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Sacrifice and Modernity
Down the ages, we humans have worshipped women as the fountain of life.
For most of human history, women were seen as the givers of life, the preservers of continuity, the transmitters of culture, guardians of children as well as the mediators of both memory and tenderness.
Greek chappie Spyridon Andrews worries that we are in a “Death Spiral” with feminism.
Modern feminism preaches that women become women through the negation of life, through denial of empathy, and through rage rather than rational and pacific strength.
Traditional masculinity has celebrated the man who sacrificed to protect women and children.
Women become women today through negating their primal spirit and can only achieve fulfillment through imitating a gross caricature of the male… [Yet] Men who are small-minded and selfish have never been celebrated…
[W]hy we are living in a culture now that celebrates sterility, fragmentation, the rejection of inherited meaning, and hostility toward family and especially motherhood.
And there is individualism. We have
a culture that celebrates radical individualism at the expense of others[.]
I pondered this question in my heart, and then came up with the answer.
In our modern society we don’t have as much need for sacrifice as in the olden time. To go all the way back to chimpanzees, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males did nothing but protect the troop territory from males in other troops, no doubt often giving their lives to protect their troop’s food-growing territory.
And women also gave their all. Back in 1800 as many as one woman in twenty died in childbirth.
And then it came to me. The extraordinary improvement in human prosperity and health means that there is much less need for sacrifice in modern society, in the sense of men giving their all to protect the women and women giving their all to make and to raise babies.
And so we have the space and the time to develop and worship ourselves as individuals. Creativity is celebrated today not in the communal creation and protection of human life but in the individual creations of artists and intellectuals.
Now I have a theory of sacrifice. Back in the day, humans sacrificed their first-born sons.
Because the firstborn was considered to belong to God, many civilizations practiced physical child sacrifice to express gratitude and devotion.
But later on, not so much.
Remember the sacrifice of Isaac? God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his first-born son, but then relented and let him sacrifice a ram instead.
You think that maybe Abraham wasn’t about to sacrifice his first-born son and cheated?
And then we come to Jesus Christ. Here, God sacrificed his Son so that humans didn’t need to. So now sacrifice has become symbolic.
Are humans cheating? Or are we reducing the salience of sacrifice from actual humans to domestic animals to religious symbols?
Whatabout the First Feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft?
Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appeared to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
Reason and Individualism. But Wollstonecraft had two affairs and one child without marriage. Why? Because, in the 18th century, women lived not just as part of a family, but also in society at large as individuals. Society had become rich enough to allow such stupidity.
Notice that I say that human society has reduced its faith and worship of sacrifice, and has promoted the idea of humans as individuals that are not called upon to sacrifice except in a general way through their taxes and to help save the climate.
Because it can afford to.
Do you think we humans will return to the worship of sacrifice, even if only symbolically, like the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, because sacrifice is a basic characteristic of human society?
Stay tuned.
| Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:58:50 GMT |
CBS & Cummings and LKY and Boyd
All the world is shocked, shocked that 60 Minutes veteran Scott Pelley is beside himself that his new boss Bari Weiss is throwing out all the dyed-in-the-wool liberal narrative reciters.
And I was talking to someone commenting on how all the kidz of Wall Street chappies are signing on in Private Wealth Management. Like they know anything likely to help their clients beat the conventional wisdom.
It’s the same thing in the Liberal Band as Democratic politicians are trying their best to keep the liberal road trip going, even though they can’t fill the theaters any more and tough nuts like Nick Shirley are exposing their scams, as Sen. Schumer might say, six ways from Sunday.
OK. All these regime go-alongs don’t have a clue. But the rest of us would like to hope that we, the ordinary folks below the Cool Club, can navigate the inevitable shape-shift without joining our betters as they do the lemming thing.
Actually, it wasn’t lemmings that went over the cliff. It was buffalos chased over the cliff by brave First Nation warriors back in the day before the Europeans decided that it was better “to rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner.” Leave those poor buffalo alone, killer man.
But what should the shape-shift look like, how do we find leaders to lead the shape-shift, and how do we educate ourselves to understand what is needed?
A good place to start is a recent Substack piece by Brit rebel Dominic Cummings. Cummings ran the campaign in Britain to Vote Leave the EEC. He recommends listening to Bismarck of Germany and Lee Kwan Yew (LKY) of Singapore. Cummings starts with a quote from LKY:
We noted by the 1970s [in western Europe] that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of the family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance. People did not have to work for their families’ well-being. A handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down. People lost the drive to achieve because they paid too much in taxes. They became dependent on the state for their basic needs… We thought it best to reinforce the Confucian tradition that a man is responsible for his family.
As Charles Murray wrote in Coming Apart, in the lower classes in the US the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much.
What to do? We should copy LKY and:
recruit talent, huge focus on infrastructure and skills, huge focus on attracting global investment, personal accounts for health/welfare that can be passed on with zero inheritance tax, stop all boats with the navy as LKY did etc.
Hey, there’s a concept: personal accounts for retirement/health/welfare “that can be passed on with zero inheritance tax.” Notice how this is just about the opposite of the current Democrat mania for an unrealized capital gains tax. Instead LKW wants to empower families to look after themselves from this generation to the next.
Cummings also recommends that the upcoming dissident elites grow a pair and stop being afraid of being called fascists (or racists, etc.).
Name-calling is not as bad as most of you fear and life is much easier in many ways once you realise it doesn’t matter if irrelevant NPCs call you names[.]
But dissident leaders “must have iron in [them].” They don’t have to be super-intelligent but they do need to have super-courage.
You must really truly be on the side of the people, going to [Washington] to champion the best of the nation against those who came to dominate [Washington].
Hmm. Let’s see: seems like we have seen this happen here in these United States already. And that “dissident leader” seems too be eager to pitch out the RINOs that don’t have iron in them.
Cummings quotes Col. John Boyd, he of the OODA loop, saying that you have
To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do. Which way will you go?
You can see that while Dominic Cummings is still waiting for someone consequential to turn up in the UK, we already have someone trying to implement the Cummings agenda in the US. His name is President Donald Trump.
Does he have enough character? Has he found good enough talent to make a difference? Do his people have enough good ideas, and good ideas that work? Do his people have enough iron in them to do rather than to be, and advance against the status quo?
All we can say is: Stay Tuned. And get out and vote.
| Wed, 03 Jun 2026 04:24:25 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t have to play nice any more.
Communism is a hammer that we use to destroy the enemy — Mao Zedong
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
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