My father told me that he was trying to set up my life such that I would never need to sacrifice. Ever. When I started talking about sacrificing, it upset him a great deal. It was as if he had failed as a parent or something. He believed I should never sacrifice, and I was telling him I thought it was necessary to sacrifice. Perhaps we were simply in the middle of a great miscommunication.
Sacrifice can mean a number of things. In this post, I am not referring to taking a chicken or a goat and slaughtering it to appease some pagan god. However, what I have in mind is possibly still related in some way. For my father, to sacrifice is to give something up. Not just to give up anything though; it has to be something I consider valuable. The more valuable that something is to me, the greater the sacrifice if I am to give it up. Conversely, if the thing holds no value to me, then it is not a sacrifice to give it up. So a significant aspect of sacrifice is value.
Why a person might sacrifice is not always clear. Often, one makes a sacrifice in order to gain something else they may consider more valuable. In the case of sacrificing a chicken, the person sacrificing the chicken likely holds great value in the chicken, as a source of food for his or her family. However, it may be for a thing of greater value; the sacrifice might be in order to convince their god to provide favorable conditions to grow their crops, or perhaps to keep their ships safe while travelling in the Aegean Sea. The person is giving up one thing of value for another. So sacrifice can often be a transaction of a sort.
Are there sacrifices that are not of this transactional nature? Can I make a sacrifice without gaining something else of value in the process? It may be argued that when I sacrifice my time when volunteering that I gain nothing in return (that is why it is called volunteering), but others gain something of value from my sacrifice. If considered in isolation by myself, I may sacrifice without gaining anything, but others still gain from my sacrifice, so it seems like the transactional nature still exists.
If I assume that all sacrifices involve some sort of transaction, then it seems like sacrifice is all about giving up one thing for another. And if the sacrifice is an appropriate act, I might assume that the thing being sacrificed is of lesser value than the thing gained from the sacrifice. Are there cases where something of great value is given up for something of lesser value? Again, if looked at from one person’s perspective, this may appear to happen occasionally. When I give up my time (something of great value to me) in order to help someone with moving their furniture (something of little direct value to me), then I seem to have made such an exchange. However, there is a lot going on in that transaction. I may value the relationship with the someone, and helping them may increase the strength of that relationship. So it may not be so simple for me. Furthermore, the value of moving their furniture is of great value to the other person, whereas my time may not be of significant value to them. This assessment of valuation may quickly become difficult to estimate properly.
If we briefly consider a utilitarian argument, as this is a very popular ethical theory these days, perhaps a sacrifice is a good sacrifice if it increases the overall happiness or well being in the world. That is, the thing being given up is producing less happiness than the thing gained in the sacrifice, for all people. So even if I don’t value the thing gained, I can assume that there are others who do. Again, assuming that I am making a good sacrifice, and not a poor sacrifice.
With a bit of an understanding of sacrifice, I now return to my father’s intentions as he expressed them to me in my youth. He did not want me to ever have to sacrifice. But this seems to make no sense. He seems to want me to never give anything up, even if it may offer me something greater as a result. When I pressed him on the issue later, that is indeed what he had in mind. Specifically, he did not want me to ever have to give up anything. He would still be happy for me to gain other things of greater value, so long as I didn’t have to give up anything to get them. He simply wanted me to not have to give up anything.
It took me a while to recognize the flaws in this sort of world view. Most of my life is filled with acts of a transactional nature. I consider my experiences playing Magic: the Gathering (a collectible card game) to be the most significant in teaching me about transactions and valuation, both by playing the game and by trading cards with other players. Within the game, one often has to give up a card in order to gain another card or effect. Those who play the game well have figured out the best times to give up a card, and often the giving up of cards leads to their victory in the game. When trading cards, what seems most important is to find someone who values your card the most (even if you do not) and who values the card you want the least (regardless of the value you are assigning to the card). In other words, it seems more important for me to understand the value others are assigning to things than the value I am assigning to things.
To sum up what I’ve discussed thus far, to sacrifice is to give up something of value for something of greater value. For the sacrifice to be a good sacrifice, I need to give up something of lesser value for something of greater value. The values of the things in question are related to me, but are also related to others. For me to consider a sacrifice good, I need to value the thing given up less than the thing gained. For others to consider a sacrifice good, they need to value the thing given up less than the thing gained. In other words, I may consider something a sacrifice while others do not. I may consider myself a hero (having made a good sacrifice), while others might consider me a villain (having made no sacrifice at all, perhaps even having taken advantage of someone else in the act).
This all seems to suggest that when sacrificing, I ought to consider others, lest I gain a poor reputation.
I disagree with my father’s assessment. One who never gives up anything is a hoarder, and hoarding overwhelms a person after a while. The situation where the things you own end up owning you. But then, one might consider hoarding a sort of sacrifice too; hoarding may be sacrificing sacrificing in order to hold more stuff. This sounds much like begging the question, so I will not dwell on this. I will simply suggest that hoarding is not sacrificing. And with that, hoarding is not a good choice because I need to give up things in order to gain better things.
If it is not clear, during this discussion, the things being given up and the things gained through sacrifice need not be tangible or physical. My time is not something easily grasped, nor is its value easily estimated. Only I can say whether my time is valuable or not. However, sometimes when thinking about sacrifice, it may be easier to consider physical things, like Magic cards, so that it will be easier to understand what is going on.
For me, sacrifice is a fundamentally important skill. From my observations of the world, in order to gain things of significant value, one needs to sacrifice. Furthermore, giving up extremely valuable things does tend to get me things of even greater value. These sacrifices do tend to be quite risky, as there are times when the thing gained is not guaranteed (the sacrifice is for the possibly of gain, rather than the guarantee of gain). However, with the transitory nature of our world, most things we sacrifice are lost eventually anyway. At least through a sacrifice, we can hope to gain more than if we had tried to hold onto the things that cannot be held onto.