Escape goat

A) What is a scapegoat?

1. This is a saying of mine:

“A society gives birth to its own scapegoats, so that the same society can be retrospectively exempted from its own sins.”

2. This is a couple of definitions:

- In in its religious sense, a scapegoat is an animal which is ritually burdened with the sins of others then driven away. [1]

- In the social-psychological sense, scapegoating is the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment. A scapegoat may be an adult, child, sibling, employee, peer, ethnic, political or religious group, or country. [2]

3. Goggling ‘the most famous scapegoats in history,’ I came up with the following results:

- Sacco and Vanzetti

- Rudolf Hess

- Leon Trotsky

- Marie Antoinette

- Jews

- Catherine O’Leary’s Cow. [3]

4. The previous list is accompanied by the following comment:

“History’s most famous scapegoats prove that people never learn from their mistakes- For centuries, scapegoating has been one of the most effective tools leaders have used to unite people underneath a false banner in order to establish power. What better way to keep people’s minds off the problems at hand than bringing up and blaming an evil race of boogeymen from a distant land? It’s this kind of finger-pointing that has sadly led to many unnecessary wars, assassinations, and genocides.” [4]

B) The scapegoat must be the purest of us all

5. Here we should clarify a misunderstanding. Scapegoats are not always evil persons (like Rudolf Hess for example). In fact a scapegoat had better be a pure person so that he/she can be burdened with as many responsibilities of others as possible. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is an example that comes to mind. Jesus Christ is another example. He sacrificed himself to release the human race from its sins. And as Iphigenia had been a means by which supposedly the winds would blow (so that the Greek ships could leave for Troy), so Jesus has become an instrument by which the religious leaders of Christianity have united the crowds and have imposed their rule.-

6. It is certain that if Jesus returned to the Earth, the first people who he would have condemned would be the same religious leaders.

C) Socrates’s apology

7. But beyond the social, either religious or political, aspect of a scapegoat, there is a deeper symbolical dimension. I will use Socrates and his apology as a philosophical paradigm. The ancient Greek society has been idealized as the prototype of a free, intellectual and democratic society. But Plato’s apology shows otherwise. Socrates was accused, among other things, for atheism (introducing ‘new demons’) and corruption of the youth (teaching them to be revolutionary and sceptic). Thus the Greek society at the time of Socrates had been mostly pious and conservative. 

8. Another of Plato’s dialogues, Critias (Crito), describes the last moments of Socrates, where Socrates explains why he accepts the death penalty, and why he prefers to die:

“Then will they not say (Socrates referring to Crito): “You, Socrates, are breaking the covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any haste or under any compulsion or deception, but having had seventy years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to be unfair…

For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way, what good will you do, either to yourself or to your friends? That your friends will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or will lose their property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if you fly to one of the neighboring cities,… which are well-governed cities, will come to them as an enemy, Socrates, and their government will be against you, and all patriotic citizens will cast an evil eye upon you as a subverter of the laws, and you will confirm in the minds of the judges the justice of their own condemnation of you. For he who is a corrupter of the laws is more than likely to be corrupter of the young and foolish portion of mankind. Will you then flee from well-ordered cities and virtuous men? And is existence worth having on these terms?...

Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up. Think not of life and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice first, that you may be justified before the princes of the world below. For neither will you nor any that belong to you be happier or holier or juster in this life, or happier in another, if you do as Crito bids. Now you depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men. But if you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy; for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us. Listen, then, to us and not to Crito.

This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other. And I know that anything more which you will say will be in vain….” [5]

D) The scapegoat is an archetypal figure

9. It is true that Socrates refused to escape, although his guards had been bribed to let him go. If Socrates had escaped then he would not be a prototype of heroism and morality nowadays. Socrates chose to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others, preferring an honorable death instead of keeping on living the pointless life of a runaway.

10. Someone might argue that Socrates decision was selfish- an aspect which he had already shown in court. If he had apologized to his prosecutors, in all likelihood he would have been excused, at least having avoided the death penalty. But could we say that, like Socrates, Jesus should have begged for his life in order not to have been crucified? Should we give ourselves up to anyone else, betraying our own beliefs and ideas, living consequently the rest of our lives humiliated and deprived of our pride?

11. After Socrates drunk the conium, it is said that his accusers regretted having him killed. But such regret always comes retrospectively. The function of this feeling of remorse is to make us think if what we did was right or false. In the process of thinking we become more moral persons, and this way we gradually transform our society into a more tolerant and open- minded unity.

12. However we will always need a scapegoat to point at, focusing thus all our attention on a certain problem, thus also on the nucleus of beliefs and ideas which hold our society together. If it weren’t for that core, which gathers the basic principles of our identity as a social and political species, our whole society would fall apart. Therefore we may say that the existence of an ‘escape goat’ is an ‘inescapable’ archetype which unites us all.

E) The scapegoat as an invisible enemy

13. Throughout history, the scapegoat- the one whom we may all cast a stone at- has served as a unifying factor for society. It is ‘us’ against ‘them,’ as another political, religious, ethnic, or racial group. Recently terrorism (in the form of the Islamic or Communist ‘threat’) has been used as the scapegoat, justifying the cause and the means of modern superpowers to invade and occupy other nations. If it weren’t for Islam or Communism, another religion or political view would be targeted, so that the same superpowers and people would still satisfy their greed and their own phobias.

14. Because, ultimately, and beyond our wildest ambitions, isn’t it our ‘common enemy’ a ghost which we are all afraid of, an invisible scapegoat which keeps us united?

F) Well, any volunteers?…

15. Who will cast the first stone?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat]

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating]

[3]: [https://www.google.gr/search?q=most+famous+scapegoats+in+history]

[4]: [http://www.viralnova.com/scapegoats/]

[5]: [http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html]

9/18/2018

Image: [http://www.pravmir.com/scapegoating/]