A Brief History of Humankind Through the Lens of Scapeghostism

DESHSUBBA

Yuval Noah Harari, in A Brief History of Humankind, documents countless examples of human sacrifice, infanticide, elder killing, and ritual burial that defy modern logic. These acts were not random cruelty. They were scapegoat rituals. And behind each ritual lurked a ghost.

Harari notes that among the Ache people, when a valued band member died, they customarily killed a little girl and buried the two together. When an old woman became a burden, a younger man would kill her with an axe-blow to the head. One Ache man recalled proudly: “I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts.” Babies born without hair were killed immediately. One woman’s first baby girl was killed because the band did not want another girl. Another child was buried alive because “it was funny-looking, and the other children laughed at it.”

From a Scapeghostism perspective, these killings were not senseless. The ghost was the survival of the band. The old woman, the crying child, the hairless infant—each became a scapegoat for the group’s fear of weakness, scarcity, or bad luck. The ghost demanded that the burden be removed. The community performed the sacrifice and then continued living as if the ghost had been satisfied. But the ghost never leaves. It only finds a new victim.

Harari writes that the Ache viewed killing children, the sick, and the elderly as many today view abortion and euthanasia. This is not moral relativism. It is scapegoat faith. Every culture has its ghosts. We simply give them different names.

Consider the Sungir burial site in Russia, 30,000 years old. A fifty-year-old man was buried with 3,000 mammoth ivory beads, a fox-tooth hat, and twenty-five ivory bracelets. Nearby, two children, a boy of twelve or thirteen and a girl of nine or ten, were buried head-to-head. The boy wore 5,000 ivory beads and a belt of 250 fox teeth. The girl wore 5,250 beads. Crafting these beads requires over 7,500 hours of work, more than three years of labour by a skilled artisan.

Why would a community expend such wealth on children who had never hunted mammoths or led bands? Harari offers three theories: family charisma, incarnation of spirits, or ritual sacrifice. Scapeghostism sees a fourth possibility. The children were scapegoats for the leader’s death or for the community’s need to appease an unseen ghost. Their extravagant burial was not love. It was an offering. The ghost demanded that something precious be sacrificed. The children were that something.

Harari also documents prolonged warfare, debt slavery, and human religious sacrifice. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change. But the ghost remained constant. A hunter may address a herd of deer and ask one to sacrifice themselves. That is scapegoat faith speaking through prayer. The deer becomes a willing scapegoat in the hunter’s story.

Harari admits that we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers. We don’t know which spirits they prayed to or what stories they told. Scapeghostism suggests that the stories were always about the ghost. The ghost of hunger, of weakness, of enemies, of the unknown. The scapegoat was the solution. And the ritual was the forgetting.

Today we do not kill old women or bury children alive. But we still have ghosts. We still have scapegoats. The unemployed migrant, the outspoken colleague, the foreign enemy, the unpopular law—all become offerings. We call it justice, or security, or tradition. Scapeghostism calls it by its true name: the ghost we refuse to see.

The Sungir children died 30,000 years ago. Their bones and beads remain. The ghost that demanded their sacrifice did not die. It changed its clothes. It now wears politics, economy, and culture. But it is the same ghost.

To name the ghost is not to escape suffering. But it is the first step toward refusing the role of unconscious sacrifice.

Scapeghostism, the philosophy I founded, begins with a simple premise: every scapegoat has a ghost. That ghost is not supernatural. It is morality, belief, religion, ego, race, culture, and tradition. We see the accused. We perform the expulsion. But we never ask what spectral force demanded the offering in the first place.One important point is, Scapeghostism can view Harari’s book, but his book cannot observe Scapeghostism.

(DeshSubba is the founder of Scapeghostism and the author of the book Scapeghostism (2025). Views are personal)