In the world of fantasy, human beings initiate wars because they seek to “gain” something. In reality (scroll down and look at the table below), warfare generates extraordinary, monumental loss. What is the meaning of this human tendency to create events that result in monumental loss?

Economists analyze human activity typically in terms of the desire for gain, an assumption that underlies the theory of “rational choice.” Norman O. Brown, on the other hand, suggests that the desire to possess is superimposed over a deep 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, sacrifices. 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 are essentially useless. Pyramids serve no practical purpose whatsoever. The creation of these useless structures lay at the dawn of civilization.

Civilization begins as human beings “reach for the stars.” The development of civilization did not grow out of survival needs; was not based upon practical motives (Marshall Sahlins called hunters and gatherers the “original affluent society”).

Civilization begins when human beings 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 their concrete existence in order to feed the Pharaoh’s fantasy. Death was overcome, Brown says, on condition that the “real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things.”

Civilization began with the creation of these “dead things;” monumental stone structures that had no purpose whatsoever. The pyramids represented an escape from concrete existence—denial of death. The pyramids were built based on the fantasy that the Pharaoh might live forever.

Pyramids are the place in which “history” begins. Kings create history as they carve out a space or domain into which fantasies of immortality may be projected. The sacred space of history provides the illusion 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 characterized by self-sacrifice.

Horace felt, however, that renunciation was 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.”

With regards,

Richard Koenigsberg