• cult
        161·
        2 years ago

        Also fun fact. Human sacrifices aren’t really a thing outside of deeply hierarchical societies like the Aztecs and the Babylonians.

        Similarly, the caste system in many cultures of what’s now called “India” only really became as strict and hierarchical because of the British colonizers (doG bless the queen)

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
          10·
          2 years ago

          Idk about that. I mean what do you call the millions of people sacrificed yearly on the altar of profits to the invisible hand of the market and the god of trickle down (i.e. mammon)? /s

          …but actually we kill so many more people than any ancient civilization could possibly have ever done. Millions in war, sanctions, mismanagement of covid, impediments to food sovereignty, etc. so I’m only half joking.

          • cult
            9·
            2 years ago

            Lol well I said “outside of deeply hierarchical societies”… I think the US fits the bill

            • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
              4·
              2 years ago

              lol gotcha. There is actually some merit to the idea that these bohemian grove type cults, even if not sincere cults to mammon, at least help the capitalist ruling class internally reconcile their gross dehumanization of the working class and their crimes against them.

              (I’m not an expert or anything - I’ve done very little digging but that idea makes sense to me. and I think overall the secret society and cult dynamic plays into that sense of othering the average person)

              • cult
                7·
                2 years ago

                I’m sure you could write a convincing Nacirema-esque piece showing how much they really are cults to Mammon lol

        • REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml
          2·
          2 years ago

          Interesting, I never made the connection between the lvevel of hierarchies in a culture and the tendency towards human sacrifices.

    • cult
      134·
      2 years ago

      You know what’s not real? Photons. No seriously. What do you think of when you imagine one? You probably imagine a little white ball bouncing around off of things. But there’s no such “thing” as an individual photon. It’s just a metaphor we use to explain that this thing has both the properties of a wave and of a particle. It’s not like we could really observe it directly. Instead we have observations about its behaviors and interactions and then we come up with some metaphor that helps us visualize it

      Well, similarly, many South American cultures had explanations of “spirits” that let trees talk to each other. These spirits often lived underground. Well “spirits” are what white people translated them into because it didn’t map on to anything in the white cosmology so they just wrote it off as “magic” or som’n. Now there’s an exploding area of research on mycorrhizal fungi. It’s finding that trees can send resources and even messages underground to other trees through underground fungal networks. Some trees can even recognize their own offspring and send specific nutrients and even memories to them. We recently discovered that even microRNA molecules can make it across this network so there’s even some epigenetic stuff happening there. The networks are so important that basically no tree alive today would be able to survive with mycorrhizal fungi gathering nutrients for it. Indeed it seems like the roots of plants aren’t actually evolved for sucking up nutrients. They’re actually pretty terrible at that except for a few annual herbs. Instead their main purpose is communication and trading sugars for nutrients.

      What’s the difference between a photon (a Western spirit) vs the indigenous concepts that were translated into “spirits” by white people? These “spirits” were most likely a representation of what the West now calls mycorrhizal fungi. Both are cosmological metaphors created to provide a human understanding of observations of nature. Both are “not real”. Both are extremely useful.

      If you ask me, the difference is the size of the army of the culture from where these metaphors originate.

      • No Más@lemmygrad.ml
        63·
        2 years ago

        Photons came after the development of the scientific method and thus have a more proximate relationship with scientific purpose, rather than a mystical metaphor to whom we can only re-attribute purpose at this point.

        Edit: Photons have contributed to our understanding of light, due to their scientific formulation by Einstein (amongst others), thus making their application in devices such as lasers possible. What of the “spirits” metaphors? Where do we apply them?