Sacrificial culture

I think the entirety of my work can be viewed as oriented around one aim: enabling, for once, human culture not to revert back to sacrifice.  This is, of course, grandiose–I have recently diagnosed this as one of my traits–and yet, ideas DO matter.  They start somewhere, with someone who refuses to accept the tranquilizing commonplaces and platitudes at their face value, and in a qualitatively rich society, with MANY such someones, each from their own view, their own place, with their own method.

Most historical culture can only be viewed, in my estimation, as functionally psychotic.  It is based upon the elevation of power, of meaning based upon coercion, of conformity muted and routinized and vanished in vast seas of time and habit.  If the particular recapitulates the general, at any rate.  Certainly, this process can be seen in many homes the world over, and what I read of history seems to bear this basic idea out.

Sacrificial culture: the inability of some mass of individuals to learn to trust their own instincts while respecting those of others.  This leads to the build up of covert and generally undiagnosed, subterranean hostilities, which can only dealt with by expression.  This expression can take the form of ritual murders of various sorts, and it can take the form of ritual sadism in the form of requiring some set of the population to be “born” inferior.  I think one could take Pareto’s formula here and put it to rough use: either some 20% of the population controls 80%, as in most forms of authoritarian rule; or 80% rules a 20%, as for example in the Hindu caste system, which renders some inferior, and some not even worthy to be included in the system.  The inferior in the system are referred to, appropriately enough, as the “feet”.

So much of the life of every person is myth.  It is covert, hidden, subtle.  Only by revealing the hidden can we avoid the sacrifice, avoid covert sadism of our own.  Most sadism, you see, is not overt violence.  It is not overtly taking pleasure in the pain of others.  It is, rather, best seen in refusals to perceive, in manic repetitions, in failures of empathy and love.  We could all love one another, yet we don’t.  We don’t due in part to fear, but mainly because the root of love–understanding–is absent in those under the thrall of unrecognized sadistic compulsions.

Love, to be clear, is not a duty: it is an outcome, of a particular level of understanding.  To see oneself is to see others as they are; yet most of us refuse to see ourselves, and thus fail to see others.  And thus we create chasms when the world is otherwise filled with bridges.

This has been a strange week for me, and I will leave it at that.  There is ample to ponder here, particularly if you think you have already understood what I am saying to you.

Edit: I will add an obvious point, which seemed extraneous: the Hunger Games is quite obviously a description of a sacrificial order.  The children are human sacrifices, fed to appease the inability of the ruling elite to form independent identities.  They do not need their material comforts nearly as much as they need to be SUPERIOR to some other group, and sacrifice is a means of expressing this superiority and the following bloodthirst openly.  It tranquilizes them, calms them, eases their relations with one another.

This is perhaps gratuitous, but I do feel like I have been on Earth many times, and seen this dynamic countless times.  What is surprising is not that there is evil on Earth, but that at times and places Goodness blossoms, and decency fills the air. 

This is a feeling only, with no memories to back it up.