Well maybe I misunderstood a reference to personal sacrifice as referring to communal human sacrifice. Like I say, it's not a hill I'm interested in dying on, because "The gods need sacrifice or else they won't be able to make the sun rise" is hardly less dystopian than "The gods need sacrifice to keep them entertained".
They're both quite unpleasant, but I'd actually consider living in a society that explicitly believes that supernatural forces are evil, malicious, and only kept at bay through intense suffering to be worse than, "We have to sacrifice our lives in order for the world to continue to exist." I could see the latter resulting in some sense of shared communal burden or other virtue. I can see absolutely no upsides to the former, unless, I suppose, you think you can overthrow those gods or ward them away through methods other than giving in to their desires. Then it can form an ideological scaffolding for resistance to tyrants.
If you're a sacrifice, of course, the difference would be academic, but if you're going to talk about "rotten foundations," those different worldviews would presumably result in different societal beliefs.
Every society ensures compliance with orthodoxy. If that makes a society dystopian, then there's never been a non-dystopian society.
... No, they don't. Most societies throughout history concern themselves with ortho
praxy--you need to do the rituals correctly, you have to give the rulers what they want, that kind of thing. They aren't terribly interested in thoughtcrimes.
Living in the middle of a civil war tends to be an objectively bad experience. Do you want to dispute this?
I can't help but note you're implicitly placing the blame on the weak people revolting against cruel governments, rather than the people oppressing them. The local lord is the one commanding the tax collectors and the troops. He is completely capable of negotiating with rebellious peasants if he so chooses.
Secondly, the Aztecs themselves went in for slavery, conquest, and genocide, so this isn't a matter of "slavery, conquest, and genocide vs. human sacrifice" but of "slavery, conquest and genocide vs. slavery, conquest, genocide, and human sacrifice".
When did the Aztecs perform genocide? They were the same ethnic group as most of the other people in the lands ruled by the Triple Alliance, and had issues projecting power enough to do more than demand tribute (areas nominally under their control
warred with each other); I'd honestly be kind of surprised if they had much in the way of opportunity to perform genocide.
Regardless, even if they did, you'd have to believe that human sacrifice was significantly worse than slavery, conquest, and genocide in order to view the Roman Empire's faults as excusable and the Triple Alliance's as not. If they were just equally bad, well, that's three really bad things versus four really bad things; not exactly a compelling difference.
Thirdly, I've already explained that religious beliefs are foundational to a person and society's worldview in a way that few other things are. If you believe that the gods are thirsty for blood and need constant human sacrifices to feed them, that's going to seep into your entire outlook. A rotten building can sometimes be salvaged, at least in part; a building built on rotten foundations rarely can.
Except, you're wrong, because the notion of religious beliefs being some neat separable thing away from the rest of your beliefs is a new thing; the religious beliefs of both the Aztecs and the Romans were woven throughout the entire structure of their society. The Romans believed that their expansionism and conquest were
endorsed by the gods, that was simply how belief in the gods worked in that time and place. The gods were granting them victory.
But apparently Roman society isn't built on a "rotten foundation" despite the belief in authoritarianism and conquest being divinely endorsed, but the
Aztecs are uniquely awful because of human sacrifice.
ETA: Also, with Roman imperialism and the things that went with it, one could at least make a utilitarian argument that it ultimately led to better outcomes than we'd have seen in a world without Roman imperialism, insofar as the average standard of living seems to have gone up, the Empire promoted trade and intellectual exchange both during its existence and afterwards by giving Western Europe a common medium of communication, etc. With Aztec human sacrifice, on the other hand, I think it would be much harder to argue that its absence would have made Central America worse off, so you can't even make an "ends justify the means" argument in defence of it.
Even if we grant that this actually happened, and could only have happened with Roman imperialism (as opposed to making trade treaties, new technological advances, et cetera), there is absolutely no evidence
whatsoever that
slavery and genocide was necessary for any of those "better things." Or, if one wants to play the card that those things were necessary because that is Just How Things Were back then (which, to be clear, is an assertion without actual evidence, but whatever, let's be generous), so it would have been impossible to support an empire without them, we must also recognize that human sacrifice was Just How Things Were back then, and the Aztecs were, presumably, similarly unable to do the positive things we're assuming empires do without it.
But we
shouldn't assume that empires actually have those positive effects, because evidence of an increase in health due to the Romans is
not conclusive, and the intellectual exchange mostly benefited elites.
I think this is sort of splitting hairs. The gods actions required their being sated by blood sacrifice to maintain the world. I think that can be characterized as "bloodthirsty." And I could be wrong, but I don't think Fabius Maximus ever said anything about the purpose of sacrifice being to entertain the gods.
I see your point, but the colloquial use of "bloodthirsty" tends to imply that bloodshed is something actively desired for its own end rather than a necessity for a greater purpose. We generally would not consider WWI generals bloodthirsty for sacrificing their own men to accomplish military objectives, because it's understood that these sacrifices served a broader goal--though we might well consider their conduct towards civilians or enemy soldiers to be bloodthirsty.
The sorts of excesses in those kinds of executions, ones pertaining to treason or the attempted assassination of a sovereign, can indeed uncritically be called an attempt to exercise state power. Where this case, I think, cannot be made so easily is when it comes to capital punishment more generally, and capital punishment more generally is what people cite when drawing an equivalency between Europeans and the Aztecs. But if the most direct equivalency is with the reaction to treason in Europe (and indeed most of Eurasia), and perhaps the treament of POWs as well, it does seem fairly clear that the Aztecs engaged in this on a much, much larger scale.
I would agree that capital punishment for reasons not related to state power or religion cannot be considered to be directly equivalent to Aztec human sacrifice, to be clear.
Something I'm curious to your knowledge on,
@Citrakayah is quality of life and the nature of the class divide in Aztec territory. The Spaniards remarked upon the visible class divide in Tenochtitlan, but what can we really make of this?
Oh, yes, they were quite stratified and that stratification had legal force. What immediately comes to mind are the presence of a great many sumptuary laws tightly regulating what wealth could and could not be displayed by non-nobles. As I recall,
pocheta would sometimes have to hide their luxuries. And, of course, you had slaves. Some were debtors, some were captives; not all war captives were sacrificed. They don't appear to have been a major source of labor from what I understand, though.
This stratification appears to have been somewhat less present in the Tlaxcalan Confederacy--ironically,
due to the influence of the cult of Tezcatlipoca--but, to the best of my knowledge, was still present to some degree. They'd be very stratified by pretty much any modern standard, much less mine.
Regarding quality of life--my understanding of lifespan and nutrition for the peasants in the Triple Alliance is not as great as I'd like it to be. I will note, however, that Tenochtitlan was noted to be incredibly clean (at least by European standards), which would have made living in there substantially more pleasant.
