The Flow of Sacrifice — Sacrifices in a Complex System

To our modern culture, the concept of a sacrifice brings forth images of animals being slaughtered on an alter; a practice that is ancient and is no longer meaningful to our modern needs. Ritualistic sacrifices were central to many ancient tribal traditions. From the Aztecs to the Celts, sacrificial ceremonies, including human sacrifices, was part of their religious beliefs. However, sacrifices is also a part of the major religions including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Sikhism. The big question that has always perplexed me: why was the concept of sacrifice so important to our ancestors?

By looking at complex systems, what I would like to show is that sacrifices are not only important, they are needed in order for complex systems to exist. Sacrifices is what flows through all complex systems and is needed for the creation of any new qualities.

What is a Sacrifice?

One might find it fascinating just how much sacrifice plays a role in everyday life. However, the concept, and really the word itself, has been drowned out of our western culture for the last century. Today you’ll only hear the word used when you talk of child rearing and career advancement.

But sacrifices are happening everywhere and all the time. To see why that is, let’s look at what sacrifices are.

Let’s start with skills: if you would like to learn to play the piano, you must practice the piano. But not just a little practice, you must put in years of practice in order to play the piano well. If we were to rephrase this in the context of sacrifice: you must sacrifice years of time and energy to increase your skill as a piano player. Sacrifice is 2 things, time and energy, and is needed in order to play the piano well. But not just quantities of time, the quality of practice is just as important. If you just practice your scales for 3 years, you will not be able to play the piano well.

Now let’s look at something more practical: vehicle drive trains. There needs to be sacrifices in order for your car to move. No, you don’t need to sacrifice a chicken to the gods to get your old chevy to start, that’s not what I mean. However, your car does consumes gasoline. The gasoline is converted into motion using combustion. Or in the context of sacrifice: you must sacrifice gasoline in order for your vehicle to produce motion. Not just any gasoline, but quality gasoline. Cheap gasoline can destroy your engine. What’s also important is that the gasoline didn’t just come from nowhere. Time and energy was sacrificed to extract the petroleum from the earth. And more time/energy was used to convert the petroleum to gasoline.

Hopefully you can see some repeated concepts in these two examples: time, energy and quality. All three are vital to a sacrifice.

So what is a sacrifice?

A sacrifice is when an entity converts and/or gives up time and energy for consumption in order to produce a new quality.

This is happening everywhere. From your body to your vehicle drive train, sacrifices are constantly being provided and consumed. This concept is so important, that it’s fundamental to our reality: even atoms sacrifice.

Atomic Sacrifice

The concept of sacrifice affects every level of this reality, from the very big to very small. It’s even happening at the smallest level that we’re fully aware of: the atomic.

Let’s go back to the very beginning of time. After the first few minutes of the Big Bang, hydrogen was primary, and only element in our reality. As the universe continued to expand and cool over millions of years, gravity began to exert its influence on all the hydrogen atoms. Once the gravitation force got to a specific point, the hydrogen atoms decided to fuse together.

During nuclear fusion, four hydrogen nuclei (protons) combine to form one helium nucleus (with two protons and two neutrons). However, the mass of the resulting helium nucleus is slightly less than the combined mass of the four hydrogen nuclei that formed it. This difference in mass is known as the mass defect. Due to the mass defect, energy is released. This is how the furnace of our sun works, and for the majority of the stars out in our universe.

To put the above in another way: the hydrogen atoms sacrificed time and energy in order to produce helium, a new quality. The energy sacrificed is released during the fusion process, to thus be consumed by other entities.

Some would say that this is not a sacrifice but a process dictated by the laws of physics. But that is what a left brained materialist would argue. Time and energy was used to produce a new quality: Helium.

Sacrifice is at the heart of this reality. The interesting part is that in this example of atomic fusion, the energy wasn’t consumed but released (provided).

Complex Systems — Consumers and Providers

Everything that is made of atoms is a complex system. In order to continually create new qualities, complexity has to be distributed. These complexities are a distributed hierarchy of consumers and providers of sacrifices.

Milton Friedman, an economist and statistician, has a wonderful story that does a great job describing how our interconnected complex economic system can produce something that we would consider simple, a pencil. ( click here to watch him wonderfully explain the concept of dependencies in a complex system by how we create a pencil) But creating a pencil is not so simple, in fact, as Milton Friedman points out, no single human can create a pencil.

Just take the wood, for example. The pencil manufacture needs wood to create a pencil. The manufacturer isn’t gonna cut the wood themselves, they are dependent on another service. The pencil manufacturer consumes wood from a lumber company. This lumber company provides wood as a consumable good. But the lumber company can’t just cut wood with their hands, they are dependent on another service. Lumber company needs saws to cut down the trees and create wood planks. The lumber company consumes saws that are made by saw manufacturers. Saw manufacturers provides saws as a consumable good. But the saws need steel in order to be created. The saw manufacturer consumes steel from a steel supplier. A steel supplier provides steel as a consumable good. But steel is made from iron ore. Iron ore is underground. Steel suppliers need equipment to dig out the iron ore. And on and on!!!

Hopefully this illustrates how complex systems are put together: a series of entities that are chained together by consumers and providers. Yes this example was an economic example, but all complex systems work this way. From biological (organs), to social (institutions) and technical systems (software modules). They all are created by an interdependent array of consumers and providers.

All these complex systems have something in common, there is something that flows through them. Goods flow through a manufacturing system, money flows through an economic system, blood flows through biological systems and data flows through software systems. What do all these have in common? They are all sacrifices.

The Flow of Sacrifices

Sacrifices are what flows through all complex systems. To review, sacrifices are fundamentally energy and time. It takes energy and time to produce iron ore. It takes energy and time to produce the saws. It takes time energy to produce the wood. And it takes time and energy to produce the pencil.

It also takes time and energy to acquire a skill, like playing the piano. It also takes time and energy to produce gasoline for your vehicle. Finally, it takes energy and time for you to exist. Plants sacrifice their fruits for you to consume in order to survive. It took time and energy for the plant to create its fruit. The cow has to die in order for you to consume its flesh. It took time and energy in order for the cow to grow its flesh. That consumed fruit and flesh is converted into fats and glucose that flows in your body via your blood cells. In a way, time and energy is flowing through your body.

I arrived at this insight thru 20 years of architecting software systems. In these systems, data flows through them. But what of data? It takes time and energy to create data, either by humans or another machines. That data is either collected through graphic user interfaces or computer application programming interfaces that collect data by sensors. Both take energy and time.

But what of quality and data? A wise man once asked me: what is the difference between data and information? Embarresed, I had no clue. He rightly pointed out that information is data, but it’s qualified data. If the data that runs through your software system isn’t of good quality, your software system will fail. This is why I cringe when I hear people say that business should be “data driven”. I would prefer if it was “information driven”.

Christ’s Sacrifice

The ultimate sacrifice in the western world is Jesus’s crucifixion. Up until Jesus’s time, sacrifices were a way of providing to God. The Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, provides detailed instructions on how to perform various types of sacrifices within the religious practices of the ancient Israelites. These instructions are primarily found in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The sacrifices outlined in these texts includes offerings for different purposes, such as atonement for sins, thanksgiving, dedication, and purification.

The sacrifices humans made were provided to God. But then something interesting happens: God sacrifices his son, Jesus who was God made flesh, to humanity. God provides his son as a sacrifice to humanity, thus inverting the dependency! This is why the Eucharist is so important: we are consuming the sacrifice of God’s son, Jesus. This turns us from a provider to God into a consumer of God. As a consumer of God, we now need to be providers of new qualities to the world.

This concept is why I believe Christianity has been so important to the development of humanity, especially in the western world. It turned humans from consumers of gods into creators of new qualities by having God flow through us. This provides us a relationship with God, the fundamental creator of everything. Now, thru us, God will continue his creation, his kingdom.

Overview

A sacrifice is when an entity converts and/or gives up time and energy for consumption in order to produce a new quality. This is fundamental to our reality and is happening everywhere around you and in you. This is why sacrifices were so important to our ancient ancestors and should still be important to us today.

Originally published at http://longloft.com on March 25, 2024.