“The Scapegoat” by William Holman Hunt (1854)
I posted this over on social media, but it seemed worth preserving in some form:
I’m suddenly fascinated with the concept of the scapegoat. There seems to be a psychological need to incarnate the inchoate and kill it.
I’d never given it a ton of thought. It seemed like a quaint religious ceremony. And, of course, it’s a metaphor we use for imposing undeserved blame on others.
But the metaphor and the religious ceremony almost certainly come from the same impulse – likely to satisfy the need to feel like you’re acting against forces which are harming you but are otherwise too remote or abstract to fight in a tangible way.
So, you pile up the anxieties, formless ideas, and unreachable offenses onto somebody or something that you can hurt and you make them sacrificial in the hopes that your life will improve as a result. If I had to guess, it’s probably something to do with soothing one’s fight or flight instinct.
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