Scapegoat Mechanism
Description
1. Charles Eisenstein:
"Sacrificial victims are proxies for disorder, pollution, and evil. In normal times they come from various marginal and powerless minorities. In revolutionary times, the class of sacrificial subjects flips to those who stand apart by standing above. The bloodshed of revolutionary France, Russia, China, Cambodia, and others, where the liquidation of the old elites surpassed any practical need of power, echoed ancient precedent and could well be repeated if we remain blind to its ritual motivation.
Evidence from literature and anthropology suggests that in many societies, the original sacrificial victim was the king. As the one responsible for the well-being of the nation, if ever calamity befell it, the king would be the natural choice to represent order-turned-to-chaos. In some places, he would be required to commit all manner of forbidden acts so as to concentrate poison within himself. If misfortune befell the realm, his sacrifice would remove the poison, appease the gods, and restore harmony to the realm. Or, his timely sacrifice could forestall calamities like floods, famines, or plagues from happening.
One might imagine that the king was not always enthusiastic about ritual regicide. He might have suggested, “Don’t sacrifice me, let’s sacrifice this criminal over here.” Eventually substitutes were found, such as prisoners or children, or animals (a literal scapegoat, for instance), or various kinds of effigies. Or a special temporary king would reign in unrestrained debauchery for the duration of a festival, which concluded with his sacrifice (and therefore the symbolic removal of his sins from society). The carnival king often took the form of a fool or a buffoon, someone to display human faults, foibles, and failings in exaggerated form. One cannot help but wonder at the latent psycho-social forces that propelled Donald Trump to power and then tore him down again. His personality suited him perfectly to the role, foreshadowed by his pro wrestling persona, of carnival king. Ostentatious excess is part of the job description.
The perennial impulse of ritual regicide has also surfaced in recent times at Burning Man, whose king—an effigy of sorts—perishes by immolation at its conclusion. Another faint vestige of this practice is the homecoming king and queen and the prom king and queen, though they are not, in contemporary American culture, ritually murdered. Or are they? They are in fact favorite targets of gossip. A primal impulse lurks in the human psyche to tear down our rulers; hence our fascination with celebrity scandals. Something is at work here deeper than displaced proletarian anger or the revolutionary instinct of the oppressed. It is a rebellion against order itself, and a hunger for the renewal that follows the descent into chaos.
This does not bode well for today’s elites. Whatever their faults, the technocracy. billionaires, and political leadership are creations of a system more than they are its architects."
(https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-sacrificial-king)
2.
"The second movement in mimetic theory is that of the scapegoat mechanism. As rivals become more and more fascinated with each other, friends and colleagues may be mimetically drawn into the conflict as rival coalitions form. What began as a personal battle may escalate into a Hobbesian battle of all against all, threatening the cohesion and peace of an entire community. One way of solving this problem is to find someone to blame for the conflict that all the rival coalitions can unite against. This unfortunate person may or may not be guilty. All that’s required for the scapegoating solution to work is that his guilt is universally agreed upon and that when he is punished or expelled from the community, he will not be able to retaliate. The proof of his guilt is found in the peace that now returns to the community, obtained by virtue of the unanimity against him.
Mimetic theory allows us to see that the peace thus produced is violent, comes at the expense of a victim, and is built upon lies about the guilt of the victim and the innocence of the community. This mechanism functioned at the origins of the human species, when this peace appeared as if by magic and was attributed to a visitation from an ambiguous god who came first as the terrible cause of the conflict but then was revealed to be its cure. Prohibitions emerged to forbid the imitative behaviors which lead to conflict, rituals developed that consist of a well-controlled mime of the redemptive violence against a victim (originally human, later animal and so on), and myths were born as the stories that tell of how we became a people as the result of a visitation from the gods. This method of controlling violence with violence can be found in the rites and myths spread all over our planet and gave rise to human culture.
Scapegoating also operates in individuals at the level of identity. We all construct identities over against someone or something else. I’m a woman, not a man. I’m a liberal not a conservative. I’m an atheist not a believer. And most problematically, I’m good not bad. When we need some other person or group to be bad so we can maintain our sense of ourselves as good by comparison, we have engaged in scapegoating. We are using others to solidify our identity the same way a community uses a scapegoat to solve its internal conflict."