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Jonas's avatar

A big part of fitting in is to have the exact same blind spots as the people around you. That's more important than having the same beliefs as those around you.

For social harmony, you don't have to both agree if you can agree not to examine certain contested areas too closely (aka the taboos). But that can become too rigid for the society as a whole. So you have specialists (people from the top or bottom of the status hierarchy) who are more free to probe the taboo areas.

Seems like your "sacredness" is just one example of this kind of mechanism. "Sacredness" might not be the right word for it, as it encompasses more than this general desire not to examine something too closely.

Medical spending is not really a taboo topic to discuss, although depriving people of medicine due to costs (aka "death panels") is sort of taboo. As is debating who controls the trade-off decisions in making "medical judgments" (particularly doctors vs politicians / business people or even individual doctors v. the medical establishment, patients themselves or other family members).

Of course, just because something is taboo doesn't mean it doesn't happen. In fact, it's probably about just as likely to happen, but people like to keep it firmly within their blind spots so they don't have to acknowledge the distastefulness.

Specialists in their niche communications channels, using jargon, can poke at the boundaries, so society is not completely paralyzed. It generally only filters into mainstream communications though as hypotheticals, edge cases & outlandish proposals, limiting rational public discussion about it.

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Brick Mason Pros Charleston's avatar

I'm grateful for this, many thanks. It makes me wonder how it relates to Girard's idea of the holy, particularly how violence fits into it. concreteresurfacingcoralspr...

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