Against scapegoating

Especially murdering people

Preroll

First, some thoughts on the rarity of thoughtful engagement, inspired by the low quality of pushback against Richard Hanania’s critiques of the MAGA right.

That Hanania's a provocateur with a taste for going against the grain isn't relevant. What's most interesting now about his 'stack is the reaction of his readers to articles like Two Cheers for the Democratic Establishment?

The first impulse of ideological team sport participants is to attack that a case is made, not what the case is.

I see what Hanania is doing. He already knows the failure modes of the leftish and that's less interesting to him than the failure modes of those with Trump Sycophancy Syndrome.

On the homeopathically-contrasting platform of Rarely Certain, being from the leftish, the failure modes of that camp are more interesting than banging on at the same targets I spent a lifetime jeering at.

These days I ignore anyone who cannot (or will not) steelman a position with which they disagree. Steelmanning isn't just useful cognitive practice for improving 'intellectual' rigour. If someone can't (or won't) articulate the most persuasive version of the case they wish to dismiss, all that results is a self-serving illusion of superiority.

The people in Hanania's comments and elsewhere who constantly make the argument that if the right is bad, the left is worse without engaging with their own side's manifest failings probably imagine that they're making a point when really they're defending against uncertainty, threat and cognitive dissonance.

This delusion of engagement says more about them and their identities than the issues at hand.

You can still engage without adopting the perspective that you reject, but this seems to happen rarely. People complaining that Hanania only ever attacks the right these days seem hellbent on not updating their wetware. They think they're reasoning, when really they're retreating and (I'd intuit) buttressing their identity.

As J.S. Mill said:

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”

What makes Hanania interesting (if often annoying, in his delight at getting people riled up) is that he is critiquing his own historic camp. You know that he could steelman all their positions, having once held them himself. This is why I mostly discuss the failure modes of leftishism and its fetishes for credentialism, the moral vanity of expertise, stifling etiquettes, normative language patterns and the overall project's essential soullessness.

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On killing scapegoats

Is Elias Rodriguez a psychopath? One presumes that he's agitated by death and suffering in Gaza. But did he think that murdering Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky would change the calculus in some way?

What does “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza” mean?

Written down, that question looks stupid because we don't tend to think about these things much. Perhaps we already subconsciously understand violence and scapegoating as a feature, rather than a bug, wherever people are organised into common belief groups. Maybe it’s just a hidden prior. That which is obvious to everyone doesn't seem to need explanation.

We might find comfort in the notion that acts like this are aberrations; manifestations of particularly intemperate personalities, perhaps even diagnosable as personality disorder.

Safe to say I'd rather that Rodriquez were diagnosed with something from the DSM. You gun two people down, reload your weapon and then finish them off while one is crawling away. There will always be psychopaths, is a good cope.

We saw the same kind of situation when Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thompson.

"it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming"

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All of this steers me back to René Girard's theories of mimetic desire, violence and scapegoating. And the obvious absence of redemptive power in political ideologies, which has been the raison d'être of Rarely Certain for nearly 5 years.

Lately I've been reading about the French Revolution and wondering how an advanced modern state like the one I'm in can seriously celebrate Bastille Day and the wave of murder that followed.

Let’s march, let’s march

That their impure blood

Should water our fields

It might seem ironic that The Marseillaise - an ode to wanton killing and gore - was written by a monarchist but adopted by revolutionaries, but maybe it isn't.

René Girard's suggestion was that any ideological system must contain a scapegoat mechanism as a channel for violence.

This isn't confined to extreme or revolutionary ideologies. It includes the sacralising of 'liberal democracy' as much as the combative identity or 'struggle' politics of race or nation, fundamentalist progressivism, MAGA 'Trumpism' or any other idea which promises salvation or collective transformation.