https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KhBHk2c206Q
Alright, so Drew McMahon asks, Hi Jonathan, can you comment on our current obsession with the oppressed? Why is our culture so obsessed with it? Every conversation, especially as it relates to politics, has to do with the oppressed and gets used as a point of leverage. What’s going on? Is there any relationship to this verse in the Gospel of Matthew? But when you get to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. I mean, maybe, maybe. For sure, the obsession with the oppressed, the way that it’s happening now, is something like an anti-Christian trope. Which it sounds weird because anti-Christian in the strict sense, in the sense that it is something which comes from Christianity, but then opposes Christianity. It’s a kind of parasite of Christianity, something which looks at the outset like Christianity, but then turns against, becomes upside down. So René Girard noticed this himself, even when he started writing his books. So the way he praised it was that once the scapegoat mechanism is exposed in the story of Jesus, then you can’t ignore it. Once you see it, you can’t pretend like it’s not there. And that the idea of the person that becomes a victim in order to justify our unity, and the outsider that is persecuted in order to justify our unity as a group, you just can’t ignore it. What happens in the weird obsession with the victims now is that it’s framed in a revolutionary way, which is that being a victim becomes a form of moral justification in itself, and becomes a justification to reproduce the type of behavior that the scapegoat mechanism itself brings about. It’s a very dark thing where if you can portray yourself as a victim, then you are the morally justified one, and it justifies your moral actions if you are able to portray yourself as a victim and then portray others as oppressors. So it’s very different from what Christ happened to Christ. I mean, Christ on the cross said, you know, forgive them for they know not what they do. The Christian martyrs are known for loving the ones that murdered them, and that ultimately is the final solution to the scapegoat problem, is not to reverse it to make it upside down and to now create a kind of upside down scapegoating where the oppressed and the persecuted can band together in order to now oppress their persecutors or to get rid of them. That just leads to the same kind of madness, a kind of upside down version of scapegoating. The solution is to see yourself as the persecutor and then to forgive those that persecute you. That’s the solution. If everyone did that, then we would have healed the problem of identity.