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Comment by foobar_ | Hacker News Reader

Girard is the greatest philosopher since Nietzsche. His analysis on mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism is deeply disturbing and convincing. The #metoo movement is full of scapegoats.

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It's very useful to read Girard, not least to steel yourself against the influences of directly Girard-inspired social networks. But I'm increasingly seeing this idea that any time someone powerful or influential is held accountable for something they're being made a Girardian scapegoat, and it's ridiculous. It's becoming a myth people tell themselves when they don't want to take ownership of the ways they've messed up. "Oh I haven't really done anything wrong, I'm just being made a scapegoat to resolve the mimetic violence of an unthinking mob. Really, I'm the victim here."

The point is to see innocence in the scapegoat. They are the victim in some sense of the mad justice of the mobs. Mexicans are scapegoats. Muslims are scapegoats. Rich jews are scapegoats.

Let's take the "grabbing by the pussy" Trump. Why is that shocking ? Do you think Justin Bieber can't grab the pussy of one of his fan girls ?

If you don't see innocence in the scapegoat, we go back to our old ways of literally crucifying people. Once you see the innocence you can think of alternative ways of dealing with the problem, instead of killing and shunning people.

This. It's a simple yet eloquent description about human culture since the foundation of the world. Everyone who reads the Bible should read about scapegoats and mimetic theory.

The #metoo movement was largely borne out on social media, Twitter specifically. Twitter has really started to worry me for the reason you said. It seems like it is really effective at forming angry mobs. I remember reading an interview that Girard did somewhere where he talked about social media's influence and he said we should be working to prevent mobs, not form them.

Social media has sadly exasperated the effects. Everyone is a target! Every time I see a person being lynched, I can't help but see the mechanism in action. This affects both the sexes, I would say Katie Bouman is the most recent scapegoat.

The #MeToo movement became visible to many of us (particularly us pink-skinned American men) on Twitter. Was it born on social media? I guess not so much. It was born, I guess, in conversations between people who were the targets of Gamergate and other much older systems of oppression.

These oppression schemes have been around for ages upon ages. Witness the gospel accounts of the crowd chanting "Crucify him, crucify him" about a particular outsider troublemaker a couple of millenia ago.

Social media amplified the movement. And social media called the oppression to the carpet. Is #metoo a violent mob scene? Is it the same dealio as the stuff on Facebook about attacking the Rohinga in Myanmar/Burma? Or the stuff on radio about the Hutu-Tutsi violence in Rwanda? Those are hard questions to answer. I personally don't know.

I suppose it's up to us all to stop short of exacting revenge, while insisting on justice. That's probably the hardest task ever to confront humanity. We gotta try.

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