The scapegoat mechanism describes a primal pattern in human culture wherein a community, embroiled in internal conflict and rivalry, reconstitutes its unity through the designation and subsequent expulsion or elimination of a single individual or group.
This mechanism is a form of false Transcendence and provides a means for a community to temporarily achieve peace and unity by concentrating its shared contempt and hatred upon the victim.
The Structure of Atonement
The sacred ritual of the Yam Kippur sacrifice provides a clear structural image of two distinct sacrificial types necessary for atonement, or at-one-ment, which is the process of making a people one.
1. The Scapegoat Sacrifice: This is the horizontal sacrifice, often referred to as the scapegoat mechanism itself. In this ritual, a goat is designated, and all the community’s evil is placed upon it. The animal is then expelled, kicked out into the desert, or caused to fall off a cliff to become for the demon. Historically, this pattern is seen in the sacrifice of prisoners or captives, such as those made to manifest the glory of Rome in the arenas.
2. The Vertical Sacrifice (The Sacrifice of the Best): This sacrifice involves offering a pure animal up towards God. This type of sacrifice, distinct from the scapegoat, is exemplified by Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, where the highest or best part of existence is surrendered to the authority that precedes it. Giving up the best part is necessary to anchor the value of everything else and allow the world to have meaning.
Sacrifice, in its broadest sense, contains both a necessary element of elimination (the scapegoat) and a necessary element of offering the best up towards a higher goal.
The Mechanics of Violence and Foundation
The scapegoat mechanism functions solely as a means of stopping the spread of more violence. The principle is described as Satan casts out Satan, meaning a little bit of targeted violence is employed to prevent a wider outbreak of violence. This is a calculating way to think that possesses terrible ethics and fails to account for the dignity of the human person.
A community must be experiencing a mimetic crisis, driven by shared, imitative (mimetic) desires, before the mechanism is triggered. The identification of a victim who is similar to the community and in close proximity is essential for the mechanism to work effectively.
The victim cannot be too strange; ancient cultures would dress up sacrificial animals or integrate them into the community to ensure a required kindredness before the sacrifice would work. The victim's actual guilt or shortcomings, such as those of a criminal, can ironically make them a better stand-in for the collective guilt of everybody else in the community.
Every culture is understood to be founded upon a founding murder. Culture, rituals, and institutions arise primarily to prevent the violence of that founding murder from happening again.
Deification and the Revelation of the Mechanism
Immediately following a successful scapegoating, the victim is often deified or worshipped by the community that killed them. This occurs because the scapegoat achieved temporary peace and unity by solving the community’s problem, leading people to attribute a sacred, divine power to the victim. This subsequent worship is considered a false deification that relies on false Transcendence.
The mechanism, which relies on the diversion of attention through the projection of shortcomings and sins onto a single figure, is constantly being perpetuated, notably in modern forms such as cancel culture.
The efficacy of the scapegoat mechanism is seen to be diminished due to its revelation through the scriptures. As the mechanism becomes known, it loses its power to bind people together. This revelation has culminated in the universal value of concern for victims. However, this concern has subsequently inverted, leading to a mimetic rivalry over who can attain the status and power of being the best victim.
Transformation through Self-Sacrifice
In the context of the New Testament, Christ embodies both goats of the Yam Kippur sacrifice. He accepts the role of the stranger outside the city, taking on the sins and blame, while simultaneously fulfilling the role of the sacrifice of the firstborn.
By willingly becoming the scapegoat, Christ subverted the violent mechanism. His self-sacrifice joins the vertical and horizontal forms of sacrifice, transforming the act of being scapegoated into a sacrifice of worship. This singular act of self-giving, rather than sacrificing others to preserve the self, becomes the seed and anchor for the church and society.