Show me🎧an incited crowd, giant banners, heralds, and calls for the destruction of Jews, exactly the mechanism that drove the darkness of the Middle Ages, especially in Spain.
Reflective examples include the Black Death in Europe in 1348, when a false rumor claimed that Jews were poisoning the wells to destroy the Christian world. This triggered a mass psychosis that burned entire communities alive (in Strasbourg, for instance, about 2,000 Jews were burned in a single day in front of a celebrating crowd).
About 40 years later (the 1391 decrees/pogroms), incitement in Spain turned into a mass slaughter.
The resemblance is chilling. Spain went through crises, and the blame was directed at the Jews. A priest named Ferrand Martínez called upon the masses from every possible stage to go out, destroy synagogues, and expel or destroy the Jews. Indeed, the incited crowd moved from city to city, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered, entire communities were wiped out, and many were forced to convert. A mentality of a mass "lynch mob" received absolute social legitimacy. Today, a "mental Holocaust" is what generates, in giant rallies, the psychological infrastructure that characterized the Middle Ages: turning an entire group, then the Jews, and today the State of Israel, into a monster that must be destroyed in order to "save the world."
The tools change, but the mechanism of hatred and mass incitement remains, unfortunately, the same primitive mechanism.
"The lowest place of the human impulse" is the core of the human tragedy, and it reveals itself when primitive impulses receive social permission to unleash. The human impulse reaches an especially deep low when it convinces itself that it is doing good, and in the name of this "good," turns murderousness into a sublime value. Executions of Jews were a social event, a spectacle that masses flocked to celebrate around, and particularly horrifying is the numbness of senses in our days, when masses are capable of dancing and waving signs of destruction.
A Righteous Among the Nations, Prof. Jan Karski, once said that humanity's greatest sin is adapting to evil. When signs of destruction become a part of the legitimate landscape on the streets of Europe, it means that the low impulses of the Middle Ages are trying to break through to the surface again. Paradoxically, we fly in spaceships yet are driven by caveman impulses due to the vast gap between two completely different timelines: the pace of biological evolution versus the pace of technological evolution, and there are two explanations for this.
1. Our biological evolution has not fundamentally changed for tens of thousands of years. The ancient part (the amygdala and the limbic system) is responsible for survival, fear, aggression, and a sharp division of the world into "us" and "them" (the enemy). The modern part (the prefrontal cortex), which is responsible for logic, morality, philosophy, and empathy, develops slowly, which requires immense mental and cultural effort to overcome the ancient impulses. Therefore, during negative brainwashing, the ancient and animalistic part wins in seconds and takes over the person.
2. Technology does not create morality. It is merely a tool that distributes what is inside the human being at a higher intensity. A person in the Middle Ages shouted his hatred to fifty people in the local church, and today, with the help of that same "technological progress," one person with a burning hatred can infect millions across the globe with a single click of a button.
Technology took the impulses of the Middle Ages, gave them jet engines, and created alienation that facilitates evil. When people sit in front of or behind screens, they are emotionally detached from the fate of the victim.It is far easier to call for the destruction of a country or a group when you do not have to look an individual in the eyes. This allows people to be "clean" barbarians, part of a fashionable trend that does not delve into the criminal meaning of its words.
Since, contrary to external technological progress, moral evolution is internal, education, self-restraint, and awareness are required to stop high technology from becoming a servant to the lowest impulses. There is no magic cure, but history and science show that these dark waves can be defeated through social, legal, and educational structures that force the impulse to undergo sublimation; through zero tolerance and determined enforcement against anyone who fails to understand that calling for genocide is not freedom of speech, and international laws will treat it as a severe hate crime.
The solution to these dangers lies in educating children toward mental resilience, independent thinking, judgment, and personal morality, and in building international coalitions and strategic and cultural partnerships that will eliminate mental inferiority.
On a personal and national level, we must not let hatred extinguish our spirit, culture, and belief in the justice of our path. A strong and proud voice that represents true moral and human progress will replace the darkness of the Middle Ages with the light of an enlightened world.
Humanity wins thanks to those who refuse to surrender to low impulses, and indeed, a little light is enough to dispel the darkness.
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