Hayek, Session 2: Why Antisemitism Is Civilizational Suicide
You cannot engineer a culture of tolerance from the top down once the bottom-up habit of tolerance is dead.
During the first program of 2026 at Mindset Shifts U, we will work with Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap. Dr. Harris’s theoretical framework is consistent with our other studies. His many practical applications will help you bring to life the ideas of Emerson and others you have found valuable. More about this series and a detailed schedule will be provided early in 2026.
Upgrade today to receive all these essays and gain immediate access to our archives. I hope you will consider supporting this Substack by becoming a paid subscriber.
The conservative author of the outstanding book Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher, wrote in his Substack, “If you ever wondered what you would have done if you have been alive in Germany in the early 1930s, or Russia in the early 1910s, well, you might be about to have a chance to learn.”
Dreher is not forecasting concentration camps or gulags in America. Still, he is concerned, as am I, that we are only a major economic crisis away from an American form of totalitarianism that will be catastrophic for the future of freedom.
Carylyn Beccia explains the above photo: “By the time the Nazis came to Vinnitsa [Ukraine] in July of 1941, the remaining Jews were marched to the outskirts, toward a trench already layered with bodies — neighbors, cousins, wives, daughters. Shoot. Fall. Shoot. Fall. The trench filled the way a trench fills during a flood—quickly, silently, unstoppably.”
She adds, “The world did not stop. It continued in the same key, unbothered by human catastrophe.”
Beccia then describes the scene in the photo:
A Jewish man kneels at the edge of a pit already filled with bodies. His fists clenched. His eyes knowing his life is about to end. Behind him, a ring of SS men look on, almost bored. Their expressions are steady. Their posture relaxed. One leans forward with the mild curiosity of someone watching a demonstration. Another stands with his hands in his pockets. The shooter plants his feet, squares his shoulders, and raises his pistol with the practiced ease of a man carrying out an assigned task.
The man holding the trigger in the photo was a schoolteacher before the war. Beccia asks, “Why would ordinary men choose to extinguish lives on a gruesome order?” She then observes, “The photo holds no clues. Not a face shows reluctance. Or horror. Or pressure. Just the ease of people doing what they have come to see as normal.”
Beccia points out the Nazis “took photos, like this one, as war trophies.” One wonders how many of the soldiers in the photo above perished not long after they murdered Jews.
The stance of the Nazis in the photo shows, Beccia surmises,
That’s not obedience; that’s enthusiastic participation.
The “obedience myth” survives because it’s a psychological air freshener. It makes the Holocaust smell like a tragic accident of human wiring instead of what it was: millions of individual choices, made by people who found brutality normal, rewarding, or at least more convenient than growing a spine. It’s a storied myth perpetrators tell themselves to keep living with their own reflection.
Beccia correctly observes, “Those who refused to kill civilians were not executed. They were reassigned. Given alternative duties. Allowed to step aside.”
In this essay, I want to consider two haunting quotes from Hayek’s “Individualism: True and False” that explain how society can devolve to the point where few disobey. Hayek’s great lessons have haunted me for many decades:
The great lesson which the individualist philosophy teaches us on this score is that, while it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.
Equally haunting is this Hayek warning:
What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”
I urge you to heed these lessons before it is too late, because it is almost too late. Let’s apply it to antisemitism because that is the latest and most visible manifestation of the desecration of civil society that is fostering the collapse of civilization.
Viewing the rising tide of antisemitism—and more importantly, the widespread silence of those who witness it—through the lens of “Individualism: True and False,” I see a danger that extends far beyond the immediate threat to Jewish communities: I see the dismantling of the invisible moral infrastructure that makes a free society possible.
Hayek observed, “The spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend.” Such spontaneous collaborations depend on the unwritten social contract of mutual respect and the voluntary enforcement of civil norms.
Examples of social institutions that evolve through spontaneous human action—but not human design—include language, common law, property rights, markets, and moral conventions. Due to countless small adjustments by individuals responding to their circumstances, knowledge that no single mind could possess helps to build the blessings of a robust civil society
Hayek’s true individualism rests on the idea that freedom is possible only when people voluntarily submit to certain conventions. We don’t need a police officer on every corner when we share a social norm that says We do not dehumanize our neighbors. This decency is a spontaneous formation. A law didn’t decree it; it emerged from millions of people engaging in uncoerced social interactions in a commercial society.
The failure to speak out against antisemitism is an example of how we may lack the power to reconstruct a free society once its foundations are destroyed.
Today, in many institutions, the shared social norm seems to foster going along with institutional capitulation to antisemites. In the aftermath of the Bondi Beach slaughter, ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote:
Antisemitism in Australia didn’t appear suddenly. Over recent years, it has risen steadily, then sharply. Synagogues have been firebombed. Jewish schools and daycare centers have been vandalized. Cars have been torched. Homes marked. Children bullied. Threats normalized. Since October 7, reported antisemitic incidents have surged several times over, reaching levels not seen in living memory. Terror attacks on Jewish targets in Melbourne in October and December of last year have been linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Yet too often, leaders chose reassurance over honesty. Chants calling for violence were justified as protest. Language forged in violence was treated as politics. Direct threats were brushed aside. Each retreat gave hatred more room. When murder is given a moral excuse, it no longer shocks. It simply spreads.
The Bondi Beach atrocity was horrific, but it wasn’t unforeseen. It was the result of long indulgence. It was tolerated into being. Ideas matter because they shape what people come to accept, especially when they are repeated unchallenged. When crowds call for intifada, they are calling for the most brutal form of violence. When Jewish symbols are burned, and Jews singled out as symbols of evil, this is not dissent, and certainly not “resistance,” but preparation. It is a rehearsal for what follows. Every society that has failed its Jewish citizens has done so first by looking away, persuading itself that hatred was only speech, and that speech carried no consequences.
Ali adds: “Islamist extremism isn’t merely another grievance-driven movement. It is an existential threat to Western society and to the values that sustain it. It rejects pluralism, despises freedom of conscience, and targets Jews and Christians precisely because those traditions stand for limits on power and the dignity of the individual. History shows this pattern clearly. Where such extremism is tolerated, minorities suffer first, and the wider society follows.”
The failure of ordinary citizens, institutions, and leaders to speak out against the resurgence of Jew hatred represents the unraveling of the principles that sustain a liberal order. Hatred is given more room and tolerated as socially acceptable.
Can you sense that the flame of liberty grows dimmer each time someone gets satisfaction by listening to the woke right or left?
Antisemitism often masquerades as a “theory of everything”—a designed explanation for the world’s problems (e.g., “Jews control the banks/media/wars”). It is the ultimate rationalistic conspiracy theory; it refuses to accept that bad things happen due to complex, impersonal forces, and instead insists there must be “designers” (the Jews) behind it all.
There is an almost infinite demand for Candace Owens-type content. Eugyppius recently observed about the woke “Owens” right that their absurd takes on current events are “designed to engage broad audiences by simulating unique insight into hidden machinations. Doing this successfully can be worth millions of dollars, and a lot of very smart people spend their days thinking about how to tap into this growing market.”
“The sea of mental garbage” is the description the late psychiatrist Thomas Hora had for the collective mental climate that distorts truth.
The mentally weak and morally corrupt don’t have to dive too deep into that sea to get support for their hate. When I write mentally weak, I am not talking about stupidity. Tucker Carlson is not stupid. Weak means lacking the strength of character to understand what is driving your destructive behavior. Or worse, understanding but continuing because riches are to be had by undermining a liberal society.
The woke right and left are moving antisemitism from the fringes to the mainstream. When their messages are met with silence or equivocation by the majority, Hayek would say society is devolving. Jew-hating progressive former Congressman Jamaal Bowman recently found his new ideological brother in Nick Fuentes.
Progressives see traditional academic standards, meritocratic hiring, property rights, family structures, and legal procedures as products of oppression that must be consciously reconstructed in accordance with their ideas of justice and equality.
The antisemite believes they have “reasoned” their way to the source of society’s ills. It is a grim parody of individualism.
The one thing we can be sure of is that our ego produces moods. Having created a negative mood, the ego seeks to escape responsibility by blaming someone or something else (in this case, the Jews) for personal feelings.
Silence around Jew hatred is destructive because it signals that the protection of the individual is no longer a universal principle but a conditional one, dependent on political hierarchy or social fashion. Once the rule changes from we protect everyone’s inalienable rights to we protect everyone except Jews (or those deemed oppressors), the general rule of law has been replaced by the arbitrary logic of tribalism. Hayek teaches we cannot simply “switch” back later to revive the universal rule of law. Once the precedent is set that some groups are fair game, the trust required for a free society fades.
Consider the contemporary example of Jewish students or professionals who hide symbols of their identity (a Star of David, a kippah) in order to safely navigate public spaces. Of course, it is not only Jewish students who are being impacted. All med students at UCLA were required to take a class in which the lecturer led them in chants of “Free, Free Palestine.” For many, just as during COVID, it is safer to stay silent and not jeopardize their careers. But where does this lead?
If a generation learns that attacking a specific minority is socially cost-free—for example, that one can shout slurs in a subway car or ban Zionists from college spaces without facing immediate, organic social ostracism—the muscle memory of civilization atrophies. Once a community fractures into suspicious enclaves, the spontaneous integration of society ends. We are left only with the heavy hand of the state trying to manage conflict between warring tribes—an authoritarian condition that is the opposite of liberty.
Civilization survives because most people voluntarily follow norms of civility, not because they are forced by the police. The norm we don’t scream slurs at people on the street is a voluntary submission to a rule of social intercourse. See this news story of the most recent incident of that norm being shattered. To be clear, in this essay, I’m not focusing on compiling examples; I’m pointing you to the principle.
The most terrifying part of Hayek’s lessons is his warning of what is “beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct.”
We live in an age of rationalist hubris, where we believe we can engineer social outcomes. We think that if antisemitism gets too bad, we will simply launch “awareness campaigns,” hold “diversity trainings,” or pass new regulations to fix it. Hayek exposes this as a fatal delusion.
Hayek wrote, “The fundamental attitude of true individualism is one of humility toward the processes by which mankind has achieved things which have not been designed or understood by any individual and are indeed greater than individual minds.”
You cannot force people to feel solidarity with their neighbors through a forced diversity workshop.
You cannot create a “safe space” by an administrative decree if the culture outside that room is one of hostility and silence.
The person who stays silent in the face of antisemitism may believe they are merely avoiding conflict or “staying out of politics.” Hayek would argue they are doing something far more consequential: they are participating in the active destruction of the conditions that make their own freedom possible.
For centuries, antisemitism has been the “canary in the coal mine,” a clear warning that a free society is being attacked at its very foundation: the shared principle that individuals should be judged by their actions, not their collective identity. By allowing this spontaneous norm to shatter, we are drifting into a world where order can only be maintained by force. Foundations of our own society that evolved spontaneously are eroding, and we assume we can construct new foundations whenever we wish. Hayek assures us that we cannot.
Very good essay Barry. If you haven’t seen Ben Shapiro’s opening speech at TPUSA Americafest he delved right into this (though didn’t reference Hayek) aimed at his fellow podcasters on the right.