From “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis
Consider how ingrained sacrificial thinking is in our psyche. If only we could destroy that other political party, that other company, those terrorists, that troublemaker, that fast-food joint next door that has caused me to gain ten pounds, everything would be better. The sacrifice always seems right and proper. Our violence is good violence; the violence of the other side is always bad.
For many years, according to Girard, sacrificial rituals were so effective that they hindered scientific progress. “We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches,” Girard said in a 2011 BC interview with David Cayley. “We used to blame droughts on witches: once we stopped blaming witches, we looked for scientific explanations for drought.”
Humanity still tends to revert to a primitive, sacrificial mindset that characterized our ancestors and kept them stuck in cycles of violence. From the perspective of the crowd, the scapegoat mechanism is entirely rational. So when the scapegoats become the sacred center around which a culture turns – when myth and superstition reemerge as dominant forces in a culture – actual rationality takes a back seat.