The Apologist's of Sacrifice

[dream_weaver]

Human sacrifice played a key role in shaping ancient societies: Brutal butchery of the lower classes created a hierarchy and helped the elite gain power

Sacrificial victims were typically of low social status, such as slaves, while instigators were of high social status, such as priests and chiefs, installing a sense of fear in the lower classes.

I tend to think of the leading article in For The New Intellectual as Attila and the Witch Doctor, where Attila represents the chiefs and the Witch Doctor a stand-in for the priest here. There's nothing quite like the sight of a corpse on stake to strike a curiosity that can grow into fear to the onlooker.

'In Austronesian cultures human sacrifice was used to punish taboo violations, demoralise underclasses, mark class boundaries, and instill fear of social elites  - proving a wide range of potential mechanisms for maintaining and building social control,' they wrote.

This hearkens to mind " an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error." Punishing taboo violations, depending on the violation, could be akin to the death penalty in a charge of murder. Find enough crimes that can be packaged as worthy of the death penalty, and add a couple of borderline cases, and the multitude may not question it for fear of having to drink the hemlock.

'While there are many factors that help build and sustain social stratification, human sacrifice may be a particularly effective means of maintaining and building social control because it minimises the potential of retaliation by eliminating the victim, and shifts the agent believed to be ultimately responsible to the realm of the supernatural.'

This stresses again, the symbiotic role between Attila and the Witch Doctor. The leap of faith, however, comes in the closing paragraph:

'Unpalatable as it might be, our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today.'

The sacrifice has only changed forms, from the unpalatable perceptual sight of slaves and taboo violators being slaughtered openly on the sacrificial alter in the public square, to the more difficult and equally unpalatable conceptual sight of the CEO's being vilified for supposedly "'doing nothing' and profiting" while the criminal is being incarcerated for "doing something and 'profiting.'"

Reason is what provided the transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today. Replacing reasoning with this type of rationalization will ultimately return us to the small egalitarian groups from whence we came lies at the heart of what Miss Rand foresaw.

Edited April 5, 2016 by dream_weaver