Dominant ideologies require sacrificial victims at their core to function.

Our notions of the rule of law are fueled by the sacrifice of black and brown lives at the hands of law enforcement. Our notions of national destiny are fueled by the sacrifice of native people at the hands of our history. Our notions of a pseudo-individualizing right to bear arms are fueled by the sacrifice of children at the hands of school shooters. Our notions of the right to life are fueled by the sacrifice of women at the hands of rapists. Our notions of human exceptionalism are fueled by the torture and killing of billions of animals every year.

Rather than cynical viewing these victims as a cost or as collateral damage, I view them as the structural heart of the ideologies built upon them.

Sitting in a stream of blood, eating hair and drinking the water that has washed corpses and wet beards.

They are dragged off, with nooses around their necks, and fall into an awful darkness where they are suffer grief as they are burnt and boiled; eaten by foxes, dogs, carnivorous animals, crows, herons, wolves, tigers, serpents, scorpions, and insects; pricked by thorns, cut by saws, squeezed by machines, dragged around on their knees, and beaten by pestles; oppressed by hunger, thirst, the odor of pus, blood and foul-smelling places. They are also forced to eat various unsavory things: pus, blood, vomit, feces and fetid flesh; and finally roasted in places where heaps of hair, blood, flesh, marrow, bones, and dead bodies are scattered.

It is a path enveloped in thick darkness and covered with moss and hair, muddy with flesh and blood. Bones, body parts and entrails cover the earth, which is thick with worms and insects. The putrid stench of rotting flesh pollutes the air, already filled with bees, gnats, and flies. Grizzly bears, evil spirits with pointed mouths, and birds of prey with iron beaks are everywhere. The place itself is a plain of fine white sand, rocks, and stones of iron, surrounded by a river of boiling water and bordered by blazing fires and inaccessible strongholds. There is also a forest of trees with sharp leaves, like swords and razors, as well as iron jars of boiling oil.