It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.
Traditional society is conservative in the sense that it seeks to conserve its institutions over many generations. It is not conservative in the sense that it is less 'tolerant' of transgression than the Enlightenment state. Traditional society is not tolerant at all, it does not reproduce around the principle of 'tolerance', and yet the abominations that it cultivates, all that may be contained and processed as 'man' in the reveries of God, far exceeds what the modern state recognises as human conduct. As a product of traditional society, Judas extended the logic of the Prodigal Son to the point of snapping the elastic tensions and rivalries generated by the paternalistic relations which routinely structure the small group form endemic to extra-state and para-state life-worlds. All that may be spoken and all that may be heard (the sum total of what God countenances) within the constraints of the small group is personified by the Prodigal Son, who remains eternally of the same dimensions as Ham son of Noah, an 'all' that is destroyed by Judas who stands at the historical threshold to state jurisdiction. It is Judas who introduces state dimensions into para-state small group relations. The exceptionality of Judas is not to be found in the scale of his vengeful behaviour towards that distant descendent of Shem, a scale that is of a common and fatalistic type, but in the compatibility of his intervention with state process. His betrayal 'takes things too far' in what can be understood at one level as the ordinary testing of boundaries which is the traditional role of the subordinate male. However, it also disintegrates the possibility of small group autonomy by exposing its contents to the scrutiny of external authority. Judas separates himself from mere prodigality by escalating his complaint into an abstract form: an invocation, or 'calling upon' the agency of the state. In later eras, the form of denunciation itself will develop further, its vengeful character replaced by the logics of propriety and appropriate ordering. But even at this early stage, Judas successfully introduces into the vendetta-scale conflicts of his milieu, a distinctly other register of social force, and thereby effects (without his intending it) the obliteration of his own life-world.
