Scapegoating

SCAPEGOATING names the act through which a community discharges the rivalry the polarity play has generated onto a single creature, producing the relief that registers as sacred. The everyday instances — the workplace "bad apple," the family's designated problem, the friend group's cast-out — are not separate phenomena from the founding murder Girard names. They are the same mechanism running at smaller scale. The mechanism's full architecture, its installation as permanent civilizational infrastructure, and the constitutional claim against it: see THE CENTRAL SACRAMENT.