Conformity is valued in all groups. But in some non conformity is punished in worse ways.

There is a whole science of the super-organism that waits to be discovered.when one joins a group he thinks it is from his own free will and thinks he can leave of his own free will. but this is not the case. Once inside a group the rules change. There are for example social norms that if one violates the groups has a way of punishing. this does not happen by any particular individual in the group by by the power and energy of the group itself. This gets to be problematic if the stated norms of the groups are different from the actual norms.

Conformity is valued in all groups. But in some non conformity is punished in worse ways. Growing up in Anglo American society one gets used the idea of individuality being tolerated and sometimes even respected (if one can prove his merit). (It was considered an ideal to aspire to to be your own self in the 1960's) But in many groups individuality is harshly punished. Sometimes  because the group is just a small religious group there is not much they can do legally. But still they tend to label anyone that  deviates from the norms as a kook; and because of the power of the super-organism, this label can in fact stick. This problem is impassible for all human beings.
For being part a of a group is no different than a cell that is part of a human body. Though it seems self sufficient. Taken away from the larger body it decays and dies. So again if one does not want this to happen to him or her he should be careful what kind of group he joins.



At any rate I am pretty sure that the fact that being part of a social organism is so essential to the human being that this must be the reason Habermas [who some people consider the greatest philosopher of this generation] is not as against Marxist theory as most serious philosophers are. He must see it as a kind of social paste.--and who knows maybe it is. But my complain is that once a long time ago the Constitution of the USA was a marvelous social glue. But the effect of the socialist policies introduced in the 1960's did what socialist entitlement policies generally do--they create interest groups who have no sense of identity with the general society, and instead try to suck the life out of the larger society. This has happened in America.

super-groups and super organisms.

super-groups and super organisms.

(To have any group you need law. No law-no group. And the law is always based on ideology. This is part and parcel of human beings.. You want to have a true ideology as opposed to a false one. But even among true principles there can be a lot of divergence. All animals seems to be organized around some basic principia. Super-organism are just  examples of this. (The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. were good examples. The problem with Socialism is it forces people into rival interest groups, that try to suck the blood out of society to support their own group. But still there the you see the basic aspects of the human need to be part of a super-group or super organisms.
These super-groups have all the traits of a real life form.
They develop hooks that they stick into people that want to leave the group. Once part of a group one can never leave it without losing his life except by some miracle. But not all these groups are bad. Sometimes a person comes along that wants to found a movement or group based on some good principles.

E.g. the Madragat HaAdam (a disciple of Israel Salanter) that tried to start a movement based on trust in God. I tried to follow this path myself. I discovered a funny thing. It worked until I left it. But once I left it I could not make it work again. But as long as I stuck with it it worked.

Hegel thought individual conscious can only exist in connection with other peoples consciousness. 

Capitalism it is true does not reward virtue. So what does? Did the USSR reward virtue? Does Cuba reward virtue? Does the welfare system in America reward virtue?
Or does it reward laziness and covetousness?
Capitalism rewards greed. And Communism Does not? here is a anecdote that has a kernel of truth of how property far from being considered theft was actual worshiped in the USSR. a group of solders are standing watch around a perimeter before nuclear test. they are given instructions that if the yield of the Bomb is more than expected they should hold their rifles away from their bodies so that as the rifle is melting it should not drip onto their boots which are soviet state property.[It is hard to predict accurately neutron absorption. Also it is true there were a lot of nuclear related incidents and accidents that happened. People know about Chernobyl but not so many know about the K278 on April 7 1989.
However that was a very advanced model. It could dive more than twice as deep as a Los Angeles class or an Alpha ]



On 7 April 1989, while under the command of Captain 1st Rank Evgeny Vanin and running submerged at a depth of 335 metres (1,099 ft) about 180 kilometres (100 nmi) southwest of Bear Island (Norway)[1], fire broke out in the aft compartment, and even though watertight doors were shut, the resulting fire spread through bulkhead cable penetrations. The reactor scrammed and propulsion was lost. Electrical problems spread as cables burned through, and control of the boat was threatened. An emergency ballast tank blow was performed and the submarine surfaced eleven minutes after the fire began. Distress calls were made, and most of the crew abandoned ship.

The fire continued to burn, fed by the compressed air system. Several hours after the boat surfaced, it sank again in 1,680 metres (5,510 ft) of water. The commanding officer and four others who were still on board entered the escape capsule and ejected it. Only one of the five to reach the surface survived.

Rescue aircraft arrived quickly and dropped small rafts, but many men had already died from hypothermia in the 2 °C (36 °F) water of the Barents Sea. The floating fish factory B-64/10 Aleksey Khlobystov (Алексей Хлобыстов) arrived 81 minutes after K-278 sank, and took aboard 25 survivors and 5 fatalities. In total, 42 men died in the accident.

It has bothered me for some time why a great philosopher -Jurgen Habermas seems to like Marx.
The only explanation that I can see is he likes the idea that means of production {and apparently means and ways of making a living} determine people's morality and world view, instead of the world view determining their means of support like they claim. If this is the whole big deal about Marx--that people are irrational primates, then I don't see what the great news is. Original sin is a doctrine that I have heard of before. People are born into sin and then they excuse it with philosophy. Fine.
(Kelly Ross: "Karl Marx did not have a theory of morality; he had a theory of history. Thus, Marxism was not about right or wrong but about what will happen in history.
and what his theory predicted did not happen. The problem with Marxism was that it has never been willing to accept the discipline of falsification. The Marxist "high tide of prophecy," in Karl Popper's phrase, was perfectly willing to kill people by the millions rather than accept that "wreckers," spies, or some diabolical conspiracy were not responsible for the failure of Marxist economics.")

Maybe what is going on is the idea that desires determine perception--and especially the class one belongs to of better yet the social group. But this is saying the same thing. people desire to be upstanding member of a social group more than life.as the kamikaze pilots of WWII teach us.

OK you can say all I need to do is to read Habermas. But there is the trouble (besides the German language). At blowing Rawls (and the postmodern lunatics) out of the water he is great. But in building his own system he does not seem all that great.
Personally I would like to ask him why he does not spend more effort on John Locke and John Locke's state of Nature?

I think that Nietzsche is not a bad guy.Dress up anything as science, and Americans will believe it. Psychology is the best example of this.

I think that Nietzsche is not a bad guy. He might be my opponent. He might be wrong. But that does not make him bad or have some kind of evil heart. I do think that his critique against morality has some very important points. You might say that I see his critique on morality as actually being pretty astute. I see him kind of like I see Kant in his critique on pure reason. Kant saw the limits of reason, and Nietzsche saw the limits of morality. So today, any defense of Jewish-Christian morality of the Bible definitely needs to take into account the Nietzsche critique if it is to have any validity at all. Otherwise, it is like you are giving a class in the Talmud and someone asks a question and that you can not answer, but you decide to ignore it, or to put down the questioner as if he is too stupid to understand you. Obviously, all your credibility is gone in an instant.

Now I first would like to deal with the issue of logical fallacies in his thought. The fact that people did not create themselves does not contradict the existence of free will. The idea of Nietzsche was that since we are not self created (which he would call being free agents) then we have no free will. In spite of the powerful rhetoric behind his words, this does not logically follow.

This is just one example but the logical fallacies in his thought are numerous. [It is possible to prove that moral relativism is false.] [Actually it is possible to prove relativism itself is false. Not just moral relativism See the essay of John Searle from Berkley.] Rather I would like to mention some of the good points he makes. First he holds that morality is in general a weapon used against others, not a tool of self improvement. In fact, it obvious that this is what he does not like about it. If he would be in fact against morality, then why would this bother him? If it is a lie used by the powerful to subdue their enemies, then what could be wrong with that? If Nietzsche would be against morality, then he should welcome this.-- The point it he hold from Jewish-Christian morality, but he hates how it is misused. I can only agree with him in this.

He is right that people are different. But this is not an argument against morality. I boil milk and broil steak. Milk and steak are different. But this does not make how I cook them to be arbitrary or non objective. Again Nietzsche has a great point, but the logical conclusion is different from what he thinks. [He is of course knocking Kant that wanted to place all morality on one universal principle--much like the ancient Greeks wanted also.]


This I think is relevant for today, since I think it is the Nietzsche critique against morality which is the basic foundation of the Democratic Party in America today. People don't really think too deeply into morals, but they hear that they don't need to be moral and they like what they hear. Especially since psychology has becomes dressed with an air of science and is basically saying the same thing--it gives extra power to this. [To real scientists it has become clear that psychology is a pseudo science and that is why it has been rigorously excluded from the natural sciences.]
No wonder America is slipping.

Mainstream America loves to hallucinate, believing pseudo science. Dress up anything as science, and Americans will believe it. Psychology is the best example of this. Most Americans, for example, believe that financial details don't really matter as long as the spending party continues. (In the last four years, the national debt has risen 17 trillion dollars. That is real money.) Americans believe that you can get something for nothing if you just manage to fool enough people.
I was swamped with scams in the mail when I lived in New York--even Reader's Digest which you would expect to have some standards of decency.


But this I repeat does not make Nietzsche wrong. It just means that someone has to figure out a way of dealing with the issue of morality that takes into account the Nietzsche critique. This is a harder job than it may seem. It does not mean simply refuting his arguments. It means we have to reexamine the entire structure of Christan-Jewish ethics and figure out where and if it is wrong or might need correction.

I have a little more time on the Internet today so let me just at this point at least present my own basic approach to morality. Moral values are objective. They really exist, and are independent of observers.
2. Moral knowledge is an example of universals.
But in this case I go with Maimonides and Aristotle that universals are not independent of particulars --but that they exist.
I know many people will think this strange. After all, you do not bump into moral values as you walk down the street. But on the other hand, you don't often bump into the number two as you walk down the street either.
[Also to prove universals exists: (1) Yellow is a color. (2) The truth of statement (1) depends on the fact that yellow exists . Yellow is a universal. Therefore universals exist. QED]]



This brings me to the idea of argument from authority which is a logical fallacy. The trouble with Orthodox Judaism  as it relates to this topic is that the major issue which is all consuming  is who is the biggest rabbi --yours or mine. Logic and material evidence are not even considered as evidence. and how do you determine this all important question who is the biggest rabbi? By stories.
The trouble with this is that stories are not evidence. They can be helpful inspiration for what you know already by reason, but they can't cancel out reason or logic.

Now the importance of the Talmud for Christians is simple. I should preface my remarks that I am not saying the Talmud is divine. [It never claims such a thing. This is an orthodox invention.] The importance of the Talmud is simply to understand the basic question it deals with: What do the laws of the Old Testament mean? This is the area that the Talmud excels. To go looking for dumb statements in the Talmud, and thereby disparage the whole thing makes no more sense than doing the same thing with Shakespeare, Hegel or Nietzsche which have plenty of more outrageous and self contradictory statements than the Talmud. Shakespeare if you did not know lionized Brutus- -the murderer of Caesar. I forget which play that was in but the last line (I think maybe it was the play about Mark Anthony) was something like: "Here was a real man"--about Brutus! Oy Veehs Mir!

This is relevant for today's news:
Cathy told the Baptist Press that the company, which puts faith ahead of profits by closing on Sundays, was “guilty as charged” for backing the “biblical definition of a family.”

He later ratcheted up the rhetoric in a radio interview, saying: “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.”

Christians don't need to accept the Talmud. But with a little knowledge of what it is about, all this would not even be an issue.
In fact, you could even just look at the Mishna (the short version written by R Yehuda HaNasi) in Tractate Kritot and see the general rule about what is considered strict and what is considered minor in the Torah. [In short the 36 types of things that one gets the death penalty for are considered strict. You might say.]

\




The basic sources of information concerning Nietzsche: The statement “consciousness is a surface.” And the fact that he gets this from  Leibniz. [If Leibniz actually meant this is hard to say. He said, “consciousness
(Bewusstheit) is merely an accident of representation"] The there is a debate nowadays between Mattia Riccardi and Paul Katsafanas about some important questions about the meaning of Nietzsche.
She holds of conscious causation, while Paul thinks Nietzsche changed his mind about it, and the other thing that Nietzsche says about consciousness is consciousness  is “basically superfluous”. [When it comes to understanding of people, I prefer to go to the original thinkers instead of to the pseudo science of psychology which is just a business of lunatics by lunatics and for lunatics that shall never be divided, while at least Nietzsche had real insights.]


The entire structure of the Eitz Chaim of Isaac Luria --the entire universe and all the higher spiritual worlds and lower depths are all in the human heart. the other place is where is specifically states that what we call the self is the nefesh--the soul--or rather the upper layer of the soul.--the surface layer.plus the fact that he sees the souse of evil extending from the lowest level of simple animal desires up to the it root in holiness== fallen angel in one unbroken string or linkage, .i.e. after the simple animal desires there is a specific spirit that inspires people to do things that have zero desire or please. The sole motivation of this evil inclination is to do wrong because it is wrong. And there is the general middle levels where the sin has some pleasure but the main motivation is because it is evil and the level where people believe they are doing a great mitzvah. The Satan dresses himself up in Mitzvas. There is a level also where one does mitzvas for honor, power, and sex (to get a shiduch marriage opportunity) etc.
OK I hope I have not exhausted your patience with me as I get to my point--which is this: For  Torah, free will is important.  And for Torah, morality is objective.
[How could it not be objective? It could be like if someone says "Redness is not objective because whether a thing is red depends on the nature of the observer and not just on the nature of the object. Saying" Morality is objective" here means: there is some actual state of the world that corresponds to a value judgment.
To prove it is objective I offer this point by Michael Huemer: Moral objectivism (like objectivism in general) seems to be entailed by the law of excluded middle and the correspondence theory of truth, along with a couple of what seem equally obvious observations about morality:

(1) There are moral propositions.
(2) So they are each either true or false. (by law of excluded middle) (3) And it's not that they're all false. Surely it is true, rather than false, that Josef Stalin's activities were bad. (Although some communists would disagree, we needn't take their view seriously, and moreover, even they would admit some moral judgement, such as, "Stalin was good.")
(4) So some moral judgements correspond to reality. (from 2,3, and the correspondence theory of truth)
(5) So moral values are part of reality. (which is objectivism"

Another refutation of relativism. You can't even state moral relativism without denying it. Suppose you say
1. All moral truth is relative to the interests and perspective of the person
making the truth claim [like Nietzsche]. or 2. There are no universally valid moral truths. or
3. There are no absolute truths. It looks like in each case you have to exempt the claim itself from the scope of its application. But then you have given up the claim, for the claim was supposed to be universal in in its application. Or else there is one exception to the claim. If there is one why not more?]

The result of there being free will is that consciousness has to be the major battlefield between good and evil. For Nietzsche, the consciousness is superfluous because he does not hold there is any function of the conscious to choose. (Now if Nietzsche holds from free will at all I am not sure, since he might hold of such a thing for the higher man though he denies it in general.] But clearly the place of the choosing is in the deeper layers of the subconscious.
 He apparently felt he was waging battles on higher planes of existence. But the place where the final discretion lays is this physical world.





It is interesting to compare all this to Kant in which it seems most of what is going on is on the surface level where reason organizes sensory input into it categories. One would be justified in asking, "Where do this structures of reason come from?"


To both there are independent objective values that the self recognizes




And of course, last but not least, it is very important to understand how all this relates to John Locke and his (and his teacher's (the Earl of Shaftsberry)) idea of the self which in turn is the basis for his type of government.
John Locke's self as is known is the enlightened self [what some people call the bourgeois]. And much as the Left despises this, it is the basis for the American Democracy. The question here is simple. What is wrong with Socialism and Marx and Lenin and Nazism [all based on the concept of the general will of Rosseau and Hegel and as basically setting the pattern for the deeper aspects of the self and ignoring John Locke], and why is this government of superficial, selfish, unenlightened, bourgeois selves of America so successful? [In the ways that it is. I am not claiming there was nothing good about the USSR.]
Nietzsche. To Nietzsche, conscious falsifies

Another subject that is related is the desire to be part of a community which seems to be the direct opposite of the desire to be an individual. And in my opinion the desire to be part of a community is the most fundamental of human desires.--not the enlightened self interest of John Locke. So the question is how does this play out here.   With Nietzsche also this is a difficult issue. He was pitted against Democracy which he despised.

The assumed inherent goodness of people [that Rosseau claimed a the state of nature]

 is simply false. Here is one good example of a pure state of state of innocent human life as it is before contaminated by TV and McDonald's; Yanomamo men have two great sports--hunting and war. The patterns of their warfare bear a strange resemblance to those of the langur.
Yanomamo men sneak up on a neighboring village and attack. If they are successful, they kill or chase away the men. They leave the
sexually-capable young women unharmed. But they move methodically through the lean-to-like homes, grabbing babies from the
screaming captives. Like the langurs, the Yanomamo men beat these infants against the ground, bash their brains out on the rocks, and
make the footpaths wet with babies' blood.]

SDI

On the "Life in Israel" blog: there is a comment: "Star Wars(SDI strategic Defense Initiative). I seem to remember that a large part of how Ronald Reagan brought the Soviets to the knees in the '80s was via the Star Wars program. An arms race was created in which the United States and the Soviet union competed to see who could spend more money than the other on weaponry, satellites, and the like. Eventually, the US was able to out-buy the Soviets, and essentially bankrupted the Soviets into collapse."


My comment: "It was not just money. This was battle of Talent. There was a whole sub layer of events concerning Star Wars. First of all it is important to understand that Star Wars was being developed by the USSR and the USA long before either announced it. In fact after the Russians already had a head start with sputnik they leaped ahead with star wars right in the beginning of the 1960's. at that point they had more technology and even more of the mathematics necessary for such a program. America got wind of this and gave subcontracts to private firms like TRW and Hycon to develop a USA Star Wars. These corporations went t to my Dad and hired him to build a laser communication system between satellites so that the Russians could not monitor our communications.(the trouble with radio waves is that they spread. That means the Russian can eavesdrop. Lasers lack that drawback.) By the time Reagan announced it. we had caught up with the Russians and had gone beyond them.


One Russian told me it was battle between the American Jewish scientists and the Russian Jewish scientists.