The scapegoat mechanism

When tension in a group grows with nowhere to go, it tends to find an outlet: someone. Not just anyone — preferably a person already in a fragile position, whose accusation can be repeated by everyone at the same time at no cost. When the accusation converges, the group experiences real relief. And it is precisely that relief that makes the accusation seem true.

René Girard called this the victimary mechanism. His central thesis is that human violence is mimetic: we desire what others desire and accuse whom others accuse. That is why accusation spreads by imitation, not by persuasion. Nobody needs to examine the evidence — it is enough to see that everyone else has already made up their minds.

What changes in social networks is not the mechanism; it is the speed, the scale, and the fact that, for the first time, it leaves a measurable trace.

The four stereotypes of persecution

In The Scapegoat, Girard observes that whenever the mechanism operates, four things appear together — he calls them the stereotypes of persecution. In the episodes we document, all four are there, and almost always in this order.

1 · The crisis that was already there

The tension comes before the victim, and it is about something else. Some issue already divided the group without finding resolution. The victim does not cause the crisis: the victim is what the crisis finds.

When a presenter defended on air the existence of a Nazi party, the debate over whether the movement then in power was or was not a form of Nazism was already running. When a writer made ironic remarks about the assassination of a political commentator, the death had already divided those who celebrated it from those who mourned it. When a reality-show contestant was seen using the debate on racism against another contestant, that debate was at its height. In each case, the tension was looking for a face.

This prior context is established by press coverage and by the public history of the discussion — not by our network data. The collection followed the person or the episode: in most cases it begins near the trigger and, when it reaches days or weeks earlier, it records the conversation around the person, not the dispute that preceded it.

2 · The accusation that admits no defence

Accusations against scapegoats are remarkably repetitive. Girard shows that, across the centuries, they are almost always the same: crimes that attack what founds the order — parricide, incest, poisoning, sacrilege. Not because the victims committed them, but because these accusations have a specific property: they make defence impossible. Whoever defends the accused becomes suspect of the same thing.

Today, the accusations with this property are, above all, paedophilia, Nazism and racism. And there is an important temporal detail in the reading of the cases, supported by press coverage: the type-accusation usually gains strength shortly before the peak, not at the start. It is not what sets the mobilisation in motion — it is what converts it into unanimity. In the data, what appears first is the act — what was said or done, named most in the first hours of the episode (Analysis, in Portuguese); the passage from the act to the type-accusation is not measured directly. The moment the conversation goes from “he said something stupid” to “he is a Nazi” is the moment dissent stops being cheap.

3 · Who can be a victim

Girard insists that the victim is not selected by extreme difference but by difference within the system: whoever does not fit well into the available categories. Inside enough to matter, outside enough to be disposable — without a group that recognises them as its own and shows up to defend them. In our cases this appears in two ways. Sometimes as a discreet prior isolation, which the crisis turns into sudden isolation. And, in two cases where the collection reaches the preceding days or weeks, as the opposite: the person was already the centre of another controversy, exposed, and the crisis found in them a face that was already in view.

There is a second, more precise criterion: the target’s act crystallises in a concrete case the dispute that was in the abstract. Nazism was being discussed, and he defended a Nazi party. Whether celebrating an adversary’s death was acceptable was being discussed, and he made ironic remarks about a death. Racism was being discussed, and she was seen using anti-racism as a weapon against another person. The target is whoever gives body to what was being discussed — and that is why they serve so well.

4 · The convergence

It is the visible part, and the only one that appears whole in the case videos: attention concentrates, interactions converge on a single account, the group’s internal divisions dissolve and, when the mechanism completes, the person at the centre tends to be talked about more than talked to. In Girard’s reading, as long as someone still talks to them — and above all when those who talk to them defend them — the mechanism does not complete; in the cases of this collection, the sanction sometimes came while the person was still being addressed (Analysis, in Portuguese).

It is also the part the group cannot see while doing it. Girard calls this misrecognition: the participants in a collective persecution never see themselves as persecutors — they see themselves as those who finally reacted.

The dilemma of the one at the centre

Whoever is at the centre of the convergence faces a choice in which no way out is good. It is what we call the scapegoat’s dilemma.

If they accept the accusation, they also accept what came with it. By then the accusation is no longer the first day’s: it has grown into the type-accusation, and the apology comes to count as a confession of the whole of it.

If they refuse, the refusal is read as proof. For the group, whoever defends themselves confirms that the danger was real. Each reply becomes a new trigger, and the persecution drags on.

Both ways out are costly, and the outcome does not depend only on the person at the centre. In the cases of this collection, not even an early and organised defence prevented the sanction. What changes when someone talks to the person, and not only about them, is something else: the person remains someone one talks to.

Describing the dilemma is not recommending either way out. It is showing that the feeling that everything one does makes things worse is not a mistake of the person at the centre: it is the shape of the trap.

And afterwards: the victim becomes a symbol

Once the episode is over, the person does not go back to being a person. They become the illustration of a rule: this is not done. The name comes to work as a warning, sometimes as a common noun. In the data, the conversation shifts from the person to the norm — in the Nazi-party case, from what the presenter said to the responsibility of the platforms.

It is what Girard describes as the double transference: the victim, expelled as the cause of disorder, returns as the foundation of the new order. And it is what explains something that those who go through it usually find incomprehensible — why apologising closes nothing. By then it is no longer about you: it is about the rule being established with your name.

Vocabulary

Why this matters if you are going through it

Because it changes what the experience means. The feeling that “everyone, suddenly, at the same time” concluded something about you is neither paranoia nor proof: it is the shape the mechanism has. Convergence is a network effect, not a verdict.

Four things follow from this — and none of them depends on whether you were right or wrong:

• The crisis was not yours. It already existed, about another subject, and was looking for a face.
• You were not chosen for being worse. You were chosen for being badly positioned, and for having given concrete form to a discussion that was already in the air.
• You stopped being a person and became a rule. That is why the apology does not close anything: it is no longer about you.
• There was no right answer. Apologising can be read as confession; defending yourself, as proof. The perfect reply you think you failed to give did not exist.

None of this makes the pain go away, and none of it decides whether you were wrong — that question is separate, and remains yours. But it removes from the experience its cruellest interpretation, which is that so many people could not all be wrong at the same time.

To go to the source: René Girard (Wikipedia) · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Colloquium on Violence & Religion. Recommended starting point: The Scapegoat, by René Girard (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).