Love Is Not Blind, But Hate Sure Is

For those of you who have watched the show Love is Blind, you have seen participants “fall in love” and get engaged just by talking to each other over several days while sitting enclosed in makeshift pods with a wall in between them, thus never even seeing each other.

What happens afterward, when they finally meet, tests the hypothesis of whether love is truly blind and shows that it is categorically false. At the point that the participants in “the experiment” finally meet each other and have to deal with what the other person looks like and how they behave in real life, it more often than not destroys their imagined sense of love for the other, and they typically find themselves saying “no way” when they actually arrive at the altar weeks later.

In short, I believe the show demonstrates what I call “pod syndrome,” a temporary mental impairment of the people in the pods who, once enclosed without external stimuli and essentially divorced from reality and under social pressure to choose someone to be with, can basically talk themselves into anything, including thinking they are in love and proposing to someone they never even met. In real life, no one would ever do anything that dumb!

In contrast to love being blind, I was fascinated this week by an article in Time Magazine by Noah Feldman called “The New Antisemitism.” Here, Feldman demonstrates that when it comes to Jew hatred (or now hatred of Zionists), it is blind as a bat. It is an age-old mental derangement where people scapegoat, hate on, and oppress Jews regardless of their perceived theological, political, economic, or social status.

Feldman correctly points out that Jew-hatred has existed for any reason, no reason, and for opposing reasons:

• Whether out of jealousy because Jews were considered “G-d’s Chosen” or out of rage because they rejected Christ
• Whether because the Jews were seen as wealthy, powerful capitalists who controlled the world or because they were viewed as impoverished communist parasites who wanted to redistribute others’ wealth
• Whether Jews were seen as smarter, conniving, and superior or they were deemed “racially inferior” to be exterminated
• Whether the Jews were viewed as timeless, downtrodden, stateless refugees ready to be kicked to the curb again and again or put on a power pedestal as imperialists, colonialists, and occupiers
• Whether the Jews were considered white supremacists of European origin who invaded other people’s lands and oppressed their indigenous peoples or they were the Mizrachi Jews of mixed origin from Arab, Asian, and African lands who were themselves oppressed as second- or third-class citizens
• Whether the Jews were survivors of the Holocaust, which was to be brushed over as either grossly exaggerated or denied altogether, or that the Jews had weaponized the Holocaust to get world sympathy for founding the State of Israel

In any case, it really didn’t seem to matter; the Jews were the all-time convenient scapegoat for all society’s ills, and as a small minority, they were perfect for discrimination, oppression, murder, or expulsion. Thus, when it comes to Jews, we have living proof that hate is the emotion that truly is blind. But not only is hate blind, it is deaf and dumb to the harrowing screams of the victims and to the common sense of there being no reason to objectify an entire race of people, to hate them, and to persecute them.

What blind love and hate do have in common is an irrational mob mentality that destroys one’s ability to think rationally and morally. When you either deprive people of real information and outside perspectives, brainwash them, or create a sense of baseless fear and anger, you can bring out a real destructive side of humanity that borders on the psychotic and sociopathic. Thus, when people get back to their family, friends, and “real life,” similar to when Hitler was killed and the Nazis and their propaganda machine were defeated, then perspective and normalcy could return. This is why it’s so important to fight the fake news and brainwashing that are so prevalent right now.

In the end, love is not actually blind, but hate most certainly is completely blind, deaf, and utterly dumb.