Scapegoat

What Hacker News says

1. fwlrMar 2023
   No, I haven’t, though I will eventually. In the meantime, some other pieces that always come to mind as being definitely on that list are Weaponised Sacredness by Sarah Perry, specifically the section on egregores (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/ ctrl-f “The Egregore”), Rene Girard’s Scapegoat, and as antagonistic reading (threatening ideas you must engage with) Spandrell’s IQ Shredder, and Nick Land’s Hell-Baked. In general the list is about coming to understand little-recognized forces that control the world.
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2. leohFeb 2022
   “The Scapegoat” by Rene Girard, which suggests that we are deeply vulnerable to imitating others; and that when we imitate, this tends to lead to deep conflict, for we often imitate desire for scarce objects (e.g. a certain role at work, a particular romantic partner, etc.). We also tend to imitate hatred for a given party, as we tend to imitate hatred, too; thus engaging in the process of scapegoating, when, in fact, scapegoats are almost always innocent.
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3. 5cott0Jun 2021
   Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton

   Bad Blood - John Carreyrou

   How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story - Billy Gallagher

   Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman

   Whistleblower: My Unlikely Journey to Silicon Valley and Speaking Out Against Injustice - Susan Fowler

   Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener

   What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley - Adrian Daub

   The Scapegoat - René Girard

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4. anotherarrayJan 2017
   The Scapegoat, René Girard.
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5. la_jocondeJul 2025
   In 2020, remote work felt like an inevitability. Studies showed productivity didn’t collapse. Employees were happier. Companies saved on real estate. Tech workers—especially engineers—started doing something radical: living well.

   They fled San Francisco for Lisbon, New York for Buenos Aires, D.C. for Kraków. They claimed the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, slashing their tax bills. They worked from cafés, beaches, and co-living spaces—delivering the same (or better) output than their office-bound peers.

   Then, suddenly, the backlash came. CEOs demanded a Return to Office. Managers moralized about “collaboration.” HR departments spun up surveillance tools to track badge swipes.

   What happened?

   The usual explanations—productivity! culture! innovation!—are weak. Study after study showed remote work didn’t hurt performance. So why the crackdown?

   The Girardian Unmasking

   French philosopher René Girard’s theories on mimetic desire and scapegoating explain this better than any MBA analysis. Here’s how:

   1. Mimetic Desire: The Office as a Shared Delusion

   Girard argued that humans don’t desire things directly—we desire through others. For decades, white-collar workers mimicked a single model of success:

   Live in an expensive city.

   Grind 60-hour weeks.

   Chase promotions for status.

   This system worked because everyone bought into the same fiction. Then came remote work—and a new model emerged:

   Geoarbitrage.

   Tax optimization.

   Lifestyle freedom.

   The moment workers saw colleagues thriving outside the system, the old model started crumbling. The desire shifted. But instead of adapting, corporations panicked.

   2. The Scapegoat Mechanism: Sacrificing the Digital Nomad

   When mimetic rivalry escalates, Girard says societies restore order by uniting against a scapegoat. Remote workers became that scapegoat.

   Executives couldn’t admit the truth (“We’re jealous you escaped”), so they invented moral crises:

   “Remote workers aren’t collaborating!” (Yet Slack/GitHub metrics disproved this.)

   “We need office culture!” (But only after commercial real estate values tanked.)

   “It’s not fair if some work remotely!” (A classic Girardian complaint—masking envy as justice.)

   By forcing RTO, they ritually sacrificed the remote worker to restore the old order.

   3. The Sacred Myth: “Offices = Serious Business”

   Every institution has sacred myths it defends at all costs. For corporations, the myth is: “Real work happens in offices.”

   Remote work exposed this as a lie. Worse, it revealed that:

   Middle managers exist to supervise, not produce.

   Commercial real estate is a paper tiger.

   The tax-optimized nomad is winning capitalism better than the CEO.

   The backlash wasn’t about productivity—it was about protecting the myth.

   Today, hybrid work is a compromise no one loves—the worst of both worlds. But the genie won’t go back in the bottle. The more companies enforce RTO, the more they reveal the system’s fragility.

   If you have a scapegoat story, share it.

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6. wrapupandkeepitNov 2021
   Start with some online summaries. Girard's theories span multiple essays and books. Instead of jumping straight into one of his books, it will help to get some overall context.

   I personally read "The Scapegoat" but Girard is doing literary critique which, like philosophy, can be dense and difficult to read if one isn't used to such texts. Personally, I would like to read "Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure" sometime in the future.

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