Historians often claim that human beings initiate wars because they seek to “gain," for example, power or economic advantage. Another hypothesis (scroll down to the table below) is that  warfare  is undertaken to generate extraordinary loss. What is the meaning of this human tendency to create political events that result in monumental loss?

Economics views human activity in terms of the desire for gain, an assumption connected with the theory of “rational choice.” Norman O. Brown, on the other hand, suggests that the desire to possess is superimposed over a deeper psychology of giving. The archaic institution of the gift, Brown says, leads to an understanding of the “sacred superfluous.”

Prestige and power are conferred by the ability to give. Gifts are sacred and the gods exist to receive gifts (do ut des). The compulsion to produce an economic surplus is created in order to have something to give.

Archaic gift giving, according to Brown (the famous potlatch being only one example) refutes the notion that the psychological motive of economic life is utilitarian egoism. Archaic man gives because he wants to lose; the psychology is not egoist, but self-sacrificial. Hence there is an intrinsic connection between economic life and the sacred. "The gods exist to receive gifts,” that is to say, sacrificial offerings. Gods exist in order to “structure the need for self-sacrifice.”

The ambition of civilized man, Brown says, is revealed in the pyramids. In their creation, we see how economic activity may have little to do with practical considerations or survival. In the case of the pyramids, monumental efforts were directed toward creation of the “sacred superfluous.”

Egyptians devoted a large proportion of their wealth and psychic energy toward creating these gigantic structures—that useless from a practical point of view. It is nevertheless true that creation of these useless structures represented the dawn of  Western civilization--even, one might say, the bedrock of this divilization.

The pyramids reflect the human effort to “reach for the stars.” Civilization did not  develop based on survival needs nor practical motives (Marshall Sahlins called hunters and gatherers the “original affluent society”).

Civilization begins when human beings begin to project their existence into structures that contain the possibility of immortality. Herein lies the essence of the motive to sacrifice.

The workmen who built the pyramids devoted a large proportion of their lives toward the creation of these gigantic structures--that symbolized the immortality of the Pharaoh. They sacrificed the pleasure of concrete existence in order to feed the Pharaoh’s fantasy of eternal life. Death was overcome, Brown says, on condition that the “real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things.”

A foundation of Western civilization was the creation of these “dead things;” monumental stone structures that had no practical purpose. The desire to create and build pyramids represented an escape from concrete existence—denial of death. The pyramids were built based on the fantasy that the Pharaoh might live forever.

One may say that “history” begins with the pyramids. Pharaohs  create history as they carved out a space or domain into which their fantasies of immortality could be projected. The sacred space of human history constitutes a domain based on the assumption that it is possible to escape everyday (mortal) existence.

Brown suggests that much of civilized activity takes the form of “sublimation:” energy deflected away from the “real, actuality of life” in devotion to symbols of immortality. He writes of the poet Horace, who viewed poetry as a career in and of itself--characterized by self-sacrifice.

Horace felt that his renunciations were worthwhile—if success would allow him to “strike the stars sublime.” At the end of his third book, he celebrates his success:

I have wrought a monument more enduring than bronze, and loftier than the royal accumulation of the pyramids. Neither corrosive rain nor raging wind can destroy it, nor the innumerable sequence of years nor the flight of time. I shall not altogether die.

Horace’s motive for writing poetry was not unlike the motivation that generated the building of pyramids. Brown comments on the passage from Horace above:

I shall not altogether die—the hope of the man who has not lived, whose life has been spent conquering death, whose life has passed into those immortal pages.

This thought may be dominating the psyche of many people reading the LSS Newsletter at this very moment--whose hopes and dreams are contained within the "book" they are writing.
__________________________________________________________________________