Politically speaking, we say that someone is tone deaf when
they fail to grasp the meaning of what is said all around them. Another
expression of the same sort is the one which refers to the writing on the wall
a politician fails to see or understand.
When you probe into the reasons why these people are so
removed from the realities that surround them, you quickly discover they have
more than a difference of opinion with the rest of the clan. You find they live
in a universe that's put together differently from the one in which we live.
You know this to be true because those who live in our
universe and have differences of opinion with some of us, are still able to
explain their points of view by referring to the realities with which we are
familiar. They may or may not convince us with their point of view, but we
understand where they come from. By contrast, the tone deaf and those who fail
to see the writing on the wall refer to realities that are so alien to us, we can
only think of them as being from out of this world.
When you parse what these people say, as you try to identify
what makes them so different, you find that their ability to maintain a logical
argument is battered and seriously damaged. Most of the time, the politicians
who suffer from this condition would be those that run for office in the
so-called Liberal Democracies. That's where politics has become a blood sport
played-out in the arena where dog eat dog, and the winners come out with a
challenged logic they live with throughout their political career.
The distressing part is that the phenomenon is beginning to
spill out the political arena and permeate the rest of society. I learned
something about it because I once had a student who used to come to class late
every day. When I told him he should come on time, he came a little earlier but
still late. He did not express regret that he came late again, but wanted me to
praise him for doing better than yesterday. After several such performances, I
told the principal of the school, and he dealt with the situation. I never saw
that student again.
It was much later that I learned he was a “special
situation” student who was put in a regular school to see if he can be
rehabilitated. Though bright academically, he had a difficult time adjusting
socially because he had a difficult upbringing as a child. A good part of the
therapy he received consisted of praising him when he did the right thing. This
was the reality of the universe in which he spent his early years, and that's
what he expected from me. I was not told any of this when I had him in my
class, and he was not ready to join the universe of a regular school.
Whereas this case was cruel because it happened to a child
that spent his early years in a bad nuclear family, you may view the political
arena as a big family in which today's participants are forced to grow up under
difficult conditions. By the time they reach the finish line, they are so badly
battered; their psychology resembles that of the difficult-to-rehabilitate kid.
And that's not all because the proliferation and prevalence of confusing news
and opinions in our daily lives has dragged the entire society into the
political arena. In fact, society was made a part of the game when the taking
of opinion polls became an important part of the “democratic” process.
This explains why it is that some groups – especially the
religious ones – are now creating realities of their own to compete against
those espoused by the politico-journalistic world. One group that has deviated
the farthest from the norm is the Jewish establishment. You can see its effect
in the article which came under the title: “Israel Dismantles Another
Settlement, Gets No Credit,” written by Stephen M. Flatow, a lawyer, who is
also vice president of the Religious Zionists of America. The article was
published on April 7, 2017 in Algemeiner.
Like the difficult student I once had in my class, this
lawyer cannot begin to understand that the Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine are being
dismantled because they were built illegally in the first place. Thus, the
criminals who built them cannot ask for credit when they are forced by the
world to take them down. In the same way that we feel sorry for the kid that
had a difficult childhood and grew up with a challenged logic, we feel sorry
for a society whose lawyers are operating with logic as challenged as that of
Stephen Flatow.