The Collective Illusion - The Power of False Gods

Humans are not just individual actors; we are deeply social creatures, and our desires and fears are often imitative. We look to others to learn what is desirable, what is acceptable, what is taboo. This basic mimetic (imitative) tendency is a glue of culture - it allows us to share language, norms, and dreams - but it also has a dark side. The French scholar René Girard proposed that much of human conflict arises from mimetic desire: we want what others want, simply because they want it. Two children in a room full of toys will often fight over the one toy both of them see the other playing with. Scale this up to adults and resources - land, wealth, status, romantic partners - and you have a recipe for rivalry and violence. According to Girard, when many individuals mirror each other’s desires, a community can be pulled into a vortex of competition and envy where everyone becomes everyone else’s obstacle. If unchecked, this can escalate to mimetic violence - all-against-all chaos.

How, then, have human societies survived historically, given this tendency toward internal conflict? Girard’s answer is provocative: communities have often restored peace through the scapegoat mechanism. Essentially, when tension and violence reach a fever pitch, societies unify by collectively blaming and eliminating a single victim or subgroup. The scapegoat - often someone slightly different or marginal (an outsider, a minority, or a person of high status who becomes a convenient target) - is accused of causing the disorder. As Girard puts it, “The scapegoat mechanism is what arrests mimetic violence and, at the same time, lays the foundation of a renewed social order.” In a crisis where everyone is fighting everyone, if suddenly all can agree “X is the cause of our troubles”, and if they channel their aggression toward X (through exile, ostracism, or killing), the cyclical revenge can stop. All but the victim are suddenly united on the same side, and for a time, peace reigns.

This process is largely unconscious in early cultures; people truly believe the scapegoat is guilty or somehow the cause of the chaos. Girard theorizes that after the fact, societies often mythologize what happened. The murdered victim - now unable to defend themselves - is paradoxically remembered as both a culprit (the one whose presence caused the strife) and a savior (because their removal brought peace). Thus, many ancient religions and myths carry traces of a founding murder. A person or animal is killed to end a plague or war, and later worshipped as a god or revered as a hero. Girard notes that, for example, in myths and legends around the world, the god or hero is frequently someone who was different (lame, foreign, ugly, or aristocratic) and was violently killed by the community. The community’s collective murder brings a catharsis - temporarily, people feel relieved of their aggression - and so the victim is sacralized: seen as having had a kind of magical power to both cause and resolve the community’s strife. These are the “false gods” of the scapegoat cycle: the idols that demand blood. In archaic societies, this cycle became ritualized - sacrificial ceremonies in which a victim (human or animal) would be regularly slain to keep violence at bay. The logic is brutally simple: channel the community’s aggression onto a designated sacrificial victim (a proxy), rather than let it stew and explode unpredictably.

While modern people might think we are far removed from primitive sacrifices, the truth is that the scapegoating impulse is alive and well - it has merely taken new forms. Consider the French Revolution as a historical case. In 1789 the French overthrew the old order of king and aristocracy, inspired by high ideals of liberty and equality. Yet by 1793, the revolution had descended into the Reign of Terror. Faction after faction in the revolutionary government accused others of betraying the revolution. Waves of executions by guillotine swept Paris and the provinces; tens of thousands were killed as “enemies of the people.” This was scapegoating on a massive scale. The revolutionaries were under immense stress - facing foreign wars, internal economic collapse, and ideological division - and they coped by continually finding a culprit for each crisis: the King and Queen, the aristocrats, the clergy, then moderate republicans, then even former radical allies who were deemed not radical enough. The Jacobins effectively sacralized the concept of “The Republic” or “Reason” and anyone seen as a threat to that sacred ideal was marked for sacrifice (execution). The collective chanting at the executions and the quasi-religious fervor for the Republic show how close this modern political violence was to ancient sacrificial rites. Indeed, observers at the time remarked that the revolution was “eating its own children.” Once the initial external enemies were gone, the dynamic turned inward, ever narrowing the definition of purity and casting out those who failed to meet it. The Terror finally ended only when its chief architects, like Robespierre, themselves became the scapegoats - executed to purge the fever and allow society to reset.

In the 20th century, totalitarian regimes provided even starker examples. Under Stalin in the Soviet Union, whenever the utopia promised by Communism failed to materialize, the state hunted for scapegoats: “wreckers,” “saboteurs,” spies, or entire classes of people (wealthier peasants called kulaks, for instance) who were blamed for economic shortfalls or dissent. In the Great Purges of the late 1930s, millions of Soviet citizens were accused, tortured into confessing imaginary plots, and either executed or sent to the Gulag. This served to channel public frustration (over hardship and the regime’s failures) toward internal enemies. Each purge temporarily gave the society a sense of renewed unity and righteous purpose - the feeling of cleaning house - even as it consumed its own. Similarly, in Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler rose to power by deftly exploiting the scapegoat mechanism: he pointed to the Jews (and also Roma, homosexuals, and other minorities) as the secret source of Germany’s woes - the loss of World War I, the economic troubles, the moral decline. By uniting the majority of “Aryan” Germans against these purported culprits, Hitler bound the society together in a perverse religion of racial purity. Nazi propaganda relentlessly dehumanized Jews and depicted them as an evil contaminant. When the regime carried out the horrific “Final Solution” - the mass extermination of European Jewry - many ordinary Germans went along, some out of fear, but others out of a genuine (if tragically misplaced) belief that eliminating this scapegoated group would heal their nation. The aftermath of the Holocaust revealed in the starkest terms the lie of the scapegoat: the murdered victims had never been the cause of Germany’s problems, and their elimination solved nothing - it only added an indelible stain of guilt and trauma to German history. Yet while it lasted, the scapegoat illusion was powerful enough to co-opt a civilized nation into industrial-scale murder.

Even in democratic societies that pride themselves on individual rights, scapegoating tendencies emerge, especially in times of uncertainty. We see it in the way political partisans demonize the other side, sometimes elevating political leaders to near-messianic status while portraying opponents as quasi-diabolical. Such rhetoric goes beyond normal disagreement and takes on a religious intensity - the language of absolute good versus evil - essentially turning political movements into faiths and opponents into sacrificial offerings (at least figuratively). We also see scapegoating in social panics: for instance, during economic crises, immigrants or minority groups are sometimes unfairly blamed for job losses or social ills, sparking hate crimes or discriminatory laws. A classic example was the Red Scare in the United States after World War I and again after World War II, when fear of communism led to witch-hunts for supposed subversives (the McCarthy era), ruining many innocent lives to exorcise an amorphous societal anxiety.

In the hyper-connected environment of today’s internet and social media, the scapegoat mechanism has found new outlets - what some call “cancel culture” or online mob justice. A single errant remark or unpopular opinion expressed on Twitter can lead to a virtual stoning, as thousands of strangers pile on insults, threats, and calls for the person to lose their job or status. The speed and scale of these dogpiles can be astonishing. Within hours, someone’s name can be trending worldwide as the embodiment of whatever is outraging the crowd that day. Often the targets of such shamings are relatively powerless individuals - a random private citizen who made a tasteless joke, or a low-level employee caught on a viral video behaving rudely. The online collective, fueled by mimetic outrage (seeing others express anger, we become angrier), turns the person into a symbol of a larger evil - and then attempts to obliterate their reputation and presence. This provides those participating a rush of righteous satisfaction and camaraderie (“We did something about X problem by destroying this person”). Yet, just as in ancient rituals, this sacrifice does not truly solve the underlying issues (be it racism, sexism, or whatever the offense represented); it merely vents anger for a time. Tomorrow the cycle may well repeat with a new victim. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who we met earlier, had a famous line: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” In the collective fervor to fight perceived monsters, groups often end up mirroring the very cruelty and intolerance they believe they are opposing.

The phrase “false gods” in this chapter’s title refers to the ideologies, idols, and collective delusions that drive the scapegoating process. Whether it’s the image of a pure race, a classless utopia, the absolute correctness of one’s political tribe, or the supposed moral perfection of a social movement, these are held up as sacred ends that justify transgressing normal ethical limits. The victims sacrificed on their altars are deemed necessary offerings. Girard noticed that archaic religions often had dual-faced gods - beings of violence and peace - born from scapegoating events. In modern times, we create abstract gods: Nation, Party, Ideology, even “The Market” or “Science” (when politicized) can become an unquestionable authority that demands human sacrifices (sometimes literal, more often in the sense of ruined lives or forsaken ethics). These are “false” gods not only in a theological sense but in a practical one: they promise salvation (if only we eliminate this group, implement this revolution, silence these heretics, then harmony will come) but deliver only fleeting unity followed by deeper guilt and division.

Is there an alternative to this grim cycle? Yes: the alternative is truth and voluntary atonement in place of blame and forced expiation. Instead of holding some other responsible for all our ills, each person and group can take responsibility for their share. This requires humility and a willingness to sacrifice one’s pride. In essence, it means practicing the opposite of scapegoating: forgiveness and self-examination. We see glimmers of this alternative in practices like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid, where the focus was on truth-telling and forgiveness rather than vengeance on former oppressors. That process was far from perfect, but it averted what many expected to be a bloodbath by asking both victims and perpetrators to voluntarily confront painful truths, apologize, and forgive. This is ordered sacrifice at the collective level: the sacrifice of revenge, the sacrifice of the “right” to pay back wrongs, in order to break the cycle of violence. It is a hard path - it goes against the instincts of anger and domination - but it points toward a more lasting peace.

The world’s great moral religions at their core urge this transcendent route. Buddhism teaches compassion for all, even those who harm us, recognizing that harm comes from ignorance (akin to illness) rather than inherent evil - thus, the “enemy” is also a suffering being who needs truth, not a demon to be destroyed. Christianity places at its center the figure of an innocent victim (Christ) who prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” revealing the blindness of those caught in the scapegoat frenzy and imploring an end to it. In the Christian narrative, God Himself takes on the role of the scapegoat victim to expose the mechanism and offer a new way: one of reconciliation through love, not violent unanimity. We will explore that revelation more in a later chapter. The key point here is that voluntary sacrifice - of ego, of ill-will, of the insistent need to blame - is the remedy for the collective illusion of the scapegoat. It is a medicine that must be taken by each person involved, freely; it cannot be imposed by force (imposing it by force would just be another form of scapegoating!).

In a society that chooses transcendence over raw power, conflicts are certainly not absent, but they are approached differently. Rather than rallying people into mobs, leaders and citizens alike have the courage to say, “We all have a part in this; let’s each do our part to fix it,” and “Even if we strongly disagree, I will not dehumanize you.” Such a society builds unity through shared values and sacrifices - perhaps everyone giving a little rather than someone being made to give all. For example, in a severe economic downturn, instead of one group being scapegoated, all sectors might agree to tighten belts a notch (shared sacrifice) and work together until recovery. It sounds idealistic, but history provides examples where broad-based cooperation and sacrifice saw nations through peril (as Britain did in World War II, when all classes endured rationing and bombardment together, or how various countries responded in unified ways to natural disasters).

To sum up, the “collective illusion” is that if we can just find the right person or group to blame and cast out, we will solve our problems. This has proven time and again to be a false cure - a momentary fix that often leads to moral disaster. The real antidote is harder: it involves truth, repentance, forgiveness, and yes, sacrifice - but the right kind of sacrifice, freely given, not forced on a victim. Societies that learn this lesson edge closer to a form of transcendence: they break out of the ancient cycle of violence and open up the possibility for genuine and lasting peace.

Having examined how the dark side of our mimetic nature can entrap whole communities in violence and delusion, we will now turn to a broader historical perspective: why do civilizations rise and fall? In Part II, we shift from diagnosing these patterns to understanding the cycle of collapse - how the loss of meaning and the abuse of power can doom even great societies, and what lessons we might draw to avoid that fate.