Scapegoat Theory explained

[00:00:00]Right now, the US left and the US right agree on almost nothing except one thing. The Western world and the Eastern worlds agree on absolutely nothing except one thing.

[00:00:15]This is called scapegoat theory. René Girard is the theorist behind scapegoat theory. So, here's what he explained.

[00:00:22]There's something in societies called mimetic rivalry. What that means is that we don't Our desires don't come organically from within. They're almost manufactured in society. We see what other people desire, and that causes us to desire the same thing. For example, a child who sees another child wanting a toy, all of a sudden wants that toy, but they didn't want that toy 5 minutes ago, right? So, seeing another child want the toy is exactly what gave the toy its value. So, this starts in childhood, but develops into adulthood. For example, uh a man talks about how much he finds a woman attractive. Now, all of the men in his friend group suddenly find the same woman very attractive. Or a woman goes on holiday to Italy, let's say, and now all of the her friends in the same friend group also want to have a destination wedding in Italy. And it applies to everything. Politics, you know, the other side has the power to pass legislation. Now, you want to have the power to pass legislation. So, essentially, what Girard explains is that because of this mimetic rivalry, where we're copying each other's desires, what happens in a society over time is that this obviously creates friction. It's creating rivalry. So, this rivalry, he explains, starts to spread, starts to grow, the tension starts to build.

[00:01:46]People start to organize themselves into groups, into factions, and they're organizing around mutual destruction, right? So, for example, the American left or right. The rivalry continues to build and build and build until it reaches a point where there's nothing left but to be violent toward each other, to actually take the other side out. This is the point that the scapegoat emerges.

[00:02:14]Because the scapegoat has to emerge.

[00:02:18]I'll explain. The scapegoat becomes the object that absorbs all of the tensions, all of the problems are projected onto the scapegoat. This is now declared to be the reason that everybody is fighting. And once the scapegoat is eliminated, order is restored within the society. It is really important to understand that the guilt of the scapegoat is completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that enough people agree that the scapegoat was the problem for that harmony to be restored. Because now everybody's breathing a sigh of relief. Oh my gosh, all of these problems, all of these tensions between us, it all because of them, right? And this is why it always looks like discovery. When the person or the group or the tribe discovers it was the Jews.

[00:03:09]There's this almost like this was the buried truth that has been concealed from us for all of this time. This is the reason why the left and right couldn't get along. This is the reason why the east and the west couldn't get along. This is the reason for capitalism, for socialism, for all of these things.

[00:03:27]And so there's this agreement that allows these two warring tribes to now get along by determining that the source of all of these individual problems, which could in no universe ever be individually resolved, is entirely the weight of it is entirely carried by this object that has now been removed. So we've obviously seen so many historical examples of this, Nazi Germany, Hitler blames Jews for the German defeat in World War with the stab in the back myth, Stalin is blaming Jews for the doctors plot which is the conspiracy that they were intentionally poisoning the Soviet dictatorship.

[00:04:08]The Black Death in the 1300s, Jews in Europe were accused of poisoning the wells when Jews were dying at the same rate of the same plague and it it is so often Jews because they represent all of the things that the scapegoat needs to represent which is that they are a minority everywhere they go and because they are a minority they are easily targeted and disposed of which is exactly why people will often tell you that there's no way for Jews to survive without their land because it was specifically because of the fact that they had no land that they were targeted and this is really interesting because of what we were talking about last time with the Dreyfus affair, right? And I was talking about how Herzl stood in the mirror middle of Paris at the time and heard everyone chanting death to the Jews in the safest place for Jews in Europe at the time and realized, "Okay, we are not safe here.

[00:05:07]We cannot assimilate our way into safety."

[00:05:11]And what I wanted to tell you then which becomes relevant now is that the irony is that the assimilation wasn't the thing that saved them. It was the very thing that made them the scapegoat. The fact that they had to disperse all over the world, right? Because their land, Judea, was conquered so many times and they were exiled. They had to disperse all over the world. The idea that assimilation would save them ends up becoming the very thing that makes them a minority in every land and because they became a minority in every land they became the perfect scapegoat to absorb all of that nation's problems, to dispose of so that nation could return to peace and harmony. And you actually see this parallel in other communities that are similarly situated to Jews, like for example Kurds, right? So Kurds, very similar story, landless people, a minority everywhere. For example, in um Iraq under Saddam Hussein, you know Iraq is falling apart under Saddam Hussein.

[00:06:15]The Kurds are scapegoated and disposed of, right? So the chemical attack uh kills 50 to I think 180,000 Kurds, and it all goes back to this complete inability to take individual accountability because of total blindness to the fact that they are subconsciously acting out this scapegoat mechanism. Nobody ever thinks that they're scapegoating. They always think that they've discovered the truth. So we are now seeing the exact same thing play out in the present day. The left and the right, who were so at each other's throats that they were on the cusp of violence, all of a sudden are seemingly coming towards harmony by their shared hatred towards the same object, right?

[00:07:04]Which is Israel.

[00:07:07]Um the right will just come out and say Jews. The left can't say Jews. Um if they've been, you know, professing the values of tolerance this entire time as they have, how can they say, "Yeah, we are actually against one people, one nation, one ethnicity, one race?" They can't, so they say Zionist. The whole point is that these two sides that were at each other's throats are suddenly sitting down at the table, okay, shaking hands, laughing and smiling, saying, "Oh my god, I can't believe that we were against each other all all this time.

[00:07:38]How did we not see that it was one people causing all of these problems and it's so interesting to to know how scapegoat theory works and to see the true conviction in their eyes, right? I just think of the times that I was on Piers Morgan, for example, and I had, you know, Cenk Uygur screaming his lungs out, "Israel!

[00:08:01]Israel! Israel!" because they need, just the left needs, just as much as the right needs, Israel to be the scapegoat.

[00:08:10]And it isn't just the left and the right, it's the east and the west. These two are now coming to this mutual agreement, "Hey, maybe all of these wars will be resolved if we just eliminate Israel, right?" And this is the point where we have to remember that the guilt of the scapegoat is completely irrelevant. It's completely irrelevant because it isn't about whether the scapegoat is guilty or not. It's about the fact that this one object becomes the thing that carries the weight of far more problems than it can actually carry. And that's how you know it's a scapegoat. It's not holding proportional blame. You think about all of the worst regimes in the world right now, the worst atrocities in the world right now, and yet our society is constantly organizing around one state and one people that have become the domestic and global scapegoat. And once this scapegoat has been agreed upon by both sides, that's when the mythology begins.

[00:09:14]That's when all of these arguments are created, academic thesis are written to explain that yes, indeed, this is the source of all the world's problems.

[00:09:24]And inside this mythology, that's where the moral in- inversion starts to take place. I'll give you an example. When the Houthis were striking Israel, right?

[00:09:34]And then eventually Israel strikes back, all of these activists were rushing online to say "Look at Israel, another unprovoked attack against Yemen."

[00:09:45]We all know which way around this is, but the victim and aggressor has been inverted. It's been inverted to support the mythology that the scapegoat really is to blame for all the world's problems, and suddenly everything else is being erased because what becomes more important than anything else is preserving this mythology that demands the scapegoat absorb the weight of every problem.

[00:10:12]It isn't about what's true or false. It isn't about who's guilty or not not guilty. It is about the fact that for order to be restored in this chaos, they have to blame, justify blaming the scapegoat, and then eliminate it. This actually has nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East. It has nothing to do with who was there first, who's wrong, who's right. The way that you can tell when the scapegoat mechanism is in action is that all of these sides that once wildly opposed each other, once mortal enemies, are suddenly converging against the same villain.

[00:10:52]That's scapegoat theory.