The one percent always ate us alive: How human sacrifice led to our society’s gross inequality

[applegrove]

The one percent always ate us alive: How human sacrifice led to our society’s gross inequality

by Kally Holloway at AlterNet, Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/07/the_surprising_root_of_our_societys_inequality_human_sacrifice_partner/

"SNIP............


“By using human sacrifice to punish taboo violations, demoralize the underclass and instill fear of social elites, power elites were able to maintain and build social control,” lead study author Joseph Watts stated in a press release.

......

The method by which sacrifices were carried out reads like a horrifying laundry list of ways you would never want to go out. Ritual killings took the form of “burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being cut to pieces, crushed beneath a newly-built canoe or being rolled off the roof of a house and decapitated.” Once a society began using sacrifice keep the ancient equivalent of the 1 percent in the top slot and slaves at the bottom, the system became self-perpetuating.

“What we found was that sacrifice was the driving force,” says researcher Quentin Atkinson, “making societies more likely to adopt high social status and less likely to revert to egalitarian social structure.”

The study, which was published in Nature, holds obvious implications for the role of religion – and, of course, fear – in our own top-down, elite-ruled culture.



..............SNIP"

[SoLeftIAmRight]

1. and the sad thing is - some support one percent candidates

lol

[Downwinder]

2. And we are still doing it, with the death penalty.

[tblue37]

3. And with lynchings--often now by LEOs--and use of people as cannon fodde in wars of

choice to benefit the wealthy and powerful.