Marie Antoinette Archives

The Psychology and Philosophy of Scapegoating

The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ego defence of displacement plays an important part in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group.

The scapegoats—often outsiders, immigrants, minorities, ‘deviants’, or other vulnerable groups—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their uncomfortable feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation. The creation of a villain necessarily implies that of a hero, even if both are purely fictional.

Sometimes it is the villain, or villains, who are in need of an even greater villain. Especially in a time of crisis, unscrupulous leaders and politicians can cynically exploit the ancient and deep-rooted impulse to scapegoat to deflect and distract from their own inadequacies and evade, or seek to evade, their burden of blame and responsibility.

The Ideal Scapegoat

An ideal scapegoat, whether a person or group, is sufficiently different to be blamed, sufficiently conspicuous to be noticed, and sufficiently vulnerable to be attacked.

A historical example of a scapegoat is Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI of France, whom the people called l’Autre-chienne—a pun playing on Autrichienne [Austrian woman] and autre chienne [other bitch]—and accused of being profligate and promiscuous. When the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette arrived in France to marry the then heir to the throne, the country had already been near-bankrupted by the reckless spending of Louis XV, and the naïve foreign princess soon became the unwitting target of the people’s mounting ire.

A scapegoat, such as Marie Antoinette, need not be entirely innocent. Indeed, some impression of guilt may make for a better scapegoat, providing a hook on which to hang greater grievances.

A scapegoat is often a person or group, but can also be an object, animal, or spirit. In fact, even human scapegoats are no longer regarded as fully human but are to varying degrees dehumanised and objectified. Some, such as witches and midwives in mediaeval Europe, are quite literally demonised. The dehumanisation of the scapegoat—which might, in the process, be transformed into a sacred or ritual object—makes the scapegoating both more potent and more palatable, and can even lend it a sense of pre-ordained, cosmic inevitability.

The Madness of the Crowds

According to the philosopher René Girard (d. 2015), owing to our crooked nature, envy gradually builds up in a society until it reaches a tipping point, at which order and reason cede to mob rule, chaos, and violence. To quell this ‘madness of the crowds’ which poses an existential threat to the society, an exposed or vulnerable person or group is singled out as a sink for all the bad feeling, and the bad feeling bred from the bad feeling. The scapegoat does not merely absorb aggression, but unites the aggressors and reduces their diffuse problems to a single, visible face.

After the defeat of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens in 403 BCE, Socrates, with his close links to prominent oligarchs such as Critias, who had been the first and worst among the Thirty, no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation made against him, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for the sufferings of the tyranny. The trial and death of Socrates, as related in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, still makes for compelling reading.

Once he is no more, a scapegoat may be totemised—and all the more so if he is also a martyr, that is, one who opposes or resists a belief or system of beliefs that is being imposed upon him. Today, Socrates is chiefly remembered by his death, with the Stoic Seneca going so far as to opine that ‘it was the hemlock that made Socrates great’ (cicuta magnum Socratem fecit). Socrates himself seems to have anticipated his totemisation, which is one reason he accepted the death sentence even though he could have avoided it, or later escaped. In Plato’s Apology, he seems almost to court death.

The Ultimate Scapegoat

The term ‘scapegoat’ is rooted in the Old Testament, more specifically, in Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus, according to which God instructed Moses and Aaron to sacrifice two goats every year. The first goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled upon the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest was then to lay his hands upon the head of the second goat and confess the sins of the people. Unlike the first goat, this second goat was not to be killed but released into the wilderness together with its burden of sin, which is why it came to be known as a, or the, scapegoat.

The altar that stands in the sanctuary of every church is a symbolic remnant and reminder of this sacrificial practice, with the ultimate object of sacrifice being, of course, Jesus himself. Upon seeing Jesus for the first time, John the Baptist is said to have exclaimed, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ (John 1:29). In Christian iconography, Christ is often depicted as the victorious Lamb of God of the Book of Revelation, with one leg hooked around a banner with a red cross—whence the name of one of Oxford’s most famous public houses, the Lamb & Flag.

The sacrifice prescribed in the Book of Leviticus prefigures that of Jesus, who played the role of the first goat in his human crucifixion, and the role of the second goat, the scapegoat, in his divine resurrection.

Scapegoating is so ingrained in our nature that we scapegoated God himself.