Rene Girard & Wokeness

Unmasking The Scapegoat

We all feel it. from rising violence in the streets to the ideological skewing of every movie & TV show, the implicit beliefs of our society have changed. In fact, woke dogma has overtaken our culture so deeply that boomer media tried to release a reality show called “The Activist” in which groups would compete in making sacrifices to the new gods in hopes of getting a pat on the head from some corporate-approved celebrities. So brave.

Despite how transparently fake and even humorous corporate wokeness may be, at the heart of the new religion lies something much darker. Under the mask of “social change” lies the return of a pre-christian value system. A return of the scapegoat.

Enter Rene Girard. I heard him mentioned somewhere and the more i looked into his work, the more i became convinced that he is key to understanding today. Girard was a french polymath who wrote several books on the history of human violence and how christ forever overturned it.

At times i find him hard to understand but i’m going to break down his major ideas to the best of my ability.

A staple of Girard’s work is memetic desire. The idea is that, as humans we want what other people want. It’s like the guy/girl who wasn’t interested in you until someone else was. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.

As Girard points out, if we weren’t imitative, we’d have no ability (or use) for things as basic as language. We’d be pre-programmed robots. The fact that we imitate is beautiful but it is also corruptible. “Memetic desire is what lowers us below the animals and what elevates us above them.”

Part of our misunderstanding he writes, is our dismissal of the tenth commandment. We often view it like “don’t murder, don’t steal… and oh yeah, don’t covet your neighbors car… be grateful for your car.” In his view, after forbidding immediate violence (Thou Shalt Not Murder) the tenth commandment speaks to the heart of all human violence, corrupt desire.

As we begin to imitate the same models or war over which models to imitate, tension builds. We are now in competition. Satan then turns this tension into resentment.

The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good "individualists," the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred.

The conflicts resulting from this double idolatry of self and other are the principal source of human violence.

The role of satan is to continually welcome us to justify our resentments. As the community’s collective resentment continues to build, each individual resentment is dissolved into one shared unstoppable rage. This rage continues to build until the need for release becomes so great that the mob decides on a victim and exorcises it’s demons on the scapegoat. This restores peace (temporarily) to the community.

Satan casts himself out and in so doing, becomes seen as the solution to the problem he set into motion.

If he were purely a destroyer, Satan would have lost his domain long ago. To understand why he is the master of all the kingdoms of this world, we must take Jesus at his word: disorder expels disorder, or in other words, Satan really expels Satan. By executing this extraordinary feat, he has been able to make himself indispensable, and so his power remains great.

Let’s look at the betrayal of Peter. Today we often depict Peter as failing by result of his temperament or character. Girard’s view is that, this is false. The point is not that Peter is weak, the point is that the pull of the mob is absolute. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is the beginning of the end for morally justifying the scapegoat mechanism. Prior to him, all our eyes were scaled. “Forgive them father for they know not what they do.”

Another key insight of Girard’s work is his handling of myths. First, he points out that myths disguise real violence. in our age historians dissects the specifics of myths and pronounce that they never happened.

However his view is that, these stories served as a code of morality. Whether Character A physically killed Character B is not the point. The point is that, the myth provides a moral framework for everyone in the culture which adheres to it. As a result, myths are not merely fanciful stories cultures tell themselves for amusement. They reveal and justify a culture’s attitude towards violence.

Scripture and Myth. Skeptics often dismiss the bible by citing the similarities between it and myths throughout history (a hero who dies and rises again etc.) Believers often dismiss myth as anti christian. They are quite right; but as always, avoidance is not the answer. Girard’s view is that the similarities serve to accentuate the differences. My wife and your wife are biologically more alike than they are different. It’s the differences that count.

Here are a few examples: In the story of Apollonius of Tyana a community finds itself in a state of social unrest which no one knows how to solve. Along comes Apollonius who suggests that, the source of all their woes is a beggar they find in the street. It took some convincing, but eventually; the crowd buys in and they murder him in cold blood.

Now let’s look at John 8. A woman is caught in adultery and the Pharisees suggest that she be stoned. Rather than restore peace through a scapegoat, Jesus subverts the cycle of scapegoating by saying “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”

A similar thing happens between the story of Oedipus and the biblical story of Joseph. despite the similarities, what’s different is the point of view.

In the story of Oedipus, (and myths generally) the scapegoat is guilty of the things the mob accuses him/her of. However in the story of Joseph, the Bible reveals that, just because the mob all agree on something, does not make it so. Might does not make right.

The myth and the biblical story are in basic opposition over the decisive question that collective violence poses: Is it warranted? Is it legitimate? In the myth the expulsions are justified each time. In the biblical account they never are.

This brings to today. Much like the movements throughout history, the rising tide in our culture today is the justification of resentment. The goal of the new religion is to convince us, that if a resentment is understandable it must be justified.

For so long we have enjoyed the benefits of living in a post-christ world that we’re beginning to believe we no longer need him.

Leftism intentionally pretends that the moral values which resulted from a Christian framework are merely natural to human nature.

This is because, it facilitates our need to feel superior. After all, if concern for victims (as I define it in my own head) is nothing more than natural, than it’s only right to see those who transgress it (as I define in my own head) as less than human.

Not only are we superior to our neighbor, but when taken to it’s logical conclusion, we begin to believe we are superior to God himself. Free from original sin, we become free to indulge our deepest and most satanic desire of all: self divination.

In short, Wokism takes “Nietzsche for babies” and “Christianity for babies” and mixes them together. It denounces forgiveness as weakness while demanding it’s every self definition be praised.

It trades the sinfulness of all for the sinfulness of some. It trades truth for power. It trades “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” For, “I am innocent. You are guilty.” “I am oppressed. You are privileged.”

It weaponizes Christian self reflection and uses it to turn it’s enemies against themselves.

These two philosophies are incompatible and their marriage will not hold. Our culture will either become more Christian or more nietzschean.

You cannot have both resentment and stability. The more we indulge our desire to create morality, the more we will eventually find, that the only thing we can agree on, is using power against people we do not like.

Should we give up our responsibility to preserve the rights of our opponents, Should we forgo our commitment to the belief that law is above power, it will not be long before each of us find our heads on the chopping block.

“Christianity asserts that law is above power. Remove that, and power is all that is left.” -Peter Hitchens