Dimensional Exile into the selfless void
René Girard's mimetic theory shows how societies manage internal tensions through scapegoating mechanisms that project collective anxieties onto marked others. When social tensions reach crisis levels, communities spontaneously unite against arbitrarily chosen victims, temporarily resolving conflicts through what Girard calls "sacred violence." The scapegoat becomes simultaneously blamed and venerated - powerful enough to cause all problems, sacred enough that their sacrifice restores order.
In contemporary systems, this operates through racialized scapegoating (immigrants steal jobs while being lazy), gendered scapegoating (feminism destroys families while women are too weak to matter), and class-based scapegoating (the poor drain resources while having no power). The mechanism's power lies in concealing its arbitrary nature through mythmaking that portrays victims as genuinely guilty.
Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection deepens this analysis - societies maintain coherent identity by expelling aspects of human experience that threaten symbolic order. The "abject" must be radically excluded to preserve social boundaries. This creates rigid categories of acceptable versus disposable beings, contamination fears around contact with marginalized groups, and sacred/profane splits that position some as pure and others as polluted.
This systematic positioning creates what can be understood as dimensional exile - the removal of entire groups from full participation in social reality. Mass incarceration removes whole communities from society, immigration systems create legal/illegal persons with differential humanity, economic exclusion positions the unemployed as burdens rather than victims of extraction. Like the discard phase in narcissistic relationships, these populations are abandoned when no longer useful, yet blamed for their own exile.