Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Sacrificial thinking is designed to justify the necessary evil of this discharge of resentment toward the central being that can never fully incarnate the divinity and put an end to conflict rather than merely defer it. Sacrificial thinking is a necessity of ritual society , all the more so in its often repressive hierarchical forms. But in market society , political structures come to supplant ritual structures in deferring the violent expression of resentment. Sacrificial thinking becomes counterproductive within the framework of democratic politics, as witness the results of fascist and communist contempt for the parliamentary democracy of the bourgeois market system . In today’s victimary thinking , the object of this contempt has been extended from the market system, from which we can conceive no transcendence, to humanity itself . The ethical mission of originary thinking is to provide us with a post-sacrificial anthropology . Victimary rhetoric derives its power from the dynamic of the originary scene . What we resent in the other is his real or fancied proximity to the center. Because we are in principle equal exchangers of signs, we find it unjust that others surpass us in the exchange of things. Where victimary thinking goes wrong is not in denouncing injustice, but in assimilating it to sacrificial victimage .”

— Eric Gans, The Ethical Mission of GA · Saturday, April 13th, 1996 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment