On "the Jews"

I'm on holidays at the moment so here's just a few lines on things I've been thinking about recently.

I just finished reading a book called "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, which I at first thought was about the absolute opposite of what my core beliefs about success are: that everyone has the same innate capacity. And, yes, at first glance it appears to be saying that you can expect to be in low-skill service jobs if you're Latino, you can expect to be good at maths if you're Asian, and you'll probably be a doctor or a lawyer if you're Jewish. And if you're of African descent you'll probably want to kill and physically hurt others for minor slights. Generalizations? Stereotypes? Actually, it deals more on examining the roots of why people turn out to be the way they are based on specific things that happened to the ancestors of their culture, and that for the most part continue to imprint on their futures. An interesting note was made of New York's Jewish community.

In the last week I made my mum visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York with me. Now, she's a very humble woman with a primary school education who can barely pick out the location of countries on a map of the world (e.g. not long ago she was surprised to find out that Spain is in Europe and not in South America like she assumed for a long time). You get my point: she's a humble woman with not a lot of knowledge of what is not essential to her survival. At the Jewish museum while we were looking at concentration camp uniforms and learning about the disgusting things that happened to so many people during WW2, mum asked me, "why did all this happen to the Jews?" I thought it was an excellent question! There's probably no single answer why that did, and there's definitely nothing in this universe to justify it.

What I find even more fascinating, though, is how a great majority of the Jewish community post-WW2 became so prosperous. They were always an oppressed and abused people. They were workers and they had to learn skills. Since thousands of years they've been working (even under slavery conditions) - they had to learn! So the theory goes that around the time of WW2 when dislike of the Jews was quite overt and common, even in the new lands they settled in they were discriminated against for many reasons. So to escape this oppressive environment, Jews after some time used the skills hey had learnt previously, textile and garment industry, for example, and started up their own operations. They hired other Jews. They taught their children the importance of work to better yourself and aiming to equalize opportunity (I maintain that this is the true value of education). The story goes that the children of garment workers went on to become lawyers and doctors and business people at the insistence of their parents - but after they became lawyers (for example) their gentile counterparts still discriminated against them. They ended up working the legal cases nobody wanted, working the medical fields nobody else considered worthy at the time (things like psychiatry and neuroscience, for example). And then, something happened: the Jews had created niches of industry for themselves - which as fate or history would have it, soon became the most sought out niches in industry.

Why did the holocaust happen? I guess there's no valid or all-exhaustive answer to that. But you know what, I believe the best thing the Jewish people ever did was 1) acknowledge their position as others viewed them, and 2) used it not as an excuse to become victims of oppression but to motivate forward action. They were people who once they left the concentration camps, they left the concentration camps. They didn't sit down and feel sorry for themselves for their dreadful pasts and suffering. They began to build instead their prosperous futures. Can't we all learn from that? Once the suffering is done with, let's stop suffering and start building a future we desire.

On propaganda

I was watching these Youtube videos on North Korea, which somehow led me to watching videos of Cuba and Soviet Russia. I’m very nerdy so I find watching documentaries fascinating. So after watching some of these videos and seeing them diss on the propaganda styles used by socialist countries, “communist propaganda”, I started to think that the videos themselves seemed like anti-communist propaganda. Now, I don’t know much about politics or governmental styles nor do I have any opinion on what’s good and what isn’t, but I found that it’s almost impossible to present a topic that is so fraught with emotive images and stories and not be biased. Because it is the mainstream media, the bias is usually pro-capitalist and anti-communist. Like I said, I don’t favour one way or the other.

One of the comments often made about these “communist” countries is their use of propaganda to idealize their nation’s system of government and also demonize that of capitalist/imperialist nations. Well, the videos and media most westerners have easy access to do the same thing in reverse direction: demonizing communism and glorifying capitalism. So I guess that’s just how the world works, to prove ourselves right and just we often attribute to others injustice and wrong.

The other comment often made about countries like North Korea and Cuba are their censorship or restriction of access to foreign media. This is proclaimed as an injustice because people only have access to biased information, skewed towards that of the current system of governance. They’re also denied access to what else is going on in the world, and –critically – to how much “better” than themselves capitalist countries are. Again, this is seen as bad by the leaders of countries like the U.S. because people should have the freedom to choose what to watch, hear, and believe. The so-called communist leaders give it a different spin: they believe they are protecting their people from materialism, from self-centeredness, and from greed. So on the one hand the argument is that some people are being denied their freedom, and on the other hand is the counter-argument that these same people are being protected from greater evils. What evils?

I remember reading once about methods of persuasion. One group of people really interested in methods of persuasion are commercial enterprises, and by inference also advertisers. Another very interested group are politicians. What both these parties do in order to achieve success (whether that be votes or money) is use propaganda to persuade others (consumers or voters or subjects) to buy their product, ideal, philosophy, etc. Of course, there are many different methods of persuasion or propaganda styles. You could, for example, reward a person for supporting your “product” (ideology, philosophy, or physical item) or punish them for using that of a competitor. Most nations use a system of governance that uses this method of “persuasion” to some degree in the form of legal systems and prisons. Another method, especially used by health promotion teams, is to demonize something, to make the consumer fear/dislike it in order to abhor a behaviour or consumption of a product. Politicians of communist countries are often noted to use this method, blaming all of a country’s woes on the enemy state and demonizing their way of living to ensure their voters/subjects are alternatively loyal to their own nation. In capitalist countries one of the major methods used by commercial companies to sell a product or a service is to first convince a person that they are lacking something or that their method of doing things is outdated before showing them a new product that will make their life so much better. Non-capitalist estates abhor this, calling this one of the greatest evils of capitalism because it is seen as a method by which a person is first sold dissatisfaction (usually towards their own person or their family or some other entity) before being offered a “solution”, the product being advertised.

Some time ago I read some criticism about the rising use of antidepressants in medicine. The story goes that going back some decades ago, rates of depression were much lower than they are today. The change can be attributed to a number of things: smaller family sizes, greater awareness about depressive states and suicide, more time dedicated to the workplace, breakdown in family structure, greater use of chemicals in the environment, pretty much anything that has changed in the past several decades. But is there one causative factor or is it a multifactorial phenomenon? The answer is almost always “multifactorial”. However, one thing about the increased awareness of depressive illnesses that is particularly interesting, is that the groups that were “raising awareness” about depression consisted mainly of pharmaceutical companies that had themselves developed the antidepressant medication to treat it. Some of the early public service announcements (advertisements?) about depression would go through a list of “symptoms” that if you identified with you should ‘talk to your doctor about’ to be prescribed treatment to ease you of your illness. Now, this is an extreme example were commercial companies are accused of selling you dissatisfaction, in this case it’s purported they convince you to believe you’re “sick”, so they can sell you their solution: a pill. Similarly, people are convinced their lives are somehow lacking if they don’t buy a certain drink, wear certain clothing, eat at a certain restaurant, drive a certain car, travel to a certain place, etc.

Now, my point is not to argue whether depression is a real or a commercially-created diagnosis, nor whether communist or capitalist systems of governance are better; my point is to remind us that we are human beings and not just consumers or voters or subjects or victims. Who was it that said that once you understand a thing you can’t be used by it? I don’t know, but he had a point. The one liberty no government or person or amount of persuasion can take away from us is the innate human ability to reason for ourselves.