← The Observable Unknown
The Observable Unknown
Interlude LXX: Sacrifice | Trade-Offs, Decision Making, René Girard, Ernest Becker, Hidden Costs, Deferred Consequences
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Welcome back to the observable unknown. Human beings dislike the language of sacrifice. The word feels ancient, it feels religious, it seems uncomfortable, and it suggests loss. Modern culture has become extraordinarily skilled at discussing benefits while remaining strangely silent about costs. Yet every stable system is built upon something it agreed to lose every one. A marriage, sacrifices, alternatives. While a profession may sacrifice possibilities, some civilizations sacrifice spontaneity. A calendar has to sacrifice freedom. Commitments, sacrifice, uncertainty. The question is never whether sacrifice exists. The question is whether the sacrifice remains visible. Because invisible sacrifices have a habit of returning as confusion. Throughout much of the 20th century, at Stanford University and later at institutions across Europe and the United States, literary theorist and anthropologist Reiner Giraud studied one of the oldest forces shaping human societies conflict. More specifically, how societies prevent conflict from consuming themselves. Girard argued that human beings imitate one another far more than they realize, borrowing desires, ambitions, borrowing fears, status markers and rivalries. Eventually, those imitations create tension. The more similar people become, the more intensely they compete, not despite similarity, but because of it. Giraud observed that many societies historically resolved this tension through sacrifice. A burden was concentrated, a debt might be assigned, some victim may be chosen. A conflict was simplified. The system restored temporary order by deciding what would be lost. Whether or not one accepts every aspect of Giraud's theory, the underlying observation remains difficult to ignore. Coherence always carries a cost. At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and throughout a career spanning medicine, psychiatry and cultural criticism, Ernest Becker examined a different form of sacrifice, the sacrifices human beings make in order to live with mortality. His Pulitzer Prize winning work, the Denial of Death, proposed that much of human behavior is organized around managing the terror of impermanence. Not consciously. Structurally, every identity sacrifices competing identities. Every belief sacrifices alternative explanations. Every life path sacrifices countless unlived futures. The moment a choice becomes real, something else ceases to be possible. This is one reason decision making feels heavier than information gathering does. Information expands possibilities. Decisions collapse them. And collapse is a form of sacrifice. A person spends years exploring careers. Eventually, one must be chosen. A person imagines countless relationships. Eventually, one has to become real. A writer imagines a thousand books. Eventually, one manuscript script demands completion. The chosen path gains coherence. The abandoned paths become cost. Modern culture often presents freedom as the absence of sacrifice. The opposite may be closer to the truth. Without sacrifice, coherence becomes impossible. Without exclusion, structure cannot emerge. Without limits, form dissolves. This appears everywhere once you begin looking. Economic systems sacrifice certain efficiencies to gain resilience. Biological systems sacrifice energy to maintain stability. Governments sacrifice flexibility to preserve continuity. Families sacrifice individual preference in order to sustain collective function. Even attention operates this way. To focus on one thing is to sacrifice awareness of another. This principle sits close to the themes I explored in my books. The cost of the move scripts, bodies, consequences, exit strategies, and the 12 decision bodies. They master cognition, choice, cadence, and the interiority of regret. Choices don't merely produce outcomes, they produce exclusions. Every active movement generates a field of abandoned alternatives. Many regrets are not failures. They're delayed encounters with the price of coherence. The difficulty is that consequences rarely arrive immediately. That is why sacrifice becomes invisible. The cost is paid later, the debt matures quietly, and the trade off reveals itself years after the agreement was made. A society neglects maintenance for decades. Then infrastructure fails. Someone may neglect their health for years. Then limitation appears. A family might avoid difficult conversations. Then estrangement arrives. The consequence feels sudden. The sacrifice occurred long, long ago. Deferred consequences are often forgotten. Sacrifices returning to collect payment. This doesn't make sacrifice tragic. It makes sacrifice honest. Because maturity may be nothing more than learning to ask a question. Many people spend their lives avoiding what am I willing to lose? In order to preserve what matters? Every coherent life eventually answers that question. Consciously or unconsciously. The answer becomes the architecture of the future future. If this interlude clarified the hidden costs beneath your own choices, make that known. Leave a rating or a review, not for validation, but for signal. So consequences reach places where trade offs have remained invisible for too long. Until next time. Remember, you don't become what you feel, you become what you return to. And what you return to returns as you.