In this episode, I use a classic Bulgarian novel by Ivan Vazzoff, called "Under the Yoke," to talk about what it means to kill another individual or animal. I talk about how technology, drones, and artificial intelligence has been designed to prevent humans from feeling the usual emotion and trepidation towards killing that has prevailed for centuries. That feeling of fear and trembling is a "Baptism of Blood," which is a term taken directly from the novel. Why is it a baptism to kill another man, because once you do so, you supposedly are cleansed from the moral codes that have so sanctimoniously defined our human civilization and life. To use a Lockean and Hobbesian term, you are now out of the social contract and into the state of nature. A baptism with Holy Water is a convenient with God, a cleansing of one’s sins and the providing of a clean state for those participating in the act. To murder someone, especially in the way that the three men have done, face to face, only a few paces away, looking them dead in the eye, reverses that covenant, it is thought, and establishes a new one with blood – whereby the sanctity of life carries slightly less weight and taking the blood of another is possible. Now to do so, to actually follow through on the act of these Bulgarian men is difficult, painful and scary – that is why they were petrified, “terrified” when they were given these orders. Man does not naturally, when he considers the totally of the action, want to take the life of another, but only does so, when he’s pushed into extraordinary circumstances or those circumstances fall upon him. But once he do so, it opens up a new world, a new baptism that is hard to come back from. Now to pivot slightly, what I have observed is that in modern times, we have set up our world in such a way as to make the baptism less painful, less difficult, less human. The mass killers of our world are not bandits, not criminals, not individuals or the mafia, but rather governments whose deployment of warfare with drones, artificial intelligence weapons, bombs, long range missiles, and all the rest etc etc… make it easy not to feel the real impact of killing hundreds if not thousands of people – and this is dangerous because as soon as you start reducing the price of the baptism in blood and make it more accessible to many – the more and more people that will take that oath whether they realize it or not – and not find a way back through repentance – the only means back from the blood baptism because they have and would not have understood the severity of the oath that they took. And we do it with animals, which perhaps we consider the killing of less severe – for food I mean – we allow ourselves to participate in the slaughter en mass by designing machines and systems to do all the work. Very few people grasp the full meaning of buying a chicken breast or a steak from a store and perhaps they would if they were forces to kill and produce it themselves. Get full access to athanasios at athanasiosjcy.substack.com/subscribe
