Triangulations I: The Founding Murder Behind Normies, Sociopaths, and Nerds

René Girard's Scapegoat Mechanism x Venkatesh Rao's The Gervais Principle

via DALL-E 3

In 2018, the extremely online writer

Venkatesh Rao

destabilized a small corner of my mind.

That was when I read The Gervais Principle, his series of essays that revealed a secret layer in the social games played in the office—at least to me. By then, I was a corporate tech veteran and was several years into my entrepreneurial journey. I had a pool of experiential data to map into Rao's model. And I hated how well it fit.

Rao uses the American sitcom The Office (2005 - 2013) as his palette for illustrating these social dynamics. Rao writes in his introduction:

The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.

Rao then presents three archetypes, each with a different view of the game they’re playing:

• Sociopaths are skilled at navigating organizational politics and usually focus on their personal ambitions. They manipulate the system to their advantage, often at the expense of others.

• The Clueless are true believers in the official rules of the game. They buy into conventional narratives, oblivious to the manipulation and power plays around them.

• Losers see and understand the sociopath's game but resign themselves to supporting whoever is in power.

The comedic engine of The Office is fueled by the cluelessness of Micheal Scott, the show’s main character. The sitcom is a “mockumentary,” so we see him explain his cleverness in applying leadership techniques to the off-camera interviewer. We then cringe and laugh at the contrast between his self-perceived wisdom and his actual ineptitude.

Reading The Gervais Principle was the first time I felt my mind changing towards a view of the world that I didn’t want. In internet-speak, it was a "black pill"—a gateway to disillusionment and nihilism. Yet that was not the most disturbing part of that experience. As I was reading The Gervais Principle, this thought slowly crept across my mind: am I Michael Scott?

René Girard, my Virgil

It took five years, but I finally emerged from that purgatory.

Once again, René Girard showed me the way. As I relayed in The Three-City Problem of Meaningless Work, Girard's Mimetic Theory led to my biggest breakthrough in mastering desire since I learned practical virtue ethics in my teens. That experience made me dive deeper into his ideas, thus this current season of Explorations.ph. In this first part of three essays, I'll present the "scapegoat mechanism," which is at the core of Girard's model of social dynamics. The scapegoat mechanism is more fundamental than Rao's triangle and can reveal the latter's source in human evolution.

Girard also gave me a model of how to approach Rao in his critique of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, which I will also touch upon here. To Girard, Nietzsche is as profoundly insightful as he is metaphysically wrong.

The prelude to this series used “antifragility” and evolution to make sense of the mechanism behind life’s growth in its scope, complexity, and ability to replicate itself. These two concepts will also play key roles in the exploration below. Girard’s models flow from the logic of evolution. Similar to how each of our organs is a record of a successful adaptation in our biological evolution, cultural universals are also solutions to the threats of surviving as a society. For instance, how come all cultures have a form of ritual sacrifice? Girard’s answer paints a picture of humanity even grimmer than Rao’s. Yet, by grounding Rao’s triangle to human nature, Girard allows us to create “clear pill” triangles. He also brings us to places beyond mere escape from Rao’s world, giving us a new lens to view science and militant postmodernism.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics (1982) relays the power struggles, alliances, and social dynamics within a community of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands. The most exciting parts of the book (appealing to my primal instincts, perhaps) are when the alpha male is challenged for the top position. This involves political maneuvers, betrayals, and bloody confrontations.

According to Girard, the difference between humans and other animals is that the dominance hierarchy among non-humans tends to be stable when established. In Chimpanzee Politics, we follow Nikkie from childhood until he grows strong enough—physically and socially—to challenge Luit, the alpha. Luit, when defeated, accepts his fate.

There is a huge gap in the capacity for episodic memory between humans and chimps, our closest relatives among primates. (Dogs are probably a more accessible reference point for most of us—they effortlessly live in the present.) Perhaps this is the neurological explanation for the ubiquity of violence that Girard paints in our long process of hominization. Acts of violence are never forgotten and are paid back with interest. A cycle of vengeance starts, and the nascent society dies with the blood feud.

This inevitable crisis is the Great Filter for a primate species with episodic memory. The ones that passed through this filter are the societies we can observe, the ones that survived. The features common in these societies—e.g., taboos and sacrifice—are likely part of the solution.

According to Girard, this solution has to be more instinctive and mechanistic than the primordial social contract. The alternative he presents is the "scapegoat mechanism." As the cycle of violence escalates, a society eventually reaches a tipping point where unchecked aggression and vengeance threaten its very existence. The scapegoat mechanism emerges as a subconscious response to this existential threat.

In this mechanism, the collective violence of the group gets directed towards an individual or a subgroup blamed for the prevailing crises. By uniting against this scapegoat, the community releases its pent-up tensions and restores peace and order.

This sudden restoration of peace feels magical to the group. To Girard, this experience is the source of another universal feature of archaic societies: the sacred. Over time, this mechanism becomes ritualized, and human sacrifices are substituted with animals (though not always). The sacrifice is eventually justified by myths, legends, and religious narratives. To Girard, gods are not the cause of sacrifice; sacrifice is the source of gods.

Survival Before Truth

Your interest in this topic likely means you have received years of training in scientific thinking. This comes with some blind spots. According to Girard, we tend to think that myths from archaic societies are primitive explanations of the physical world, like science with bad tools and methodology. Yet, if we follow the logic of evolution, the earliest maps of reality must have evolved with one purpose: the survival of society.

Venkatesh Rao reflected on his own blindspots in a 2016 interview on the Farnham Street podcast. He says that there are three decision-making styles. What we call “scientific thinking," he calls "conceptual reasoning." A recent discovery for him during that interview was how most of the world actually does not think this way. Instead, most people view the world through two other styles: "ethical reasoning" and "affiliational thinking." Ethical reasoners start with a deep sense of good and evil and make their decisions based on this fundamental option. Affiliational thinkers select an identity and then make choices socially acceptable to their team.

Rao speculates that affiliational thinking is probably the most ancient style among the three, and conceptual reasoning is the most recent. This aligns with Girard's scapegoat mechanism and a popular theory on what made homo sapiens the dominant and the only remaining human species: our ability to imagine an "us" and a "them." We outplayed other species with this cognitive innovation, but it also made it inevitable that we completely eliminated them. Without an external enemy, this tendency turns its dividing gaze inward, threatening a cycle of murder. The scapegoat mechanism breaks this cycle by picking a them that all of us can unite against.

Concealed Murder

As I read what I have just written above, I’m reminded of Richard Feynman's famous dictum, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." The previous sections show that I consider myself part of team science. The stereotypical weakness of this team, exemplified by Micheal Scott, is cluelessness to unspoken social rules, thus earning the label of "nerd" or, in the extremely online world, "autist." Being masters of intellectual combat, we turned these slurs into a badge of honor. The kid ignorant of power structures and social conventions is the only one who tells the emperor that he is naked.

This, of course, is a well-designed lie. Throughout my life, I gained esteem by topping exams, getting high grades, and winning academic awards. Behind the armor of my self-identification with science, truth, and even autism lies what might be my greatest fear: not being a special kid. Or in internet-speak, being a "normie." Yet when the knives are out, even just figuratively, do I really have the courage to speak the truth, and the self-awareness to say no to the easy choice of ensuring my own safety by taking part in the mob's witch-hunt?

I would like to say yes, but what if the probable answer is actually no? What if this tendency is so embedded in human nature that, in most cases, I won't even notice that I’m part of a mob? And when I do take part in scapegoating, wouldn't I most likely build a case to prove the scapegoat’s guilt to justify my involvement?

Girard observes that this lie is the key to understanding ancient myths. The miracle of peace that comes from the sacrifice of the scapegoat is told and retold across generations. Let's say it’s now my turn to retell these stories. My ancestors, of course, cannot be monsters (no society is without piety for their ancestors, except the postmodern West, as we will see later). This means the scapegoat must be guilty of the most unspeakable crimes to merit such a punishment. As the scapegoat's guilt increases, my ancestors' crimes diminish.

In his 1982 book The Scapegoat, Girard presents examples of scapegoating in more recent times to expose this lie. For instance, Jews in 14th-century France were blamed for epidemics. For their guilt to make sense, supernatural powers had to be ascribed to them. This is unbelievable in today’s age of science. And we know from historical records that massacres of Jews have occurred repeatedly in Europe.

We can see the same pattern with the literal witch-hunts later on in Europe and America. We know, scientifically, that the accusations against the witches couldn't have been true. The more likely explanation is that the Jews and the witches were scapegoats. The texts from the accusers follow the same pattern as the myths that obscure the ancient murders. Yet, these newer stories fail to hide the crime. Why is this?

The Age of Truth

(“The West” is more temporal than geographical!)

If you hang out in the nerdier corners of the internet, you’ll eventually encounter this drawing of a plane with red dots.

This drawing is based on World War II planes. The U.S. military wanted to add armor to its aircraft to protect them from anti-aircraft fire. To determine the best places to add the armor, they looked at the planes that returned from missions and marked where they had taken the most damage. These damaged areas were typically represented with red dots or markings on a diagram of a plane.

However, Abraham Wald, a mathematician, pointed out a flaw in this approach. The military was only considering the planes that had returned, not the ones that had been shot down. Wald argued that the areas without red dots on the returning planes (the places where these planes were not getting hit) were the areas that should be armored. This is because planes that got hit in those areas did not return from their missions; hence, they were the actual vulnerable spots.

This cognitive blindspot is called survivorship bias. If we conclude from the previous section that the Europeans and Americans from the 14th to 18th centuries were particularly prone to scapegoating, we would be committing the same error that Wald pointed out. If the map of human nature that Girard created is true, all societies have blood on their hands, and the massacres of the Jews and the burning of witches were just the survivors of the obscuring tendency of narratives told by the guilty parties.

According to Girard, something happened in history that unveiled the lie at the heart of the scapegoat mechanism. Girard says this unveiling can be seen in various sacred scriptures like the Hindu Upanishads and Buddhist thought. The world-changing revelation, however, comes from the Jewish scriptures, and especially in the life and death of the first-century rabbi Jesus of Nazareth.

The Golden Bough (1890) presents us with Christianity's similarities with older myths, like the miraculous birth of gods, their death, and their rebirth. Most scholars today consider this work outdated, but similar ideas are still used to discredit Christianity. Girard says that defenders of Christianity should embrace its similarity to myths worldwide instead of denying it. Myths and Christ's sacrifice stem from the same crisis and solution. The similarities highlight their essential difference. Myths are always written from the perspective of the mob, the perpetrators of the scapegoat mechanism. In contrast, the Jewish and Christian scriptures are written from the perspective of the victim. This revelation of the guiltless victim reaches its summit in the crucifixion of Jesus. The Christian gospels are certain of his innocence, yet he is sacrificed as a scapegoat, the spotless "Lamb of God."

They had to be similar for Christ to unveil the scapegoat mechanism. Christ’s sacrifice was like an invincible wrench thrown into its engine. The crisis brought about by Christ was a trap for satan, which, for Girard, is the personification of this murderous solution to chaos.

The spread of Christianity has also spread this shift in the fundamental choice of who to side with: from the strong to the weak. Siding with the victim is a choice against the lie at the foundation of all societies, the scapegoat mechanism. This fundamental option for the downtrodden has produced societies based on truth-seeking instead of the peace that stems from murder; societies where pogroms and witch-hunts can no longer be hidden.

The Antifragility of Societies Based on Truth

In the Farnham Street interview mentioned above, Rao speculates that ethical reasoning, a worldview that starts from morality, is more recent than affiliational thinking but is older than conceptual reasoning. This also aligns with the history that we laid out above. However, Rao and his interviewer miss an important connection between the second stage, ethical thinking, and the third stage, conceptual reasoning, perhaps because they, like me, are hard science supremacists.

In the same interview, Rao speculates how conceptual reasoning is probably only 500 years old. This seems to be the standard hard science version of history. See, for example, the first paragraph of the Introduction of David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity. It’s as if the scientific mindset was created ex nihilo during the Scientific Revolution that started in the 16th century and continues today.

To Girard, atheistic science is the patricidal child of Christianity. Truth-seeking rests on the fundamental moral choice that comes with siding and defending the innocence of the victim: that sacrificing truth is a false path to peace. This choice has become so rooted in this age of truth that we assume that it’s the natural state of humans. Yet, if we look at archaic societies, we will see that this is false.

Aside from myths, literature, scriptures, and history, Girard built his maps of reality from the ethnographies of the last archaic societies. I've recently enrolled in a master's program in Anthropology and have started reading some of these accounts. Of course, Girard has primed me to see how truth is sacrificed for the sake of harmony in these accounts, but it’s remarkable how his models fit so well with ethnographies across cultures.

These archaic societies have disappeared not because their members have died out but because they have entered the Age of Truth. Antifragile systems always outlive fragile and robust ones. The prelude to this series used the system of life to show the difference between fragile systems (easily destroyed by stress), robust systems (resistant to destruction from stress), and antifragile systems (benefits from stress).

Antifragility requires a record of truth. The genome, for instance, is a record of the kinds of bodies that can thrive in specific environments. In the case of societies, justice systems based on truth will inevitably replace those based on deceitful harmony (see the anthropologist's surprise in the court case relayed in A Dispute in Donggo). Societies based on the truth of the natural world (i.e., science and engineering) will overtake societies based on myths that explain natural phenomena (e.g., sacrificing children to the sea to survive a storm in The Argonauts of the Western Pacific).

The Age of Truth benefits from some stress. The mistakes humanity has made in this age (e.g., bad systems of government and bad scientific theories) have made society better after learning from them. This antifragility of societies based on truth is the source of David Deutsch's optimism in The Beginning of Infinity.

The Other Patricidal Child

Those with a social science background might cringe at Girard's anthropological sources, as these studies were made mostly by white colonialist men. Even The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, considered a pioneering masterpiece in ethnography, is now considered "problematic," especially after the release of the diary of its author, Bronisław Malinowski.

We can also trace this hypersensitivity to "studying down" to Christianity, by way of Nietzsche. The 2021 book Philosophy's Violent Sacred by Duane Armitage presents a Girardian critique of Nietzsche and postmodernism. The book shows us a side of Nietzsche rarely expressed by his internet champions. Nietzsche also saw the fundamental choice made by The Age of Truth—the choice of the weak over the strong—and famously despised it.

Nietzsche is considered to be the precursor of postmodernism because of this skepticism of objective truth and distrust of "metanarratives." To him, power is more fundamental than truth: the ones in the position to speak frame the world in their favor. Aside from Christianity, he also despised modern science because of its basis in truth. From Philosophy's Violent Sacred:

We could say then that Nietzsche’s thinking atheistic modern science through to its essence leads Nietzsche to his own perspectivism, which we would call today his “postmodernism.” There are no truths, only perspectives, or, as Nietzsche sometimes puts it, “There are no facts, only interpretations”—even this itself being an interpretation—and “so much the better.” As we have seen earlier, Nietzsche sums up his perspective as such: “The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fable . . . it is ‘in flux,’ as something in a state of becoming, as falsehood always changing but never getting near truth: for—there is no ‘truth’”.

According to

Cleo Kearns

, the unconcealable mass murder that was the holocaust challenged the philosophers of Europe "to a profound revision of the central tenets of many inherited belief systems, including but not limited to theological ones, and of the ways in which they are held and deployed." They blamed metanarratives like nationalism and religion for the unprecedented scale of violence that erupted in the continent. To Girard, this is a metaphysical kind of scapegoating. Postmodernity blamed truth for violence when the actual culprit was and is the mimetic rivalry that stems from human nature.

The activist siblings of postmodern philosophy—"critical theories" like Marxism, feminism, post-colonial nationalism, critical race theory, and gender theory—are all downstream of Christianity and Nietzsche. They retain Christianity's fundamental option for the downtrodden (unlike the Nazis), each choosing a victim to defend. Following Nietzsche and seeing the continued inequality and injustice in the world, they also scapegoat truth. If power is more fundamental than truth, as Nietzsche declared, then all maps of reality made by the holders of power are tainted by their “positionality.” To militant postmodernist scholars, these maps must be redrawn from below.

Like a mirror image of the victims they defend, critical theories also create persecutors to resent and attempt to destroy: capitalist pigs, the patriarchy, neo-colonialists, racists, and transphobes. They scapegoat the strong in the name of justice for the weak. This sacrifice includes their own ancestors, a phenomenon unique to the postmodern West. They are non-Christian in their role in this cycle of unforgiving resentment and violence. Let us not forget that the mother of all critical theories, Marxism, resulted in the deaths of millions. They are "satan casting out satan," in the words of Girard.

The Conclusion of This Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell theorized that many myths and stories from around the world share a common structure, which he called the "monomyth" or "hero's journey." This structure consists of a series of stages that the protagonist, or hero, must pass through in their quest. Here is a diagram of the Hero’s Journey from its Wikipedia page.

I realized that I also went through this journey, and this essay is its chronicle. My view of the world was disturbed by Rao’s revelation. This led me to a five-year quest. Help from beyond came through René Girard. His ideas brought me face-to-face with the violence and deception at the depths of human nature and within myself.

Here’s the revelation at the abyss. First, it is now plain to see that Rao’s triangle employs a Nietzschean sleight-of-hand. Rao’s triangle is dark in the sense that it obscures reality.

Rival Voices

, whom we will meet again in Part II of this series, distilled the Gervais Principle with this Tweet:

Those who play the game (sociopaths)

Those who don’t (losers)

Those who don’t even realize a game is being played (clueless)

The unspoken definition of “the game” here is straight out of Nietzsche. In Rao’s triangle, the game we play in society is fundamentally about power. In reality, each archetype is playing a different game. If we are to build a triangle that assigns equal metaphysical grounding to each corner, we will end up with three epistemologies or three map-making styles:

• The epistemology harmony

• The epistemology power

• The epistemology truth

Next, we can redesign Rao’s triangle without the Nietzschean distortion based on what we saw in this journey.

In Part II, we will dive into this triangle and others like it, from

visakan veerasamy

’s “Friendly Ambitious Nerd” to Christology’s “Priest, Prophet, and King.”

With that, we end this part of our journey. What wisdom can we bring home? As someone inside the triangle of truth, the one thing I want is a map that corresponds better to the territory of reality—a map that perhaps will help me live a better life. This is the goal of parts II and III of Triangulations.

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Hat tip to Samantha Law, who had a huge positive impact on the structure of this essay. Thanks as well to

Dave Marulli

, Raymond Ng, and

el Jefe

for reading and giving suggestions for improving it towards this version. And thanks to

Dylano

for the last-minute support to reject feedback and keep the opening sentence.

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Plug: My first book, How to Turn Ideas Into Reality, is available at Gumroad and Amazon.