This and your thread on childhood circumcision has me a tad bit concerned about how dated these feminist books your reading actually are… just the range of assumptions suggests a ideological background that sounds Neo-Freudian, in identifying taboos your not in a position yourself to experience, and constructing a interlinked world vision from it.
Human Sacrifice comes in many forms, only a few is religious. For example- your above has jack diddly squat to do with the 4000 Kamakazi Pilots sacrificed. Yes, there was a bare minimum of ritual, such as drinking the Sake, but I can guarantee you the training unit was the most relaxed unit in the Japanese Armed Forces… really hard to be strict or ideological with guys drafted into something they didn’t really want to do. It’s one thing to self sacrifice, it’s another to be told that your sacrificing- evn though externally seen or logically thought out by others to be one and the same thing.
The military’s survival of the cult of self sacrifice is directly related to the pagan forms of self-inflicted sacrifice as well as the society lead involvuntary sacrifice of others. In the West, our Just War Theory actually in part developed out of this. The Loeb Classical Library has a work dedicated to the writer ‘Onasander’- he discusses a Augustian era survival of the rite, and what a general is expected to do in it. In earlier times, it was expected that the General actually sacrifice HIMSELF to ensure the success of the battle.
We can see that foresight is involved here. Where does foresight occur in the brain? Is it in a location where a small child is expected to have much coherent use of it? I’ll leave the first for you to track down, but the latter I’ll anwser… No, it’s a area barely activated in the youth. They need to have an active imagination, and that in and of itself requires a sophisticated, learned understanding of left brain-right brain operations of the mind.
The children of your age target aren’t that cognitively much different from Cats who can close their eyes and look away when they are finished of being bothered or pestered… such as when they poop somwhere they were not supposed to go, and are being told NO! It’s commonly noted by veternarians and child psychologists that the rates of cognitive development don’t differ that much in mammals in the early years… humans have greater magnitude of learning abstract ideas, animals qicker at getting up and moving around, but development wise, we paralell one another greatly. I can’t help but notice they don’t actively sacrifice themselves whenever bad or trying times occur. They exhibit fear, strong dislike for individuals of the same species as well as towards humans. They live in sexually divided hierarchial orders… this is the stuff we assume sits at the core of archaic religious practices, war cults, priestess prostitutes, vendetta oriented societies.
Major factor here in my opinion is that they can’t maintainall the feedback loops consistently and as coherently as we can, and for as long. A cat can hate another cat- get into fights with them often… but it doesn’t have a capacity to assume a need for foresight in searching for a difinitive, assured final solution as their fights are situationally triggered, and are temporary. Cats fight for a while, then split off, lick their wounds… and even one another- the very people they hate. Humans can remember and associate more and more and more. Literally pick up a idea from one thought process, and try to get it to adapt to a otherwise alien and largely incompatible form of thought. Before, when they were split, there wasn’t anything inherently invalid in either thought processes. When combined, they are a bit perverted and weird to other cultures. Some in the other cultures might grasp it in part… we in the west, who have a decent understanding on how Morale in terms of unit cohesion and related to rewards and punishments- can understand and speculate on and on and on why Bushido evolved as it did as opposed to western conceptions of Kishido (Japanese terms for the western philosophical tradition that paralells)… we can explain, calculate, and exactingly explain many of it’s characteristics. However… such a person wouldn’t necessarily be of the Bushido school or Kishido school of thought, when put into trying circumstances where such formulations were put into practice. Would I, with a good understanding of self sacrifice, slam a grenade against my chest when the foreward elements of my unit would be defeated, like in the movie ‘Letters from Imo Jiwa’? No… I’m too much the coward, too egocentric, and too convinced the effort of doing so would be lost on everyone around me. However, if I knew everyone around me might understand, I might do it if I thought somehow that would keep more people alive… if they ‘got the message’.
Would I take a landmine or rocket underneath a tank and blow it up, myself along with it? That’s cultually more palatable, but probably not. If I could get that close to a tank with explosives, I know better ways to undermine it… but that’s only because I have the training and understanding, well over the average soldier, on how to disable such scary looking and menacing beasts. If I didn’t, if I valued others nearby more than myself… if I understood the imperitive but not the knowhow, doing what I knew to be correct, or even a possibility, might be worth it. I might crawl towards that tank, never to be seen again.
That requires a combination of ignorance with know how. A technical understanding riding up against the Clausewitzian Friction, and Sun Tzu’s Formlessness, that comes to meet Musashi’s Void. Inductive and Deductive thought operating in paralell.
Now, in such a society… if you have position of authority and duty… men incharge of men… especially in the military, where men are expected to die… then yes, sacrifice, and it’s effects, are expected to in time take a higher and higher precident when unknowns are expected to be confronted, and the actual understanding of how to consistently triumph are rudimentry at best. A simple, methodological expectation can occur… Jim killed himself to save us (we assume it was to save us from modern perspectives), therefor Bob should be expected to live up to Jim’s example and save us too, as he’s of the same categories, and therefor the same expectations. Bob can be a commander, or something less valuable can be substituted, some as Mike the low ranking private, or Larry the Slave, or we can sacrifice a Mixed Deli DIsh of Hams, Beef, and Turkey delightfully arrayed.
The alternatives are not equal in scope when individual self preservation is concerned. Sacrificing a deli dish might sound the best to you, but when the soldiers are questioning why they are about to fight- the logic of it, and how it’s making them feel… seeing it expressed in a form that emphasizes not so much with their humanity but with their grotesque nervous system driven para-sympathetic unbalance… something that matches the images and feelings of youthful dreams of dying- attacked by dogs ripping through your skin, falling off a building, not being able to breath, poisioned, clubbed to death… whatever… then it’s going to do one hell of a job in cognitively identifying and consciusly surfacing everything in their unconscious that is troubling them. Seeing Larry die in a grotesque way can be massive therapuetic for them, especially when that very method of death copies what they are fearing themselves. It makes it known to them… they see the agony, the colors and sounds of death… it’s made palitable and known, shared by all.
What emerges over time is a increased valuation juxtapositioned against a decreased devaluation. The person sacrificed decreases in social rank, and is aesthetically and ritually complicated in terms of attractiveness… because the society simple put doesn’t want to actually sacrifice the best of itself, just wants to give the illusion of doing so, while still reaping the benifits of doing so. Or the exact opposite happens… it’s dragged out into overkill, and everyone, no matter how high or low, is engadged in it, and the society becomes completely interlinked, ritualistic… and the rituals overtake every aspect of life, such as the Aztecs, who were a large, complex, literate civilization in possession of one of the largest cities on earth when they fell, who had a firm understanding of complex mathematical throught and a unique and complicated form of agriculture. They were not a stupid people. Thier knowledge of medicine was recorded to be more advanced than the Spanish at the time.
Now… unfortunately, we still practice Human Sacrifice. If anything, it’s proliferation has grown more dramatic in modern times, and not just the martial variations. We aggressively and joyfully practice Infanticide, and in the west, major political parties gleefully pronounce it’s benifits, for a range of reasons… but those reasons, inpart because they are now forced by political agendas, are joining together with other, largely incompatible forms of thought and forced to cohabitate until they become a cornerstone of culture. In America, we kill more children in a year than the child graveyards of Cathage gives evidence of- the pace outstrips anything we can produce in warfare anymore. We oftentimes practice coporal punishment, or selective isolation of people from society in such a way that for all practical purposes, their existence is completely removed. We adopt sacrifical ideologies, such as Marxism or Jeffersonial Democracy. How dare I place those two outlooks together? Do they not both advocate acceptably killing others? A Marxist, such as Zizek, does little to hide his desire to kill. However, we have rustic yet refined furniture from the Monticello and art, science, and simple undertakings inherent in the latter. Bother result in enslavement and death of others. The Marxist is as much a fiend to humanity as the Jeffersonian… just culturally, we can make one more acceptible than the other.
The instinct to kill the other requires in my mind more than a instinct to violence, which arises quite early. Like cats, it’s a momentary, poorly coordinated thing. I attack… I inflict pain, and it’s over. Sports do this in more refined and prolonged manner. It’s learning how to kill- knowing this will result in destruction and death… a permanent negation of the otherwise persistant problem of the other.
The Roman expectation of the self sacrifice of the commander… I can’t imagine it getting more profound than that. A man can sit before you, telling you your cause it important, can stand behind you and push you foreward to your expected death. How deeply, no matter how great of a sacrifice he presented to you by killing a sexually attractive virgin, or a low ranking private, or a slave, can that actually motivate you? It might give you better control of the nameless feelings going through your body, and the distrubing sights before you than otherwise. But if that commander then before the battle, or doing it… kills himself, killing off all notions of being used as a Pawn, or he’s doing it for his own profit, caring more from himself than you… that can have a massive impact. It obliterates all expectations, and one can’t help but notice that they are still there, and have a better chance of making it out of the battle than their now dead, and certainly quite serious commander. It’s a better proof in such moments than anything we can derive from science. That sickly feeling of death and decaying we have in our dreams, or when we’re about to puke doesn’t anwser to formal logic. It anwsers to a counter in kind. A animal, or a small child, can’t get anything out of it though. They just see the images of death, uninitiated and brutally as their first. It’s not a elementry understanding, but a cultured, highly developed understanding. One we’re likely destined to grow MORE AND MORE INTO. I expect western civilization is going to become more heavily indebted to human sacrifice. It’s to be expected… our morality grew out of Christianity and it’s Martyrdom-Messiah Complex, that killed off the Roman formulations. Anything seeking to grow out of it, or to replace it, has a massive blood debt that it has to at the very least equal. And we’re doing it quite well… making fantastic progress. We like to kill, we LOVE to kill. What feminist doesn’t jump for joy when crying for Women’s Right to Abortion? We all fucking love it, and are deeply attracted to it, impassioned by it. It’s the best shit ever.