GR 'Father Rapier's Sermon'

[Michael Joseph]

Ken, You might wnat to check out Rene Girard's work on scapegoating, or
eric Gans' on language as the deferral of violence, if you haven't
already. I think they both have some pretty useful points to make about
the social causes of violence that could conceivably lend themselves to
your critique.

Best,

Michael J.



On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, s~Z wrote:

> 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
>
>
>