The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

René Girard opens his book The Scapegoat with an ambitious hypothesis. He outlines three “stereotypes” that can be used to detect persecution. These are:

1. Social crisis – a plague, collapse of authority, war, drought, economic collapse, etc.; in general, there is a state of undifferentiation among individuals (e.g. a clique of high school girls can’t decide who among them is prettier than who…)

2. Accusations of contagious crimes – these crimes are either so heinous that they shake the deepest foundation of social order (incest, parricide, regicide, infant murder, rape, etc.) or are scalable in terms of numbers of victims (poisoning of water sources, magical spells, treason); either way, the nature of the crime must be such that it allows for a small number of perpetrators to strike at the whole society

3. The person or group of people blamed for the crime stand out with an “abnormality” that draws the attention of the mob; this abnormality can be physical (hunchbacks, the lame, the blind), socio-economic (the homeless, the rich), related to ability (giant, dwarf, genius, idiot), or it can be the status of a foreigner, a strange visitor, or an outsider belonging to a racial, ethnic, or religious minority

Girard’s goal is to uncover historical persecution behind old texts. The texts that contain the three stereotypes he calls “texts of persecution.” As his first and representative example of such texts, he gives the account of the Black Plague by a 14th-century French poet, Guillaume de Machaut. Machaut recounts how the plague came to his hometown and wrought death and terror. It was then “revealed” that the plague was caused by Jews poisoning the streams. The Jews were promptly massacred, and the plague subsided.

All three stereotypes of persecution are obvious in Machaut’s text. They are, Girard argues, what allows the modern reader to perceive the events described as persecution. Machaut didn’t perceive them as such - he was “naïve,” in Girard’s words. It was his naïveté that makes his account a valuable historical document. Had he been suffering from guilty conscience about the slaughter of the Jews, he would have tried to hide the crimes. He would have tried to dissimulate the violence perpetrated against an innocent minority.

Given the text as is, the modern reader has little doubt while inferring the reality behind Machaut’s narrative. The narrative is a mixture of fantastic and historical elements, but the reader has no hang-ups separating the two. That Jews had poisoned the streams is fantastic – for one, no chemical or bioweapon of such toxicity existed in the Medieval times. But the Black Death and massacres of Jews are understood to be historical facts.

One thing the modern reader does not do is dismiss Machaut’s whole text because some of his testimony is false. He does not apply the same criteria that would be used in a court of law.

After setting up, Girard makes two astonishing claims. First, he takes his blueprint of the three stereotypes of persecution and compares it to ancient and archaic myths. He discovers the stereotypes in so many of them that it draws him to a revolutionary conclusion: all myths are stories of persecution told from the viewpoint of the persecutors.

As his first myth example, he takes one very popular in the West: the tragedy of Oedipus the King as told by Sophocles. The tragedy was based on a popular myth of even more ancient vintage. This tragedy resounds with the three stereotypes of persecution. Thebes, Oedipus’s city, is afflicted by a plague – stereotype one. The consequences of the plague are dramatically described as destructive of social order (see e.g. COVID-19). The crimes that will turn out to have caused the plague are quintessentially seditious of the most basic human order: Oedipus had unwittingly committed both incest and parricide. That’s the second stereotype. Finally, Oedipus himself is a walking reference manual for the third stereotype, the victimary signs: he’s lame, an orphan who had been abandoned and exposed, an outsider from Thebes, a former vagabond, the current king, a seer (the ancient analogue to the modern “genius”).

All this leads Girard to conclude that the real Oedipus on whom the myth was based was a community scapegoat blamed for a social crisis and then lynched by an angry mob.

This brings me to Girard’s fourth stereotype of persecution:

4. Collective violence to remove the designated victim either by execution or expulsion; the collective aspect is either literal (e.g. stoning, mob chase) or done by consent – execution is witnessed or approved of by consensus.

In the tragedy of Oedipus, the hero is not purged by the mob. He purges himself. Stricken by the realization that he’s responsible for the plague because he had inadvertently slain his father and married his mother, he gouges out his eyes and banishes himself. But Girard shows that it is very common for myths to obfuscate the true nature of the original violence. More on that later.

Girard goes through many examples of myths to prove his theory. I won’t go through his other examples here, but I will say this in passing: if you think off the top of your head right now of a few myths with which you are familiar, there’s a high chance that you will recall examples of some sort of crisis, crime, extraordinary perpetrator (perhaps a god or a demon), or retribution.

Now, not all stories that we call myths have the four stereotypes, even in a dissimulated form. But Girard argues that enough of them do to make his claim regarding the origin of myths as accounts of persecution undeniable. He arranges myths on a spectrum, from those containing the most explicit persecution, through those that partially dissimulate it, to those in which all traces of persecution are completely erased. The most explicit ones tend to be the most archaic. This spectrum is analogous to an evolutionary chain of species. While two distantly related species at first sight seem to share nothing in common, their placement on a genealogical tree reveals intermediate forms that provide witness to their common origin.

The second surprising claim Girard makes is this: only the modern culture produces texts of explicit persecution. To Girard, modern culture is a child of Western modern culture, and the latter is in turn the daughter of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. More on the genealogy of modern culture later; let’s get back to the claim. Can you find a pre-modern text that recounts persecution as such? If you can, please email me. I can’t.

The second claim leaves only two possibilities. The first one is that non-modern cultures didn’t persecute anyone. You may laugh at the thought but remember that many among the “neo-primitivist” (Girard’s phrase), noble-savage types still believe in the immaculate innocence of pre-Christian European pagans, or aboriginal populations before their contact with European colonizers.

The second possibility is that of course pre-modern societies persecuted people. Girard’s entire anthropology is based on the idea that all human culture, indeed humanity itself, is based on the scapegoating mechanism – on the spontaneous and later ritualized execution of a victim blamed for the societal unrest and then credited for the peace that the execution brought.

Girard argues that pre-modern societies didn’t have any stories of explicit persecution because they were not aware of the fact that they were committing persecution. Otherwise, the scapegoating mechanism would not work. Instead, they wrote – or told – myths. Remember the first claim: all myths are stories of persecution told from the perspective of persecutors. The persecutors never see themselves as such; they see themselves as victims, and they see their victims as villains. As myths were the most important stories told by pre-modern societies, it follows that persecution was, unknowingly, their hottest topic.

The stories were remembered by the persecutors and told by them. As a myth passed from one generation to another, the violence, the victimhood, and the crime itself were often dissimulated, to use a favourite term of Girard’s. This was the ancient version of making things G-rated. The victim character often became a supernatural being - god, demon, monster. Rather than getting chased off a cliff, he or she dove into the sea to reach her underwater abode, or flew into the heavens. The crime often got transfigured into a quirky offence – stealing food from a banquet, breaking a social taboo, giving someone an evil eye, etc. Later, various forms of “wisdom” were tacked on to the stories to give them educational value. Don’t abuse hospitality or you’ll end up like Tantalus, etc.

Let’s now get back to the genealogy of modern culture, and specifically, why it is the only one able to square up to persecution and call it out for what it is. To Girard, the revelation of persecution as such was started in the ancient Hebrew scriptures. Many scholars have noted that the Hebrews had a habit of siding with victims. However, this was typically ascribed to the fact that Hebrews themselves were geopolitical losers, so they naturally emphasized with the downtrodden. Not much thought was given beyond that.

Girard, in contrast, believes that this siding with the victim was of capital anthropological significance. If geopolitical loses were the principal cause of it, then there ought to have been many more Bibles written in the world, he argued. It wasn’t mere “sentimentalism” either, as some 19th-century humanist might say. It constituted a sort of scientific revolution. The science was the science of man – what we now call anthropology. The Judeo-Christian tradition discovers the mechanism at the foundation of humanity – the victimary mechanism. Once this was done, there was no going back; as history flows forward from that point, the victimary mechanism becomes ever more revealed and ever less effective. This process is still ongoing. (The terminal collapse of this most basic of culture-building mechanism is what Girard identifies with the Apocalypse.)

You can call the Bible mythology or not. Either way, the claim is that it was unique among all mythologies because it went against the common grain. Whereas every other mythology under the sun masked the violence of foundational murders, the Biblical tradition exposed it. Abel could have been another Oedipus, or he could have been another Remus and his brother Cain, the founder of cities, another Romulus, the founder of Rome. But the Bible insists that Abel was innocent. The Bible insists that Joseph was innocent, as was Job, as was the Psalmist, as was Lot, as was John the Baptist, as was, ultimately, Jesus.

So, if when I asked you above to think of a pre-modern text that recounts persecution as such, you thought of a story from the Bible, it doesn’t count. Bible is the one exception that birthed our modern sensibility to persecution. According to Girard.

Girard was a Catholic, and he used his anthropological theory to give a stunning new angle to the general Christian belief that 1), the Biblical tradition is singular and 2), Jesus completes and crystalizes what the Old Testament prophets foretold. But his treatment of the Passion is a whole other tangent.

The cherry on Girard’s Christian apologetic cake: the tool he used to do all that was deconstructionism, which is the very thing invented by ultra-progressive French philosophers like Jacques Derrida for the purposes of dismantling (deconstructing) traditional cultural edifices. That’s some black-belt intellectual jiu-jitsu right there.

This may be getting too religious for your comfort zone. If that’s so, let me also tell you that from what I’ve seen, religious readers seem to get offended by Girard’s truncation of their ineffable faith to his smart-ass theory as much as atheists get offended by his taking the Bible seriously.

Anyhow, at this point I would like to shift gears and venture my own little application of the stereotypes of persecution for the times in which we now live. I will try to keep the application as scientific, as logical as possible.

Stereotypes of Persecution: Reverse Application

Ours is an age far removed from the ancient times when the natural thing to do was to sweep persecution under the rug. Back in the day, everyone was respectably pure and blameless. Today, we’re all about doing the exact reverse: uncovering persecution. Everyone is an oppressor; everyone is guilty. Ironically, we may have the über-patriarchal Judeo-Christianity to thank for that.

So hot are we on tracks of every and any persecution that today’s cultural purveyors’ chief occupation seems to be looking for persecutors. Demand seems to outstrip supply, judging at least by how much effort must be placed in explaining why someone is a persecutor (I’m not saying supply is low, though). Nowadays, it’s hard to find a plain old rapist or murderer for all the freelance journalists and social justice warriors out there. And even when one is found, it’s too easy to make a persecutor out of him. Too obvious. The column about that would be too short. So journalists tend to take on the greater challenge of portraying them as victims.

It is a confounding phenomenon. In a way, nothing has changed – humanity, as always, is about witch hunts. Only now, the witches we are hunting are the witch hunters? It’s hard to make heads or tails out of it, really. Indeed, I keep thinking of one of those dragons swallowing its tail.

Be as it may, whatever it is, the plain fact is that in today’s West, unlike in other times and places, rather than trying to save face, the cultural narratives are trying to sling mud. Everyone is jostling for a chance to be the defender of the widow and the orphan – or the non-binary gendered and the undocumented migrant, if you will. As a result, rather than obscure myths, our culture is steeped in narratives of vehemently explicit persecution.

That presents a challenge that is the reverse of René Girard’s famous deciphering of myths. He was facing dissimulated persecution and trying to uncover it. What we need today, I say, is to look at the endless stream of contemporary texts of explicit persecution and decide whether they are not just “myths.”

For our challenge, I cannot think of any tool better than Girard’s four stereotypes of persecution. We must be rigorous, though, and ask ourselves if the stereotypes will work in reverse. We need to machete our way through some logic.

Girard said that the four stereotypes of persecution in a text point to real persecution of an innocent victim. I’d like to go the opposite way and ask:

If there is real persecution, does that imply (necessitate) the existence of Girard’s four stereotypes?

Let’s be careful and clear here, and repeat the conditional statement in another way: do all acts of real persecution involve Girard’s four stereotypes?

Or, if you want to get mathematical about it, is the following statement true: Persecution is real if and only if there are present Girard’s four stereotypes of persecution.

All this begs the question: what exactly is persecution?

Merriam-Webster: “to persecute - to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict; specifically: to cause to suffer because of belief.”

Oxford: “the act of treating somebody in a cruel and unfair way, especially because of their race, religion or political beliefs.”

Well… looks like there’s not much stoning of village hunchbacks left in the modern world. The two dictionary entries highlight discrimination based on identity – which is very much legitimate – but they do leave open the possibility of other causes. What they don’t do, is they don’t put forth a system of persecution. So I will have to tackle that here myself.

Before I proceed, I think we can agree that not all violence is persecution. Murdering someone during a botched robbery, for example, is not persecution. Killing a rival gang member over a turf war is not necessarily persecution. I think we can agree that persecution always entails unjust blame. Moreover, the blame is believed in by consensus; a single individual going after someone for reasons entirely his own would simply be considered delusional.

To stick with the logical rigour, the next question to ask is this: Can we think of an example of persecution that does not include at least one of the four stereotypes? In other words is it possible to persecute someone:

1. but not in response to some perceived or real social crisis or threat,

2. without blaming them for some general, subversive crime,

3. who does not stick out from the “normal” one way or the other,

4. without the consensus of some in-group.

I will argue that it is not possible. I will argue that any real persecution necessitates all four conditions listed here. Of course, I don’t have serious data to support my arguments – it’s a blog/newsletter – but I will try to wave my hands as best as I can.

Let’s pick the most brazen, cold-blooded, screw-humanity example of persecution you can think of. This would be the best example to use, because if such an example needs all four conditions, it stands to reason that some more bashful and embarrassed persecutors would need them even more. What example will I pick? You guessed it: the Holocaust.

Nazis are the all-time world champions when it comes to doing one’s very best to not have any guilty conscience while persecuting. They straight-up admitted that they were transgressing every established moral code. Because they were “beyond good and evil” or whatever – they were über-mensch. So if even the Nazis needed conditions to go ahead and persecute, and not merely persecute but commit genocide, on several nations and races, it is reasonable to conclude that all other persecutors would need those conditions, too.

Condition (stereotype) (1): Did Nazis pop out of the clear blue sky, when everything in Germany was fine and dandy, or did they rise in a crisis? Of course, they rose to power in the midst of a debilitating crisis. The humiliation of defeat in the First World War, hyperinflation, economic catastrophe, revolutionary threats, etc.

Stereotype (2): Did Nazis blame Jews for “some general, subversive crime”? Yes – big time! We’ve all heard of anti-Semitism, right? As much as they talked of the racial inferiority of the Jews and their own superiority, Nazis obsessed over the mystical power of the Jews to rule the world and subvert the Nordic man. It doesn’t get any more “general and subversive” than that.

Stereotype (3): This one is easy. Obviously, neither Nazis nor anyone else could persecute a person or group whom they consider to be average or normal. All their victims were different from the norm, and that difference was obsessively emphasized and blown out of proportion. According to Girard, the tendency to select victims based on abnormality is common not only to humans, but to the entire animal kingdom. Lions attack the one buffalo that sticks out from the stampeding herd.

Stereotype (4): collective violence. The extent of collective guilt gets debated a lot. Namely, how aware was the general German public of the extent of the Holocaust? I won’t try to unpack that here. I don’t need to. I will say that consensus for violence was required at least on some level. If the average German civilian was not aware of what was going on in the concentration camps, the soldiers operating them certainly were. It would not be possible to get soldiers to slaughter thousands of camp inmates even though they respectfully disagreed about it. Hitler was very aware of the need for group consensus. This is precisely why he and his earliest party members expanded such tremendous effort on propaganda. To realize their murderous plans, there needed to be mass hypnosis of some sort. Without it, persecution would be neither logistically nor morally feasible. All persecution needs a mob, a consensus that the victim is guilty and deserves to be eliminated.

So there you have it. Nazis checked off the four stereotypes of persecution in a big way. But was that really something in a way of a condition they needed to fulfill in the eyes of the public before embarking on a preconceived murderous agenda? Or was it something that they somehow relished? With the Girardian understanding of the nature and purpose of persecution, both questions should be answered with a yes. Persecution is ritual. It is a technique for generating the sacred. And there is an economy to that - the technique can be very effective or not so effective. To generate the greatest possible cathartic effect, the persecutors need to exploit the four stereotypes as best as they can. The catharsis, and the elation involved in the whole process, is shared between the onlookers and the persecutors, or executioners. For persecution is at its heart a collective act.

* * *

I will not venture into the minefield of picking out specific contemporary accusations of discrimination and putting them through this “Reverse Stereotypes of Persecution Test” (RSP test?). I hope you, the reader, will do a bit of that on your own. Pick a victim, individual or group, getting publicity in the media. Then ask yourself the four questions:

1. Are the accusations a reaction to a perceived social crisis?

2. Are the victims blamed for contagious crimes?

3. Are they considered abnormal?

4. Is there a mob-like consensus of animosity towards this group?

If the answer but to one of these questions is in the negative, there is reason to question the reality of the claimed persecution.

At this point you may ask: what about just looking for physical, empirical evidence of a crime? For one, that evidence is often lacking. And even if a crime has been committed, as mentioned above, not all violence is persecution. There are arbitrary and isolated acts of violence, and when the public is not sure if these are linked to persecution, the reporters may describe their perpetrators as “lone wolves.”

Some may say that even when it comes to persecution, it’s better to err on the side of possible victims. There are two things wrong with that. First, giving credence to false victims steals the attention from the real ones and destroys the significance of true victimhood. Secondly, if those accused of persecution are not guilty of it, then there’s a good chance that those pointing the fingers are the real persecutors. You can turn the RSP test on the accusers and see what comes out.

This blog post got quite serious by the end, but I do hope that this bit of Girardian wisdom can add to your toolkit when it comes to a practical understanding of the world. That said, I must emphasize that my idea of the reverse application of the four stereotypes of persecution is highly speculative. It would be nice to hear what you think. Then and only then might I go ahead and start spamming the inbox of the UN Human Rights Commission about it.

Read more in the book Catharses.