is a useful adage. It serves to represent a type of behavior consistent with a certain sort of society. A society which views “sneaky” behaviors in a morally-negative light.
If all agree that sneakily harming others is a bad tactic because (for example) it is dishonorable and that society values honor, then treating a misfortune caused by another as unintentional and approaching them with a tone of correcting another’s mistake is likely to lead to positive outcomes. It not only avoids the opportunity for a genuine mistake-maker to suffer from being falsely accused of malice but even creates the opportunity for a genuine mischief-maker to respond to a warning with no consequences.
Of course the complementary saying to Hanlon’s Razor is “fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you”. And yet this is not always followed in all contexts.
Actually the tactic popularized in the name of Jesus is to respond to even known malice by rejecting this second adage, saying that responding to a mistake or a malicious betrayal by remaining unwaveringly trusting and friendly towards the other party is “heaping coals on their head” in karmic terms. And indeed it is difficult to argue with the successful spread of this meme and the outcomes of the society it creates.
One property of this society and this attitude is however that it creates a niche for a very specific type of parasitic behavior.
Namely, if “fool me twice shame on me” becomes “fool me any number of times I will never stop trusting you”, anyone who desires for whatever reason to commit repeated acts of malice need only be willing to pretend it was a mistake in order to get away with it.
This attitude was made clear to me in a play called Giulia the Poison Queen of Palermo when a corrupt official in a clearly threatening tone of voice speaks of “an unfortunate accident” causing harm to the title character’s wares. Which is not to say that this was my first exposure to the concept of “make it look like an accident”, but rather that it was a moment which reminded me that I was currently in a position which might be interpreted in precisely this fashion.
The question of Hanlon’s Razor comes at the point in which the plausibility of that explanation is stretched beyond belief. And to be clear I do not think that Hanlon intended for his adage to create the opportunity for exploitation, but rather that he felt a high bar should be set to establish malice in order to avoid baseless paranoia.
I think that the consequence of adopting an attitude which refuses to leave this framing as a tactic for acquiring new converts is the creation of a specialization which is specifically about getting really good at learning how to pursue malicious aims by repeatedly making things look like an accident. The most effective part of such a tactic is that anyone who does not see through the ill-doer’s mask may wind up unwittingly aiding them, and that these people are genuinely innocent of malice having only made the mistake of trusting someone engaging in secret malice.
The only real defense against this tactic is to adopt a baseline mistrustful stance towards anyone who has been caught engaging in it. The outcome of pattern-matching might lead one towards an attribution which identifies all parties involved but fails to distinguish between those masterminding the disguised-malicious “mistakes” and those lacking in malicious intent who mistakenly believe those coordinating things to be similarly unmalicious.
And I think the story of the Tainted Grain best exemplifies this attitude. The story attributable to Rabbi Nachman speaks of a society whose food source has become polluted with something which causes all who eat it to lose their minds after some fashion. The characters conclude that they themselves ought also eat the tainted grain because their sanity would be perceived as insanity from the context of the insane group members. It points I think to a very real phenomenon which underlies the importance of excommunication in R” Nachman’s religion. If one views Orthodox Jews as categorically and in all cases insane, then one might imagine that a person in this society defeating the toxins in the grain and becoming sane would be perceived by the overall populace as suddenly becoming insane, and that the act of shunning him or her from society would serve as a countermeasure against the possible infectiousness of this cure. I was in a workplace once where I learned of “toxic negativity”, and I couldn’t help but think that an employee whose complaints when shared with others become those others’ complaints might be thought of as a person who had identified a genuine problem which the leadership did not wish to solve yet whose significance was made manifest in its ability to inspire that same desire for change in others. So long as those in charge of establishing what is sane and what is insane in the context of the society are able to export any who demonstrate what observers in other societies would call sanity before their ideas are able to spread internally, a stable state of insanity may be retained. And indeed in R” Nachman’s story the last two sane people decide to eat the toxic substance and accept the resulting insanity to avoid being subjected to negative peer pressure exerted by their insane countrymen.
The difference between Catholic excommunication and Jewish excommunication is that an excommunicated Catholic is barred specifically from communion but otherwise encouraged to continue attending Church in hopes of eventually making the attitude adjustment necessary to rejoin the community as a whole. This is the type of remedy pursued by a society whose ideas are stable. The Orthodox remedy which produced Baruch de Spinoza is a remedy pursued by a society whose ideas are unstable and which manages that instability by exporting anyone who develops ideas in the direction of something more stable. The drawback of this “solution” is that anyone having become sane cannot be reintroduced into the group’s insane delusions because the stable pathway towards sanity which that person embodies represents a threat to the continuing insanity of anyone else in their proximity.
This explains the attitude I observed as a Reform Jew operating in an Orthodox setting. The Orthodox perspectives on many things are from my perspective completely insane, and my ancestors used to be Orthodox before leaving those ideas behind. The strategy I was subjected to treated me like I was insane from the moment I walked through the door, but insane in the way that a young child might be thought to be insane. Which is to say “filled with all sorts of grand and well-intentioned but ultimately unrealistic and perhaps impossible ideas resulting simply from a lack of world experience”. The truth is that if you want to privately operate in a cognitive frame of mind which appears insane to everyone outside of your own clique and which requires you to believe that everyone outside that clique is themselves insane in order to maintain it, simply infantilizing others is an excellent strategy to avoid creating any friction.
The main drawback is that the extent to which this behavior is tolerable to others depends upon their own willingness to be treated like a small child. Many find this experience actively enjoyable, and I wish more power to them. My experience was that I began to perceive the insanity of the beliefs of Orthodox Judaism as decreasingly mistakenly-harmful to me and increasingly intentionally-harmful to me: the response that I received for explaining as clearly and as politely as I could my objections to being infantilized was to be (emotionally rather than physically) whipped and beaten like a child whose differing beliefs are likewise not perceived as harmlessly implausible and rather requiring punishment to answer their maliciousness.
I remember a time when I worked as a teacher, and a student that I specifically connected with. Her name was Meira Secter, and I still have a card that she gave me somewhere in a pile of mementos. I remember observing the way that she was treated by the special-ed teacher at the school, and it reminding me of the way I was being treated. I didn’t infantilize her and she responded very positively to being treated in that way. As my own infantilization ramped up I found myself wishing that there was someone like me in the company of those responsible for doing this to treat me the way that I had treated her. And yet the conclusion I reached was that it is only possible for these insane people to hold on to their insane beliefs by excluding from the conversation the voices of the sane. Hence the necessity of excommunication.
I have made peace with this fact, or rather, I am sharing the perspective in this post in hopes that it will bring me closer to making peace with that fact. The larger reality is that my claim here that Orthodox Judaism is a form of mental illness would be received in any interpersonal context as definitionally false and not worth considering, which is ironic, because I believe that what I have concluded based on my experiences would align with what a majority of people believed a mere century ago. Would that I could travel back in time to Hitler’s war room and explain to him that I am from a future where he carries forward with his planned massacre and that the outcome is to create a world in which the behavior which he abhors becomes widespread amongst the entire population because his act of violence ruined the credibility of the entire set of beliefs he was representing.
I remember coming across the concept of a Volksgeist, and finding it extremely useful for explaining reality, only to learn that because this philosophy was connected to Hitler’s philosophy it is considered by-default sketchy. It is a classic example of “guilt by association” like that currently surrounding Jeffrey Epstein.
The conclusion I have myself reached is that the root of the malice I struggle to deny the existence of in Orthodox Judaism is actually the power of the Rabbis, and that most Orthodox Jews are insane primarily due to believing the crazy nonsense told to them by their leaders. The compounding factor is that I think many Rabbis are also blindly “just following orders”, and that it is actually Yehuda Ha’Nasi who is the posthumous leader of this group of people in the same fashion which Jesus posthumously leads his people. (It is said that Yehuda was a patrilineal descendant of King David, meaning that he satisfies the Orthodox requirements for Messiah.)
The truest meaning of the story of the tainted grain is that the Talmud itself is tainted grain, meaning it is both nourishing to the body and harmful to the sanity. I think that the nourishment it provided my ancestors was very useful to them in a time in which the alternative seemed worse, and I am grateful every day that those same ancestors decided to begin eating wholesome grain and abandon their prior insanity. I do not regret my own actions exploring for myself just how tainted the old grain was and is, and I thank God that I am out of that world and back to the world of the sane.
Orthodox Judaism is a form of mental illness. That is my opinion as a Reform Jew. And honestly my experiences have led me to conclude that the feeling is mutual.