Reality, Jew Hatred, and Denial of Death Daniel Birger M.D. and Herbert M Wyman MD
“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
—Ernest Becker
The Garden of Eden myth is the mother of all Utopias. In that perfect creation there is no aggression- the lion lies down peacefully with the lamb-there is no fear, no anxiety, no sex, no shame and there is no death. Blissful ignorance, peace and plenty prevail. In this perfect world Adam made the terrible mistake of opening his ignorant eyes to reality. Giving in to physical desire he eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge and instantly becomes aware of sexuality and of his body. Shame at his nakedness is the first human emotion in response to this biological and physical reality. Fear is the next emotion producing the vain effort to escape from reality by hiding from God. Then in Genesis (3:23) “…the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever and therefore the Lord sent him forth from the Garden of Eden…” The expulsion occurs along with the death sentence: “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Death appears as an inevitable, inescapable part of reality.
Death is probably the most difficult part of reality for mankind to accept. Fantasies of immortality have existed since the dawn of civilization. Gods in Greek, Roman, Egyptian and other mythologies live forever. Religions promise life in the hereafter to the right people, and ultimate resurrection to the just. The bitter realities of life—aggression, fear, anxiety, illness, aging and death—have been contested since the dawn of civilization. Utopian ideologies have come and gone, all of them challenging one or another element of reality. All those realities foreshadow the final one, death. As Philip Larkin wrote of death, “the anesthetic from which none come round” in his poem, Aubade: “Most things may never happen: this one will.”
Death’s grievous blow to our narcissism has generated many counter assaults. Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost is immortal, insisting he is self created and therefore God is powerless to impose death. Powerful kings have been assured by their followers that they will never die. This is a belief that Shakespeare’s King Richard II debunks eloquently in his soliloquy that begins, “..Let us talk of graves, worms, epitaphs..” And concludes with death arriving “…at the last, and with a little pin bores through the castle wall, and farewell king…”
Humans are pleasure seeking animals and death undermines that quest. An ingenious work around is to make death itself a source of pleasure. This is the solution of sado-masochistic perversion. As the late psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel pointed out in her study of the Marquis de Sade, such perversions constitute an attack on reality as described in Genesis. Sade, over and over in his writings attacks and ridicules the God of the Old Testament. That God has imposed a reality, in the form of difference between the sexes and the generations that Sade’s perversions all undermine. Ultimately then, inflicting sexual murder is a way of making death a source of pleasure.
The enormous appeal of the Marquis’s world of sadistic perversions was seen by all the world on October 7, 2023 when the rapists, torturers, murderers and true believer Jihadis proudly filmed themselves for all the world to happily watch. Yes millions of voyeurs were delighted, especially because Jews were the victims. Jews who brought terrible reality to the world, the reality of difference and distinction and the reality of moral law, and yes, the reality of death. These sadists went a step beyond the Nazis. Nazis tried to hide their evil deeds; not the Allahu Akbar shouting Jihadis and their ecstatic followers. Like Milton’s Satan they were delighted with their evil deeds and phoned parents to boast about their rapes and murders. One might say that they were adherents of a Satanic religion, one which delighted in death. Sadism and masochism go together so these murderers were happy to die as martyrs because they would go to a sexual paradise and live there forever. In fact the meaning of martyrdom for Moslems is itself a denial of death. A martyr is transformed instantly into a dweller in the bosom of Allah living forever. To call this religion a death cult would be correct but calling it a Sadeian religion promising immortality would also be true.
It is important to note that in the very heart of Western culture there exist many sympathizers with those who would destroy it. The woke system is one of the challenges to the common reality we live in. If the organizing dogma seems foolish and at times absurd, we cannot deny its appeal. That appeal lies in its rejection of reality. The reality is that the world is a complicated place of differences, inequalities and conflict. Life is not fair. We are born unequal in many ways and our lives are inevitably shaped by our differences. One of us a near- sighted, over educated Jew from the Bronx could not play center field for the Yankees as my childhood idol, a poorly educated, non wordsmith Italian from a San Francisco fisherman’s family could. This was a terrible blow inflicted by reality. How unfair! For the woke true believers such differences are evidence of oppression, and reality can be dismissed. The world according to our left utopians like Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, or RashidaTlaib can be divided into oppressors and oppressed. Failure and success are not attributable to the individual but to the social forces that oppress or reward depending on skin color and what happened to ancestors hundreds of years ago. The oppressors are always from the patriarchy and naturally include the Jews who are white or “white adjacent”(!) and hence oppressors. How about the reality of biology? After all, biology is destiny, at least in the sense that we all are born and die. The body ego is the first ego, before we develop language and develop other elements of our sense of identity. If we can overturn the biological reality of being born male or female, then death itself can be denied. Hence being woke means never having to let biology define you.
Let’s do some ‘word thinking’, a characteristic feature of the woke mind at work. Sex is a ‘construct’ and therefore can be ‘deconstructed’, so we’ll make ‘gender’ replace biological sex and encourage every conflicted child to become what she or he fantasizes being today. Turn it into a civil rights crusade, rather than a psychological phenomenon that occurs in all children as they grow up. The woke cause then allows the added satisfaction of inflicting surgical mutilation, a sadistic form of child abuse, while calling it “gender affirming care.” Once again ‘word thinking’ overrides reality; it allows sadism to masquerade as kindness just by changing some words.
It has been insufficiently noted that a close affinity exists between utopian woke ideology and Hamas’s Islamo-Nazi Jew hatred. Both claim victimhood as an excuse for sado-masochistic assaults on reality including moral law, so mocked by the Marquis de Sade.
Wokism’s assault on reality takes various forms: opinions are called ‘facts’. Achievement based on merit is deemed ‘unfair’ and fairness means equality of outcome. Thus is Martin Luther King’s injunction reversed: skin color becomes the primary definition of individual identity. Time, that brings death to all, is abolished as an unavoidable aspect of reality and guiltless people living today owe money to the descendants of people sinned against hundreds of years ago. Ultimately this is all a rebellion against time, biology, change and death, the final unacceptable reality.
While Hamas and the supposedly innocent civilians of Gaza embrace martyrdom and eternal life in order to inflict torture and death on Jews while feeling virtuous, many are puzzled by their western supporters. We would argue that educational indoctrination in the woke pagan religion accounts for so called ‘progressives’ support. Wokism is a utopian creation that believes innocent humans are corrupted by “structural racism’, capitalism and the ‘patriarchy’. It starts as early as ‘progressive’ nursery schools where children, when introduced to each other are told “you’re too young to decide that you’re a girl or a boy.” It rejects Judeo-Christian belief that human beings bear responsibility for their choices. After all, Adam and Eve are punished for what they have done. They seek to blame the serpent and portray themselves as innocent victims but God will have none of that. Death drives the point home.
A recent event is illustrative: Hamas forced a hostage, before being released, to recite how pleased he was to return to his wife and children. As he did so his Islamo-Nazi captors gleefully laughed knowing what he did not, that his wife and children had been murdered. It was glee at the destruction of the family and the torture inflicted on a father who survived. The Marquis de Sade would be proud.
And so, we are witnessing the merging of sado-masochistic assaults on innocent families, with denial of death. Jews are the ideal targets. Killing Jews provides sexual and aggressive gratification and satisfies the desire to overthrow reality as laid down in the founding document of Western civilization.
Western civilization’s shared human condition was described in the Old Testament. The irreducible, unavoidable reality is that each of us will die. This incredible blow to human narcissism has proved unacceptable and the original bearers of the message, the Jews have been held to blame. This is because these political movements are, whether consciously or unconsciously, pursuing the utopian goal of eternal life, of the life lost in the Garden of Eden. While some are puzzled by the alliance between progressives and Islamists, it makes perfect sense when one realizes both groups wish to attack and destroy reality. Both assume victimhood in order to victimize others. Both assume virtue in order to commit sadistic cruelty. Thus do words themselves lose meaning and become tools to overturn our shared reality. Gender identitarians defend transsexuals bullying their way into women’s spaces while insisting they are victims of discrimination. Thus is reality overturned and delusional people in need of mental health care become crusaders for civil rights.
In our own profession, Freud’s tragic realism was rebelled against from the start. In the 1960’s psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, like their woke heirs, proclaimed that the mentally ill were actually victims, that they were really the sane ones, that schizophrenics were truth tellers and everyone else was crazy. Words again, as Orwell taught us can be reversed in meaning and turned against reality.
Although conflicted human nature rebels against the reality of death there is room for hope. That hope actually springs from our biology. Awareness of our biological selves exists long before we are capable of utopian thinking and long before we can imagine what it is like to be the opposite sex. Even though children may be told in nursery school that they should not decide they are boys or girls, the body joins in those conversations. It seems that the majority of our fellow Westerners are not quite ready to submit to the bullying demand that they cheer the surgical mutilation of children to gratify a transient wish to be the opposite sex. Nor are they comfortable with men, dressing like women, competing in women’s sports. Yes most who live in the civilized world think their biological sexual being is not something to be discarded to gratify fantasies of post modern intellectuals, woke wordsmiths and haters of Western civilization. Awareness of our biological selves and of the reality of death may save us.
As E. M. Forster wrote: “Death destroys a man but the idea of death saves him.”
The price we pay for holding onto reality is high—the unavoidable fact of death. Judaism’s acceptance of the reality of death is vividly told toward the end of Genesis, in recounting Jacob’s death as he blesses his grandsons and passes on to them and their descendants the covenant with God and future generations. While each of us dies, the story of the Jewish people is thereby made eternal.
The struggle between civilization and barbarism, between reality and utopianism also seems eternal. Satanic forces are strong but Hitler and Stalin are gone, Sinwar and Nasrallah are now gone too. The ayatollahs and the enemies of Israel are quaking with fear. In the past, rivers of Jewish blood were spilled on the road to utopia and when utopias inevitably fail, Jewish blood has again been spilled. Now however Jews, who lived as powerless exiles for centuries have guns and a state and Jewish blood will be avenged, not by martyrs but by heroes, the heirs of Jacob/ Israel.
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