Logically, if social hierarchy is based on violence–and we see this in chimpanzees, for God’s sake–then a non-violent social order will be flat. Egalitarian. Egalitarian not in wanting every individual to be the same, as what I might term the Pseudo-Egalitarians want (their actual preoccupation being the reduction of society into two classes, with both classes possessing equal material wealth among themselves), but rather in respecting each individual as a world unto him or herself, and sufficient therein.
Love, unconditional love, is inherently equalizing. It is anti-hierarchical. And to return to the previous post, it is anti-sacrifice. If sacrifice is a method for demonstrating and creating and reinforcing social difference through ritual violence, then love is the anti-sacrifice.
And in my mind it is highly ironic that Christ himself was made a sacrifice. Since it is a free country, and I can read history any way I please, and rewrite it any way I please–without, of course, being able to demand anyone join me in this quixotic enterprise–I would like to suggest that Christ never meant to get himself crucified. He was a teacher, not the Son of God.
It could be foreseen, of course. If social order is ratified through violence, then attacking the social order will logically always result in violence. It is a beast, which when woken, will reliably act to destroy and consume its enemies. Death shows the existence of the order, but the intent can only have been to critique it. Death was a consequence, but never a goal.
And as I have commented from time to time, it is thus amazing and absolutely contrary to the spirit and intent of Christ’ teachings that from his life and death and resurrection (resurrections, by the way, can be witnessed to this day regularly, in the work of David Thompson among others, or so I personally choose to believe) a Church characterized by countless layers of bureaucratic structure should evolve. Christ would have nothing to do with the Pope. If He came back, he would collect crumbs at St. Peter’s with the lowest of the laiety, and laugh at the cosmic absurdity of it all.
The overall point I would make is that as a cultural ideal, egalitarianism is laudable, but this word, like that of Liberal, has been misappropriated and abused by liars. Slaves are economically equal, too, but no one applauds their state of being, that of servitude. Slaves, like the Cubans, may in fact have access to “free” education, “free” housing, and “Free” health care. But like the Cubans, they have walls which they must climb to actually be free, and many of them will die, by design, in such enterprises.
Christ would lament and condemn Cuba, and excoriate–He did have a temper–any of the fools and hacks, and cynics who condone what those evil human beings have done to that proud and beautiful people. Every Cuban has a thousand lashes on his or her back. They are invisible, but they can be seen, I am quite sure, in their eyes.