Dear President Obama,

This is the second part of my open letter to you. We were, I believe, discussing Afghanistan and Pakistan and moving into our key topic: Scapegoating.

Scapegoating is not rocket science. It is older than the wheel. The academic literature on the topic overflows with wisdom. Yet even if it did not, it doesn’t matter because, strangely, people seem to know intuitively – even if they don’t have the words — just exactly what it is.

Yet it might be useful, with an appropriate dash of gratitude, to tap into a few great minds that know infinitely more than I do to conjure up some words that might light for us a path out of this mess. We have reached a critical point in human existence where the words for such a dug-in and ancient human thing might well come in handy.
We don’t normally consider the human race as being guided, like countless other species on the earth, by instinct.

If we did consider it, however, our species proclivity for scapegoating, might be one of those instincts.

Scapegoating is a self-defense mechanism for – ostensibly — increasing our chances for survival. It largely operates below the radar of our normal awareness. And apparently it always has.

It’s longevity and ubiquity seems to indicate the powerful presence of some ingrained human characteristics we all share, some “least common denominators” at play, regardless of person, place, culture, religion, philosophy or historical context.

Let’s look at two of them — both widely thought out, researched and documented — courtesy of such minds as Soren Kierkegaard, Ernest Becker, René Girard, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and nearly every spiritual prophet who has ever graced the earth.

Tonight, let’s explore the first LCD: a powerful group phenomenon called mimesis. And on Monday night we’ll wrap up our discussion looking at humankind’s greatest paradox, but we’ll save that term for later.

In biology and in anthropology, mimesis is a tendency for an animal to mimic those of the same species near by. It produces “sameness” in a group, including the sameness of desire, and the resulting competitive tensions that arise out of everybody wanting the same thing. Many animal species experience mimesis, but the human capacity for mimicry is off the charts. As a survival mechanism, like scapegoating, mimesis can also pose insidious problems. And today the consequences of human mimesis in our large scale actions, is pointing the way to catastrophe.

How so and why?

In any group or society, mimesis is the mostly unnoticed and preceding condition that often morphs into scapegoating. As “sameness” intensifies, so do the competitive tensions related to fulfilling the mimetic desires of the members. Naturally, as this tension builds, so does the need to relieve the tension. The relief is found through internal violence.

This sets up an odd but unavoidable condition in any mimetic group: as the group becomes more undifferentiated (more the same), the more violent it becomes.

Here, according to Rene Girard, a leading scholar of mimetics, is how the group is saved from self-annihilation.

Human groups, very early on, learned to use sacrifice “to replace the potentially multiple victims inside the group with a unique candidate: the scapegoat.”

The rest is easy. Sacrifice the scapegoat. Save the group.

“The ‘scapegoat’ is selected for sacrifice to purge the group of its internal violence. Therefore, and this is key, scapegoats are inevitably selected from a source as remote as possible from the selecting group.

“The act of the sacrifice permits a rupture in the sequence of violent action and thereby grants
a form of salvation to the group by occasioning a release from self-inflicted violent action with an alternate but equally fulfilling form of violence.

“The inherent and mimetic necessity for violence is transferred to an object away from the group. The need for violence is no longer inter-acted, yet the violence is still expressed. Sacrifice thus constitutes a cathartic function for the group.”

Let’s go over it again, but fill in some new information this time.

“During the mimetic crisis, the convergence of desires leads to reciprocal hatred, meanwhile, the
object of desire becomes veiled. And this more intensified undifferentiated situation – mutual hatred –tends to radicalize the conflict.

“When the mimetic crisis peaks, and the lack of differentiation inside the community becomes absolute, the self-preservation instinct is activated. A scapegoat is selected and eliminated. And the release of tension in the group leads to reconciliation.

“Again, in the animal world, the mimetic conflict already exists, but animals have an instinctive inhibition that prevents intra-group slaughter merely in response to mimetic rivalries. Ethologists emphasize the domination-pattern effect: animals will stop fighting as soon as dominance is established.

“According to Girard, man is at once the most mimetic animal, and the less able to cope with his own violence.

“Hence, for group survival human beings elaborate what becomes a ubiquitous cultural response: the scapegoating mechanism.

Since dangerous mimetic crises never fail to re-appear, the community adopts and repeats a reliable and low energy method for selecting the necessary scapegoat — the accusatory gesture.

The experience of the act of scapegoating unites the group and recovers for it what it longs for: a naïve and magical peace. Scapegoating is therefore a lived and sacred experience. Groups re-iterate these truly self protecting ritual sacrifices, analogous to the original. And in this way arise cultural and religious patterns to maintain the survival of the group.

Spotting the scapegoating motives and methods of an unfamiliar group is not so difficult. What is difficult, sometimes impossible, is the coming to awareness and recognition of the scapegoating in one’s own group.

Mimetic intensities in the modern world shift from balanced states to unbalanced states, and back again.

Fundamentalism and conservatism encourage the mimetic, the imitation, the undifferentiated, the status quo. These “unchanging”, mimetic orientations are common in all cultures simply because they create feelings of safety for a lot of people. And that’s a good thing. But as their mimesis intensifies, they create the violence in the world.

From time to time a leader or a nation or an average citizen become self-aware of these factors at play in their respective groups, and attemps are made in various ways to reverse their group’s mimetic and violent fates. Such basic awareness is a powerful internal switch for interrupting the scapegoating cycle, and elevating the group to a new level of peace.

Take Japan for example. Who would deny the existing power of its undifferentiated culture, with the world’s highest mimetic energy – meaning its capacity for exporting violence through scapegoating – to avoid massive internal violence — is higher in Japan than in any other culture.

History illustrates Japan’s warrior culture. Internally and externally. Many Asian people today, in Japan’s neighboring countries, can still testify to the savagery of Japanese scapegoating during and before WW2.

Yet how many countries today have carved into their constitutions the very illegality of war? The same. Japan. Yes, Japan was burnt and broken when it made war unconstitutional, but records show it was in fact their own initiative.

It took unthinkable courage for this intensely mimetic, two-thousand-year-old, warrior nation – even as they worked and slept in the ashes of their loved ones – to single themselves out as a pacifist state.

But they did it. And as you know, this clause is still in their constitution. For over 60 years, in spite of their neighboring country’s hatred for them, Japan has not sacrificed a scapegoat, nor spent its hostilities internally on itself.

Indeed, Japan has continued to find, in the meantime, the most creative and productive ways the world has ever seen for releasing their mimesis. Japan today still wins the prize as the most mimetic culture on earth. But they’ve adapted. They’ve learned how to deal with it.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s set aside and forget about Japan’s constitutional amendment. Japan continues today as a needed and healing lesson for the rest of the world, a vision for what is possible, an undeniable and dramatic proof of concept.

The earth is now a tiny place for human beings. It more resembles a community than it does a arguing mish-mash of politically sovereign nations. Our shrinking earth underscores my motive for addressing you from a Pakistani forum: Pakistan is not different. The earth itself is becoming one mimetic entity.

To avoid species annihilation, we need the most powerful among us to stand up and say so.

That, Mr. President, would be you.

Politics might be the art of avoiding being scapegoated, while increasing one’s power to single others out for sacrifice, but great political leaders can do much more.

American mimetics has long been intensifying. And yes, that is a good thing. There have been accruing benefits for all. You might not be in office otherwise. Yet our potential today for scapegoating — indeed our long record of scapegoating for the past 60 years — is scary, even more so considering the relative unawareness (and denial) of our population for this gathering national mimetic tension and our increasing addiction for exporting it.

It’s time for the US to stop the cycle. At present, this does not appear do-able. Why? You do have many differentiated strengths, but in the area of foreign policy and peace, you remain undifferentiated, hence your potential for exporting American violence, for singling out scapegoats as we’re discussing now, is significant.

Yet we still must, and for our own sake, for our own survival, stop this decades-long cycle of ours, and in order to begin the process, (and this is difficult for me to say) our leader must become willing to single himself out – to clearly differentiate himself as a peacemaker.

You know what, Mr. President? In millions of people’s minds, even sometimes in my own, you are already a hero.

So why risk your standing? And why risk the accruing benefits your standing may have for millions of people and for decades more?

Only you can think that question through.

As you do, you’ll ask yourself: How in the world can I do this? Where would I possibly start?

Well, first it might be a good idea to allow yourself the quiet realization that this is not an impossible task. And with that in mind and keeping things simple, let’s take something you said yesterday as a good place to start this differentiated healing process.

“I remind everybody, the United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan. Nearly 3,000 of our people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, for doing nothing more than going about their daily lives.”

I am quite sure most Americans would agree with that statement and I empathize with my compatriots, and I am awestruck by your responsibility to protect America. But frankly, coming from you, I could not believe what I was reading. Your statement knocked me off my chair. And I do know why.

I know in your heart you see the bigger picture. You understand the roots of “terrorism”, and every ingredient of its mortal desperation. And you know these things largely from your own life experience. And you do have the capability, perhaps more so than anyone, to articulate and make happen your deepest heartfelt understanding …

…but to do so, would be to single yourself out, to differentiate yourself, to set yourself up as the scapegoat, and to completely lose your status.

Yes, this is the risk.

But consider Gandhi for a moment, a fellow lawyer. And Lincoln who did the same. And Martin Luther King.. And consider – again in irony but with a knowing smile this time — the great Pashtun leader and Islamic pacifist, Abdul Gaffar Kahn.

Yes. There are great people who do this. Leaders who stand up under the crushing weight of political and personal risk and single themselves out as peace-makers.

And Barack Obama is one of them. And now it is your turn.

With all due respect, this right now is your test, Mr. President.

I’m convinced you’ll pass it. As are the majority of human kind, including with all their hearts most of the people of Pakistan, as well as the people of our own country, even if we don’t yet realize it.

You know it is the right thing to do – to differentiate yourself. You know it will work. Let’s reverse the new AfPak policy, lay down our weapons and turn our soldiers into healers.. And let’s do it now.

Sincerely,

Tommy Schmitz
Des Moines, Iowa

_______________________________________________________________________________

P.S. For the sake of argument I’ll post the third installment Monday night, 31Mar09. It takes a different, yet significant angle on our need in America to explore and heal our increasingly dangerous and still denied addiction to scapegoating.

References:

Jean-Baptiste Dumont, MSc, Mres. “Mimesis – The Scapegoat Model.”

René Girard, “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World”, 1978.

Also see:

website: Colloquium On Violence & Religion (COV&;R)

website: The Scapegoat Society. Forest Row, East Sussex, RH18 5JF, England.

About tommyschmitz

has written 33 articles on this journal.

Tommy Schmitz is a writer in Des Moines, Iowa. He Grew up in Cincinnati's west side, spent nine years in the corporate world, then seventeen years running his own consultancy, mostly to automobile machinery makers in Japan, China and the US. He lived in Tokyo from 1992 to 1999. Besides serving auto industry clients (Toyota, Honda, Denso, Robert Bosch, Mitsubishi) he was the first non-Japanese accepted by the government as a paid advisor to Japanese small and medium sized companies. (Chushokigyochou, Division of JETRO and MITI).

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