Aaron Cariotti
speaker
76 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Aaron Cariotti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's an enormous amount of social tension, free-floating anxiety, as Matthias describes it. There's another social theorist, formerly at Stanford University, named Rene Girard, and he described this scapegoating mechanism that we see at play in this particular case of this murder that's being celebrated by so many otherwise known
ordinary, normal-looking people in society that social tension builds up. Girard called it mimetic violence, that people... people begin imitating not only other people's behaviors, but other people's desires. And in this case, it's a desire to purge or expunge the evil from our midst, right? In this case, that's projected onto this individual who is
whatever his faults might be, and perhaps the company that he was running was unjust or corrupt in various ways, as all large corporations to some extent are going to be perhaps in one way or another. But then to place upon him
all of the responsibility or sort of the symbolic distilled injustice, right, that people are feeling, to place it all on this one person and then come to believe that if we can only do away with him, if we can only, in this case, murder him, gun him down in broad daylight, then somehow we can, I don't know, make things right or establish justice.
And you see this scapegoating mechanism repeat over and over again in various societies throughout human history. You see it in the history of religions, you see it in the history of political societies.
It's been very well characterized, very well described, but when you see it in real time with something like this, and in this case it's probably amplified by the power of social media, it's very striking. So not only do we, you know, today versus let's say 20 years ago, not only today do we have many people who are cheering on the murder of this innocent person,
presumably innocent person, let's say, but they're doing it very openly and visibly and publicly because they can post about it on social media or they can actually follow and endorse the account of of someone who's celebrating this or someone who's been accused of this or someone who's cheerleading this. It's very striking to see it in real time.
On the other hand, given what we know about human history and given what we know about human nature, everything that Matthias has described, René Girard and others, it shouldn't surprise us, but it's still shocking when you see it unfolding in real time.
Well, there is a catharsis, but it's always only temporary. That's one of Gerard's observations, is that there'll be immediate reduction of social tension. And probably some people felt some sort of catharsis when they read about the murder of this CEO. It was you.
Just so and it's not going to last very long because people are going to wake up in a week or two and realize, no, actually, my loved one still has cancer and it's still a pain in the neck navigating. And, you know, I was denied coverage for this procedure that I think I need or whatever, whatever it was that was being projected on this person or the health care system as a whole.
is broken and i don't trust doctors i don't trust hospitals i don't trust the whole machinery because of you know whatever this murder is obviously not going to resolve that and so the catharsis does happen but it's always only temporary and then the social tension builds up again and the scapegoating cycle just repeats itself until we step back and get out of this mass formation and realize that it doesn't work and this is why i think matthias is
description of what needs to happen in order to protect yourself from and extricate from this phenomenon of mass formation is so important for us to heed.
If you look at the history of religion, this is a very, very excellent question, really important question. The word scapegoat actually comes from the Hebrew Bible, from the Jewish Old Testament, where essentially the Hebrew people on the Day of Atonement would place the sins of the people onto the head of literally of a goat, and they would take it out into the desert and throw it off a cliff.
They would sacrifice it. as this kind of, again, symbolic ritual of cleansing from sin. And probably there was some degree of reduction of social tension in there. And then you see this in pagan religions. You mentioned the Aztecs. Basically, most religious systems throughout human history, people had the implicit sense that something is off kilter, right? In Christian terms, that would be
that would be called original sin. But the universe is out of whack. Society is out of whack in some ways. The human nature is off kilter. And something needs to be done to sort of make reparation for that. And then in some cases, this took the extreme form of actually sacrificing human beings and not just animals or grain or something that was valuable to the community.
Gerard's insight about Christianity is interesting because he said, yes, you obviously see that scapegoating mechanism in the story of the crucifixion. And it's, I mean, it's a clear Isabel example of the scapegoating mechanism at work. But what the Christian story does to sort of turn that on its head is the revelation that actually, in this case, the victim is innocent.
The victim in this case is entirely innocent, the most innocent victim. um which if we were to uh morally ethically spiritually fully assimilate that truth should rob the scapegoating mechanism of its power of its social force um and you know should be as as you pointed out should be the end of of all of this repeated uh attempts to um
to right all wrongs through the sacrifice of, um, of other human beings. Uh, but of course we haven't assimilated that, that truth fully of the, the innocence of the scapegoated victim. And so, you know, we continue to do it over and over again. We continue, uh, to place, you know, all of our social problems onto the head of a CEO of a company or some political leader or, um, you know,
some other figure that becomes sort of the public object of this repeated mechanism. So I think one of the things that the story of the crucifixion, whether or not you're a Christian, the story of the crucifixion, if you read it very carefully, should remind you of is that the victim, the scapegoated victim in this case, is innocent.
Maybe not wholly innocent, maybe not perfect like Christ, but certainly not responsible for everything that has been placed on his or her head. And as Matthias points out, this cannot be the resolution or the solution to the underlying social tensions, free-floating anxiety, loneliness, isolation, alienation that is currently infecting our society. It won't work.
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