Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“We can consider the emergence of the Big Man out of the primitive egalitarian community as the beginning of civilization. With civilization comes the placing of some individual at the center of the community, as the source of power (this could just as easily be described as some individual appropriating the center). A new moral order is thereby initiated. With the central object, prey animal, ancestor/icon at the center, the overriding moral principle is precisely preventing anyone from seizing the center—the ritual means of distributing food, mates and other goods follows from that imperative. Once a human occupies the center, that human can be held responsible for everything attributed to the center, which is everything required for the well-being of the community. Sacrificial morality involves adhering to the rules surrounding the worship and eventual sacrifice of the central figure. These rules are already a deferral of the immediate killing of the central figure as soon as some failure in his mediation of the cosmos for his people is revealed. The most moral one can be in the sacrificial community is to increase this space of deferral, by attributing as much of the responsibility as possible to the ruler for actions one might imagine he could actually have carried out otherwise, or left undone. But under sacrificial conditions there is no way of consistently isolating which actions might fall into this category.”

— Adam Katz, Fraud and Force · Aug 2018 · GABlog