Devoted Actors die & kill in the name of Sacred Objects: Part XVII

Humans define the groups to which they belong in abstract terms. They strive for intellectual and emotional bonding with anonymous others—and make their greatest exertions in killing and dying not to preserve their own lives or defend families and friend, but for the sake of an idea or a transcendent moral conception. Transcendent objects in the name of which human beings die and kill—may be interchangeable. Call it god or whatever secular ideology one prefers, including any of the great salvational ‘isms’— colonialism, socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism and liberalism.