/lit/ - Literature

>>11130837
ken wilber on immortality:

>When people become objects of the negative Atman project, they become victims, substitute sacrifices, scapegoats—and war, the mass potlatch of death-dealing for immortality, is merely wholesale victimage in outright form. And victimage, as Robert Jay Lifton put it, is simply “the need to reassert one’s own immortality, or that of one’s group, by contrasting it with its absolute absence in one’s death-tainted victim.” And Eugene Ionesco summed it up beautifully: “As long as we are not as sured of immortality, we shall go on hating each other in spite of our need for mutual love.” Hating each other, and killing each other. Mumford has really built his extraordinary study of history, politics, and technics around the phenomenon of sacrifice itself, and the special necessity of mass sacrifice and war in maintaining the social equilibrium of the state.

>For what is at stake in war is not food, not properties, not even ideologies directly, but one’s own version of the Atman project: one’s qualifications for immortality power and death transcendence. And the more the enemy drops, the more immortal the conqueror feels.

>For the staggering and terrifying thing about war is that, despite the loathsome things said of it on the one side, and, on the other, despite the noble causes and holy reasons and high ideals brought in to prop it up, one fact stands alone: war has been popular. It has thus served a necessary function, and served it well. And it served the cultural Atman project, the attempts to make egos into gods, power-soaked and blood immune.

>When people become objects of the negative Atman project, they become victims, substitute sacrifices, scapegoats—and war, the mass potlatch of death-dealing for immortality, is merely wholesale victimage in outright form. And victimage, as Robert Jay Lifton put it, is simply “the need to reassert one’s own immortality, or that of one’s group, by contrasting it with its absolute absence in one’s death-tainted victim.” And Eugene Ionesco summed it up beautifully: “As long as we are not as sured of immortality, we shall go on hating each other in spite of our need for mutual love.” Hating each other, and killing each other. Mumford has really built his extraordinary study of history, politics, and technics around the phenomenon of sacrifice itself, and the special necessity of mass sacrifice and war in maintaining the social equilibrium of the state.

>For what is at stake in war is not food, not properties, not even ideologies directly, but one’s own version of the Atman project: one’s qualifications for immortality power and death transcendence. And the more the enemy drops, the more immortal the conqueror feels.

>For the staggering and terrifying thing about war is that, despite the loathsome things said of it on the one side, and, on the other, despite the noble causes and holy reasons and high ideals brought in to prop it up, one fact stands alone: war has been popular. It has thus served a necessary function, and served it well. And it served the cultural Atman project, the attempts to make egos into gods, power-soaked and blood immune.

>And why its popularity? I believe the central reason is very straightforward: war, just like money, is a simple and easily accessible immortality symbol. Both war and money have been equally popular throughout history because neither requires much talent to gather or use. They are much, much easier to come by than are other immortality symbols, such as a pyramid or mummification. Thus, money and war were the cultural forms of the Atman project that were most accessible to vast numbers of the common folk. Both gold and war placed immortality prospects in the hands of the average citizen, and thus kept alive the cultural arm of the separate self’s Atman project. For not only could you traffic for immortality in the marketplace, you could traffic for it on the battlefield. And historically, both have been the necessary glues for complex societies—one positive, one negative, covering both sides of the Atman project. We have already discussed the necessary role of money in civilization. Let us, then, without belaboring the point, simply note as well that the “ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history.