DEFEAT ANTISEMITISM: HERE’S HOW

If we revived critical thinking, antisemitism — and most of our other problems — would take care of themselves.

Left to right: Your brain on antisemitism; Your brain thinking critically.

Antisemitism is more than just hatred. It is not merely prejudice. It is a way of processing information, a way of understanding the world.

Antisemitism is a tool people use to reduce complexity to simplicity, nuance to slogans, and human beings to caricatures. It blames Jews in order to make sense of the world. Of course, this is inverted logic. Antisemitism neither makes sense of the world — it emphatically upends sense and reason — but it also really has nothing to do with Jews, except in the troubled minds of the perpetrators.

Antisemitism almost always requires a fundamental antecedent: a society that has abandoned critical thought.

If we want to understand why antisemitism is rampant right now, we need to look at the way we consume information.

For most of human history, people consumed information in relatively coherent forms. Since the advent of literacy, they read books, newspapers, essays, long-form journalism. They listened to lectures. They engaged with arguments that unfolded over pages, chapters, or hours. In preliterate times and societies, they engaged in oral traditions that passed down wisdom.

Today, unlike at any time in history, information arrives in fragments. A headline. A meme. A TikTok video. A screenshot. A tweet. An infographic. A 10-second clip detached from its context. A photograph stripped of everything that happened before and after it was taken.

We are bombarded by endless scraps, snatches, and oddments of information. But these tiny fragments of data deluge us like a garbage truck discharging its cargo into our eyes, ears, and brains.

The human brain can process only so much information. When confronted with an overwhelming flood of disconnected content, we simply must simplify. Complexity becomes exhausting. Context becomes a luxury.

So we sort, categorize, and place everything into the simplest possible boxes.

Good/Bad. Victim/Oppressor. Hero/Villain.

The result is a culture increasingly incapable of holding multiple ideas simultaneously. The ability to say, “This situation is complicated” has become a lost art. The recognition that two things can be true at once is disappearing. The ability to tolerate ambiguity is being replaced by an insistence on certainty because sorting through complex ideas simply takes too long.

And this black-and-white, good-and-bad sorting is the soil required by antisemitism to take root.

To be clear, antisemitism is not the only catastrophic outcome of this phenomenon. It is merely — as antisemitism so often has been — the first sign of a calamitous societal decay.

The refusal to engage deeply on almost any subject will have deep consequences on every person and every topic. But it almost always starts (for reasons too extensive to go into here) with Jews.

Antisemitism has always offered simple answers to complicated questions.

Why are people poor? The Jews. Why are institutions failing? The Jews. Why is capitalism exploitative? The Jews. Why is communism oppressive? The Jews. Why are wars happening? The Jews. Why is globalization happening? The Jews. Who is responsible for everything bad? The Jews.

Antisemitism offers believers the intoxicating comfort of certainty. Reality is messy. Antisemitism is simple.

We live in a time of flux, uncertainty, and fear. That is always fertile ground in which ideas about Jews propagate. In the Middle Ages, it was obscene ideas like the canard that Jews kill Gentile babies to consume their blood. Today, it is visible in obscene ideas like the dissipates running allegations that Israel trains rape dogs to assault Palestinians. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

But that fertile ground is fertilized by the corrupted manner in which we get our information.

Consider: When we see surveys that indicate young people are wildly anti-Israel and that maniacal antizionism (and antisemitism) dissipate the higher one goes in age demographics, this is not really a statement about age or wisdom. It is a symptom of how people of different ages accumulate knowledge and make decisions.

Older people (for now) are more likely to get their information from legacy media. That means they are spending at least a few minutes watching, listening to, or reading about a topic.

The younger a person is, the more likely they are to get their information from a flash on a screen, a single image, a meme, a 10-second video, a 240-word screed.

Antizionism and antisemitism are not inherent to any age group. They are inherent to groups based on the way they consume and decipher information.

It just happens that younger and older people mostly consume information differently. If the consumption methods were reversed — if older people were getting info in snack-sized bites and younger people were engaging with longer-form content, survey results would reverse.

It is not a coincidence that even Great Thinkers today subscribe to binary, simplistic answers to the world’s problems. The prevailing race narrative is based on one-dimensional Oppressor/Oppressed narratives (even as the same people counterintuitively advance a multi-dimensional concept of “intersectionality”). It is not surprising that this ludicrous hierarchy of victimhood places Jews — history’s most consistently victimized people — in the wrong category. That is an inevitable confluence of ignorance, oversimplification and scapegoating — the very prerequisites in which antisemitism has always thrived.

Jews complicate simplistic narratives. They are simultaneously a religion, a people, a culture, a civilization, and a nation. That doesn’t work for people in an era when we insist on shoving people into boxes.

Nothing about Jewish history fits neatly into contemporary ideological categories, which is why simplistic ideologies inevitably distort and attack it.

The genocide libel now spreading throughout respectable society is a perfect example. It is not merely a horrific falsehood. It is the product of a particular intellectual environment: an environment that rewards certainty over inquiry, emotion over evidence, slogans over analysis, tribal loyalty over independent thought.

It is no accident that some of the loudest proponents of the genocide accusation are also among the least interested in examining contradictory evidence. The conclusion comes first. The facts are recruited later (if at all; rote repetition often seems to be all the evidence many people today require as proof).

This is, of course, not how serious people think. It is how mobs think.

The good news is that critical thinking can still be cultivated. People can learn to read deeply, to question assumptions, to tolerate ambiguity, to seek evidence, to resist the seductive appeal of simplistic explanations.

The bad news is that our culture increasingly discourages these habits. Social media algorithms, which determine a great deal (if not most) of what young people hear and see, reward snap judgments and punish critical thinking.

Antisemitism thrives in precisely such conditions. Because antisemitism is not merely a hatred. It is a symptom of intellectual decline, of a society losing its capacity to reason, of a culture that increasingly prefers false certainty to challenging truths.

If we, as a society, were able to restore critical thinking and more rational consumption of information, antisemitism — and most of our other problems — would take care of themselves.

Unless we reverse this disastrous trend of simplification, binary thinking and Good/Bad categorization, antisemitism will not be the only devastating result.

It will simply be among the first in a long civilizational decline.

Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588402258315

Follow me on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/patsshtick/

Follow me on X: https://x.com/PatsShtick

*

Some people have generously asked me to make it possible to make one-time contributions to support my work. I have now set up a PayPal link for donations. If you like snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and want me to keep it up, any support is deeply appreciated. Click here.