The Scapegoating Phenomenon

Rene Girard, influential French philosopher, is best known for his examination of a universal human tendency called “scapegoating.” According to Girard, every human group must at last occasionally have someone(s) they scapegoat. Scapegoating is based on the Hebrew practice, related in the Pentateuch, of symbolically placing the people’s sins on an animal (usually but not always a goat) and sending it out of the people’s living space and into a wilderness to die alone.

According to Girard, every human community has a scapegoat, a person or subgroup that they persecute in some way, irrationally, for allegedly being evil. According to Girard, in most cases, the scapegoat person or group is not evil. In the case of Jesus, he was sinless. That doesn’t matter. The people need an individual or minority group, whatever its identification may be, to punish. The point of it is to lay on the scapegoat the majority’s anxieties and cleanse themselves of some perceived impurity.

Scapegoating happens most noticeably when society is in a crisis. The people must have someone to blame. The leaders of the people place blame on some outsider person or group and the people rally to that identification in order to free themselves of blame and/or anxiety.

Scapegoating is always irrational even if there is a small element of truth in the blaming. It is always irrational because it is out of all proportion to whatever blame is deserved by the scapegoated individual or group.

Cases of scapegoating in history can be piled high. In Girard’s own country, the Dreyfus Affair. In Germany, the Jews. In America, young black men. In Africa, children accused of witches. In colonial New England, everyone accused of being a witch, especially women.

The scapegoating phenomenon plays itself out in many different ways; it doesn’t always look the same or result in the same outcomes. But the pattern is the same. Some individual or group is selected in the popular mind to be the scapegoats. They become the objects of hatred and persecution.

The question we, Americans today, must face is who is our scapegoat group? On whom are we laying blame out of all proportion to reality? Who are we treating, even if only in our own minds, hatefully? Do they really deserve that? Or are we being brainwashed by leaders and group-think influencers?

Merely criticizing is not scapegoating unless there is no real basis for it or if it blows out of proportion into hate.

Ask yourself if you are guilty of scapegoating. Ask yourself if the political leaders you support are guilty of scapegoating. Scapegoating is a sin.

*Note: If you choose to comment, make sure your comment is relatively brief (no more than 100 words), on topic, addressed to me, civil and respectful (not hostile or argumentative), and devoid of pictures or links.*