Never Again is Now (Addendum)
The Schizophrenia of Civilization: Iain Mcgilchrist's Theory on Brain Lateralization and Modern Antisemitism
Scapegoating is not a modern problem. As we discussed in Thomas Sowell’s writing on “middle-men minorities” the successful minority is often seen as the source of all societal ills, often persecuted, and societies that persecute them pay a hefty price. Something so common points to a truism about humanity and is a pattern which reveals our nature. We’re not now looking to understand the fact of the pattern but instead the particulars of the modern pattern.
What is it about today’s antisemitism in the West that makes it particular to our times and possibly more (or less) dangerous?
Dr. Iain McGilchrist might say that it has the potential to become worse because of the manner in which we have allowed - or even encouraged - the view of our brain’s left hemisphere (LH) to dominate our language and negatively affect our outlook on life.
"It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes." - Theodor Reik
McGilchrist posits that the right hemisphere (RH) is our connection to reality: it sees the world as a living, breathing, tragic whole. The left hemisphere (LH), by contrast, is a tool for manipulation: it sees the world as a collection of static, decontextualized parts—a machine.
1. The Language of the Machine
We can detect the LH takeover in the very way we describe ourselves and our society. In a healthy civilization, language is relational and embodied (RH). In a decaying one, it becomes technocratic and modular (LH). Consider how often we now use machine metaphors to describe human life:
Human Capital: We no longer speak of “neighbors” or “craftsmen,” but of “units” or “assets” to be optimized.
Bandwidth: We treat our emotional and intellectual capacity as a digital throughput rather than a lived experience. -“I don’t have the bandwidth for that.”
Social Engineering: We speak of society as something with drivers and levers that can be re-engineered to produce a guaranteed output. -"What are the drivers of this behavior?"
This language devitalizes the human. When a person is reduced to a metric or a data point, it becomes logical to treat them as a part to be replaced or a bug to be fixed.
2. The Puppet Master and the Machine
The LH is deeply uncomfortable with the Tragic Vision, which accepts that the world is messy and un-steerable. The LH demands a linear cause-and-effect for every frustration. If the LH’s utopian machine is not producing the desired results (e.g., total equity or total unity), it concludes that there must be a singular and specific thing sabotaging the gears.
This is the birth of the conspiracy theory. The LH cannot accept the RH’s reality (that life involves trade-offs and complexity). Instead, it projects its own need for control onto the other. The Jew becomes the imagined mechanic of the machine, the secret hand pulling the strings. This mirrors the influencing machine delusion found in schizophrenic thought, where the patient believes invisible forces are controlling reality.
3. From Covenant to System
As we have explored, the Covenant is the primary relational foundation of Western civilization. The Covenant is a RH concept; it is based on relationships, nuance, and sacred bonds. A society in decline moves from the RH’s Covenant to the LH’s System.
In a system, there is no sacred honor—there are only incentives and outputs. When a society views its citizens as components of a machine, the canary is the first to be discarded as a faulty part. The horseshoe convergence of the Left and Right is a convergence of two LH-dominant worldviews that have both lost the depth of the RH to see life and humanity as a sacred whole consisting not of things but of processes.
4. Conclusion: The Return to the Whole
The path back to the Tragic Vision is a return to RH Realism. It is the courage to see the world not as a machine to be fixed, but as a life to be lived. It is the rejection of the schizophrenic puppet master myth in favor of complicated reality. To protect the canary is to insist on the living, breathing humanity of the realist, and to refuse to let Nietzsche’s tarantulas of the LH turn our civilization into a schizophrenic nightmare.