The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice

I've been quietly minding my business developing my ideas of the modern Double Revolution, in physics and in the market economy, and the Great Reaction, in the left's return to the old world, pre-revolution, in reaction to the unbearable force of the Double Revolution.

But this morning I happened on a piece by David Gornoski, who reports on his YouTube interview with Jordan B. Peterson. Gornoski raises the issue of sacrifice, specifically the Christian abolition of sacrifice, the culmination of a process that begins in the Old Testament with the substitution of a ram in the place of Isaac in a sacrifice that Abraham makes to God.

In other words, it used to be that humans would sacrifice their most precious possession, the son or the livestock, in order to propitiate the gods. But now God sacrifices his own Son, so we don't have to.

The concept of innocent sacrifice is developed by René Girard in his concept of the scapegoat. The idea is that human communities avoid the descent into the chaos of the war of all against all by picking out an innocent scapegoat, and in sacrificing that innocent scapegoat they end the war of all against all by collectively turning their rage against the scapegoat.

It is this that Christianity attempts to end, but only tentatively, as we can see in the eruptions of witch-hunts down the ages. It is this that the left has returned to in its scapegoating first of the bourgeoisie in which the rage of of working class is to be resolved, and in the demonization of racists, sexists, and homophobes to resolve the rage of the traditionally marginalized.

Of course I have been writing about this for years, as in "The Left Returns to Sacrifice" back in 2004. I said:

The lefty twentieth century exhibited a return not just to real sacrifice but human sacrifice, the kind that went out when God told Abraham to sacrifice that ram instead of his first-born son.  Wherever left-wing regimes held sway, whether in a socialism-in-one-country version or in a national-socialist-German-worker version, millions of humans were sacrificed to atone for the sins of the world in the most gruesome manner imaginable.

Then, in March of 2016 I wrote that "The White Working Class is the Designated Scapegoat of the Ruling Elites." Yeah, and that was way before Hillary Clinton had spoken about "deplorables." Here is what I said:

Let us turn to René Girard and his Violence and the Sacred. On his theory humans have learned to end escalating violence between factions by sacrificing a victim, a scapegoat. All of the hate and the rage of a divided community is diverted from hating each other and onto the newly selected victim. Somehow, at the civil rights revolution of the Sixties, the white working class got selected as sacrificial victim. Thus the necessity of Archie Bunker, racist, sexist, and bigot, that Norman Lear wanted to teach us all to hate.

Actually, now I think of it, the scapegoating by the left is a tactic to avoid internal violence between factions on the left and directing all their rage on an external scapegoat: the white working class, the patriarchy, racists, sexists, homophobes.

Here's a Google Ngram chart to make the point.

Notice that all these lefty insults took off after the civil rights revolution? Hey kids! Surely 75 percent of the problem of racism and sexism would have been solved by the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And yet there was a mere ripple of "racism" before 1965, and almost nothing about "sexism" and the "patriarchy."

How could this be? Well, I don't know. But it all makes sense if you think of the left as a Great Reaction, and a reactionary return to scapegoating and witch-hunts in a movement of neo-sacrifice.

So, as of right now, we can say that the left represents a Great Reaction characterized by the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

Because that is what the sacrifice of the scapegoat is all about, it is the clarification of all social and tribal rivalries into the fascist dictum of "all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." To make that work, to totalize everything into the state, you have to unite the mob against a sacrificial scapegoat.

Notice how Donald Trump is completely against the Great Reaction. Is he a feminist? No. He is for women, he is for men, he is for everyone. Is he a racist? No, he is for the American nation state, to make America Great Again. And he is removing the stake from the heart of the white working class.

It is obvious, in retrospect, to realize that the astonishing Double Revolution of our era, in physics and in the Great Enrichment, should have provoked a Great Reaction in the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

The point is that the exchange economy removes the need for bloodthirsty tribalism, because the means of existence no longer depend of the food-growing land that must be protected against all odds, because the need for a great lord to shelter us from the Vikings no longer applies, because the society that interacts through the exchange economy no longer needs to vent its rage on designated scapegoats.

But it takes a while for everyone to learn the new ways and get with the program.

And that is why I propose my Perfect Plan for the ruling class. First, it should gently teach the workers and peasants how to wive and thrive in the market economy and learn its ways. Second, it should treat the ordinary middle class with compassion and understanding rather than contempt and marginalization.