Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / The Scapegoat - René Girard // 271 (preview)

Transcript

The Scapegoat - René Girard // 271 (preview) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Just like the rituals, the rituals have their special masks.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: And we start looking at the primitive societies, and they
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: always have a mask that displaces something. So here we
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: have the medical vaccines that replace the purity rights on
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: the pro-vax side. And the mask now, well, the mask
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: used to be the mandated in-group tribal sign. Then it became,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: as it is now, a sign of paranoia. And I
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: mean that like no disparagement. Whether or not the paranoia
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: is warranted, of course. Some people got, you know, whatever immunodeficiency.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: That warrants paranoia. Sometimes paranoia is the rational response. But
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: now that's what the mask signifies.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Whereas it used to be, I guess, the lack of
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: a mask. If you were willing to dare to go
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: out in public without a mask, then you were paranoid
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: because you thought the government was using it to try
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: to control everybody.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: Like until.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: Even in modern times with the outbreak of some kind
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: of epidemic illness, until they understand what actually causes it
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: and what its dynamics of transmission are, the public health
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: establishment is still going to mobilize and make recommendations like
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: wear masks, stand five feet apart. When you come home
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: from a flight, go home for two weeks. Just all
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: these things. Maybe some of them are apt now. And
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: others are not.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: I remember spraying my groceries with like disinfectant spray in
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the first couple of weeks. Now that's embarrassing, but we
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: like didn't know.
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: Get the toilet paper quick and take some horse pills,
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: like whatever drinks or inject some bleach.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: What was it? Yeah.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, the establishment reacts like with all these different solutions.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: And clearly not all of them are going to be
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: working or reasonable. But that's kind of like what ritual does.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: It's preventative.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: It's a preventative measure against violence.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: It's not.
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: Something that you do in response to violence as its cure.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: It's sort of like before the worst outbreaks come along.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: And COVID caused like an insane amount of disruption and
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: people were kind of going insane. And you can also
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: chalk that up to maybe the loss of all the
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: other rituals that maintain society. They were all disrupted by
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: locking it in your house.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was interesting because it almost felt like.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: It didn't help that they were just saying things also
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: that were completely false. Like they said... I think they
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: said it lived on surfaces for five days, which is
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: the reason that I was disinfecting my grocery bags.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Back when you could still get plastic grocery bags?
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: A lot of grocery stores started doing delivery because of COVID,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: and I jumped on that train pretty quick.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: Oh, God, yeah. I used the meal kits, and I
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: can't go back.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Can't go back. Well, let's just start with the lead here.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: The scapegoat, no hidden meaning here, really. The scapegoat is
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the displacement of violence. And you would normally put that
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: into fighting against people who are vying for the same
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: stuff as you, mimetic desire and all that. And with
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: the scapegoat, then all of the members of the community
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: can unconsciously, they're not aware of it because it's a
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: sort of trick. And that person has to resemble a
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: community member, but is in some way different from the
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: community proper. Then there's the repetition of this scapegoat ritual,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: the sacrifice ritual. And doing this keeps violent energy directed
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: at the boundary of society rather than letting it boil
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: up in the center, which is always the risk. So
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: that's pretty much what the scapegoat means in the common
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: parlance too. So in that sense, there's no surprise here.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: The surprise may be that Girard thinks this same mechanism
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: exists is everywhere he sees it everywhere he looks for
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: it and everywhere you see displaced violence done for the
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: sake of social cohesion and uh i don't know what
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: what your guys's position is on this but i think
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: i'm i'm still in a state of confusion about gerard
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: because it's it's true in a way in kind of
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: the way that carl schmidt is true because carl schmidt's
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: like well we've got We need to make an in-group,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: we need to make an out-group society depends on having
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: an in-group and an out-group. And that's what the sacrifice
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: does as well. If we can all focus our violence
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: on this internal external person on the victim, then we
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: don't need to continue the cycle of violence on each other.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: So I can't really decide if it's like superficially true.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: And making it unnecessarily deep by saying that societies maintain
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: a distinction between inside and outside, because that's going to
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: be true all the time.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems trivially true.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems trivially true because that's just the definition
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: of society, that society maintains a distinction from not society.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: He goes everywhere. He says the distinction between philosophy and
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: poetry is made possible by a scapegoat mechanism because philosophy scapegoats...
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: and art to make itself seem more rational. So I
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: don't know why he's going off like that. At a
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: certain point, it's like, well, I can explain everything by
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: this thing. And it almost seems like a Jordan Peterson,
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: everything is either chaos or order and these forces are
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: forever competing.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: I'm curious, so how different is that from what a
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: lot of other kinds of theorists do? Because I feel
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: like this can be a recurring problem where a theorist
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: will have their pet concept of And they'll just want
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: to explain– like I feel like one of our early
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: episodes was Agamben, right? And it seemed like he wanted
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: to make everything kind of state of exception. I guess
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: it's a narrower concept though because he is talking about– yeah,
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: more– or I don't know, power, the way that power
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: is theorized in Foucault. It just like applies to everything,
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: explains everything. Everything is power.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Well, no. Power is the conclusion. Power is not the
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: explanatory mechanism.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: It's not the explanatory mechanism. You're right.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: The equivalent would be Freud's Oedipus complex.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: And this is a competing, a competing theory with that.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: Well, the way he positions it always makes, it makes
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: sense though. Like when he's talking about earlier anthropologists, like
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: what was it? Fraser, the guy who wrote the golden
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: bow and the way that the earlier anthropologists look at
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: these ritual practices as just superstition and or stupidity, or ignorance,
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: or naivete.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: And compare.
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: Oh, they do it one way or the other. They'll
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: compare it to modern civilization to show, oh, look how
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: advanced we are compared to them. Or even the other
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: way around, like look how fallen and corrupt modern civilization
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: is compared to the pure, pristine, primitive state who knew
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: how to deal with things better than we did in
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: a more direct way. And he's sort of positioning himself against,
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: he's saying like, well, there's not a, there is a
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: load of continuity there between the sort of like sacrificial
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: ritualistic basis of religious practices. And, but then the distinguishing
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: feature of modern society, which was really clear to me too,
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: he kept saying this is, is a judicial system. That's
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: a system of vengeance, right? Because someone commits a crime.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: and you commit vengeance upon the guilty party. It's some
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: kind of vengeance. Except, unlike sacrifice, no substitute is allowed.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: It has to be the person who committed the crime.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: The guilty party gets the punishment. The whole point of
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: sacrifice is to avoid that, is for the community to
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: select someone else to take the place of the what
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: we would consider to be the guilty party.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: You know what i feel like i'm nitpicking this because
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: to peer to likes it whereas a lot of the
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: other things i would.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: Have read i was gonna say i was gonna say
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: like i feel like you're being extra hard on this
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: a little like i'm not saying i love it but like.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: I didn't even criticize it yet no.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: No no but no no sorry like i just mean
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: i think that you're i can feel both in this
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: episode in the last episode that like you're I can
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: feel your self skepticism where you're like, I don't want
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: to like, like I could feel you, you being like, uh,
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: like this is interesting, but like, I don't know. Anyway,
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: I'm just, I'm just validating what you're saying. Cause I
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: think you're right. I think, I mean, in a way
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: I feel that too. I'm like, Oh, Peter Thiel and
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: all those creeps love this shit. But you know, just
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: taking the text on its own terms, I think there's,
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: there's interesting stuff here, which you didn't not say.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: We've never established. This is taken as a fact here
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: and he's, he's written a lot more than this. So
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: maybe it's somewhere else. But it's never explained the connection between,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: or evidentiary connection between the sacrifices stopping violence.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Now you'd have to go do, I don't know, you'd
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: have to have like a control group to find that out.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: And he doesn't do, he's never been to any of
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: these places. He's a second, he's an armchair anthropologist.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: That's true.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: That's a good point. Actually, it makes me think. I
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: wonder about, did you guys see the news? This crazy
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: thing that the that the trump administration wants to live
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: stream the the firing squad execution of this of this
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: uh this the fort hood killer the the soldier who
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: killed like 13 other soldiers at fort hood and it's
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: interesting because my reaction and everybody's reaction i would say
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: for the most part is like this is barbaric right
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: this is like a This is like introducing more violence
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: into society by making it explicit and live streaming it,
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: making it a spectacle. But yeah, I don't know. This
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: is obviously different than the kind of sacrifice that Eric
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: was talking about because this is the guilty party, right?
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: This guy did kill 13 people or whatever. So I
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: don't exactly know how it fits into this framework. But
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: since it's news right now, it might be interesting to
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: think about.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: You made me think of a recent item in the
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: news too, the botched, was it the, you heard about
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: the botched execution? I mean, that's an interesting, you know,
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: the vengeance forestalled, not quite carried out. If that's the
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: purpose of the judicial system is actually, it's even more
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: vengeful because it requires the guilty party to always be
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: punished than that seems to be.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: It'll be interesting to see how that, like a, I
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: don't want to call it like a natural experiment, but
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: I was just thinking too, like, you know, in that
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: colonial situation where these rituals are just suddenly and violently suppressed,
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: wouldn't you expect to then see a massive outbreak of
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: violence in some cases as well? because suddenly all these
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: sacrificial rituals and all these compensatory mechanisms are all suddenly suppressed,
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: you'd expect then violence to well up, like suppressed sexual
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: energy in the psychoanalytic sense. But then I guess that
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: then the response to that is, well, it was because
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: a judicial system also serves that purpose, even if it's
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: one imposed by a colonial authority.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's where we see things like cancel culture or
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: these things march. Maybe that's the violence coming out where
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: it's like people want to pile on. They want to
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: become part of that thing, addressing some suppressed urge.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: This definitely has explanatory value. The question is, is violence
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: the primal energy here? Or is there a deeper economy?
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: And I kind of settled last week. I said, there's
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: a deeper economy and violence is one form of payment
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: in that economy. Violence is not the form. And I'm
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: not sure about that because I'm also an armchair anthropologist.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: But it just seems to me like, yeah, if you
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: took away someone's ritual sacrifice, society doesn't devolve immediately. Or
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: you'd have to prove that it would. And that's not.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: possible but then one interesting thing to think about though
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: is the sort of precarity i guess you could say
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: of primitive society like he he suggests this over and
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: over is that you know violence is always threatening to
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: out to break out and tear apart the fabric of
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: society and whereas we he compared he says this a
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: couple times like in modern society violence is is not
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: that serious i I mean, I think, okay, you have
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: these massive outbreaks of violence, like the world wars and Vietnam,
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. But he says, he says technology
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: and technique of modern warfare doesn't make any essential difference
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: in there. In that case, the difference is the judicial system,
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: I guess, but that's what tamps down the violence in the,
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: in modern civilization and in these places where. chains of
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: vengeance and blood feuds and all these things are always
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: threatening to break out like if you if someone injures
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: someone else and they demand retribution and go kill a
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: member of that group and then back and forth back
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: and forth interminably until like it devolves into like he
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: just said he emphasizes how precarious the situation is and
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: how carefully these rituals need to be carried out and
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: how important they are. He says we don't understand ritual
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: properly because something's happened to Western civilization that prevents us
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: from seeing the real social function of ritual.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Which is preventing the originary chaos from returning.
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, like he says, what does he say here? Western
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: civilization is hindered in its efforts to isolate and analyze
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: the causes and to examine them in any but the
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: most superficial manner because it has enjoyed until this day
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: a mysterious immunity from the most virulent forms of violence.
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: An immunity, not it seems, of our society's making, but
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: one that has perhaps resulted in the making of our society.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: weird little, suggesting that violence is constructive of a society
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: and that originating violence has been covered over to such
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: a degree that we can't even understand primitive institutions anymore
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: because violence was so close to these primitive societies, always
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: threatening to break out. And for us, when we're like, well,
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: violence is like the furthest... going outside and getting like
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: ritually blood murdered is not something that's on my mind
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: constantly or just being caught up in some feud. I
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: don't have to be hyperbolic about it. Going out and,
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: and being, being like heckled by the Capulets, whatever. That's
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: not on my mind.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Someone challenging you to a duel.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. He even says, yeah,
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: Social bearing towards one another has become so much more
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: flexible because of this, because we don't have to worry
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: about offending someone, saying the wrong thing or saying something
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: in the wrong way, and then becoming a pariah or
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: being challenged to a duel or having some other form
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: of social censure put upon us.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: You're saying we don't have to fear that?
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of back though now with social media.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: I feel like there is this fear of becoming the
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: pariah of getting canceled or whatever.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but I guess you won't have to be killed
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: over it though.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: No, no, but it's a kind of social century.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: The point of this is you never would have been
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: killed because the second that there's society, the violence all
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: becomes a different form. It becomes like a ritual form. Again,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the parallel is like the Freudian incest taboo. Incest taboo
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: is the basis of society. That's why you don't have
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: any incestuous societies. And before any of the comments go, well,
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: what about the Habsburgs? You can reintegrate incest in like
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: a mark of distinction as a different form, as a
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: form exclusive to the upper class. You can't, though, have
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: random incest, just like you can't have a society with
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: random violence. So the same thing is when you have
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a society, the founding moment is displacing the violence in
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: this case too. So there's no really such thing as
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: a random violent society. And his example, maybe we can
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: tell this story. This is a story of a tribe
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: from Brazil. Other authors describe how savage this tribe is
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: because they're cannibals, right? But his point is, even in
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: this society, you as a random person, you're not going
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: to be killed and eaten. You're only going to be
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: ritually killed and eaten if you fit certain criteria. So
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: let's tell the story about this tribe here.
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: Oh, the Tupinamba?
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Tupinamba. He's describing other authors' descriptions of cannibalism and saying,
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: all these people are so savage, they eat people. Isn't
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: that disgusting? And he goes into cannibalism, and cannibalism only
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: takes place in very localized circumstances in one particular ritual
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: that they don't... It's not a daily occurrence, right? So
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: he's combating people who don't understand what cannibalism is for,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: and he explains... the cannibalism ritual. So first of all,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: it only applies to adversaries slain in battle or war.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: So you go to war and you get prisoners of war. Now,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: something very weird to our mind happens with these prisoners
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: of war. They take the prisoners of war home. Everyone
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: knows that they're a prisoner of war, but they don't
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: treat them Badly, they actually integrate into the community. They
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: become a part of the community. They get married, they
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: have kids in the community, but they always still have
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: this status as a prisoner of war. So after a
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: while they're integrated, people know them, they're friends with people,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: but then we start performing the ritual that led to
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: them getting eaten. And the first step of the ritual
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: is they have to pretend to escape. So everyone gathers around.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: We have pretend to escape night. But they stop being fed.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: They cut off their food supply and they go on
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: the lam.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: So they run away and then they get captured. And
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: all of this is a performance. They get captured after.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: pretending to run away. Then they get pretend captured. And
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: now they're considered a bad guy. And then they're encouraged
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: to do crimes. They're like, if you want food, you
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: have to steal it. If you want to have sex,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: you have to rape somebody. So now you become the
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: evil person living in the town. And then you perform
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: this role for a while. You were integrated. Now you're
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: evil in the town. And then after being evil for
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: a while, then you're given gifts and then they kill
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: you and eat you.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: They smash you with a club.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: So Gerard, this particular ritual and its progress perfectly describes
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: what Gerard is hoping to describe here. Because like before
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: we said last time, you can't kill.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Animals that are unlike humans for a sacrifice it has
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: to be sheep or cows domesticated animals it's not squirrels
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: it's not insects it's not mice it has to be
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: things that you could mistake for a human in some
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: way or another in this case it's different because it
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: actually is a human but you can't kill an enemy
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: because that's not a sacrifice if you kill an enemy
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: in war that doesn't absolve your internal community of the
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: violence that you want to commit against each other and
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: you want to continue the cycle of violence because you
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: accidentally kicked a guy at dinner. So you have to
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: integrate him into the community, but then he does bad
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: things deserving of punishment. So you turn him from an
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: enemy into a friend, sort of back into an enemy,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: and then at that point you can sacrifice him because
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: he's like you enough that he can absolve your sins
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: and make you not want to kill your own community.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: But he's also done enough that you would understand why
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: he's killed. So you can't have an angel killed. You
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: can't have a demon killed. You need somewhere in the middle.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: You need the angel demon. You need the hero plus anti-hero.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: You need someone like you, but unlike you, in order
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: to establish that boundary between the inside of the community
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: and the outside.