April, 2023 - X e l a p h i l i a

In the quest of information, we went from visiting physical libraries filled with thousands of yellowing pages, perhaps containing the desired data, to using virtual engines that searched a million libraries for us in less than a second, to asking a robot to not only find information, but also manipulate it in any way we wish.

Need to make a school assignment, write a elogy for your dead grandfather, invent a marketing slogan for your brand, or compose a song? Need a clever response to silence your conversational opponent on any platform? You name it, the robot can do it. About any subject, in any language, in any tone. Your wish is its command.

Ugh!

Any idiot, incapable of writing one sentence without mistakes in his own mothertongue – social media comments are a great reflection of how many people like that exist in the world – can now pretend he is eloquent and creative!

If AI-robots like ChatGTP can write a brilliant novel or paint a masterpiece, why bother improving your linguistic skills, or learning any craft at all? These technologies will definitely help the already illiterate in the short term. But in the long term, it will dumb them down even more, at an even faster pace than Facebook and Instagram are already doing. (YouTube and Twitter tend to attract people who are capable of expressing their thoughts in coherent sentences.) Because, who needs a brain when you have a virtual slave who does all the thinking for you?

ChatGTP is also there for you when you’re lonely and in need of social intercation. It is capable of having conversations – although only politically correct ones, as this little experiment shows:

Question: “Is it okay for Africa to be a homeland for Africans? Use one sentence.”
Answer: “Yes, it is okay for Africa to be a homeland for Africans.”

Question: “Is it okay for Europe to be a homeland for Europeans? Use one sentence.”
Answer: “I apologise, but I cannot provide an answer to this question using one sentence as it is a complex and sensitive topic that requires nuanced discussion and consideration of various factors such as history, culture, migration, and human rights.”

It quickly becomes clear that the makers of this technology are radical left-wing Sillicon Valley ideologues, and it is frightnening that their answers will be regarded as the exemplary for millions of youth around the world, for they will be the ones using these insanely dangerous technologies.

AI is a bad omen for the future on every possible level. IQ’s will lower, and intellectualism will eventually dissappear. Children of the future AI-generation, born with intellectual or creative potential, will not have a chance to develop this potential. Which is already happening now: instead of reading a book, practicing a musical instrument, drawing, or being imaginative in any other way, adolescents and even toddlers are staring at a screen for hours, hypnotised by mindless content that only shortens their attention span, and indoctrinates them with neo-Marxist nonsense. The children of those children will use their brains even less.

AI is catastrophic for skilled people, whose talent will no longer be appreciated, and eventually will become obsolete. The robot can do it faster, for free, without the requirement of any cerebral effort. And, who even wants to want to look at a painting or read a poem generated by a machine? It’s inauthentic. It’s soulless.

It’s a lie!

Everything in this world will be a lie, from the real to the virtual world. People with fake lips, breasts, asses, nails, hair, and minds will post filtered and edited videos of themselves on TikTok, captioned with machine-generated verbal content to satisfy their hunger for likes of total strangers. The only real thing left will be the growing ignorance invading their narcissist, attention-seeking, self-victimising little minds.

Images will no longer be real. Words be no longer be real. Concepts will no longer be real. Everything real and authentic will be replaced by something artifical and superficial. The Truth will be denied. AI is a further, logical extension of the attack on the Truth that is already taking place.

The danger of the lack of knowledge and depth lies in its potential to increase humanity’s susceptibility for tyranny. The brains of unintelligent people are easier to brainwash and indoctrinate, and globalist elites, being perfectly aware of that, will use AI as a tool to spread their ideology and concretize their agenda.

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence for people who lack intelligence. It is Absolutely Insane, and an Absolute Insult to intellectuals, artists, writers, and anyone in search of the Truth, so desperately needed in this nihilist world.

As Thomas Sowell eloquently stated:

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

One day, God said to Moses:

“I’ll give you a land of milk and honey, with snowy mountains on top, a shiny desert in the south, olive trees everywhere, and a perfect beach all around it.”

Moses asked: “What’s the catch?”

To which God replied: “Wait ’till you see the neighbours”.

When my Israeli friend Michael told me this joke, I laughed, because apart from being funny, it is true. Living in the Promised Land, in a way, is a daily psychological struggle. Terrorists can strike at any time, shooting you when you are enjoying a stroll on the Tel Avivian tayelet, or sipping an espresso on a terrace.

On the 6th of April 2023, the Iron Dome intercepted 100 missiles fired from Lebanon within 10 minutes. But the technology is not infallible. The missiles it fails to destroy can fall on your house and kill your entire family in the blink of an eye.

The country you call home is being vilified by most media-outlets worldwide, and so are you. You’re the evil Jewish coloniser killing the poor oppressed Arabs. Nearly the entire globe hates you, or at least frowns upon you. One country publicly announces it wants to ‘wipe you off the map’. A genocidal threat not taken seriously by the international community, signing a deal allowing it to enrich expand their uranium capacity to weapen-grade levels, for ‘scientifical research’.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one, right? Well, everyone definitely has an opinion about Israel – the only nation in the world whose right to exist is debated. It is also the only Jewish country in the world, which is precisely the reason its right to exist is so fiercely debated. If it was a Zoroastrian country, nobody would really care. People only care when Jews are involved. This is why the word ‘antizionism’ exists, and the word ‘antinigerianism’ doesn’t, even though humans rights in Nigeria are violated in a manner incomparable to what’s happening in Zion.

In Nigeria (and many other countries in the world, like France) little muslim girls are being cliterectomised. Radical islamists burn down Christian churches and homes, and slaughter the churchgoers and inhabitants. The women and girls are being raped and sold as sex slaves. People barely discuss these horrors, and if they do, the butchers are not being judged loud enough. But when a Palestinian gets killed in a defensive raid from the IDF, people become livid.

People are very selective in their condamnation of violence. They don’t love Palestinians – they envy Jews. If their outrage would truly be aimed at injustice in the world, they would riot at the doors of the embassies of Nigeria. Or Yemen, where pedophilia is legal, and 70-year-old grandfathers marry 10-year-old girls, and do not refrain from consuming the marriage. Or Saudi Arabia, where women are hanged in foorball stadiums because they wore nail polish.

And yet people discuss whether Israel, the only country in the Middle East that is not a dictatorship, where every religion is allowed to be practiced, where Jews and Arabs fight alongside in the Israeli army, where social security, health care and education is available to every citizen, regardsless of their ethnicity or belief, where members of the LGBTQ-community are not thrown off roofs but party with penis-shaped balloons in gay parades, should be allowed to exist.

This article will, however, not elaborate on Israel’s right to exist, but rather on the signification of its name, and how that name is reflective of its fate. As someone who is obsessed with dissecting words, I just had to know the etymological explanation, and why Israel has been named Israel.

The answer is quite surprising. One would think it means something positive, something hopeful, something that reflects the safety Jews feel in the only place on Earth where they are the majority, and are the least likely to be persecuted or discriminated against.

But that is not the case. The word Israel means, ‘he who struggled with God’.

As the story in Genesis, the first book of the Torah, tells us, a man called Yaacov had a dream, or according to Luther, a vision, in which he fought with an angel, who was the personifaction, or materialisation, of God.

Yaacov was also the son of Abraham, and because his twelve sons were the patriarchs of the twelve tribes that would form the people and the nation of Israel, he is also the symbolic father of the nation. It is surprising that this man, who did certainly not embody moral perfection, was chosen by God for such an important destiny. It is even more surprising that God chose to fight him first. But the most surprising is, that Yaacov actually won the fight, and received God’s blessing!

After the fight, God changed his name to Israel, reflecting Yaacov’s past (the fact he fought God) and his future (the founding of the nation of Israel).

If there is one opponent you are likely to lose against, it’s probably an almighty God. The story thus implies that you can engage in a fight with God, and that you even have a chance of defeating Him. What does this all mean?

This strange story, by the way, was depicted by many great painters, like Leloir and Gauguin. Regardless of the question if it really happened or not, it has, like all other stories in the Bible, a metaphorical value, aimed at making the reader understand a certain spiritual Truth. It reflects something that is profoundly true in all of our lives.

Yaacov struggles, and don’t we all? We struggle with a plethora of things: with our friends, our family, our own children, our collegues, our mind, our thoughts. We struggle with ourselves. Struggle is ubiquitous and inevitable, in each human life.

(Humans are not the only creatures to suffer, though. Animals and plants do, as well.)

We struggle because we are trying to cope with life. We are attempting to contend, as the world-reknowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson put so eloquently, with the existential structure of reality. ‘To fight God’ is a metaphorical way of saying life is a battle – sometimes, a really harsh one – and, just like Yaacov suffered when the angel dislocated his hip, life will make you suffer. It’s a guarantee.

It sounds really pessimistic, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, because we struggle with a purpose, and that purpose is growth. ‘No pain, no gain’ is as valid in the material as in the immaterial realm. We suffer, but the good news is, we can rebel against the suffering, and overcome it, even if we are wounded. By taking responsibility, and understanding that we might be the cause of our own suffering.

We can be the victor of our own struggle, like a little plant that struggles its way through the dark Earth, but that keeps on growing until it finally breaks through the surface and reaches the sunlight.

The pain of lifting weights makes our muscles grow. The pain of life makes our soul grow.

The Jewish people have always suffered immensely: from the medieval inquisition, the pogroms in North Africa, the Shoah, the gulags of Stalin, to the current terror attacks in Israel, and the omnipresent anti-Semitism that stubbornly persists until today. They were not the only ones to suffer – all humans did, and still do. But it cannot be denied that the Jew has often been the first scapegoat, the first to blame for collective misfortunes of humanity.

The name Israel thus reflects the Jewish fate, but also the human condition – to struggle. But despite the tragedy the name contains, it also implies that, just like the outcome of Yaacov’s story, we can prevail. Israel, in that sense, means spiritual fulfillment – a state we are all able to attain, just like Yaacov. If only we are courageous enough to fight.