I was seven, maybe eight, when I understood that people will do anything if you call it tradition.
At the end of each year, they would come with their old clothes and their straw. They would stuff the sleeves until arms emerged. They would shape a head from fabric and fill it until it could hold itself upright. They would erect these men in their front yardsโscarecrows with a name, with a history, with a face that had once breathed.
And then they would burn them.
My family did not participate. We watched from our window as the neighbors gathered, as they laughed and pointed, as the flames took hold and the straw man twisted in the fire. I remember thinking it was strange. I remember not having words yet for what I was seeing.
Then someone told me about Guy Fawkes. About the man who tried to blow up Parliament. About how he was caught and tortured and hanged. About how his body was drawn and quartered, displayed as a warning, reduced to a lesson.
And about how, every year, we celebrate this by burning him again.
Not his deathโthat might have made some kind of sense, some historical acknowledgment of consequence. No. We celebrate the manner of his dying. We reenact the violence. We make it festive. We stuff straw into the shape of a human being and we set it on fire and we call it tradition, and somehow that makes it fine. Somehow that makes it fun.
I didn't know who Guy Fawkes was. I didn't care what he'd done. What horrified me was simpler than politics or history or justice: you people are celebrating someone being burned alive.
You are taking the worst thing you can imagineโbeing consumed by fire, feeling your skin blacken and split, dying in unimaginable agonyโand you are performing it. You are making children watch. You are calling it heritage.
I'm sure I thought people were strange before this. I'm sure I'd already noticed the small cruelties, the casual hypocrisies, the way adults said one thing and did another. But this was different. This was the moment I understood that humans will normalize anything. That we can take the most brutal act and sand down its edges with time until it feels like celebration. That we can call violence tradition and never question what we're actually doing when we gather around the flames.
Tradition doesn't ask you to think. It asks you to participate.
It says: everyone has always done this, so it must be acceptable. It says: this is culture, this is continuity, this is who we are. It wraps cruelty in nostalgia and calls it community. It takes the image of a man burning and turns it into something families do together on a pleasant evening.
And people do it. They stuff the straw. They strike the match. They stand in their yards and watch the effigy twist and collapse, and they don't see what I saw: that we are creatures who will celebrate anything if we've done it long enough. That we will perform death as entertainment. That we will teach our children to find joy in the symbolic immolation of another human being, and we will never once stop to ask ourselves what that makes us.
I've been looking at everyone sideways ever since.
Not with judgment, exactlyโthough there's some of that. More with a kind of permanent incredulity. A watchfulness. Because I learned young that people are capable of anything if you frame it correctly. If you give them permission through precedent. If you make the violence old enough that it stops feeling like violence and starts feeling like heritage.
I learned that humans don't need to be cruel by nature. We just need to be told that cruelty is tradition, and we'll do it with a smile.
I learned that the most dangerous thing in the world isn't the individual act of brutalityโit's the collective agreement to perform it annually and call it culture.
I was seven, maybe eight, when I stopped trusting the crowd.
When I understood that the most horrifying thing about humans isn't what we're capable of in moments of rage or fear or desperation.
It's what we're capable of when we're comfortable.
When we're standing in our front yards with our neighbors, watching the flames climb higher, never once asking ourselves what we're actually celebrating.
When we stuff straw into the shape of a man and set him on fire and call it November.
When we make tradition out of someone else's worst death.
And never once taste the ash in our mouths.
And the scariest part is that this is the species I belong to.
For the search bar warriors
Why do humans normalize harmful traditions? Why do we burn effigies and call it culture? What is the real meaning behind Guy Fawkes Night and Bonfire Night? Why do people still celebrate burning a man in 2025? What are examples of violent traditions passed off as heritage? Why do communities reenact historical violence without questioning it? Why do children grow up watching effigy burning? Why do people follow rituals simply because โeveryone always did itโ? Why do humans find comfort in collective cruelty? Why do crowds excuse violence when itโs framed as tradition? Why do cultural customs hide brutality behind celebration? Why do we turn death into entertainment? Why do societies glorify punishment, execution, and symbolic violence? Why do we stop thinking when something is labeled history or culture?
If you searched anything like that, this piece will take you exactly where you meant to goโeven if you didnโt know how to ask the question.
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