The Blogs: How Societies Learn to Accept the Unacceptable

A frog dropped into boiling water jumps immediately.

A frog placed in cold water that heats slowly does not recognize the danger in the same way. The change feels gradual. Adaptable. Manageable. By the time the water becomes lethal, the frog has already adjusted itself to the process killing it.

People argue over whether the experiment itself is scientifically accurate.

That misses the point of why the metaphor survived.

Human beings adapt psychologically to gradual change faster than they realize.

Last week, Maureen Galindo, a Democratic congressional candidate in Texas, publicly proposed turning an ICE detention center into a prison for “American Zionists.” She added that it should also function as a castration center for pedophiles, “which will probably be most of the Zionists.” Then she defended the comments publicly instead of retracting them.

The political debate immediately became predictable. Some condemned her. Others minimized it. Many dismissed her as irrelevant or fringe.

But the real question is not whether she wins office.
The real question is why rhetoric like this no longer shocks people the way it should.

That is the part worth paying attention to.

A society does not become dangerous all at once. It becomes dangerous through repetition, normalization, and gradual adjustment. One step at a time. One slogan at a time. One rationalization at a time.

People do not usually wake up one morning and consciously decide to abandon moral boundaries. They adapt to smaller violations first. They learn to tolerate language they once would have rejected immediately. They absorb escalating hostility in manageable doses until eventually the atmosphere itself changes.

Then they forget where the line used to be.

I teach self-defense, and one of the hardest lessons for students to understand is that violence does not always begin with violence. It begins with permission. A person testing boundaries. A shift in tone. A crowd is emotionally escalating together. An individual is becoming increasingly comfortable ignoring another person’s humanity.

The early signs are often socially inconvenient rather than physically undeniable.

That is why people ignore them.

People prefer certainty before action. They want proof before recognition. They wait for danger to become obvious enough that responding carries no social cost. By then, the available options are usually smaller.

History has shown this pattern repeatedly.

The Holocaust did not begin with extermination camps. It began with ideological conditioning. Jews were framed as corrupting influences, national threats, and obstacles to social progress long before industrialized murder emerged. The legal and physical machinery came later. Public psychology had to be prepared first.

That preparation happened gradually.

One adjustment at a time. One justification at a time. One compromise of moral clarity at a time.

People misunderstand historical warning signs because they think danger becomes recognizable only at its most extreme stage. That is historically false. The earlier stages are usually visible. What changes is society’s willingness to name them honestly.

The word “Zionist” now functions in many spaces as a socially acceptable substitute for “Jew.” People understand this privately more than they admit publicly. The substitution creates psychological distance. It allows people to participate in rhetoric they would recognize immediately as hateful if different language were used.

Language shapes emotional permission.

Over the past several years, Jews across the West have watched things shift slowly around them. Security outside synagogues became normalized. Jewish students began calculating whether wearing visible Jewish symbols was worth the social consequences. Jewish professionals inside universities, nonprofits, media organizations, and cultural institutions quietly learned which conversations carried career risk and which forms of hostility would be explained away as political passion.

Each individual incident looked manageable on its own.

That is exactly how gradual escalation works.
People adapt. The temperature rises.

Then eventually what once felt shocking begins feeling ordinary.

One of the reasons October 7 hit so many Jews psychologically was because it shattered a deep assumption many carried for generations. Many truly believed antisemitism had become historically contained. Dangerous, but marginal. Ugly, but socially unacceptable enough to remain controlled.

Then thousands of people were massacred openly while crowds across major Western cities celebrated almost immediately afterward.

That moment changed something.

Not only because of the violence itself, but because of how quickly people justified it, softened it, contextualized it, or redirected moral attention away from Jewish suffering.

Many Jews realized they had misunderstood the emotional climate around them.

The water had been heating for a long time.

Part of surviving danger is recognizing that human beings are extremely adaptive creatures. That ability helps us survive hardship. It also makes us vulnerable to gradual moral decline. People normalize things they are exposed to repeatedly. They learn to live beside rhetoric, behavior, and cultural shifts that would have terrified them earlier.

Then eventually they begin defending the adaptation itself as wisdom, maturity, or balance.

Clarity becomes harder to maintain under those conditions.

This does not mean panic is the answer. Panic destroys judgment. It narrows thinking and weakens decision-making. But pretending not to see escalation because recognizing it feels uncomfortable creates a different kind of danger.

Jewish history carries many lessons. One of them is that early recognition matters. Another is that survival depends partly on resisting the temptation to normalize what should remain unacceptable. That is why freedom is not free and why societies that stop defending moral clarity eventually lose the ability to recognize when it is disappearing.

That applies physically. It applies culturally. And it applies morally.

Many younger Jews now inherit a world flooded with ideological messaging before they develop the historical grounding necessary to evaluate it critically. Some are learning to stay silent before they learn how to think clearly under pressure. Others are taught to distrust their own instincts whenever recognizing hatred becomes socially inconvenient. Eventually people begin believing that discomfort itself is proof they should stop questioning what they are being told, instead of understanding that what we cannot accept, we must change.

Because the greatest danger is not always the boiling water.

Sometimes the greatest danger is how easily people convince themselves to stay still while the temperature keeps rising.

Do something amazing,

Tsahi