The scape goating mechanism.
From a section of Luke’s book captioned: “Sacred Violence”
Girard saw a close connection between mimetic desire and violence. “People everywhere today are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance,” he said in his book The One by Whom Scandal Comes. “These interlocking episodes resemble each other, quite obviously, because they all imitate each other.”2
How do these cycles of vengeance start? Mimetic desire. “More and more, it seems to me,” wrote Girard in the same book, “modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.”3 These small, interpersonal conflicts are a microcosm of the instability that threatens the entire world. And before the world: our families, cities, institutions.
The nineteenth-century Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book called On War, mandatory reading in many military schools. Girard credits him with having recognized the mimetic escalation of most conflicts. Early in On War, von Clausewitz wonders: “What is war?” His answer, which he takes the rest of the book to explain: “War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale.”4
War is the escalation of mimetic rivalry. Where does it end?
Throughout most of human history, there were clear winners and losers in war, recognized as such through formal processes. Conflicts came to an end when one side admitted defeat according to rituals such as the signing of a peace accord. Not so today, when terror cells can spring up from within a community and then grow like a hydra when any of their members are struck. How could there ever be a definitive conclusion to a war in which combatants masquerade as ordinary citizens? Girard thought we had entered a dangerous new phase of history, ripe for what von Clausewitz called “the escalation to extremes”—the desire of each side in a conflict to destroy the other, which reinforces and escalates the desire of the other for violence.
Burgis, Luke. Wanting (pp. 100-101). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The author makes reference to old testament rituals that embodied all this - a literal scape goat. The author also notes this is probably all an evolutionary mechanism for communities (mobs) to use a scape goat enemy in order to preserve their own unity.
Girard was seeing this on the tail of 20th century world wars. It would seem that nothing today would be taking him by surprise either. (He died in 2015). The scriptural take on all this is nothing more than foreshadowing for the Christian.