – he believed, the universe had no beginning, nor end – we need not mention his own immoral behavior – for such is the condition of man – as the Yiddesh saying “You cannot go beyond your own mind” – for unless the mind can escape its limitation, which like a prisoner needs a key from the outside, it is well, limited – hence, quite simply, the ego, the desire for grandeur, is what traps a person’s thinking – This then is why the Greeks hated the Jewish philosophers, for Jewish philosophy is based on the reverse premise – the human mind is fallible; hence we must ignore our mind for understanding God’s edicts!

Getting back to the Roman view of man, it combines these two ideas – on one hand it was based on ideas of laws – Rome was a republic (it was Julius Ceaser who forced a kingdom, but it retained a senate and the structure of a legal versus savage “every man for himself Darwinian society”) but it also was not humble, as is obvious.

Herein we see the great, both merging as well as divergence of modern cultures and thought processes with Judaism.

On one hand, we have basically the heirs of Rome, both western civilization (including the Balkan states – Russia in fact, saw itself as perhaps it still does, as the third phase of the roman empire) who after literally not centuries, but millennia of brutal infighting (countries against countries) holy-wars and of course in our century, the two global world wars, finally (game theory) said “enough of ego!” – I know of no other culture, that dismantled willingly her empire – say what you want, but the facts are, Russia out of conviction gave up the largest empire in recent history – as did England and the other European countries.

On the flip side are the African (and I speak with some authority having lived there for over a decade) and Arab cultures – these cultures are so distant from our civilization that we have difficult time understanding them.

So decoding insanity is to firstly get to a point of reference.

The point of reference is the insanity in our culture, which not so long ago, it was thought normal to take over another country, normal to have a holy war and dare I say, normal to create a holocaust (as is evident from both the amount of Germans and other Europeans who willingly, happily and lustfully collaborated.)