Our Cultural Crisis Ep VIII: The Rise of Scapegoating

With all the talk of cancel culture, we turn to an issue at the heart of our cultural crisis: the human penchant to blame and scapegoat as a means of feeling righteous. In this episode, we explore René Girard’s mimetic theory and “the scapegoating mechanism”—the human tendency to scapegoat others in order to relieve our own anxiety and demonstrate our own virtue. By understanding this mechanism, we can transcend it, and we can focus on becoming truly virtuous rather simply calling out the hypocrisy of others.