Philosophy

the multifaceted nature of modern conflict on a global scale perhaps presents the greatest challenge yet to girard's idea of the scapegoat.

but i'm never one to count girard out. 

so, the interesting question, at least to me, becomes: on whose grave are we going to build the next relatively peaceful period of human existence?

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There's always some Other that can serve this purpose; it's a rather flexible mechanism, so the specifics can change relatively fast depending on the needs.

cognitive science, functional contextualism, tattarrattat

interesting. could you say more about this? i'm pretty sure i don't understand girard as well as i think i do.

ah, fair enough. i do find it interesting because i think back to the cold war, and that seemed to end without any clear scapegoat, at least in my view. of course the dynamics are different this time around. we'll see though.

I’m not actually very familiar with his work, but similar ideas can be found in other places. I meant that probably the most important characteristic of a scapegoat is that it simply has to belong to a different group than the one using the mechanism, which means that its selection is not very limited. Or maybe it fulfills that condition just by the virtue of being chosen as the scapegoat, which would allow for even more possibilities.

This is, of course, a very general outline; there are certainly more specific factors that predispose to becoming a scapegoat. I’m just suggesting that predicting that might be actually more complicated than it would appear at first glance.