Which world do you live in?
Below are two stories. Neither are true, but they do represent an amalgamation of real worldviews. I encourage you to read them with anthropological lens.
Below are two stories. Neither are true, but they do represent an amalgamation of real worldviews. I encourage you to read them with anthropological lens.
World A
Israel is fighting an existential war in good faith.
It’s lose lose because the enemy they fight is indoctrinated from childhood, they dream of martyrdom. They will either destroy you, or you will have to fight them (which means killing people you know are brainwashed, but what else can you do?)
Neutral people on the outside are against you, because they don’t understand the full picture, + it’s easy to criticize whichever entity has more power & agency.
“Why can’t you just stop the war? Just live in peace!”
We tried, goddamnit! We decided to live in peace - and they murdered our people. We forgave it, buried the hatchet, tried again, same thing. How many of YOUR people are you willing to sacrifice before you start fighting back?
This is not hard to prove. You could see it for yourself if you were here. If we all laid down our weapons, Israel would not exist. And then it would just be an existential war with someone else, on another border, closer to you. If that happens it will be very obvious which side is evil here, but by then it will be too late.
💖 But there’s good news ✨
Sentiment has flipped. Israel says “look, fine, here’s a peace deal”. A lot of countries stated they’re willing to recognize the state of Palestine in exchange for peace / Hamas stopping the aggression.
It’s in their hands now. If Hamas accepts it, win win! If they do not, then at least now there’s no confusion anymore.
To help spread this truth, they’re going to do open, coordinated messaging with a network of influencers. This will lead to less bloodshed if people understood the lose-lose situation Israel is in, and what an actual path to long term peace looks like.
The OTHER good news is that there appears to be a wave of Arabs proclaiming that they don’t even want the war, they are totally fine living in peace next to their Jewish neighbors & giving up the land. Now, these Arabs together with these public Israeli influencer networks can amplify the voices of truth and reason, and hating Israel will no longer be a part of the Arab identity.
“It’s impossible to find a Palestinian who accepts a sovereign Jewish state” → not anymore1! The more this faction grows, the less bloodshed will happen.
A brighter future may be possible after all.
World B
Israel is initiating a war under false pretenses. A conspiracy is afoot.
The Arabs don’t actually matter to Israel that much - they are just easy targets. It’s easy to trigger a subset of them into violent action.
This is lose lose for the Arabs because you either (1) cooperate with Israel to do what it wants, or (2) the violent Islamic militants will overwhelm your countries.
There’s no winning here because even if you laid down all your weapons, and gave up all the land, your countries will still collapse in violent warfare (because the most radical versions of Islam will get support to gain control).
Q: How is this good for Israel?
A: It’s necessary for the greater good - to successfully pull off an “inversion”2.
The steelman for Israel in this world is that they’re trying to pull off a “Game B”3. Or, if you’re familiar with Asimov’s writing, it’s like trying to save humanity by establishing the Foundation.
The world as-is is broken, and if the status quo continues, no one will survive.
Humanity struggles to coordinate & come together without the stick, without some shared existential threat. So, triggering *a* threat is better than a slow death & decay for all. It’s unfortunate that you have to trigger innocent people and make them into a scapegoat, but they’re really not that innocent. It’s not like you’re forcing them to commit acts of terrorism. You’re just giving them the option. They are making their own choices for which it’s fair game if they face consequences4.
💖 But there’s good news ✨
In this world, there’s no option where humanity does not ultimately win.
Either the plan works, all the good people come together against the scapegoats, and things get much worse for a while, but that helps them weather the necessary transition. One side loses, but, y’know, greater good.
OR, the plan fails, because enough people understand it. Recognition of the pattern is the only way to avoid playing into it. Humanity finds some other way to come together, to go through the necessary transition needed for survival.
It’s kind of a choice between a safe, predictable, bounded path (if albeit somewhat miserable) or an unpredictable, unbounded path.
Both of these are stories - there are a million other stories that frame the current world you live in. But all possible stories that frame the current world have an answer to: “what will happen if all the Arabs just decide to unanimously stop fighting and lay down all arms” - you can sort the infinite set into two buckets all via this question.
The truth is knowable, even if just in principle. This is the grounding we have for our world. If the test we need to make to find the truth to our satisfaction is impractical, we can try to work backwards to other kinds of tests that would be more practical. But the solid ground we have is that the truth is knowable - we can always look through what our story about our world tells us will happen if we take action XYZ.
An older example is Palestinian + Israeli peace activists doing media tours together in the US to show how much Arab hate there is of Jews that’s rooted in ignorance, “I realized I grew up hating people I knew nothing about, I didn’t even know about the holocaust”
“Netenyahu says we need a new generation of Palestinians who don’t hate Jews - I want to say, here we are!”
Sadly, these voices don’t propagate to get very far. But now that Israel has a public “prosocial propaganda” office, they can amplify these for deradicalisation purposes.
If you are not familiar, Game B is a decentralized movement to flip society away from zero-sum systems towards positive sum systems. See: https://www.gameb.wiki/index.php?title=Game_B
This is a critical piece of this worldview - it’s kind of the like whole “vampire needs permission in order to be let into your house”. It sounds kind of stupid, but it makes sense if you think of it like, the source of the vampire’s power is liberal democracy.
The vampire can override the source of its power (the good thing, the democracy) but then it loses the good thing that keeps it alive. If instead it uses a loophole (people vote for the thing of their own will), then you retain the power. The vampire did not make the choice for you, you voted for it. The burden of informed decision is on you.
I can see the thoughtfulness here, and that you’re trying to mindfully hold multiple worldviews. What it keeps feeling like though, is a hyper-intellectual, disembodied experiment rather than a real anthropological lens. You invite us to adopt that lens, and by doing that assume that you yourself are holding it, but real anthropology demands naming positionality and gives attention to lived experience. Without that grounding in reality, it ends up aestheticizing propaganda instead of examining it more closely, and that’s especially dangerous in the context of Israel and Palestine where propaganda itself fuels ongoing violence on a massive scale.
The framing appears balanced on the surface, but the emotional gravity leans heavily toward one story. It’s fine to write from a particular worldview, but naming it would make the piece more honest. Otherwise, it does the thing it seems to critique and turns propaganda into philosophy.
thank you - can you make the direction it leans in? Want this clearly on the record (since this is not obvious to all readers)