Israel is largely affected by this top-down stupidity cycle, intellectual idiots infecting midwits. The latter resist to some degree, with occasional backlashes caused by the predictably terrible outcomes of idiotic policies. An example is the IDF’s reservists taking the reins after October 7th and wiping most of Gaza off the map. Our enemies are affected by an opposite, bottom-up stupidity cycle. This is because their social center of gravity is not at the top but down in the bottomless pit of 80-IQ biomass which comprises their societies. Therefore, even the intellectuals of their societies exist in the context of a profoundly idiotic narrative disconnected from basic objective reality.
A example is a 2023 poll of Palestinians which revealed that half of them think that Israel’s population was 1 million or fewer, and less than a quarter had a realistic grasp of its size. This is not due to lack of access to accurate information-smartphones with internet access are universally available. Rather, these people are just fantastically stupid. And this isn’t something unique to Palestinians-if anything, due to many decades of Israel-sponsored university construction and access to Israeli society, the Palestinians are highly educated relative to the Muslim median.
In a context where the vast majority of a public are imbeciles, public intellectuals, academics and politicians spend most of their time speaking their language. Avoiding cognitive dissonance or a simply fantastic level of cynicism requires them to embrace the moronic median, like a gifted American high school student who forces himself to enjoy drill rap and recite it unironically. So you get discourse best exemplified by degenerate heart surgeon Bassem Youssef, or this fantastic tweet, with half a million views:
The relevance of the tweet above, using footage of a moderately busy Ben Gurion International Airport arrivals lounge (complete with baggage carousels) to support claims of Israelis fleeing the country in droves before Iranian missiles, is not its stupidity per se. It’s that this stupidity functions as an asset, creating incredible resilience in the populations which it afflicts. No matter how catastrophically they are defeated, they instantly reframe their defeat as a victory. Even without ubiquitous AI slop, the Egyptians were able to retcon the Yom Kippur War, which ended with Israeli forces on the Western side of the Suez Canal and a Egyptian army cut off and dying of thirst in the desert, as a tremendous achievement worth naming
major cities after.
Further, unlike the Talented Tenth (of a tenth,) the vast majority of the biomass isn’t even smart enough to experience cognitive dissonance, and has no trouble whatsoever holding the most transparently insane, self-serving and contradictory beliefs. For instance, October 7th was a triumph of the highest order, with all the rape, murder, looting and enslavement being the righteous behavior of victorious and heroic Muslims, while subsequent Jewish actions in Gaza represent violations of justice and sacred international law. Similarly, It’s Over For America, because the glorious martyrs of the IRGC are going to rain hellfire on international shipping transiting the Straits of Hormuz and otherwise engage in awesome global guerrilla 5G warfare against the Great Satan’s civilian infrastructure, but also dropping bombs on Ayatollah Khamenei and sinking Iranian warships in the Indian Ocean is a heckin immoral war crime. Etcetera, ad nauseum. The AI slop only makes things worse, because all of these morons are constantly exposed to fake footage of Tel Aviv being blown into the Mediterranean by giant missiles as the Jews shriek and cringe in fear.
Now, you might think that this civilizational retardation would be a huge military liability, and at any other point in history, it would have resulted in its sufferers being wiped out or set to work in the salt mines, which would have been eugenic. But we live at a unique time in history when its effect is paradoxical. This is because first world societies are, as I alluded to above, disproportionately influenced by high IQ idiots. The latter have never interacted with 80 IQ people on any level beyond buying menial services from them, and have a theory of mind for them which is worse than inaccurate. They assume a give-and-take which simply isn’t there, and could never be. The slogan of senior Israeli leaders before October 7th was
“quiet will bring quiet.” Our leaders simply couldn’t imagine that they lived in a sea of people who were nothing like them, who didn’t want quiet and material prosperity, who could not be reasoned with in this manner. Most of them still can’t grasp this simple fact, because it contradicts their basic assumptions about human nature, and because its implications are distasteful to them and incompatible with their self-image.
One can see this blindness expressed clearly in Israeli hasbara, propaganda directed at the outside world. Looking at this material, you can see that it is directed at a moral, reasonable and rational audience which simply does not exist. Messages such as “our enemies are cruel,” “they’re shooting missiles at us indiscriminately,” “we are reasonable and restrained,” “we are targeting our enemies’ leadership, not their civilians,” “we’re the good guys here” are inherently insane. The people who are receptive to these messages simply do not need them. The rest perceive them as cynical lying or an admission of weakness to be exploited.
Our actions reveal this same obtuseness. Killing our enemies’ leaders doesn’t work-they have an endless supply of biomass with which to replace them. Wrecking their infrastructure doesn’t work-they wreck it themselves on a daily basis. As long as there are a few hours of electricity every day and water to drink, we can’t offer a meaningful degradation to their quality of life.
A great illustration for this is Hezbollah. After the pager operation and its walkie-talkie follow-up killed and crippled thousands of its operatives, after Israel invaded South Lebanon and caused its Shia population to flee last year, the IDF withdrew from most of the terrain it had captured, allowing the Shia to return. It now holds only tens of square kilometers along the border as buffer zones and occasionally kills a Hezbollah operative or two. The result is that with the opening of the war with Iran, Hezbollah has once again began firing rockets into Israel. For now, the volume of rocket fire is low, but given a few years, Hezbollah will rebuild its stockpiles and we’ll be more or less back where we started.
Therefore, all our enemies have to do to win is not to lose all the way. A defeat one doesn’t perceive as such is not a defeat. Even if we kill tens of thousands of them while losing a handful of our own soldiers, their mentality is such that they do not feel any empathy for each other, and thus no sorrow for their own losses, but only joy at ours.