/lit/ - Literature

Girard basically solves at a stroke the fundamental similarity in all modernist political experimentation with a single term: the scapegoat. it is so fucking simple and transparently obvious that it is incredible.

the Soviets hate the kulaks. the Nazis hate the Jews. the CCP hates the old order, and being dunked on by the West. the Jacobins hate the aristocrats. Napoleon, interestingly, doesn't really hate anyone - nor, for that matter, did Alexander. loving yourself to the point of self-deification actually tends to produce different results. Trump hates the Fake News and the media hates him. the Spartans hated their own slaves and the slaves hated them. the Athenians hardly even noticed them - and neither would you, if you were alive at that time. Nietzsche hated the Last Men, and Heidegger hated the metaphysics of production. trying to eradicate Hate Facts from civilization, or Hate Thought, is tantamount to trying to think your way down to the ocean floor.

i don't know why nobody has ever made a film about Girard's stuff, maybe it's because Zizek is just too charming on camera. but if you remove scapegoating, you are presented with an incredible puzzle - okay, but...what kind of political structure *would* you come up with? you would come up with a mysterious para-organization that took errant, confused, and lonely bastards and put them on a strict regimen of vegetable farming, prayer, trying to keep the rain out of those copies of Plato and staring into the sky in complete and total mystification as to why any of this had happened at all. find a flaw.