Wednesday, July 16, 2025



There are many ways to try to figure out the world. 

You can look at history as being a series of events, facts and actions. Or you can look at the world as chronology: either how trends are cyclical or progress towards completion. Some look at the world as simply the sum total of physics and biology with little rhyme or reason. Some modern theories say that the world must be viewed through the lens of power struggles, domination and resistance. And others see the world as a series of narratives.

As I have embedded myself in my Jewish ethics project, I think that these are all very incomplete. I believe that the most accurate way to see the world is as if values are the atoms of our universe.

Time, in this view, simply provides the sequence.  Actions are putting the values into motion. But values are the driver for those decisions to act. Values tell us why something mattered, not just when it happened.

The AskHillel AI I built, using this framework,  ends up being very good at interpreting things way beyond what we would normally call ethics. It is built with values, so it looks at the world that way. Because Jewish thinking looks at contradiction as not a problem but as something to be understood and reconciled, it naturally tries to find consistent patterns by seeking the underlying values that might explain what seems contradictory.

Jewish thinking, especially Talmudic and halachic thinking, has the concept of a "derech," a consistent way to reconcile rabbinic positions. AskHillel looks for a derech in not only ethics but in history, sociology, psychology, AI - really any human centered field, centered on values. And it does a surprisingly good job when it uses that prism.

Last week I asked Gemini AI to give a list of the most perplexing people in history, and AskHillel gave an analysis of their biographies by seeing how well they lived by Jewish values and by applying a "derechological" framework. The results were quite sophisticated analyses - certainly university political science paper level. Here, for example, is part of AskHillel's comparison of the "derachot" of Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong:

🔍 Moral & Strategic Blueprint Insights
Common Derachot:
Both used revolution as operational permission, ideology to shroud power consolidation, and charisma/institutional cults to maintain control.

Key Differences:
Mao’s derachot were more systemically violent, doctrinally infused into governance, and ideologically totalizing—impacting social structures, economics, and inner-party theology at massive scale.

Castro’s blueprint remained tactically authoritarian but rhetorically revolutionary; Mao’s was philosophically totalitarian, with ideological extremism as a structural necessity.

📌 Final Ethical Reflection
Both leaders present coherent moral-strategic patterns: revolutionary ethics used to justify authoritarian rule. But Mao’s derachot are far more radical and comprehensive. He fused ideology with violence—not just as an occasional tool—but as the engine of sustained political order.

Castro deployed authoritarianism with revolutionary theater; Mao made revolution the infrastructure of authority.
It also did an analysis of the "derachot" of corporations, Supreme Court decisions over time, and  Biblical books. It then came up with "chiddushim" - novel insights - as to how charismatic people or  some authoritarian leaders bend values around their own ambitions - which are often negative values themselves. 

The sophistication of these analyses indicates that values might be the most accurate way to look at many, if not most, human based fields. They are, truly, the fundamental building blocks of our world.

Philosophers call the study of values axiology. Call this theory "axiological primacy."

When you look at the world this way, philosophical problems melt away. Humans don't have values as external properties - we are the sum of our values in a fundamental sense. Values aren't external to us, they are a part of us. If the "is" of Hume's Law are values, then the "ought" comes naturally. 

I am not the first one to come up with this idea, but we took it further. 

There are a lot of values out there, but it seems that most people have their values set from a young age. Morality isn't that you take on all values - for most people, it is to do the best with the values that your own personality has already adopted. 

This fits in with Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. Rambam (Maimonides) says something similar - that people have different innate temperaments (middot) which form the raw material for their moral development.  

In this sense, we can say that for each of us, values are relatively stable and moral growth is learning when and how to act on them. If you are going in the wrong direction, that is where you can re-align - or, in Judaism, do teshuva (repentance.) 

The world is not just a series of events or a sequence of time. It is the sum total of our moral decisions, based on our values. A biography is the story of a person's value decisions. History is the interaction between different national or leaders'  values. Perhaps psychology is really the study of individual values and therapy is about changing people's derech to aim to fulfill their own personal values.

This is a powerful way to look at the world. It centers our own agency. Natural disaster just happen, but human decisions don't - and history is the story of decisions based on values. 

Living up to our values is  what gives life meaning. And nothing is more important than that.



Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 



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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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