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The Foundation of Civilization is a Corpse
  David Gornoski
We came across a terrific essay recently suggesting that the revolution in human thought started right here at the Library of Social Science—is taking hold. Those of you who are receiving our Newsletters are part of this revolution. There’s no escape now. You know too much. Best regards, Orion
The excerpt below is from David’s essay, “The State is the Religion of the Hidden Corpse.”
To read the entire essay, click here.
David GornoskiDavid Gornoski, entrepreneur, speaker and writer


Our Modern Gods

Don't be blinded by our modern sensibilities. These gods still exist. They're called Germany, France, United States, Japan, and so on: nation-states. And we've devised myths to justify feeding them more sacrificial victims.

Our greatest vestige of sacrifice—our need to feed our collective bodies with the shed blood of one of our own—is the warfare state. Richard Koenigsberg has been helpful in collecting the sentiments of moderns celebrating the sacred necessity of war for national preservation.

During the First World War, French nationalist Maurice Barrès:

“Oh you young men whose value is so much greater than ours! They love life, but even were they dead, France will be rebuilt from their souls. The sublime sun of youth sinks into the sea and becomes the dawn which will hereafter rise again.”

Some modern statists even appear conscious of the ancient sacrificial roots of war.  Irish revolutionary leader P.H. Pearse on the carnage of trench warfare:

“The last 16 months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.”

The soldier offers a mixed metaphor—his own self-sacrificial valor, yet serving as a collective sacrifice. Why, in fact, does he need to die for us?
What did our ancient ancestors do to commemorate the inauguration of cities? Have you seen its founding? How about your nation, even the civilization itself that binds you and your neighbor? Have you seen its groundbreaking ceremony? What did our ancient ancestors do to commemorate the inauguration of actual cities—the birthplace of our human cultures? Thanks to archaeology, we have an idea of what it looked like.

Imagine you arrive on the scene, ready to celebrate the beginnings of a new fortress or city. You're nervous yet hopeful about its success; famine, out of control internecine rivalry, anything could cause its epic failure. As you munch on your third stale biscuit, suddenly the chief orders the priests to commence with the laying of the first cornerstone—the place by which all walls will intersect and bind everyone together in peace. Amidst the fervor of the crowd, men begin to push the massive stone into a shallow cleft. The crowd roars in unison as it slams into place. Order is now secured for the future!

As the crowd subsides and home beckons, you make your way past the founding stone. Suddenly you notice a horror—blood is oozing from its sides. Stop. As a member of modern culture, you'd be aghast at such a dreadful sight. Yet as a member of ancient society, you would carry on, safe in the utter assurance that it had to be done. Our city must be founded on sacrifice. We must bury the corpse in its very walls if we are to stave the risk of chaos.

The Dark Reality

This is not a fantasy. This is our history. It's not that long ago that we still practiced this ritual literally. From an archaeological report:

The child found at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor ruins was apparently killed sometime around 1450, in a sort of grim cornerstone ceremony intended to dedicate a new layer of building, according to archaeologist Ximena Chavez.

Priests propped the child—apparently already dead, since the sand around him showed no sign of movement—in a sitting position and workers packed earth around his body, which was then covered beneath a flight of stone temple steps.

The ritual sacrifice of victims in the cornerstone, sometimes buried alive, was practiced around the globe in communities who never interacted with each other—from China and the Middle East to ancient Ireland. It is an archaeological fact of human development. Before we shift this inconvenient fact onto religion, remember that in most of history's conception, religion, culture, and state were synonyms.

Religion means to “bind together” and so its tribal cultic rituals were fully emergent of kingdoms. As Brian Zahnd says, "A nation does not metastasize into an empire without shedding rivers of innocent blood. This is what the myths and monuments try to hide."

If you look at the ancient stories, you see clues that the gods were themselves actual human victims of sacrifice. From time immemorial, human societies projected their own sacrifice—their own latent blood guilt—into the sky. The gods made us do it. But if you peel back the time-encrusted mythic layer of our ancient stories, you see clues that the gods were themselves actual human victims of sacrifice. Misfits of our own—some disabled, some too rich, some too ugly—that became easy targets onto which crowds lost in group-think could safely channel all of their pent up violence.

The fact that a common enemy's death could bring such immediate catharsis to resolve our internal conflicts only served to fashion our ancient gods into capricious beings, capable of both taboo-breaking mischief like patricide and bestiality as well as nation-saving heroism—as long as you fed them with more sacrifices.

Our Modern Gods

Don't be blinded by our modern sensibilities. Sure, we've made objective refinements. But these gods still exist. They're called Germany, France, United States, Japan, and so on: nation-states. And we've devised myths—social contract theories, the will of the people, majority rule, the thin blue line, and so on—to justify feeding them more sacrificial victims.

We see their political figureheads as capstones—vicarious figures by which we collectively experience a sacred body to which we belong. We ritually cast out figureheads—High Priests of a labyrinthine complex of regulatory rituals—that wear out their sacred welcome in a ritual we call voting. And we anonymously cast out, through plunder and sometimes blood, rule breakers who violate regulations—vestiges of rites of valor, sacred games, and taboos that accompanied our archaic sacrificial origins.

Our greatest vestige of sacrifice—our need to feed our collective bodies with the shed blood of one of our own—is the warfare state. Richard Koenigsberg has been helpful in collecting the sentiments of moderns celebrating the sacred necessity of war for national preservation. During the First World War, French nationalist Maurice Barrès exemplified it:

Oh you young men whose value is so much greater than ours! They love life, but even were they dead, France will be rebuilt from their souls. The sublime sun of youth sinks into the sea and becomes the dawn which will hereafter rise again.

Some modern statists even appear conscious of the ancient sacrificial roots of war. Koenigsberg quotes revolutionary Irish leader P.H. Pearse on the then-widespread carnage of trench warfare:

The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

The soldier offers a mixed metaphor, again reflecting of our schizoid culture—his own self-sacrificial valor and yet serving as a collective sacrifice for us. Why, in fact, does he need to die for us? Modern statist cultures are sacrificial factories with something gumming up the gears. A counter historical force is deconstructing the works of the sacrificial culture—rendering statist societies increasingly chaotic and confused.