The Scapegoat Returns

Mimetic crisis in the modern world

Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsys, 1637

Cas Corach on René Girard, mimetic rivalry, and the sacrificial tensions emerging within the crisis of the modern liberal order.

This essay concerns violence, not its promotion, nor a catalogue of lurid atrocities, but violence as a heuristic through which to understand the present moment. Across the Western world, there is a growing sense of social strain: political discourse has become increasingly hostile, public trust continues to erode, and citizens are confronted daily with reports of crime, disorder, and conflict. Whether these developments represent a genuine increase in violence or merely a heightened awareness of it is beside the point. The experience of living amid perceived instability cannot be captured entirely by crime statistics or economic indicators. Violence possesses a social and psychological reality that exceeds what can be measured on a spreadsheet. Statistical averages mean nothing when one sees the sight of blood.

How should we understand this condition? Rather than pursuing metaphysical or banal socio-economic explanations for the apparent decadence of the contemporary liberal order, this essay turns to René Girard and his seminal work Violence and the Sacred. Girard’s central claim is as unusual as it is profound: human societies originated in acts of collective violence that were subsequently concealed beneath myth, ritual, and religion. At some point in man’s deep past, our mimetic nature led us to a sociological crisis of violent reprisal. This unending terror was eventually brought to an end through the communities’ unanimous decision to select a scapegoat to devour and subsequently venerate as the final act of violence to bring about peace. Through sacrificial practices, communities periodically redirect internal tensions onto a substitute victim—an animal, a pharmakos or a transcendental sacrifice á la Christianity—thereby preventing violence from consuming society itself:

There is no question of ‘expiation.’ Rather, society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect. The qualities that lend violence its particular terror—its blind brutality, the fundamental absurdity of its manifestations—have a reverse side. With these qualities goes the strange propensity to seize upon surrogate victims, to actually conspire with the enemy and at the right moment toss him a morsel that will serve to satisfy his raging hunger.

Though Girard’s theory is of questionable anthropological truth—as it cannot be empirically proven—it offers an interesting heuristic to examine our modern society, and we shall explain the details of his thesis in line with the growth of terror and violence that infects the current liberal order. This essay treats Girard not as a complete sociological system, but as a diagnostic lens—one that becomes most illuminating when applied to conditions of intensified social comparison, rather than as a universal theory of all social order.

In our modern system, ritual, religion and sacrifice are all confined to the private sphere because we are nominally secular, progressive and scientific-minded. One can have kooky beliefs or go to church, but in no way does the state or collectivity pretend to promote such practices. Even public displays of religiosity are cordoned off, as it were, behind safe cultural expressions or secularized into entertainment and mere sentimentality. Unlike our ancestors, there is little acceptable collective scapegoat mechanism built into our system and, if anything, such a need is consciously repressed.

If Girard is correct that societies require mechanisms for containing mimetic conflict, then a troubling question emerges. What happens when a civilization abolishes its traditional sacrificial institutions while retaining the elements that made those institutions necessary? Liberal societies pride themselves on having transcended scapegoating, yet this very self-repression may render new forms of scapegoating difficult to recognize.

Girard credits this civilizing development to the judicial system, which delays violent reprisal and has the final word on legitimate violence. Disputes can therefore be settled through legal procedures rather than devolving into blood feuds and cycles of vengeance. Yet the stability of such an arrangement depends upon widespread confidence in the legitimacy of the institutions that administer justice.

When that legitimacy begins to erode, the danger of reciprocal violence re-emerges. The Troubles in the North of Ireland offer a striking example. The conflict was not caused by judicial failure alone, but it did reveal the consequences of a society in which competing communities no longer recognized a common authority capable of definitively adjudicating disputes. Violence became self-perpetuating as acts of retaliation generated fresh grievances and demands for revenge. In Girardian terms, the judicial mechanism proved incapable of fully containing mimetic antagonism, allowing rivalries to escalate into a prolonged cycle of conflict. We now see analogous trends in other Western nations for different reasons, yet the end point is the same: loss of faith in the system that can stop mimetic violence between polarized communities. But why is the liberal world order, which has materially achieved so much by transcending the ritual sacrifice, once again descending into violent crisis? Again, the heuristic of Violence and the Sacred offers us an explanation.

One of Girard’s more insightful claims is that human beings desire things not for the things themselves but rather that we mimic the desire of others; we want what is wanted. This is particularly obvious in small children, but we can extend this mimetic quality to adults with examples too numerous to mention. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” comes to mind. This sharing of desire around a central object naturally creates rivalry between individuals, particularly men who are adept at the perpetuation of conflict:

In all the varieties of desire examined by us we have encountered not only a subject and an object but a third presence a well: the rival. It is the rival who should be accorded the dominant role.

The liberal system may have transcended collective ritual sacrifice, but it has not transcended rivalry around desire; in fact, it both conceals and accentuates desire to the detriment of its citizens. Progressive, modern economies champion the free movement of goods, labour and capital. This, it cannot be denied, has led to great economic wealth through an explosion of goods and services. This is the concealment. Man is free to choose his own path and consume all he can afford by the sweat of his brow, but underneath this is the perpetual conflict of capitalistic systems where relations between peoples are commodified. Just as various products compete in the market while prices race to the bottom, so does labour. The growth of real wages has stagnated significantly in the Western world, houses have become unaffordable for the young, and upskilling is now a necessary aspect of working life as industries adopt the latest technologies to further productivity and profits. We cannot step out of the numerous desires created by the system or the rivalries they engender. Added to this is the culture and advertising industry which conceals the competition under a fleeting pleasure principle.

Everyone competes against everyone else for property, promotion, titles and the social benefits these things accrue. Having no transcendent outlet to purge this violence, it turns inward as loneliness and mental illness or into senseless destruction: drug abuse, riots, delinquency, theft, etc. Traditional societies often constrained rivalry through stable hierarchies, inherited roles, and shared religious frameworks. Whatever their shortcomings, such structures could limit certain forms of mimetic competition by defining social expectations in advance, while the liberal-capitalist regimes strip it all away in the name of progress. It touches on another fundamental point of Girard: difference and social order.

Girard posits that the social order reaches a sacrificial or violent crisis as differences between individuals evaporate and the mimetic mirroring becomes so extreme as to cause societal breakdown. He does this by careful examination of Greek tragedy, which he claims analogizes the sacrificial crisis: Oedipus Rex and The Bacchae. Both these dramas have a lack of difference as a fundamental conceit: Oedipus is both insider and foreigner, the followers of Dionysus cross-dress and hallucinate their victims as animals, and Dionysus himself is an object of veneration as well as fear. This lack of differentiation leads to a crisis, which is solved by the sacrifice of the scapegoat so order can be restored again and differences reestablished.

With this in mind, has there ever been a system so accustomed to eradicating differences as the modern liberal order? Modern societies are not unified actors with a single intention, but they are structured by a set of converging ideological and economic pressures that consistently move in the direction of reducing inherited distinction. These tendencies are uneven, often contradictory in practice, and vary significantly across institutions and national contexts, even as they share a common pressure toward increased comparability between individuals.

Following on from the needs of capital, we see that all boundaries are torn down. Nations and peoples can blend and cajole together, facilitated by technology and ideology to become citizens of the world. To acknowledge any differences between peoples is seen as prejudice and this has even been extended into the realm of sex, where men can become women and vice versa, much like The Bacchae. Traditional gender roles are not seen as a respectable option but as patriarchal terror; loving one’s culture is on the same grounds as racial hatred. Beyond these considerations, the liberal notion of pure equality is no longer simply a political compromise but a full-scale ideological movement. Distinctions of status, authority and culture are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Individuals are encouraged to see themselves as fundamentally interchangeable units, free to pursue whatever desires they choose.

Yet the removal of traditional boundaries does not abolish rivalry; it frequently intensifies it. The more similar individuals become, the more they find themselves competing for the same positions, symbols, and forms of recognition. A society in which everyone is encouraged to become exceptional inevitably creates a vast population of disappointed aspirants. The result is not harmony but resentment that tips closer and closer towards a tragedy not unbefitting of the ancient Greek dramas.

All this societal polarization between radical equality and resistant citizenry leads us to another Girardian concept: the monstrous double. This happens when the mimetic rivalry reaches unbearable proportions and the subject is caught in the double bind of the model-obstacle that condemns both partners to a continual heightening of violence. The monstrous double now takes the place of those objects that held the attention of the antagonists at a less advanced stage of the crisis, replacing those things that each had sought to assimilate and destroy: to incarnate and expel.

This is very apparent in our current political crisis of left- and right-wing parties. Both sides are in a dialectic with each other, playing off each other’s fears and anxieties. Often we see that they push the extremes of liberalism but at different points. The left-wing groups frequently wish to further the dissolution of boundaries between peoples, sex and status, whereas the rightist groups promote only economic talking points or try to conserve the leftism of the last generation. What we see are the base and the superstructure fighting against each other while the citizenry is squeezed in the middle until their very identity as a people is expelled from the equation. This is not the rivalry of two genuinely different political potentials but rather of a double-headed monster that crushes everyone beneath it while deciding which direction to turn next. It doesn’t matter who the people vote for under liberalism, the disillusion is the same regardless.

But what of the scapegoat? A fundamental aspect of Violence and the Sacred is the sacrificial victim of the collective struggle towards stability. If it is true that, having lost its ritual/religious character, modern society is at risk of seeing another crisis, there is likely to be a scapegoat before a new order is articulated. At the moment, the victim is seen in the creative destruction of capitalism. Industries rise and fall with the market. What was popular today is old-fashioned tomorrow and people’s livelihoods are ruined as a consequence. But this abstract victim will not be enough to end the cycle as, due to the nature of capital itself, it can be never-ending but, on the contrary, only increase desire.

In the age of the mass man, it is unlikely that it will be a particular individual or idea but rather an entire group who will suffer the fate of being victim. We see the beginnings of this already in the recent proliferations of anti-movements: anti-Semitism, anti-white, anti-male/female, anti-migrant, etc. True to Girard’s position, it doesn’t matter who the victim is per se, just that there is a victim. A terrible fate confronts us in this regard as no one group is wholly deserving of punishment, particularly in a system as complicated as our own. However, the sacrificial victim also only works if it is one that is unanimously decided by the whole community lest the violence keep perpetuating itself. In our age of polarity, it is impossible to cleanly put an end to the cycle without destroying the wheel itself. Whether such dynamics culminate in a coherent scapegoating mechanism, as in Girard’s archaic model, remains unlikely in pluralistic societies where authority and belief are far more fragmented.

It is our contention that a return to ritual, religion and collective spiritual action can mend the wounds brought on by the modern order. Only that orientation to what is higher can provide the community with the collective discharge to end the violence being done both physically and to our minds as members of society writ large. Girard’s formulations are not perfect and open to debate, yet they point in the direction of the need for transcendence. Man does not live by bread alone, nor will violent sacrifice be relegated to the past. In the final analysis, we must prepare ourselves physically and spiritually yet at all the while hope for more peaceful times ahead. Girard’s framework is most useful here not as prophecy, but as a way of making visible the latent pressures that arise when societies lose stable forms of symbolic containment.