Personal Culpability

The practice of scapegoating goes far back into humanity's most distant past. A fair argument can be made that the earliest ritualists identified themselves with their prey. See the wizard-beast image of Lascaux. Inhabitants of geo-spheres decorated themselves with local plant-life in a ceremonial manner &, of course, in a functional manner. Every technological advancement (yes, the ancients had the equivalent of technology) integrated into the life just as today. What we do matters. Some try to blame individualism on the Descartesian declaration that the inner & the outer worlds are separate. Some try to blame the subversion of ideas & principles by the larger power structures. Some try to blame their parents or ex-girlfriends or their bosses or the inherited mess of societal psychodrama.

Back in the day every populated continent had practices of human sacrifice. Wotan the King-God progenitor of the Norse pantheon was known to sacrifice himself to himself far before the time of Jesus on Ygrassidil, the World Tree. With one eye open he saw beyond. To purge the community's sins & make oblations to the gods (of fertility, of harvest, of ill-intentions, of luck, of child-rearing) men & women partook of innumerable variations wherein people died in an offering. As mankind beat the complications of nature back this practice grew less common. 'Archaic' dissemination of information via travellers, emissaries that brought about the great, slow rippling waves of cultural diffusion the 'barbarous' or 'uncivilized' act came to be frowned upon. In the growing boundary line between the human & the 'wild' brought about by agriculture, domestication of animals, & a profusion of distancing technologies such as standing walls, metallurgy, & abstract thinking that isolates this from that man found himself more & more alone. Still, this idea of sacrifice to God or the gods was pervasive on select days people would gather to stone a goat & purge the tribe's sins or to slit the throat of a bear & throw the pelt over themselves to act out the mythical round of the tribe's origins. Blood was a fixture in daily life. Red is one of the three principle colors, with black & white. Studies on language worldwide show that only the most advanced cultures create a word for the color blue while only the most primitive tribes with the most limited language do not have a vocabulary that includes a name for red.

This growing aloneness brought with it the story of the individual, the hero. We started to define as a culture who the person could be with a glorious garden of flowers, each orchid distinct & yet so far from the lily of the pond but we narrowed down the 'good' from the 'bad'. This underlying guilt (especially in Catholics) told man that he or she was in some way responsible for the suffering. Proust perhaps put it best when he said, 'the energy that circles the globe the most per second is not love but pain.' When Jesus said, 'give them the coat from your back' he was talking about personal responsibility. This sacrifice meant that in the face of harrowing odds we are meant to rise up & do the human [in the sense of superhuman, godlike, (perhaps even accessing God within ourselves?] act that frees the benevolent energies from the bulk of injustice surrounding situations & their vast satchels of story.

While this 'this not that' identity misses the mark when the 'I' is stressed as separate from the rest, personal culpability is a reintegrator that brings us back to the 'we'. Too often have I destressed my own blame. I would never throw the stone at Magdalene. I am not Zagareus enamored with myself in the mirror wearing the Crown of the Gods. Hard work is joy. Precocious children are worth a careful tending. Intervention is necessary in a world that does not know itself very well. They write now that planting trees is not going to help much with soaking up the harm we have done to the skydome. The Pope in an act of idiocy (O what bitter hilarity!) accuses Muslims of a bloody history. In the midst of cluster bombs, carpet bombs, smart bombs, atomic bombs (anyone remember our saddest day?), & nuclear bombs we must find positive climax. I believe in orgasmic climax, forest climax, & body optimization. Gaia theory is at its best when we study how to best utilize our resources. No longer party to aspects of the atrocity in the direct sense I buy most of my groceries in bulk now, never use paper products except the rare napkin (now that I think of it I should carry a cloth one in my bag), & conceptualize every day how to live better. Once, long ago, I fell in love with a woman while we talked about our favorites. My favorite is the full life wherein I am largely responsible for the part I play, & mind you I will be playful in my playing, conscious of consequences. Harmony is the strain of binding opposites but the dance can be graceful instead of the jagged sound of machinery grating the mind into inhuman consequences. Some may sell the world as done soon but I cannot be party to such foul practices. The sacrifice is clear, I must sacrifice myself to the Self.