People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. We might not fall on our knees before any thug or bully who manages to wreak havoc with impunity (at least, if he isn’t actually in the room), but insofar as such a figure does manage to establish themselves as genuinely standing above the law – in other words, as sacred or set apart – another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that
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