I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

This phenomenon is so common, so well known to us, and so contrary to our concept of ourselves, thus so humiliating, that we prefer to remove it from consciousness and act as if it did not exist. But all the while we know it does exist. This indifference to the threat of runaway conflict is a luxury that small ancient societies could not afford.

Both political correctness and victimism stem from an authentic reality from the standpoint of the Christian faith. That reality is God's revelation through Jesus Christ of the victim mechanism and the way into God's new community of love and nonviolence. But Satan has a tremendous ability to adapt to what God does and to imitate God, and so Satan—

Once we apprehend the biblical criticism of mimetic contagion and its results, we can understand the biblical profundity of the talmudic principle that Emmanuel Lévinas often cites: “If everyone is in agreement to condemn someone accused, release him for he must be innocent.” Unanimity in human groups is rarely a vehicle of truth; more often it is

The best way of preventing violence does not consist in forbidding objects, or even rivalistic desire, as the tenth commandment does, but in offering to people the model that will protect them from mimetic rivalries rather than involving them in these rivalries.

Collective murder, or the single victim mechanism, has everything to do with the origin of the texts that do not represent it and cannot represent it precisely because they are based on it, because the victim mechanism is their generating principle. These texts are the myths.

The reversal of the relation of innocence and guilt between victims and executioners is the keystone of biblical inspiration.

Instead of criticizing ourselves, we use our knowledge in bad faith, turning it against others. Indeed, we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for hunters of scapegoats. Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.

Scapegoating phenomena cannot survive in many instances except by becoming more subtle, by resorting to more and more complex casuistry in order to elude the self-criticism that follows scapegoaters like their shadow.

THUS THE EXPRESSION “scapegoat” designates (1) the victim of the ritual described in Leviticus, (2) all the victims of similar rituals that exist in archaic societies and that are called rituals of expulsion, and finally (3) all the phenomena of nonritualized collective transference that we observe or believe we observe around us.