Sacred objects are entities which compel human beings to die and kill. We can't see or touch these entities, although they are symbolized by material objects such as "flags."

 Sacred objects are not real things, although we react to them as if they are real things. These entities, though we can't see or touch them, generate war, genocide and terrorism.

These mystical entities are given different names, such as "America" or "Allah" or "Israel." Attachment to these objects generates "history," which might be defined as the struggle between mystical objects.

Societies live within a "ball of confusion," competition between sacred objects.

These sacred objects hold societies together in a fatal embrace.

 Sacred objects are considered more significant than the lives of individual human beings. Indeed the Twentieth Century was the century of sacred objects that ruled the political world--generating hundreds of millions of dead and maimed human beings.

Of course, there is a real world separate from the world dominated by sacred objects. The people in the city in which I live, Elmhurst (part of New York City), do not live within this world. Young and old people walk around holding hands. They are oblivious. They don't read the New York Times. The paper isn't sold in Elmhurst (believe it or not). People live real lives.

But people who read the New York Times live in a transcendental world imagine as "reality."