{t-16}

Recall the last time you really felt tribal. Football game, wedding, riot, summer camp. The last time you felt like you were bigger than yourself, when the sense of “I” expanded to include more than just the fragile fleshbody that you’re directly piloting.

We think of those moments as anomalous. Feeling like you’re one person is normal; feeling like you’re a tribe is a curious and odd moment of ecstasy.

Nah, homes. Tribes are normal. It’s being one person that’s weird.

Wild humans don’t have a particularly strong sense of selfishness. Primitive man practises something called fierce egalitarianism, where no-one accumulates rank or property. Ever. 

The idea of humans as individual, independent actors is a post-agricultural fetish. Unfortunately, societies that have this fetish quickly out-compete and annihilate societies that don’t, so now the only societies left {with a few possible straggling exceptions} are individualistic and weird and unhealthy and doomed to be devoured by Moloch.

~

You can get to this level where you’re like whoa the whole idea I had of myself as one dude is all wrong and in fact everyone is the same guy. This state is attainable through meditation, mysticism, and LSD.

The project of Judaism is to reconstruct that state of tribe that existed before the invention of agriculture. The Messianic vision is of a world where “all your nation shall be righteous” (Isaiah 60:21), that is, where everyone is so wrapped up in the good of others that true tribal functioning has been restored.

Who is this God person anyway? – Oolon Colluphid

Here’s an answer I’ve been enjoying lately: God is the memetic superorganism of the Jews, a way for us to tie all our destinies together into a reified being. In Him, Jews are attempting to construct the first true post-agricultural tribe, with quite a bit of success.

That the Jewish home is a home in the truest sense is a fact which no one will dispute. The family is knitted together by the strongest affections; its members show each other every due respect; and reverence for the elders is an inviolate law of the house. The Jew is not a burden on the charities of the state nor of the city; these could cease from their functions without affecting him.

When he is well enough, he works; when he is incapacitated, his own people take care of him. And not in a poor and stingy way, but with a fine and large benevolence. His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men. A Jewish beggar is not impossible, perhaps; such a thing may exist, but there are few men that can say they have seen that spectacle. The Jew has been staged in many uncomplimentary forms, but, so far as I know, no dramatist has done him the injustice to stage him as a beggar. Whenever a Jew has real need to beg, his people save him from the necessity of doing it. The charitable institutions of the Jews are supported by Jewish money, and amply. The Jews make no noise about it; it is done quietly; they do not nag and pester and harass us for contributions; they give us peace, and set us an example – an example which we have not found ourselves able to follow; for by nature we are not free givers, and have to be patiently and persistently hunted down in the interest of the unfortunate.

– Mark Twain, Concerning the Jews, 1898

A century later, a near-zero-percent poverty rate remains the coveted dream of developed nations. Jews managed it while being tormented, brutalized, and oppressed.

And we managed it because we have felt, have strived for, and have acted in the service of that profound bonding Unity which encompasses us all.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is Our God. The Lord is One. (Deut 6:4)