This post is perhaps too dark.
I originally posted this as a thread on Twitter, but deleted it, because I don’t think most people are ready to have this conversation and it’s perhaps dangerous if the wrong person sees it.
I hope we aren’t seeing the return of ritual human sacrifice.
The truth of "Black Lives Matter" is "Black Deaths Matter." Every black death at the hands of whites is a powerful cultural catalyst. The deaths of anyone else who were killed by any other causes do not stimulate the zeitgeist nearly as much.
Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there’s a choice between life and death.
— Hagakure
The samurais knew that there is tremendous power in choosing what your death means to the whole world. And with great power comes great responsibility.
The foundation of every culture is ritual sacrifice. Death has always been symbolically more important than life. As Heidegger says, we are Being-towards-death. Death is the only thing we can truly own ourselves. Whether you're saying "Black Lives Matter" or "Pro-life," you're making more of a statement about death than about life.
The founding murder in BLM is the death of a black man by the hands of a white man. This founding murder has been ritualized and repeated countless times over the past century. People need the experience of this human sacrifice ritual to feel like their lives have meaning.
Every time that there's a crisis in society, this sacrificial ritual gets performed, so that the black scapegoat slain by the white blood magic shaman may become a guardian angel or benevolent spirit who watches over society and brings temporary peace and temporary relief to nihilism.
Only whites can be ordained blood magic shamans and only blacks can be sacrifices, or the ritual loses potency. According to BLM orthodoxy, only straight white men have the credentials to perform the highest tier of blood magic, and the blood of a black person is the finest alchemical ingredient, because it is imbued with the powers of the noble savage, who is absent of original sin.
Whites killing blacks is a feature, not a bug, of the BLM religion. The BLM religion seeks to monopolize and seize the means of production of black deaths at the hands of whites. They don’t want to end the deaths of innocent blacks. For the religion to persist, there must be true believers in the original sin of whites: a founding murder of a black man by a white man. What follows in the evolution of every religion is a more formal ritualization of the whole process, so that they may control the power of the scapegoat mechanism and choose which black individuals ought to be martyred and canonized as saints.
This is still a primitive ritual where the sacrifices happen spontaneously... but eventually it would be planned. Elites will eventually realize that they could just pay arbitrary white hitmen to kill blacks to align/amplify social energy. Jussie Smollett 2.0.
The beef between the woke and the racists is a kayfabe. They actually agree on everything. For the sacrificial ritual to happen, both roles need to be filled. The true anti-death, anti-discrimination path is to choose to play neither roles.
P.S. Some clarifications:
Archaic religions: lied to claim that the sacrificed scapegoat is guilty and deserved to die in order to end the collective crisis
Christianity: reveals that the scapegoat is innocent and didn't deserve to die
Modern ideologies: lies to proclaim someone as an innocent scapegoat when in fact the victim was not a scapegoat and died for reasons completely unrelated to the crisis at hand.
For BLM's mythology, George Floyd had to be viewed as an innocent victim of systematic racism in order for him to be canonized as a saint. When in reality, while the police was wrong for killing him, he was not a martyr who died for the purpose of ending a collective crisis of racism.
A provocative post indeed.
During these turbulent times, I’ve often reflected on the Girardian insight that identifying a class of person as the foundational cause of injustice is, in a sense, to make that class into a God. If “unaccountable elites” are the reason for our downfall, then unaccountable elites are an “uncaused cause”. If whiteness is the original sin, then whites are an “uncaused cause.” When I create a scapegoat, I am by definition imbuing it with a fullness of being which I perceive to be lacking in myself, a capacity for freely-chosen action where I believe myself doomed to blind reaction.
That said, I don’t quite buy your thesis. I don’t see BLM as willing the sacrificial death of black victims, except perhaps insofar as any bureaucracy is invested in perpetuating the problem it was designed to solve. In the Girardian formula, the scapegoat becomes the focus of all the rage and anguish brought on by the mimetic crisis; the killing of the scapegoat “magically” relieves the crisis and brings about a new equilibrium. The killing of George Floyd had precisely the opposite effect. It inflamed the crisis and propelled society into a greater state of disequilibrium--a fact no BLM activist would deny.
It’s much easier to see the scapegoat mechanism in the phenomenon of statue-toppling. There we see the psychic pain brought on by the worsening mimetic crisis projected onto symbols of a now-oppressive order, and a temporary relief of that pain when the symbols are destroyed. It’s a broken and ineffective mechanism, though, since in bringing relief to one segment of society it further inflames another segment. I fear it will take a much more radical sacrifice to generate a sustainable new order.
I’ve finally got around to putting my hand in my pocket and paying for the premium goods here. Glad I did. I have no real further insight to add, no ‘take’ of whatever temperature to offer, no reply guy urge to reword and regurgitate back to you what you just told me.
I simply wanted to let you know that this is an outstanding piece and that I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Cheers.
Tom.