The Sacrificial Rumour: Why the Scapegoat Is Chosen, and What the Trance Does

The Sacrificial Rumour

by Jean-Luc Delfin

Behind the varnish of our modern culture and our supposedly rational behaviours are hidden a number of archaic workings. So it is with those rumours whose aim is to stigmatise a scapegoat whose sacrifice — real or symbolic — makes it possible to exorcise the problems of the collectivity.

The shaman of ancient times put himself into a state of trance in order to meet the spirit of the animal hunted by the tribe and to kill it in a symbolic manner. Every “witch hunt” works in the same way: the rumour induces a state of collective trance that makes it possible to denounce and to sacrifice an expiatory victim on the altar of social consensus.

According to Edgar Morin (1), rumour expresses “the part of archaism intrinsic to modernity”. Our era is one of an existential crisis and void that give rise to malaise and unease. One of the functions of rumours is to catalyse these floating anxieties which “give rise to fantasies, seek an archaic refuge and thereby give rise to mechanisms of expulsion and of purification: the immolation of a scapegoat” (1). Such is the origin of the sacrificial rumour.

Beyond the polished aspect of our modern education, there lives in us an archaic memory, hundreds of thousands of years old, for which survival and the struggle against predators were essential preoccupations. That survival depending closely on that of the clan, any attack on the cohesion of the social group and on the collective identity is then experienced as an aggression. In every society there therefore survives the gregarious instinct of the prehistoric horde. This gregarious instinct generates an imaginary of repulsion towards all those who, perceived as strange or foreign, represent a potential danger for social cohesion: eccentrics, foreigners, the “abnormal” or nomads. It is among them that the scapegoat will be chosen whose ritual sacrifice will replenish the collective identity. René Girard has dismantled with talent all the workings of this expiatory mechanism (2).

Narratives of demonisation

Inspired by the sacrificial ritual, there exists a permanent model of persecution against the scapegoat, found in all times and across all cultures. Founded on a series of stereotypes that gravitate around the fantasy of conspiracy, rumour always forms part of the scenario of persecutions, whoever the religious, political or ideological actors may be. He who wants to drown his dog accuses it of rabies: rumour is there to explain — through the mouths of self-proclaimed specialists — how and why the dog caught rabies…

Faced with the complexity of social problems and the feeling of powerlessness it generates, it is tempting to find people responsible to condemn. According to the sociologist Liliane Voyé (3): “At the heart of the rationality that modernity claims to affirm, there insinuate themselves myths and irrationalities which testify to the existence of problems and crises that this rationality succeeds neither in elucidating nor in overcoming, and which seek an ersatz elucidation in occult forces and underground plots with inextricable ramifications.”

Sacrificial rumours are therefore narratives of demonisation that aim to transform a victim of social violence into a scapegoat. These rumours have the function of inducing a collective trance during which the public, fascinated by a narrative that answers the unconscious needs of the collective imaginary, loses contact with its habitual references, frees itself from its prohibitions and its moral censorships in order to express a symbolic or real violence.

A collective trance

The three phases of the collective trance generated by the sacrificial rumour — derealisation, fascination, sacrifice — correspond to the three stages of its diffusion analysed by Edgar Morin: incubation, propagation and metastasis.

Derealisation

During the period of incubation, the imaginary feeds on an impassioned atmosphere propitious to confusion and to the surging up of the sacrificial rumour. The fantasy of conspiracy is the décor in which the actors of the rumour move about. By destabilising the habitual references, this climate tends to efface the critical spirit, the faculties of judgement and the anchoring of the collective consciousness in the real.

This process of derealisation is at the origin of a state of trance. According to Bernard Lempert (4): “What interests rumour is not to state the real, but to substitute itself for it. Its elusive character seeks to make people believe in return that the real is unknowable and that it is useless to try to circumscribe it and to fix it by thought. From the instant that facts, as such, are considered as always bound to escape us and therefore to disappoint us, one might as well turn away from them and no longer concern oneself with their contours.”

Fascination

Then comes the phase of propagation of the rumour. Destabilised, cut off from the real, the collective consciousness is carried away in a phenomenon of trance founded on suggestion and fascination. During a trance, consciousness is focused on a single object, forgetting all the rest: “Having no external object left that could contest it in the slightest, rumour follows a sovereign course. It is certainty par excellence, precisely because it is accountable only to itself. Nothing could contradict it, since it claims to know nothing that is external to it. The recall of facts does not trouble it, since the facts do not concern it, so far do they unfold light years from its own course. The real is for rumour a beyond that leaves it indifferent.” (4)

This indifference to the real and this state of fascination are the typical marks of the state of trance. Like a river irrigated by all its tributaries, the further the rumour moves from the source that gave birth to it, the more it swells, feeding on the way on the fantasies of those who carry it. Fed by intolerance, rumour is the anonymous weapon of a silent majority which often has nothing else to say but to repeat the stereotypes and slogans that are the stock-in-trade of media propaganda. Subject more and more to the imperatives of competition, the role of the media is above all to answer the needs of collective psychology. With the development of the media and of the Internet, rumour uses the media as they feed on it. Thus finding a new force and legitimacy, a simple rumour can transform itself into a collective psychosis.

Sacrifice

Finally comes the period of the metastases that spread through the whole social body. The induction of a state of trance permits the neutralisation of censorships and the expression of violence. It is thus that, in the particular state of trance induced by rumour, the scapegoat is symbolically killed, in the course of an expiatory sacrifice. The American psychologist Ralph Rosnow analyses the functioning of this social violence: “It is useful to represent rumour activity in the same way as one loads a revolver and fires. The rumour’s audience is a handgun, the rumour is a bullet, which is loaded in an atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty. One presses the trigger when one judges that the bullet will hit the mark.” In our democratic societies, rumour is a new form of assassination: “In totalitarian regimes, one eliminates an adversary by firing a bullet into his head. In democracies, the most formidable political weapon is the use of rumour.” (5)

In our era, the expiatory sacrifice can take the form of media lynching, which corresponds to a ritual of black magic during which a very powerful psycho-energetic charge is focused on the scapegoat, the result of a concentration of consciousness of millions of individuals.

How does one get out of it?

One could not reduce the complex field of rumour to one of its modalities, that of the sacrificial rumour. Other forms of rumour exist, which obey other laws of the imaginary and of the collective unconscious. What makes the specificity of the sacrificial rumour is that it is a destructive social violence of which all those may be victims who, involuntarily, are pushed onto the public stage to play, in spite of themselves, the role of scapegoat. The sacrificial rumour tends to operate a veritable bewitchment that seizes the personal intimacy of an individual in order to reduce him to the functional role of scapegoat in an expiatory scenario.

Among the victims, some find inner resources and a circle around them that allows them to resist this bewitchment. Those who come through then know that what does not kill you makes you stronger… There are, by contrast, those who will have great difficulty recovering from this trauma: some will somatise and trigger a grave illness, sometimes fatal. Others, transformed into desocialised zombies, may live through one or several depressive episodes or are destroyed for life, sometimes even going so far as to commit a fatal act, as Pierre Bérégovoy did, for example. The victims of such violence can reconstruct themselves only by understanding the archaic processes at work in this phenomenon: collective trance, expiatory sacrifice, black magic… Therapists specialised in this type of social violence ought to be trained to help the victims of the sacrificial rumour to understand and thereby to advance on the path of healing…

(1) Edgar Morin. La rumeur d’Orléans. Seuil (69).

(2) René Girard. Le Bouc Emissaire, la Violence et le Sacré… Le Livre de Poche.

(3) Liliane Voyé. Des sectes : de la rumeur aux valeurs. Cesnur website. http://www.cesnur.org/testi/des_sectes.htm

(4) Bernard Lempert. Le Retour de l’Intolérance. Sectarisme et Chasse aux Sorcières. Bayard.

(5) Frédéric Lenoir and Nathalie Luca. Sectes, Mensonges et idéaux. Bayard.

To read:

Adam Crabtree. Nos états de transe au quotidien. Le Souffle d’Or

Pascal Froissart. La rumeur. Histoire et fantasmes. Belin

Jean-Noël Kapferer. Rumeurs. Le plus vieux médias du monde. Seuil, coll. “Points”.

Laurent Hincker. Sectes, rumeurs et tribunaux. Psychose collective et dérive de la République. La Nuée Bleue.

Le lynchage médiatique, edited by Guy Coq and Charles Conte, in Panoramiques, Ed. Corlet.

Another text by Jean-Luc Delfin on the page /library/cicns/medias/