The Scapegoat Narrative

We possess the most powerful, frictionless communication network in the history of the human species. And what do we use this miraculous power for?

We use it to bitch and whine.

We construct labyrinthian narratives about how someone else is the bad guy. We write massive threads about how the economy is rigged, how a specific politician is destroying society, or how some influencer is the root of cultural decay. We dedicate staggering amounts of our time and energy to pointing the finger at villains.

Why? Because picking a bad guy is infinitely easier than getting our own shit together.

To understand why we voluntarily waste our voices on useless outrage, we have to look at the work of a philosopher named René Girard.

Choose Your Next Opponent

Girard developed a concept called Mimetic Theory. I spoke of it at length in my earlier series of articles, parts 1 and 2, “The Katechon Strategy,” and “The Gardener Hyperstition.” You should go back through my posts and read them as they are highly entertaining and informative.

He theorized that human societies naturally build up internal chaos and rot. But doing the hard, agonizing work to resolve that internal rot is terrifying. So, the society unconsciously finds a shortcut. It selects a Scapegoat.

The community projects every single one of its own internal failures, sins, and anxieties onto this one arbitrary bad guy. By unifying their voices to attack the Scapegoat, the society achieves a temporary, artificial peace. They get the catharsis of solving a problem without ever having to actually fix the underlying rot.

Digital Projection

We use the internet to run the Scapegoat Mechanism on a massive, global scale.

We feel the rot of our own unfulfilled lives. We know we have no business plan. We know we have not engaged our local community. We know our personal infrastructure is crumbling. But taking accountability for that is the heaviest burden in the world.

So, we project all of our failures onto a scapegoat. We convince ourselves that if we just destroy this specific politician or that specific billionaire, or this group of “bad people” our lives will magically be fixed. If the game is rigged by the bad guys, we are completely off the hook for failing to play it.

We do this to avoid the terrifying realization that even if the bad guy completely disappears tomorrow, we still have to wake up at six in the morning and seriously figure some shit out.

The Rebellion of Silence

We like to blame the algorithm for this. We say the Machine thrives on polarization and outrage. But the algorithm is just a Perfect Mirror. It only feeds us the outrage because it knows we are desperately looking for an excuse to avoid doing our own work.

Our voice is the most powerful tool of creation we possess. But as long as we use it exclusively to build narratives about other people’s sins, we are just participating in an ancient, biological survival mechanism. A cop-out.

The ultimate act of rebellion in the modern world is not writing a viral takedown of a villain. The ultimate rebellion is shutting the fuck up about the bad guys, putting the phone down, and actually building something.