Transcription
When my wife and I visited the old synagogue in Amsterdam, we were granted access to a rare, heart-rending, and to me personally, amazing document. It was signed by my great-great-great-great grandfather, a member of the Powo family, the nobility of the Jews. And Pardo was a rabbi in that synagogue. And the document that I witnessed, the document that I had access to, was aim, the Hebrew word for excommunication. It was of Spinoza, better known as Benedict Spinoza, the famous 17th-century philosopher. Yes, my grandfather did this to him.
Excommunication is still going on. It is known by another name: cancel. To cancel someone. In religious excommunication, the members of the community are not supposed to talk to the excommunicated person, to transact with him or her, and in any way, shape, or form, to do business with them. The excommunicated person cannot even buy food. Cancelled culture is not very different. The person who is canceled is excommunicated, ostracized.
Ostracism, the term comes from ancient Greece, especially democratic Athens. Citizens there used a procedure called Ostraismos to temporarily banish community members thought to be a threat to the state. Citizens scratched the name of the person they wished to exile onto pieces of broken pottery known as Ostraka. If a quorum was reached, that person had 10 days to leave the city-state for a period of 10 years.
Cancel culture is no different. The person who is canceled loses his or her reputation, standing in the community, and access to other members of the same group, peer group. Usually, academic and workplace purges, moral panics, rampant incarceration, smear campaigns, systemic discrimination are all forms of excommunication. And excommunication is actually the modern, attenuated, sublimated form of human sacrifice. Whereas in ancient periods of history, people used to physically sacrifice the bodies of other human beings to all kinds of divinities and deities. The Mo, the Adex did it, and so on. Today, we don't sacrifice the body; much worse, we sacrifice the mind and the ability to persist and survive within society and a peer group. And so we have reverted to human sacrifice in multifarious forms.
Why is that? Because we're in panic. We are terrified. We perceive our reality as ominous, threatening. The uncertainty consumes us. The indeterminacy, the unpredictability of it all, the utter collapse of guardrails and laws and regulations, the lack of trust in authority, in leaders, in elites. All this is very, very disorienting, very terrifying. It's nightmarish. It's realistic. We have a feeling that we are somehow embedded in a dreamscape from which there is no escape. And so we are in panic. And when we are in panic, we tend to take it out on other people. We tend to look for scapegoats. We criminalize and we pathologize either common normal behavior, sex included. We pathologize and we diagnose other people. We use therapy speak to somehow label them and castigate and chastise them and exclude them from the community. So we say, "This person is a narcissist," even though we are not qualified to diagnose, nor are we trained to do so. We medicalize diversity. We have strange diagnoses such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathic traits, all of them describing basically the range of human traits and behaviors, the spectrum, the diversity, the plurality of what it constitutes to be a human being. We demonize scapegoats, and we do all this in order to somehow reassert control and mastery over our lives. We perceive our lives as spinning out of control. We perceive our lives as veering into a kind of vortex, spiraling. We perceive our lives as disenchanted. Our lives become wild, savage, and very, very minutiae.
This is the psychology of human sacrifice. It is intended to placate the gods and to secure their goodwill. And in a narcissistic age, the god, the gods we are trying to reconcile with, the gods we are trying to placate, the gods whose goodwill we are trying to secure, it's us. Every single one of us is a god unto himself or herself. We are all deities in this new pantheon of narcissism. We don't know what to do. We are hysterical. We are panic-driven. We're anxious. We're terrified. We anticipate the worst. We catastrophize. And so we revert to religion, the esoteric, the occult. We lose trust in impersonal or non-communal aspects of human existence. We seek to huddle together like a herd attacked by external predators. We don't trust rationality. We distrust science and mistrust authority, which are now perceived not as asocial but as positively or negatively antisocial. We give up on the impersonal in favor of the personal. Superstitions are personal. Angels and gods are personal. These are personal constructs. They interact with us on an individual level. We can somehow internalize them and continue to talk to them. They keep us company. They safeguard us. They protect us. They are a form of parental secure base. Whereas science is objective, neutral, couldn't care less about us. Authority figures and the elites are self-centered. They would sacrifice us in a heartbeat. We are slaves. We are raw material. So we opt out of social structures. We seek to undermine and challenge everything. We become nihilistic. And the response to nihilism is to try to find meaning and direction and purpose, a hermeneutic explanatory principle, an organizing principle in the transcendent, in God, in angels, in demons. We seek to impose structure and meaning on the world by scapegoating people, excluding them, imprisoning them, torturing them, even killing them. And it's a moving target. Today, intellectuals are the bête noire. Intellectuals are the culprits. Tomorrow, narcissists and psychopaths. The next day, politicians. The third, the fourth day, some minority. And all this attempt to empower oneself by excluding others, to belong to an in-group by excluding the out-group and demonizing it. This is a form of self-supply because it's like whistling in the dark. We use malignant egalitarianism. My opinion is as good as your fact. We use technological empowerment in order to somehow feel that we are godlike. We are in control. We have regained mastery of an environment which is unyielding and harsh and threatening. And the way to self-supply is by denigrating others. By humiliating and chastising them, by punishing them, we become increasingly more punitive.
The punishment-oriented psychology of human sacrifice is long and storied. It spans various dimensions: evolutionary, cognitive, social. It involves belief-driven cognition where supernatural rewards are prioritized over physical life. It involves the social control hypothesis used by elites to legitimize political authority and the reduction of social anxieties through ritualized communal bonding. Human sacrifice unites us. When we zero in or home in on a scapegoat, we experience catharsis. We project the parts in us that we find unacceptable, the parts in us that we reject, the dimensions and aspects of our personality that we cannot countenance or make peace with. We project them onto the scapegoat. The psychology of human sacrifice operates at the intersection of existential terror, group conformity, and strategic social coercion. It's not a product of random cruelty. There's nothing random about it. Historical ritual killings are deeply calculated. They are psychological acts, but they are also social acts, and they are designed to manage intense anxiety and force obedience and cohesion. Social cohesion gives humans the perceived sense of control over an unpredictable world. The social cohesion aspect is very important because human sacrifice, the blood that is shed physically or metaphorically, becomes the glue that holds the rest of us together. When we behold the spectacle of human sacrifice, we are cleansed and purified. At the core of this practice is the intersection of extreme fear, terror, and a distorted belief system. In all societies, there is the underlying current of irrationality, of superstition, of prejudice, of bias, a rejection of reality because it's intolerable and burdensome. A rejection of everything that has to do with reality, like science. Supernatural rewards, ancestral divine commands, they are considered suddenly absolute. Ritual killing is reframed as laudable social cleansing. Instead of being perceived as murder, again, physical or metaphorical, human sacrifice is viewed as a necessary act. It's an exchange to pacify a deity, a social norm, a structure, a cult, a belief system. Could be biblical, could be secular, could be Hindu, could be Christian, could be Jewish, could be Muslim. The gods are demanding. The gods are demanding, and they are implacable, and they are cruel. The only way to keep them at bay and to render ourselves their allies is to sacrifice our fellow beings, to release this spiritual power, to prevent cosmic disasters like droughts or military defeats or social disintegration, corruption, and decadence. And so this is very similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder, where a ritual is intended to fend off the inevitable evil. An inevitable evil. A ritual is intended to somehow restructure and reorganize reality in a way which would be more benign. There is a catastrophizing in obsessive-compulsive disorder. There is catastrophizing. Something really bad is going to happen. And the only way to prevent it from happening is to wash my hands 10 times and to count every second tile.
But this is the individual aspect. There is also a pronounced social dimension, and it was studied by sociologists and psychologists, social psychologists. They came up with the social control hypothesis. The practice of human sacrifice, again, real or metaphorical, serves to legitimize power and stabilize highly stratified class systems. Evolutionary studies, there was a famous study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS. This study suggests that elites actually use the taking of human life, of human dignity, of human reputations, of human access, of human social function, the taking away, the absconding of the destruction, obliteration, and abrogation of all these, elites use it to sanctify their authority, usually as somehow divinely or socially ordained. The elites don't have to be the establishment. Elites and establishment are not the same thing. The establishment could be comprised of a bureaucracy, not an elite. We are talking about religious elites, intellectual elites, political elites, especially rebellious, defined, nihilistic elites. By combining earthly power, access to money, access to favors, access to men power, by combining these with supernatural justification, "I'm on a mission from God," "History sanctifies my actions," by combining these two, the supernatural and the very materialistic, societies cement inherent class structures, and they deter rebellion from the lower classes. The irony is that the more primitive you are, the more ignorant you are, the less critical in your thinking you are, the more intuitive you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to manipulators and charismatic predatory leaders who use these rituals, use these prejudices, use these superstitions to somehow exert control over you. Modern evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists highlight the social control hypothesis to explain why human sacrifice has persisted to this very day. And remember, when I say human sacrifice, it's not, you know, plunging your knife into someone's chest and taking out their heart or cutting someone's throat. It's canceling someone. It's destroying someone's reputation. It's isolating them socially. It's incarcerating them. It's all these are forms of human sacrifice. Especially if they are socially public, the social public acts, socially condoned in an echo chamber. There is always a supervenient, a transcendent, a supernatural, sometimes justification. Ruling elites use ritual executions to demonstrate ultimate authority while claiming some transcendental mandate from history, from God, from the people, from the Supreme Court, from, you know, something from beyond. And this creates this attempt to avoid unpredictability by killing other people physically, mentally, socially, metaphorically. This actually leads to enhanced terror because you could be next. Suddenly, the realization dawns on people that now it's your neighbor that is excommunicated. Now it's your friend who is fired. Tomorrow, it could be you. And this creates terror and compliance. Sacrificial ceremonies are highly public. They're graphic, especially in the age of social media. And this instills deep psychological terror in the population because, as I said, you could be next. You are trying to minimize yourself, to cower in the corner, or even to participate in the public lynching of other people, hoping that this somehow will deflect the eye and the rage and the anger from coming your way, somehow reroute the train. That's wrong. It is a stark warning to everyone. When one of us suffers, when one of us is excommunicated, when one of us is ostracized, when the reputation of one of us is destroyed ruthlessly and callously, when one of us is incarcerated unjustly, when one of us is ruined, we are all in danger. We are all at risk. Not only political dissidents, not only the poor, not only the Jews, not only the blacks, not only women, not only LGBTQ, not only the far right, or not only the far left. We are all in danger. When one of us suffers injustice, we are all in danger, at risk of injustice. And this fear, this terror keeps us in our place, enslaved. We're enslaved by fear, not by money.
There's a landmark study published in Nature demonstrating that human sacrifice was significantly more common in strictly stratified societies, acting as a functional tool to stabilize and maintain inherited class systems. And that is true in the allegedly meritocratic United States, where upward social mobility is actually lower than in Europe. There's a lot of anxiety to go around, and the problem is the medicine is worse than the disease. Whatever we try to allay anxiety, to reduce it, to mitigate it, to ameliorate it, all anxiolytic measures not only keep failing but they enhance, they end up enhancing our anxiety.
Anxiety management and social solidarity. There is the psychology of collectives. Ceremonies surrounding ritualized violence or ritualized aggression help to manage widespread social anxieties. When we pounce on someone and destroy their lives and their reputation, their reputation and their hope for the future, their social access, their finances, their family, then finally we dump them somewhere physically. When we do this, we feel safety in numbers. It helps to manage our social anxiety. These events often integrate elements that foster altered states of consciousness, create physiological rewards, or at the very minimum, a very strong in-group solidarity. They are flash mobs that create, in order to human sacrifice someone. The psychological diffusion of responsibility across a community of persecutors, a community of predators, insulates individuals from personal guilt. The act is perceived as a collective mandate. If so many people are saying the same thing about someone, then there must be right. Where there is smoke, there is fire. And so we have trial by media, trial by social media, especially. We are judges and juries and executioners and prosecutors, and of course, all of us are victims. We have all been abused. Everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law are victims. I don't know where they find abusers to go around. There aren't enough abusers with so many victims around. And so victimhood feeds into the feeding frenzy, the feeding frenzy, the bottom feeders who then sacrifice other people, the scapegoats. And it's about anxiety mitigation. It's about an illusion of control.
Go back a bit. Ancient societies constantly faced real catastrophes, existential ones, threats. I don't know, famines, droughts, plagues, invading armies. There was good reason at that in that period of history, ancient history. There's good reason to be anxious. And the only way to reassert control, to feel somehow safe, even minimally, even for a limited period of time, was to transact. Religion is transactional. Absolutely. Human psychology naturally searches for patterns, for cause-and-effect relationships. Ritual sacrifice transforms randomness into structured transactions with some power, the gods, society, other persecutors, rampaging lynch mobs. I mean, you have to placate them because they may turn on you. I give you what you might give. When you see a mob hounding and hunting, hunting someone, you better not confront the mob because they may turn on you. And this mob doesn't have to be physical. It could be virtual, could be digital. And this relieves guilt. Disasters are often interpreted as some kind of punishment. The religiously inclined say that it is divine punishment for a community's moral or ethical or ritual egregious failures. And so when you offer someone else's life, their existence, their reputation, their freedom, their access, their finances, when you offer these, it's a kind of psychological mechanism to purge communal guilt, to reset the cosmic ledger, to settle the account properly. You say, "We may have all sinned, but now we are selecting the greatest sinner. We are punishing him on behalf of all of us." It's like the red cow, if you remember in the Bible. There's a premium value because human life is the most valuable resource a community possesses. Giving it up, even symbolically, even via the agency of a scapegoat, represents the ultimate psychological commitment to social principles, to structure, to order, sometimes as rarefied in divinities or deities. It is a form of deindividuation, shared fantasy, group psychology.
How do you, sitting back at home, doom scrolling through Instagram, how do you justify that so many people are being scapegoated, attacked, maligned, ruined in front of your very eyes? How do you rationalize and participate in such horrific violence? Symbolic, verbal, textual, I agree, but still horrific. Still externalized aggression. How do you feel about it? How do you not feel guilty? How are you not ashamed of yourself? How do you not collapse into psychological trauma witnessing the traumas of so many others, the human sacrifices? Because there's a diffusion of responsibility. When an action is mandated by the entire group, by the community, and when it is executed by multiple people or by some authority, legal authority, religious authority, individual guilt is completely neutralized. The executioners view themselves as instruments of divine will, of the law, of the protection of the innocent and the vulnerable. Human sacrifice is murder, soul murder or physical murder. And very often, there is a crossbreeding between the two. When you tarnish the reputation of someone, when you label them, when you malign them, some crazy guy or girl are going to take action into their own hands, and this may end up in actual human sacrifice, also known as assassination or murder. How do you feel about it? How do you justify yourself? How do you live with yourself? You say, "It's not me. It's for the greater good. I'm protecting people, the vulnerable, the innocent victims. I am actually morally upright. I'm a rescuer. I'm a savior. I'm a healer. I'm a fixer. Everything I'm doing is not for me. I'm not self-centered. I'm not selfish. I'm not egotistical. I'm not a narcissist. Everything I'm doing is for the community. It's communal. It's pro-social." And this leads to some kind of narcissistic elation, to an altered state of consciousness. Major sacrificial ceremonies, for example, in the Adstic Empire, incorporated intense sensory triggers, including rhythmic music, chanting, substances, mushrooms, mass hysteria, and you can witness the crowd in action. There are many excellent books about crowd psychology and mob psychology. There is some ecstasy there. There is some elation. There is some euphoria that sweeps the mob in its wake. There's a suspension of individual judgment or individuality at all. These factors induce altered psychological states, and these forge a powerful sense of community bonding and social solidarity. It feels good to belong. It feels good to be accepted. It feels good to be carried with the flow because that suspends your personal responsibility. You're no longer guilty. You should no longer feel ashamed. You're relieved by handing over agency to the group. You're relieved of your personal accountability. Violence, including verbal violence, is framed as a form of altruism. It's described as charitable, protective, pro-social, communal, loving, compassionate, affectionate, protective. So within closed systems, for example, religion, the act of, for example, excommunication, my great-great grandfather was psychologically reframed. Sacrificing an individual was not viewed as an act of hatred, but rather as a heartbreaking but necessary sacrifice to preserve the survival of the entire group.
A few days ago, I made a video about Rene Girard's work on mimetic violence, mimetic aggression, and the scapegoat mechanism. The French philosopher Rene Girard proposed a highly influential psychological framework regarding sacrifice, and it's known as mimetic theory. He said that there is internal friction. As communities grow, people naturally desire the same resources. They compete for the same resources. There's an element of scarcity, and access to resources results in social stratification and social status. And the differential of status differentials of status and access create envy and rivalry and internal violence. And to prevent a society from tearing itself apart with this envy, with this violence, they find a scapegoat. Rather than attack each other, members of the community collectively attack someone, someone selected, someone elected for the purpose, the scapegoat. Internal aggression is collectively redirected onto a singular vulnerable target. The scapegoat, an outsider, a prisoner, a slave, someone who is accused of crimes, someone who is a dissident, someone with a specific lifestyle. And this creates group catharsis, collective purification and cleansing. The collective execution of the scapegoat, literally or figuratively, releases the community's accumulated social anxiety. It generates a powerful, sudden psychological wave of peace, harmony, and unity. Everyone acting together in concert. It's like a laser beam. The killing of the scapegoat, real or metaphorical, creates a kind of peace, inner peace, and a relief. There's a relief because the anxiety disappears. It reinforces the psychological urge to repeat it in the next social crisis. So scapegoating becomes the main mechanism, the main valve, steam valve for the release of social tensions and anxieties. The more uncertain the environment, the more threatening is reality, the more unpredictable the future, the more we scapegoat and human sacrifice. Nowhere is this more evident than nowadays, the worst period in human history. And yes, I'm aware of the 14th century. The worst period in human history because we have no supporting institutions, no family, no church, no nation. We don't trust the elites, no leaders. We are alone, atomized, solipsistic. The terror, existential terror is literally infinite. And the only way we can think of to somehow reduce this anxiety is to destroy or kill someone else and to do it together. Because then there is a simulacrum. This is a simulation of safety in numbers, security and social cohesion, the rightness of our actions, moral uprightness. And this is a relief, but not for long. Gradually, human scapegoating and human sacrifice become an addiction.