"...the flattening out of life into an insignificant existence governed by institutional organs. The ideal of our public institutions is to prevent almost all kinds of death; if someone refuses to eat, he should be force-fed. The elderly person afflicted with the ailments of age is hospitalized, since death, even natural death, has been gradually removed from the realm of normal physiology and now is assumed to be a sort of pathological occurence. If death is not faced personally and consciously, then psychic life suffers one of its worse mutilations. As Freud puts in his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 'Life is impoverished, it loses interest if the highest stake in the game of living, life itself can not be risked. The state has monopolized violence, depersonalized it, and denied it to the individual. The practice of dueling, even in its most ritualized and mitigated forms, has been completely banned. This was of course inevitable, but the situation is not without its psychological repercussions. Why is that when we speak of duels, we qualify them as a barbarian custom? Perhaps the 'barbarians' accepted a little bit of blood as a lesser evil in order to satisfy some psychological need– namely, that through the 'judgement of God' the divinity itself (we would say 'the archetypal reality') was directly expressed in the duelists' acts. Our various chiefs of staff prepare machines able to shed oceans of blood in impersonal and deritualized duels, in the name of national or ideological values often abstractly determined at the negotiating table."
Luigi Zoja, Drugs, Addiction and Initiation: The Modern Search for Ritual
