Kids at WAR
On October 7 2023, Hamas launched the most deadly attack any Arabic neighbor had ever struck against Israeli civilians. It began with the shooting of thousands of rockets into Israel, followed by an attack by land, air and sea. Hundreds of heavily armed terrorist entered Israel, and atrociously slaughtering over 1000 Israeli civilians, living in nearby Israeli villages, without neglecting videotaping and sharing the footage of their inhumanity online.
The severity of impact on Israeli culture, as Hamas conspired it, stretch far beyond the civilian death toll, and beyond the surprise/embarrassment military clusterfuck. The bulk of the wreckage and ruin was done in TikTok, yes that’s right, this fucked up app.
Over the last 6 days almost all the Israeli kids, girls and boys above the age of ~10 were compulsory watching the most evil of clips graphicly showing unthinkable crimes performed by kids slightly older than their own age. The trauma, the immense psychological damage of these clips, such as these from the ‘rave massacre’. As President Joe Biden observed, Nothing will EVER scrub these from Israelis youth collective memories.
My daughter is 6, she’s supposed to be in first grade now yet due to situation they moved to zoom gatherings, on the first of such gatherings sirens started wailing, indicating rocket was shot towards our location (warning systems are very accurate by now), all the participant in zoom started to scream, the teacher was hopeless, most ran to the Mamad room (in home shelter). And i can keep going sharing surreal situations but you get it, no script no default behavior, completely and utterly novel unfolding to cope with.
This “victory” Hamas achieved over Israel, deadly evil David swinging at Goliath, so out of proportion to its military strength, was in the cards, because you can not both have fierce enemies and be high on your own supply at the same time. Agility and broadly defined fitness require any group to have a mission greater than anyone inside it. Such a greater goal is functionally conducive to increase trust amongst people, groups and tribes (a supergroup, an inter subjective belief Network that uses symbols as tokens of identity).
But the war on spirituality, the lack of humility, runs deep in Israel (and US) technocratic value systems, excessive surplus combined with empire mindset. Straying too far away from our innate group-level human values into individualism style Ayn Rand, inevitably makes any community soft in the belly (susceptible to deadly backstabbing).
It is therefore little wonder that Hamas managed to fool everyone they are willing to be paid to drop the terroristic resistance, and for their acting to be eaten without sufficient suspicion. Afterall, according to our programing, having money is better than being a terrorist so they are doing a sensible trade however you turn it, that is of course unless you are programmed differently, for example if reason won’t dominate loyalty ever.
Which, by the way, as it turns out, has been the default programing for most people most of the time, except for the tiny fraction of a sec. within the human story, we happen to live in now. For more on this I urge you to read Prof. Joseph Henrich incredible book.
I feel deeper sadness these days than I can ever recall, friends losing their kids at that damned party, strong people shattered to pieces, nothing can ever piece back together, the sheer suffering all around me is paralyzing.
Both people, the Palestinian and Israelis alike, suffer their hopelessness against a dysfunctioning leadership and decaying political system that is unequipped to anything besides doubling down, escalation into pre-written scripts of violent bloodshed. A modern “scientific” tendency, to duplicate past decisions symmetrically, unable to stop: a perpetual motion machine of ever more self-destructive stupidity.
When I snap out of it, occasionally, I remind myself about Trust and the art of Trusting, how we yearn for these to make a “big-comeback” into western culture values (or else we are fucked). We’re not just beings that have one tribal identity or one coalitionary identity we are beings which can context dependently move in and out of many of them in a brief amount of time, because we project our alliances symbolically, humans are unique in this capacity — let me try to explain this better:
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In whom do you put your trust? This is one of the most ancient dilemmas of life on Earth. Evolution has crafted several answers, yet one solution to the problem is completely unique in humans: Trust the Tribe. Human mind that was crafted to work with people we know and have a face-to-face Ledger of record of interaction with, miraculously evolved the capacity to to work with strangers — this is quite radical — all the social life on this planet are NOT able to bootstrap trust among strangers, simply because survivorship bias is so ingrained in us. Humans like certain types of strangers the ones that signal the right codex to our symbolically bootstrapped minds
So signaling membership serves the function of bootstrapping cooperation among strangers within the shared mythology beyond face-to-face social network — a group that uses symbols to identify and signal membership it communicates to strangers ‘I am your ally, let’s cooperate’ — Tribes are a kind of secret society, where the signals of coalitionary alliance grant you the rights, responsibilities, and benefits of the collective “imagined order.”
More on ‘Identity Stack’ in this evolving-page maintained by Balaji S. Srinivasan
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Now after laying all this down, its now easy to see why by removing ourselves from this camp-like structure onto families as core nuclear unit (we create basically the McDonald’s of a social pattern and called it Suburban Living) explains the consequences of having a mind that’s adapted for intentional Community being robbed of that intentional community.
But the good news here, which manage to feels my heart with hope is we are rampantly finding practical ways in which we can positively leverage this instinct, rather than suppress it, for fighting our evolutionary mismatch and enhance human wellness. More on this on in David Samson new book Our Tribal Future
I see TRUST as the main natural resource, to be mined successfully over next century, like oil was for 20st century, and the mining of this precious commodity requires both (1) un-capturable un-cartelized worldwide ledger of transactions and interaction and (2) reviving within human’s interior, our innate yet neglected capacity for maintaining such ‘multi dimensional trust vectors’ with groups or tribes which align with one or more levels of our identity stack. Trusting relationships, stable for centuries, despite individuals constant change.
And our industry, the cryptocurrency industry is at the frontier of this innovation, separating money from state is only the first step in increasing our sentient supreme ability to use signals and boundaries, and multilevel hierarchical identities, to foster sustainable symbiotic trusting relationship with otherwise complete strangers.
Enough desperation for now, time to get angry and go back to building with determination.
