Ouroboros: Sacrifice, Scapegoating & Suicide
Self-devouring as a universal concept has been understood cross-culturally and made manifest in mythology, norms, and customs across human societies through space and time. That is to say, a recognition that the nature of our world can be empirically understood to be one in which an organism or system destroys parts of itself to perpetuate through the arrow of causality. Stemming from an understanding of one of the most fundamental principles of our physical universe, the first law of thermodynamics, there is a limited or finite zero-sum element to resources within this plane of existence. This recognition drives the entirety of evolutionary theory and underpins a great deal of our rational decision-making, both individually and as a collective. Without the availability of energy to be continuously added to a system, Ouroboros as we understand it, drives an evolutionary process forward.
Amalie Emmy Noether, ironically not widely celebrated in feminist literature, is responsible for teasing out that every differentiable symmetry leads to a conservation law within the physical world. Noether’s Theorem proves that for every continuous symmetry in a physical system, there exists a corresponding conserved quantity. For example, the symmetry of time translation (invariance under shifts in time) leads to the conservation of energy. Similarly, spatial translation symmetry yields the conservation of momentum. Noether's theorem provides a fundamental framework for understanding the conservation of important quantities such as energy, momentum, and angular momentum in various physical systems including the way we understand energy and matter itself. Nonetheless, the punchline is that work done by a system on its surroundings requires that the system's internal energy be consumed. There must be a conservation and balance.
Turning to larger more complex systems within our biological world can often be more visceral and intuitive. The battle for survival simply stated has far fewer winners as opposed to losers. How species are consumed either by one another or a dramatic shift in the environment to which they were unable to adapt is the ouroboric process on full display.
Homo sapiens, from Latin sapiēns, present the active participle of sapiō (“discern, be capable of discerning”) and homo relating to ‘human’ we have self-declared to be “humans capable of discerning.” From this defining characteristic, we’ve honed a symbiotic relationship with the cycle of death, rebirth, and self-consumption. The redistribution of resources has not escaped our species.
Human societies have long grappled with the concept of sacrifice to invoke an inherently understood reciprocity principle of conservation leading to a form of renewal. Often these sacrifices were associated with fertility, agriculture or successful passage to an existence beyond death each of which, so the zero-sum logic goes, required sufficient energy to have the system balance.
In ancient pre-dynastic Egypt, evidence of retainer sacrifices where servants were killed and buried with the deceased king to serve them in the afterlife. This practice dates back to around 2800 BCE. Biblically, the third book of the Torah of the Hebrew and Christian faiths makes references to sacrifices particularly relating to upholding social order. This was seen as an affront to and in direct violation of spiritual communion with God. Explicitly, the Israelites were instructed to tame their ouroboric impulses and
Not to burn your children in a sacrificial fire to Molech.
You shall not give any of your children to offer them [by fire as a sacrifice] to Molech [the god of the Ammonites]. (Leviticus 18:21)
In the New Testament, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross is also seen as a central aspect of the theology. Jesus's death and resurrection are understood as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity to open mankind to redemption. In Mezo American history, particularly the Aztec Empire of the 15th century, Michael Harner, in his 1977 article The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, cited an estimate by Borah of the number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the 15th century as high as 250,000 per year, which may have been nearly one percent of the population.
The ouroboric relation can also help us better understand the driving impetus behind social movements and revolutions within a society. A revolution, or forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system, is also defined as a full rotation symmetric about a singular axis. It’s interesting, that the same word is being used to describe complete reorganization and redistribution of power is defined physically as a symmetric movement of an object back to its original orientation.
The French philosopher René Girard's theory of mimetic desire posits that humans imitate the desires of others, leading to rivalry and conflict. He argues that this mimetic desire is foundational to human culture and religion, shaping myths, rituals, and societal norms. Central to Girard's thesis is the concept of the scapegoat mechanism, where societies alleviate internal tensions by collectively blaming and sacrificing a scapegoat. This mechanism, according to Girard, is a fundamental aspect of human culture and serves to maintain social order. The Great Leap Forward, Bulshovich Revolution, French Revolution, Thermadorian Reaction, The World Wars of the 20th Century, etc are all chop full of examples of the willful sacrifice of a scapegoat on the part of a collective to consume itself in an attempt to strive for some new development or realignment.
Sacrifices also form the basis of the relationship we have with ourselves. Each decision that we choose to make is an omission of the infinitude of decisions we could have otherwise. Taken to its extreme, the sisyphean undertaking of self-development can become unbearable and in many cases ouroboric in a violent fashion: suicide. Albert Camus among countless others recognized this as the most fundamental of all philosophical inquiries and was left with the rather unsatisfying absurdist position of uncertainty and indeterminism.
In our current socio-political environment, the developed Western World is grappling with many such existential questions. Mathias Desmot and other public thinkers such as Joanah Goldburg have recognized the ouroboric process once again making itself manifest. The often non-explicitly stated but rather undercurrent of the desire to destroy seems to be further amplified by the hyper-atomized, individualized, and novel environmental factors of a global, post-industrial information age. This impulse toward sacrifice, destruction, and suicide also carries with it the potential for growth out of the ashes of self-extinguishing. Tragic as it may be, it’s the circle of life.
