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The Scapegoating Machine

By GEOFF SHULLENBERGER NOVEMBER 30, 2016

Pe t e r Th i e l’s p h i l o s o p h i c a l m e n t o r e x p l a i n s Tr u m p, G aw k e r, a n d s o c i a l
media

 
THE WORD “scapegoat” has been on people’s lips in the wake of the
election and it’s not hard to understand why: the scapegoat provides a
readily available theory for the popularity of Trump’s supposed
populism, which is manifestly directed against innocent victims. As Jeet
Heer noted on Twitter, Trumpism can be understood as a variant of

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“socialism of fools,” his term for certain strains of “populist” anti-
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Semitism, a current which Hitler ultimately rode to power. The

“socialism of fools” gains political mileage by highlighting the
destabilizing effects of capitalism and turning its resulting anxieties
against ethnic and religious others, rather than against the capitalist
system itself.

In fact, those who adopt scapegoating as a political program saw Trump

as one of their own and hailed him as such early on. This doesn’t only
include white supremacists like David Duke or Stephen Bannon. Silicon
Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose support for Trump earned
him a place on the transition team, is a former student of the most
significant theorist of scapegoating, the late literary scholar and
anthropologist of religion René Girard. Girard built an ambitious theory
around the claim that scapegoating pervades social life in an occluded
form and plays a foundational role in religion and politics. For Girard,
the task of modern thought is to reveal and overcome the scapegoat
mechanism–to defuse its immense potency by explaining its operation.
Conversely, Thiel’s political agenda and successful career setting up the
new pillars of our social world bear the unmistakable traces of someone
who believes in the salvationary power of scapegoating as a positive
project.

Thiel, who has repeatedly cited his intellectual debts to his old
professor, funds an institute, Imitatio, dedicated to supporting research
based on Girard’s theories. His 2014 business manifesto, Zero to One,
subtly but unmistakably draws on Girard’s thought, and the seminars on
which the book was based make this influence more explicit. He even
claims to have made his crucial early investment in Facebook based on
Girard’s account of the imitative or “mimetic” basis of desire, which
according to Thiel can explain the runaway success of imitation-driven
social media platforms. Certainly, Thiel’s support for the Trump
campaign is no less an expression of his philosophy; his prescience
seems to have been borne out again. While Girard’s insistence on the
universal explanatory value of the scapegoat mechanism can seem

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media sphere that helped deliver the Trump presidency–a sphere that
Thiel had a hand in creating.

According to Girard, all desire is “the desire of the Other.” That is,
humans desire things not out of any intrinsic or autonomous volition,
but because others desire those things, and we unconsciously mimic
them. By having or seeming to have the object of desire, the Other
makes us desire it, but also makes us resent the Other’s having it, instead
of us. The model becomes an obstacle. This is why, in Girard’s account,
mimetic desire and violence are inextricable. All desire is potentially a
source of conflict, especially when the desire is for something intangible
and perhaps illusory (such as honor, status, respect, and recognition–all
fundamental to social life). The less concrete the object, in fact, the
larger the rival looms, and the greater is the potential for violence.
Violent rivalry is a recurrent theme across so many mythical traditions,
Girard claims, because it is a basic problem human societies have always
had to solve in order to avoid internal conflict.

The solution, according to Girard’s speculative account of cultural

origins, was the scapegoat. The first human communities formed
themselves around acts of collective violence against arbitrary victims;
the reciprocal violence of rivals becomes univocally redirected against a
common victim, and mimetic violence, once aligned in a shared act,
becomes a unifying factor. Thus, the group’s violence is expelled to the
exterior and peace returns. Such acts, in his view, created gods
(memorialized, deified victims), myths (idealized stories of the
community’s salvation), rituals (the structured reenactment of the
murder), and the first hierarchies. Traditional religious cultures, many
of which revolved around sacrificial practices, ritualized the scapegoat
mechanism and thereby preserved it as an instrument of social
stabilization that could channel the disruptive surplus violence of social
life into symbolic acts of violence.

Sacrifice, in this account, is symbolically enriched scapegoating.

Sacrificial rituals, and the systems of taboo and prohibition that

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preventing the antagonisms that regularly threaten human social life.

Much of Girard’s published work is taken up with revealing the veiled
presence of scapegoating in a wide array of religious texts and rituals:
his analyses range from ancient Greek literature and philosophy to the
Jewish and Christian scriptures, and from the Hindu Vedas, to African,
Polynesian, and Native American religious orders. The basic thesis of his
major writings is that religion is, paradoxically, a violent means of
controlling humanity’s violence.

With regard to the modern West, Girard elaborates a revised version of

the secularization thesis associated with Max Weber and Émile
Durkheim. He correlates the rise of techno-scientific rationality and
secular governance with the decline of the sacred as an organizing
principle of culture; but he also detects the residues of sacrificial
religion everywhere, especially in the regular resurgence of violent
scapegoating in the modern world. For Girard, the decline of sacrifice
offers the possibility of transcending the scapegoat mechanism, which
he presents as an unequivocally desirable form of progress. But at the
same time, he claims the demise of the sacred poses dangers: since
religion has been the primary form of regulating violence, its
displacement raises the possibility of an uncontained, apocalyptic
violence, as well as a panicked return to the most violent forms of
religion. All in all, though, Girard’s accounts of the modern world are
less in-depth and more ambiguous than his work on ancient religions,
leaving the significance of his theory for the present scene open to
diverse, even opposed interpretations.

Peter Thiel’s is one such interpretation. Although his book Zero to One

avoids mentioning Girard directly, it draws heavily from his theory of
mimetic desire, and contains important clues about how Thiel
understands the contemporary significance of scapegoating. One of the
central arguments of the book is its critique of the illusory, “horizontal”
mode of progress in contrast with the “vertical” progress of
technological innovation. Thiel writes: “horizontal progress is
globalization–taking things that work somewhere and making them

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mimetic process that spreads through imitation: China, India, and other
developing nations copy innovations originating elsewhere, thereby
producing goods at a fraction of the cost. This is what he calls “one to n”
progress, which drives most growth today, in contrast with the “zero to
one” progress that he insists is what we most need.

Most overtly, Thiel criticizes “one to n” imitative innovation from a

management perspective as a recipe for stagnation. Contrary to the
standard conservative free-market views of most of his right-wing allies,
Thiel regards competition as undesirable, because if many companies–
or countries–are trying to do the same thing, none will truly stand
above the others, and all will have narrower profit margins than if they
were doing something unique. (This is the basis for Thiel’s notorious
advocacy of monopoly.) On a global scale, the result of the “one to n”
model is that industries in many countries compete to produce the
same goods at the lowest cost. It is here that Thiel’s Girardian
background suggests a more serious problem with the “one to n”
progress typical of globalization: the potential for violence built into it.

This assertion may seem strange at first, but consider it in light of recent
events. In the proverbial example, workers in Ohio and Michigan
suddenly find they must compete to sell their labor against workers in
Northern Mexico and Southern China. For globalization apostles like
Thomas Friedman, this situation simply means that workers
everywhere need to pull themselves up more vigorously by their
bootstraps, and that government policy–especially in education–needs
to encourage them to do this. Since by the magic of the invisible hand
this should lead to improvements in productivity everywhere, the
endpoint will be globally shared prosperity.

Brexit and the Trump victory have reminded us that things are not
working out this way. Instead of retraining as software developers, many
workers in the developed world whose standard of living has declined
or stagnated are embracing a politics of ressentiment focused on getting
even with perceived rivals in a struggle for access to the shrinking pie of

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war, and Mexican immigrants, against whom he promised a deportation

force, served parallel functions in his campaign rhetoric because for
some of his voters, they both occupy the structural position of the
mimetic rival who appears to have deprived them of their privileged
status.

Such a politics of ressentiment is more or less what a Girardian account

would predict as the consequence of an expanding field of globalized
competition. Instead of simply striving to improve their lot in the new
economy–that is to say, focusing on pursuing the alleged object of
desire–Trump voters in declining regions instead turn their political
energies against the perceived obstacle: the Other who seems to now
possess what they once possessed. If a politics focused on getting back at
those perceived as rivals is so appealing, Girard’s theory would suggest,
that is because of the ultimately metaphysical basis of desire: the drive
to deprive the rival of the object of desire, in other words, exceeds the
drive to obtain the object itself. The basic situation of globalization,
according to this account, is what Girard called a “mimetic crisis” in
which barren rivalry spreads across societies and threatens to tear them
apart unless the impulse to violence can be harnessed into a shared
collective act. On a larger, more complex scale, it replicates the ancient
crises that, according to Girard’s speculative history, found their
solution in the scapegoat mechanism. For this solution to be reached, he
claims, the dispersed violence between rivals must be transcended in
the collective channeling of violence against sanctioned scapegoats.

As Thiel reveals in one of the seminars that became the basis of Zero to
One, he seems to understand the substitution of the scapegoat for the
rival as the original “zero to one” moment of human progress. By
putting a brake on the cyclical repetition of mimetic violence that
emerges out of “one to n” logic, the sacrifice of a surrogate victim
allowed institutions to stabilize and establish shared symbolic orders,
most fundamentally religion, but ultimately monarchy and other forms
of hierarchy. Intriguingly for Thiel’s purposes, Girard once stated that
“the goal of religious thinking is the same as that of technological

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vocabulary too, a “technology” because it transcends the violence of

mimetic competition and creates a regime for managing it. All this
suggests that for Thiel, developers of “technology” need to accomplish
something comparable to what religions did in the primordial era of
humanity: the creation of superstructures that blunt the tendencies
toward dissolution currently threatening global society.

The role Thiel sees for scapegoating in the contemporary world order is
apparent in his infamous vendetta against Gawker, which seems to have
become his own rival and obstacle for a time. This enmity should not
blind us to a certain similarity, since above all else, Gawker styled itself
as an organ of scapegoating. Indeed, in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis, journalist Hamilton Nolan semi-ironically declared: “Nobody
wants to hear about intricate economic factors that combined in
unforeseen ways to predicate an economic collapse. We want
scapegoats!” (He went on to list ten of them.) Gawker’s willingness to
single out individuals as targets of public ire, and to galvanize online
mobs against them, was a source of its appeal and at the same time what
made it so embattled.

Others have noted the similarities between Thiel and his nemesis Nick
Denton–itself an interesting case of Girardian mimetic rivalry–but they
have generally missed Thiel and Denton’s shared understanding of the
immense political power of scapegoating, even if they drew somewhat
contrary conclusions from it. “The Founder’s Paradox,” the most overtly
Girardian chapter of Zero to One, suggests an obvious reason for his
antipathy to Gawker’s version of scapegoating:

The famous and infamous have always served as vessels

for public sentiment: they’re praised amid prosperity
and blamed for misfortune… [It is] beneficial for the
society to place the entire blame on a single person,
someone everybody could agree on: a scapegoat. Who
makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats
are extreme and contradictory figures.

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“founders” (like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and himself) to mythical

“founders” like Romulus and Oedipus, who in Girard’s telling are quasi-
deified victims of collective violence. He goes on: “Before execution,
scapegoats were often worshipped like deities… These are the roots of
monarchy: every king was a living god, and every god a murdered king.
Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to
delay his own execution.” The passage resonates eerily with its author’s
monarchist sympathies. An uneasy question lurks beneath the whole
discussion: how can successful entrepreneurs like Thiel retain the
mystique of the “founder” while avoiding becoming its victims?

In one of his seminars, Thiel made the political stakes of his concern
with scapegoating more explicit, making reference to Occupy Wall
Street: “The 99% vs. the 1% is the modern articulation of this classic
scapegoating mechanism. It is all minus one versus the one.” The central
task of controlling what Girard calls the “victimage mechanism,” for
“founders” like him, is to deflect collective violence from themselves.
Gawker, on the other hand, seemed to specialize in identifying targets
for that violence, or at least for collective online vituperation–and those
targets often belonged to the capitalist “founder” class, although many
debated whether Gawker at times abandoned its proclaimed
commitment to “punching up.” Crushing Gawker was not simply an
attack on a particular organ of scapegoating that had offended Thiel, but
an attempt to disarm a certain politicization of scapegoating in a digital
world given over to it.

Upon Gawker’s demise, former editor Max Read suggested that the
publication’s deepest problem was less Thiel’s lawsuit than the fact that
various social media platforms had “out-Gawkered Gawker,” so that the
latter was “no longer the bottom-feeder of the media ecosystem”–that
is, no longer at the cutting edge of online scapegoating, thanks to “one
to n” mimesis. Thiel, as the first outside investor in Facebook, played a
role in the emergence of competitors and has cited social media
platforms repeatedly as a crucial recent instance of “zero to one”
innovation. And while he described Gawker as an organ of “bullying”

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social and political potential: “companies like Facebook create… new

ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By
starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new
world.”

From a Girardian standpoint, though, bullying and “form[ing]

communities” are connected, since scapegoating is the cement of group
identities. This is what it means for social media to “out-Gawker”
Gawker. There is a direct line between a proliferation of mimetic
behavior and the spread of contagious violence that seeks out and
persecutes arbitrary victims–a violence that can also, precisely, “form
communities.” To create machines that facilitate mimetic behavior,
then, is to create scapegoating machines. And that, Read’s account
implies, is what we’ve ended up with. Social media intensify the global
regime of universalized competition and feed its tendency toward
rivalry and ressentiment; at the same time, they create the space for new
modes of scapegoating to emerge.

Social media platforms, a Girardian analysis suggests, are machines for

producing desire. Their equalizing structure–what is most widely
celebrated about them–converts all users into each other’s potential
models, doubles, and rivals, locked in a perpetual game of competition
for the intangible objects of desire of the attention economy. By
embedding users in a standardized format, social media renders all
individuals instantly comparable in simple, quantitative terms. Enabling
instantaneous comparison creates the conditions for a universal
proliferation of horizontal rivalry. In this situation of universalized
mimetic antagonism, conditions are ripe for scapegoating. Tensions
may be redirected onto (innocent) victims in episodes of bullying that
form communities enabled by tools of mimesis: sharing, retweeting,
hashtags, and so on.

The companies that operate social media platforms have been rightly
criticized for their failure to protect users from mob abuse and from the
more pervasive daily harassment to which women in particular are

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same passions that drive online abuse and scapegoating are also what
give users a feeling of community on social media, its operators will be
hard-pressed to rein them in, even if they wish to. But Thiel’s various
activities suggest that the existence of an arena of turbo-charged
scapegoating may also serve larger political ends for him and his allies.

Thiel’s support for Trump’s populist authoritarianism, which has led

some to demand his removal from Facebook’s board, can be parsed in
exactly these terms. On one hand, this political stance makes little
immediate sense business-wise, and does not seem ideologically
consistent with his libertarianism. On the other hand, support of
Trump’s political scapegoating follows neatly from Thiel’s strategic
appropriations of Girard. At its most basic level, rightist scapegoating
represents the opposite vector from revolutionary violence directed
toward the powerful–what Thiel describes as the violence of the 99%
versus his violence of the 1%. Like the social media platforms on which it
has thrived, Trumpism channels violence mainly toward victims it
wishes to marginalize.

But we should recall that there is another dimension to the scapegoat

mechanism, also addressed by Thiel in “The Founder’s Paradox,” which
is a counterintuitive connection between the scapegoat and the ultimate
figures of authority: kings and gods. In Girard’s speculative history, this
is because scapegoats were originally persecuted outsiders, but they also
assumed divine status by virtue of their ability to polarize violence and
instill social unity. It stands to reason, then, that if the politics of
scapegoating is first and foremost based on the persecution of arbitrary
victims, the figures it empowers will nevertheless partake in some of the
scapegoat’s qualities–specifically, a capacity to serve as an object of
collective opprobrium and vituperation as well as the standard bearer of
violent power.

As it happens, two ideologically opposed observers have interpreted

Trump himself in exactly these terms. Shortly after the election, the
anthropologist David Graeber asked on Twitter: “could Trump be a sort

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but thus taking on the sins of his people…” He added: “if so it can’t end
well for him. The ‘exploits’ or transgressions that make him divine at
first make him a sacrificial victim in waiting.” But Graeber had been
preceded in this insight by conservative commentator David Gornoski:
“Trump even viscerally looks the part of the old scapegoat kings who
would be ceremonially paraded before being sacrificed.” The Reddit
users who dubbed Trump “God Emperor” seem to have had a similar
intuition. While various observers detect this symbolic efficacy in
Trumpism, Girard’s analysis also makes clear the instability of its
polarizing force.

Scapegoating is, for Thiel as for Girard, the ultimate “zero to one”
innovation in that it originates a mechanism for the containment of
destabilizing mimetic violence. For Girard, the difficult task facing the
contemporary world is to transcend the scapegoating that has defined
most human societies and create a non-violent basis for the social order.
His former student, on the other hand, seems to view scapegoating far
more pragmatically, as a still-potent source of power and danger that
must be managed carefully by anyone who hopes to control the
technologies that increasingly mediate our social life. It appears that the
ways we use social media play uncomfortably into his hands, and that
the regime of hyper-mimetic online existence he helped forge has
played a direct role in the elevation of the new “God Emperor,” whose
followers, in turn, have initiated a terrifying wave of scapegoating. But
in revealing himself and the extent of his power, Thiel may have also
triggered a cycle of mimetic rivalry that can’t stop until it claims its first
founder as a victim.

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Let Them Hillbilly Standard Trump 2.0

Drink Blood Ethnograph Gawker By A.J. BAUER

By A.M. GITTLITZ y English The extreme

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