GR 'Father Rapier's Sermon'

[s~Z]

When people become victims of the negative Atman project, they become
victims, substitute sacrifices, scapegoats--and war, the mass potlatch of
death-dealing for immortality, is merely wholesale victimage in outright
form. And victimage, as Robert Jay Lifton put it, is simply "the need to
reassert one's own immortality, or that of one's group, by contrasting it
with the absolute absence of it in one's death-tainted victim." So could
Kenneth Burke point out that the heart of man's social motivation is the
"civic enactment of redemption through sacrificial victim." And Eugene
Ionesco summed it up beautifully: "As long as we are not assured of
immortality, we shall go on hating each other in spite of our need for
mutual love." Hating each other, and killing each other. Indeed, Mumford has
really built his extraordinary study of history, politics, and technics
around the phenomenon of sacrifice itself, and the special necessity of mass
sacrifice and war in maintaining the social equilibrium of the state.

                --Ken Wilber