From “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis
Scapegoats are chosen through a mimetic process of judgment, not a rational one.
Consider the ancient practice of stoning: a group of people throws stones at someone until they die from blunt trauma. It was the official form of capital punishment in ancient Israel – the Torah and Talmud codify it as punishment for certain offenses – but its origins are even older.
The practice of stoning, in its most primitive form, happened spontaneously. It occurred outside of what we now know as “due process.” (Our modern conception of due process – that a person not be stripped of any freedoms or punished prior to a due process of law – originated in written form in England’s Magna Carta, in 1215.)
The phrase “casting the first stone” is known by nearly everyone in the Western world. What is it about the first stone that matters so much?
The phrase comes from a rabbi in first-century Palestine, Jesus of Nazareth, who was present at the strangest stoning in world history – strange because the stoning never happened, yet we know more about it than most other stonings. That we know about this two-thousand-year-old non-stoning at all is remarkable. What makes it so important? It’s a story about mimesis and the scapegoat mechanism.
Jesus came upon a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery and who was about to be stoned by an angry mob. He intervened, saying, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
The words threw everything off balance. The cycle of destructive violence was knocked off its course. One by one, the men standing around the woman began dropping their stones and walking away. First one, then another, then the pace accelerated.
What happened? Why was throwing the first stone so hard? Because the first stone is the only stone without a mimetic model. The thrower of the first stone, often acting in a violent rage, gives the crowd a dangerous model to follow. As we saw earlier in the story of Apollonius and the Ephesians, once the first stone is thrown, the second stone becomes easier to throw. It is always easier to desire something, even, and maybe even especially, violence – when it has been desired by someone else first.
The first stone thrower shows the way. The second reinforces the desire. Now the third person in the crowd is hit with the mimetic force of two mimetic models. They cast the third stone and become the third model. The fourth, fifth, and sixth stones are cast with relative ease compared to the first three. The seventh is effortless. Mimetic contagion has taken hold. The stone throwers become unattached from any form of objective judgment because their desire for a scapegoat has overpowered their desire for truth.