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Girard Digest 13: Alignment
Mar. 20th, 2019 10:10 amThe base state of society is one where all our individual mimetic rivalries make a web of little animosities with those immediately surrounding us.
As we pick up others' animosities, and transfer our uncomfortable interpersonal tensions onto less personal, less problematic, lower-stakes targets, the flow of violence starts to align. Over time certain targets prove to be more attractive than others – they can't fight back, or they more plainly 'deserve it', or you won't be punished for hating them – and these attract the animosity of more and more people.
Once they start gaining imitators, animosities start snowballing, and absorbing the smaller, less attractive ones in their path. People are always looking for someone or something to blame for their problems, especially when the real cause of them is uncomfortable or unsolvable. If a large number of people agree that X is at fault, well, they must be onto something, right? 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong!
Eventually all the competition will be absorbed into one super-animosity which dominates the social landscape, dividing society into 'us' (the wronged) and 'them' (the wrongers). 'They' are blamed for all the problems, and receive the concentrated force of all the animosity that we've transferred from our smaller conflicts.
If there is some equality in number or power on either side of the divide, then you get a polarisation, which reaches its natural conclusion in civil war:
If, however, 'they' are a minority, or lack sufficient social or other power to hold their own in this conflict, you end up with a scapegoat. This scapegoat can either be a group:
... or it can be an individual:
For Girard's purposes, this amounts to the same thing, as they both serve the same purpose as the target for everyone's transferred animosities, and the receptacle for the violence that goes with that.
The idea of the scapegoat is nothing new to any of us (though I will be exploring it in some depth, next) but when we think about it, our attention is usually on the individual or group being scapegoated. But now, turn around, and look at the general population: all the petty little interpersonal squabbles have disappeared as the one superanimosity dominates the culture. There is an astonishing unity that could not otherwise be achieved. This is the real bedrock of Girard's theory.
Chapter 14: The Scapegoat
As we pick up others' animosities, and transfer our uncomfortable interpersonal tensions onto less personal, less problematic, lower-stakes targets, the flow of violence starts to align. Over time certain targets prove to be more attractive than others – they can't fight back, or they more plainly 'deserve it', or you won't be punished for hating them – and these attract the animosity of more and more people.
Once they start gaining imitators, animosities start snowballing, and absorbing the smaller, less attractive ones in their path. People are always looking for someone or something to blame for their problems, especially when the real cause of them is uncomfortable or unsolvable. If a large number of people agree that X is at fault, well, they must be onto something, right? 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong!
Eventually all the competition will be absorbed into one super-animosity which dominates the social landscape, dividing society into 'us' (the wronged) and 'them' (the wrongers). 'They' are blamed for all the problems, and receive the concentrated force of all the animosity that we've transferred from our smaller conflicts.
If there is some equality in number or power on either side of the divide, then you get a polarisation, which reaches its natural conclusion in civil war:
If, however, 'they' are a minority, or lack sufficient social or other power to hold their own in this conflict, you end up with a scapegoat. This scapegoat can either be a group:
... or it can be an individual:
For Girard's purposes, this amounts to the same thing, as they both serve the same purpose as the target for everyone's transferred animosities, and the receptacle for the violence that goes with that.
The idea of the scapegoat is nothing new to any of us (though I will be exploring it in some depth, next) but when we think about it, our attention is usually on the individual or group being scapegoated. But now, turn around, and look at the general population: all the petty little interpersonal squabbles have disappeared as the one superanimosity dominates the culture. There is an astonishing unity that could not otherwise be achieved. This is the real bedrock of Girard's theory.
Chapter 14: The Scapegoat
