"To keep the sacrificial secret, a pretext to slaughter group members must be created. The enemy constitutes the pretext. The more credible the threat, the more completely our motives are concealed.

The more credible the threat, the more enthusiastically the group sends the victim to die (amidst general lamentation for the loss of its young), and the more group members believe they are not the cause.

The knowledge that the group must sacrifice its own to survive is a secret. We keep it secret by treating violence as primitive and morally suspect, a failure of social structure rather than an elemental component. Violence exists is presented as a last resort, a challenge to civilized modernity as the hallmark of the nation-state.

The totem secret demands that we must pose as unwilling killers. Our side must not shoot first. It is not we who want the blood of our sons. The enemy causes the sacrifice. Violence exists because of the Other not because of us. We insist the death of our own does not originate with ourselves. All group-sustaining violence poses as a reluctant response to violence that originates with others.

We use the term taboo to describe the tension between the violent mechanism that sustains enduring groups and the reluctance of group members to acknowledge their responsibility for enacting it.