Only one culture still runs a full stack of agency-building habits. Isn’t it crazy?
Not a TED talk about empowerment. Not a hashtag. Habits. Installed early. Repeated until they feel like air. Songs. Sass. Prophecy. Law that starts with leaving slavery. A childhood line that turns annoyance into a question. A man who wakes up and feels he is a nation — and walks.
Everyone else is busy managing feelings, outsourcing morality to committees, and singing about imagining a world with no countries, no judgment, no tomorrow. Then they wonder why the engine has no oil when the street goes wrong.
I keep circling the same observation. Put Israeli teenagers next to polite Western peers for ten days and the gap is not “trauma” and not “politics” first. It is body language. Volume. Who apologizes for existing. Who expects to matter in the room. When the bus door closes and the performance ends, Israeli kids explode into honesty about how strange the visitors seemed — because for a week they had been polite on purpose, which is already a workout.
Nobody asks why. An Israeli would — but they often don’t know how weird they are. If someone did ask, instead of only complaining, I’d say: you don’t need a seminar. Listen to the songs. Too bad they’re in Hebrew. That’s what I’m for.
Music theory, in Israel, is a half-joke that stopped being a joke.
It was invented on buses and trips and late nights by people comparing themselves to American Jews, British politeness, global soft power. Why are Israeli girls louder in a room? Why does a kid answer a stupid act with “so you’d have something to ask”? Why does a culture produce startups, units, and people who walk toward the fire on a morning when the state is late?
Because agency is not a personality trait. It is infrastructure.
Here is the unpopular part. Agency is exhausting. It demands responsibility, accountability, and relentless inquiry. That is why victim–oppressor stories win so easily. They sell infinite moral purity with zero personal responsibility. You get to feel clean while the machine runs without you.
A free society needs the opposite software: people who can still ask, still act, still own the street, the school, the feed — yours — before they wait for a committee. Rewrite the dictionary (“your school”) and the institution stops being a distant oppressor and becomes a machine you are responsible for. That is not branding. That is civilizational code.
Most Western education now grades alignment, not reasoning. Reverse-engineer the approved conclusion, then perform the argument. Certainty feels efficient. It saves social risk. It also kills the only skill that keeps a free people free: the ability to say “why?” without asking permission first.
Other countries wait for a movement. In Israel, a single person is expected to be one.
Suddenly a man wakes up in the morning
He feels he is a nation and begins to walk
And to all he meets on his way he calls out “Shalom.”
A man is a nation. That line only makes sense if identity is not a costume you rent from the collective, and the collective is not a cage above the individual. The nation is an extension of personal identity — Abraham’s walk, not a committee’s brand guidelines. If you grow up inside that, “I can change the world” is not narcissism. It is the default assumption until proven otherwise.
Then the recipe song — the one that answers the soft West’s “imagine” with builders’ language:
Me and you, we’ll change the world
Me and you — then all the rest will come too
They’ve said it before me
Doesn’t matter —
Me and you will change the world.
Where English anthems say wait, hope, believe, dream — this one says try. Suffer. Start small. Start anyway. If Imagine is the anthem of dreamers, Me and You is the anthem of builders. That might just explain more about a startup nation than another PowerPoint about “innovation culture.”
You don’t need history or politics to feel the install. The song is the installer. Ritual before theory. Shoulder to shoulder before the seminar. Physical habit of problem-solving with someone next to you — not a feed of people performing purity alone.
When I was a kid in Israel, someone would do something random or stupid. Another kid would ask why. And sometimes, instead of an answer:
«שיהיה לך מה לשאול.» — “So you’d have something to ask.”
As a child, sass. As an adult: doctrine. Curiosity is not a corporate “skill of the future.” It is a cultural reflex. You are allowed — expected — to poke reality until it explains itself. Fish don’t notice water. Cultures that answer questions with questions don’t experience “psychology.” They experience how people talk.
Industry leaders now say curiosity is the most valuable market skill. Fine. Where did you train it? Who was allowed to annoy the room with “why”? Who was punished for it? If your schools reward compliance and your feeds punish dissent, do not be shocked when bright kids freeze at the only moment that matters: before the plan, ask the question that could change it.
Totalitarian systems — religious or secular — always start by discouraging questions. They don’t need to burn every book if they can burn curiosity. When Islam arrives as a power system, one of the first things at risk is not only freedom in the abstract: it is the ability to ask. When elite bigotry says Jews “have no culture,” the joke writes itself — who wrote the book half the world still can’t put down? But the deeper question is the other side of the ledger: why do agency habits keep producing results out of all proportion?
Now look at what the soft empire sings to itself.
Imagine — no heaven, no hell, no accountability. No police that can replace the eyes of God, and no God either. Live for today — nihilism with a piano. No countries — which means no borders of thought, no right to be different, one smooth paste. It sounds like peace. It trains people for a world where nothing is yours to defend and nothing is yours to build.
That is not peace. That is the lullaby of the unarmed mind.
A culture that installs dreamers’ anthems and punishes builders’ questions should not be surprised when the street fills with people who wait for someone else to move — or who outsource courage to a slogan.
Agency is not only action. It is speech under obligation.
The modern debate about free speech is often the wrong frame. Paper rights cannot save a people that will not say what must be said. The Torah does not open with a free-speech amendment. It installs the prophet: the one who stands outside king, priest, and mob and speaks because silence is treason. Prophecy is not a vibe. It is a burden. Fire in the bones. After the Temple, the tradition keeps pushing the role outward — toward sages, toward anyone humble enough to carry truth that costs.
That is agency at the mouth. Not “my truth.” Not a take. The duty to name rot when the transaction still looks profitable.
Compare that to consensus cultures that call silence tolerance and call balance morality. They can be direct when the cost is low and absent when their neighbor’s daughter needs someone to treat her as their own. Love your neighbor as yourself is not a sticker. It is the test that exposes whether Christianity — or any polite inheritance — actually seeps in, or only the parts that don’t interrupt the real god of the place.
In Britain I kept feeling there was not much oil in the engine. Activists few. Enthusiasm often from people who were not “supposed” to be the core of the nation. A man who would talk Israel-hate all day and freeze on Britain. “I don’t know how to deal with what’s happening.”
Offer: if everyone cleaned a little, it would be cleaner. Not a policy white paper. A child’s recipe. Me and you — then the rest.
What he saw in Israel after October 7 was people who got up and walked. To the line. To donations. To a camera claiming a voice. Not waiting to see how the neighbors behaved first.
Other countries wait for a movement. One culture still expects a person to start walking as if they are the movement.
That is not racial magic. It is habit density: songs, schools, slang, prophets, parents, units, arguments at the table. You can mock it as crazy. Many do. The mockery is often envy wearing irony.
Put the stack in one place so you can see how rare it is:
- Identity that walks — a person can be a nation; the collective does not erase the I.
- Recipes, not daydreams — me and you; try; suffer; start; don’t wait for the perfect committee.
- Curiosity as sass and skill — so you’d have something to ask; why is allowed in the room.
- Speech as duty — prophet burden, not influencer brand.
- Law that exits slavery — freedom as structure, not vibe; accountability of heaven, not Imagine-nihilism.
- Ownership language — your home, your school, your street; agency before purity.
- Refusal to wait — act when the map is on fire, not when the poll allows.
Other cultures have fragments. Stoicism. Protestant work. Frontier myth. British debate halls. American constitutional tools. Beautiful fragments. The point is not that nobody else ever had courage. The point is that one culture still packages a full installer — early, emotional, musical, legal, comic, deadly serious — and keeps running it on children while half the West runs the anti-installer.
Isn’t it crazy that this is rare?
Not crazy that Jews argue. Crazy that everyone else uninstalled the habits that make free people possible, then called the remaining operators extreme.
If you want the West back, you do not need a new aesthetic. You need reinstall. Songs that build. Questions that cost. Speech that is obligation. A walk that starts with one person who refuses to wait for the movement.
Me and you. Then the rest.
Or keep imagining. And watch the oil run out.