I know right off the bat some of you were upset, and whether you understand it or not, that was the point.
You see the question I am most often asked is why do people hate Jews so much? Shortly followed by why do people hate Indians so much? The sad and funny part is that it’s exactly the same reason. Because it’s easy. But why is it so damn easy?
You see it is really easy to hate someone you don’t know, and it is even easier when they are different from you. I am fond of saying that it’s easy to hate an abstract concept, but it’s hard to hate a person. It is very easy to lie or believe lies about someone you know nothing about. If you have zero attachment at best you will not get involved at all; at worst you will actively get involved with demonizing and delegitimizing the “other.”
Jews have dealt with this a long time. Basically your very existence rubs a lot of people the wrong way because you remind them of things they want to forget. Nobody likes the idea that they or their ancestors were ever the bad guy, and no good guys ever woke up saying “Hey today I think I will try to kill all the Jews.” Therefore, for some people, their ancestors were in fact the bad guys.
Sometimes those who are on the pointy end of hate have a tough time understanding; they cannot see the forest for the trees. They try even harder to be liked, and the end result is they come off looking weak or conciliatory when that is the very last thing they need to appear. It is as if they are fighting the perception they are the “bad thing.”
Another reaction to being hated can come from those who aren’t genuinely strong in their identity. These people think since they aren’t being liked they may as well hate everyone. This reaction just causes wider alienation and in the end, make it even easier for others to hate on Jews because they become the “example.” “Omg did you see what that Jew wrote? He said to kill all the non Jews! I told you that Jews are all bad.” The exact opposite of what we need in a war of perception.
Think back to your school days. Every class had kids who didn’t quite fit in, who maybe weren’t the best looking, the smartest, the most athletic, but some of those kids ended up being bullied and had their lives made miserable. Some of them managed to remain on the margins, and some of them found their niche and were ignored. Now look at why those things happened and you might be surprised. You see the kids who were bullied were often the ones who were the most desperate for acceptance. They would do anything to be included and often they were humiliated and treated very badly because THEY ALLOWED IT, IN ORDER TO FIT IN. THE KIDS WHO WERE IGNORED AND those kids I mentioned on the margins, were the ones who fought back enough that the bullies looked for easier meat. They literally applied a concept called limited aggression, whereby they fought back just enough to make the bullies understand that it was just too much effort to bully them and better to look elsewhere. However the weaker kid who talked big, that kid was made miserable too, so it’s a thing where you gotta be smart and use your brain.
Now I am simplifying a bit because there are multitudes of groups, but you should understand that the concepts are the same whether we are talking mean girls at high school or modern day political and socio-economics. You have the “cool kids,” you have the “nerds,” you have the margin kids, and then you have the pariahs. The good news is that in real life very often those groups are transitional and kids who were nerds in school end up being wealthy and the “cool kids” end up pumping their gas. Sadly what rarely changes is that once a pariah always a pariah. Because science. Pariahs are often chosen not because of what they look like but how they act – if they appear desperate to fit in, if they display any weakness, if they are not firm in their identity the group will pick on them. The only way a pariah breaks that mold is by breaking the cycle, by becoming strong and by learning that being desperate for acceptance doesn’t lead to acceptance.
Now some of you are thinking “Well then, we may as well act like dicks” but those people draw bad attention – like I said they become the “example”.
Instead, what you do is you grow strong in your identity. You don’t care what other people think and you manifest that not by being a jerk and not buying in to the mainstream. You make yourself visible while showing you don’t care if you are part of the mainstream. You do your own (good) thing, and you will find that suddenly people want to be like you. They see someone who gives no effs but is enjoying themselves and feels good, and they want to feel good too. So instead of being strange and invisible and unknown, you are the cool one, you are the one setting trends, and people suddenly want to be more like you.
So boiled down, it’s easy to hate invisible people, and it’s simple to demonize people who don’t speak up against it. When someone says something horrible about you and you don’t refute it, people don’t say “Oh he was being the bigger person” they say “There must be some truth to that or he would have fought back.” You have to walk that line between crying wolf about every single thing, and fighting back when you have to. Merv says “Choose your hill to die on.” That means not every hill is important enough to die on but when you find one, you damn well fight even if it means dying because if you don’t, pretty soon you have no hills left.
I will talk about some things you can do to avoid this in another article, but for now I just figured some of you might understand why it’s so damn easy to hate Jews. From that you can understand why there are some of us who don’t. You also might want to know how some people manage to just do their own thing and remain unconcerned about what others think.
