GATR Digest #3 | Suffer, Sacrifice & Shame

The etymology, ontology, history, etc.

Hello Other Worlds,

Apologies that this was so delayed, but I have come to the realization that this year there is no “catching up.” So this Digest is March’s digest and next month you’ll get April’s digest. January was a wash. And, frankly, in Year 4 of grieving my father’s transitioning in January 2020, I think it’s just pretty obvious that’s a month that I should just leave unobligated.

Now that we’ve covered the territory of Victim, Hero, Villain and Compassion, I thought I would take the opportunity to unpack the origins of the words Suffer, Sacrifice and Shame.

These three concepts have a chokehold on humanity.

Our species chooses to perpetuate misery and then pass it down from generation to generation. Suffering, Sacrifice and Shame are the antagonists/protagonists of our personal little horror story that we feel the need to make a self-fulfilling prophecy era after era, century after century, generation after generation and millennia after millennia.

But why? What is so necessary, so great or so useful about these concepts?

What is the payoff that humanity gets from centering Suffering, Sacrifice and Shame?

Because—to be clear—humans act for personal reasons and with personal motivations. That doesn’t mean those reasons and motivations are inherently “good,” or “bad” or anything in particular. But each human being is out here doing things for their own purposes. Existentially speaking, it couldn’t be any other way. You are yourself, so who else’s motivations could you represent anyway?

Even if you are indoctrinated, stigmatized, beaten down, or bamboozled, YOU still have to agree with what the purpose of that experience WAS FOR. Nobody is in your head with you deciding that but you. So don’t give your power away just because someone told you that you should, that your power isn’t yours, or that their truth is more significant to you than your truth is to you.

Refer to Digest #0 if you need a refresher on my perspective about this, but what you co-sign—no matter how well-informed you are throughout your life—is yours to carry. You are yours. Your choices are yours. What you did in ignorance you will have a part of. Why you were ignorant you are also a part of.

I don’t say this to sound threatening or intimidating. Though I suspect, that because of our social conditioning in Nihilism, the idea of autonomy can come off that way. “You belong to you” somehow translates in our minds as “you’re on your own.”

I don’t think of those expressions as synonymous.

For those who read last month’s digest, you’ll remember when I said,

“We will get to the root of the words Sacrifice and Shame at the end of the month, but for now let me just tell you that the meaning of Sacrifice basically revolves around choosing to make something sacred. Because everything is inherently sacred and also, paradoxically, nothing is inherently sacred.”

The reason I claim everything and nothing is inherently sacred is that every person has a choice about what they find to be sacred to them. If there was anything in Existence that was ONLY—and, therefore, inherently—sacred, I’m not sure how our 100-Billionth-Generation-of-the-Universe asses would be able to feel, think or know any other way about that thing.

If something IS sacred by decree of Nature—meaning, it is the true and absolute nature of that thing TO BE SACRED—then all things that are beholden to that thing would also be beholden to holding that thing in regard AS sacred. Even an alien spending one day on Earth would be able to tell that humanity is not in agreement about what something sacred is, let alone about what “sacredness” is.

So let’s get further into understanding why or how that is.

ASIDE: I’m very sorry but TikTok actually hates 10-minute videos and makes my life 100% more anxious than it needs to be. It should not kill anyone’s will to just caption a video, but it wouldn’t save the video when I finished captioning and then it deleted the video so there are no customized captions on this video and I’m upset about that because I like my shit to be as accessible as possible! But I recorded this video on February 29th and delayed all this time out of anxiety about captioning just to end up at the same bullshit results so FUCK IT. I surrender. I hope everyone who needs captioning can download the video and do what you need to do. Feel free to recommend me a better captioning app or program.

That’s the quick and dirty breakdown of Suffer, Sacrifice and Shame. If you are on the free digest, I will leave you here. Thank you for joining in!

For those who are paying, we’ll now do a deep dive into these words.

To Suffer is to Give Way