https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ygdFZ1ri2uw
So you wouldn’t have seen, for example, the killing of foreign captors, foreign prisoners as a scapegoat mechanism. Because that seems to be a universal practice too. It’s like you win a war, you catch a bunch of people, then you ceremoniously murder some of them publicly in order to make a point about your nation and about your strength up and against another group, let’s say. I don’t know if you would have said that, but that doesn’t seem to be effective anymore. I mean, that could be because maybe at one point that was effective, but it doesn’t seem effective anymore when that’s happening. Maybe it’s because it’s not visible or something like that. And this is part of Gerard’s whole thesis, is that the scapegoat mechanism is becoming less and less effective. It doesn’t work anymore the way that it used to before it was sort of revealed to humanity. And the concern for victims prevents the scapegoat mechanism. Our eyes are somehow opened to the victim. And that is a direct result of what’s been shown to us in the Revelation, really in the scriptures. And it makes the scapegoat mechanism less effective. So we either need more of them, we need them more often, and they simply don’t work to bind people together. I guess in extraordinary cases, the scapegoat mechanism has worked to bind the world together. You could argue that the Holocaust, in some sense, did that. And we’re all united in this belief, this could never happen again. But I’ve actually argued that Hiroshima was a human sacrifice, in the sense that Americans said, clearly, we have to kill these innocent people in order to stop the war. We have to kill these tens of thousands of innocent people in one shot. And if we do that, then we’ll get a blessing from heaven. We will end the war. Because they weren’t killing soldiers. And it was like a gamble. It really was. It was very similar to the cliché of how people think human sacrifice used to happen. It’s like, if I kill this person, then the rain will come, or something like that. And it was like, that’s what Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, I think. Yeah, that’s what I calculated, human sacrifice, in the sense that we knew that innocent lives were going to be lost, but not knowing the future. Just hoping that there was some kind of a, I don’t know, would you say it was like a binding force, or just pure deterrent and fear? I think it was also a binding force. I think it, for sure, it created, I think, the United States. The United States is born in Hiroshima, in some ways, in terms of what it would become. Because it’s like the radical action, and the result of it, let’s say, ending the war, this terrible thing, terrible action at the outset. It seemed to be a kind of founding, I think, for America leading into the next phase of their existence. But I don’t know, like I said, that’s my intuition in terms of watching it. I think the intuition is, I think, is right, in the sense that Gerard said that every culture is founded on a founding murder. So culture is always founded on some violent act. It’s why culture emerges as the ritualized, rituals and culture are, and institutions arise to prevent the violence of the founding murder from happening again. And in that sense, I sort of see, it’s not like America’s only had one culture. I think we’ve had a special culture since World War II. And maybe that’s the founding murder of the new post-World War culture, consensus that we’ve had, these founding murders. Yeah, there’s a few secret scandals in World War II that we can’t, that nobody thinks about, because they’ve become, they kind of landed so deep in our psyche. The other example is that we always said we won the war, but we never say that it was actually the Russians greatly that won the war. And those Russians, we basically shook the hand with the devil in order to beat Hitler. And now because of that, communism gets a soft play in the United States. And people always wonder, why is it people are so soft on communism? It’s a very, very deep, deep mythological reason. It’s because our society is based on a very deep compromise in which we gave half of Europe to an evil empire in order to stop the war. So it’s like, there are these really deep sins that are at the origin of our civilization that we can’t see. People kind of can’t see them. But I know that, and that’s not necessarily sacrifice, but it’s like a weird sin that’s at the origin of things. Well, I think it’s very related, right? I mean, Gerard’s magnum opus is called Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. These are the things that we don’t want to admit about humanity, about our own violence. In Christian terms, you could say sinfulness, right? About our own weakness and frailty, the denial of death, all these things. There’s these things hidden since the foundation of the world are our own propensity to murder and cover up and to cover up these things under rituals, under institutions, right? There’s all kinds of rituals in the world that are really for the sole purpose of preventing violence. It’s like a very important part of Gerard’s theory. There’s an initial act of the scapegoat mechanism that happened at some point, and then it’s ritualized after that, right? In the form of rituals, right? So companies can have these rituals, like a lot of sports, I think, developed, especially in the Roman Coliseum, developed as rituals to prevent the spread of more violence. The scapegoat mechanism is always about stopping the spread of more violence, right? So Gerard’s line, Satan casts out Satan. It’s like, I need to do a little bit of violence in order to prevent a lot of violence, which is a dangerous way to think, right? It’s this very calculating way to think. I think it’s terrible ethics. It doesn’t account for the dignity of the human person. There’s all kinds of problems, but Gerard is saying that this is the pattern that humanity constantly falls back into, is thinking that we can prevent a lot of violence through targeted violence, through making scapegoats, but we always need to find another one. That’s the cycle that Christ stopped, right? By becoming willingly the scapegoat. Because some of the imagery in the story of Christ definitely has to do with this in the sense that even in many of the Church Fathers, they’ll often say, or in the hymnography, we hear how the world is created from the side, from Christ’s side. That is, in Christ being pierced, the water and the blood that come out is the Church. It’s actually the world. St. Maximus talks about the world is being created while Christ is dying on the cross. And this sense that the world comes out of his side, like Eve comes out of Christ’s side, or the Church comes out of his side. And so it seems like the symbolism is carried into Christianity, but like you said, it’s kind of flipped or it’s subverted because it’s a form of self-sacrifice. Then the civilization that gets founded ends up not being the Roman civilization that pierces Christ, but the civilization that Christ is secretly planting is the one that will rise up and take over Rome ultimately. Never completely, but at least enough for the transformation to be real. And that symbolism that you’re describing, like the blood and water that flowed from the side of Christ, the Eucharist itself has all kinds of symbolism. You’re talking about blood, blood and body, right? And it itself is constituted through a sacrificial act, right? You have to crush grapes until they can become, and the wheat and the bread. So all of the language and the symbolism of sacrifice is now non-bloody sacrifice, is thoroughly infused in the symbolism of the liturgy, at least the one that you and I, I think, both know.