Jesus makes allusion to this, I think. It is the deprivation of victim mechanisms and its terrible consequences that he talks about when he presents the future of the evangelized world in terms of conflict between persons who are closely related:
"Don't think that I am come to bring peace on the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. One's enemies will be those of his own household. (Matthew 10:34-36)"
In a world deprived of sacrificial safeguards mimetic rivalries are often physically less violent, but they insinuate themselves into the most intimate relationships. This is what the text I have just quoted specifies: the son at war with his father, the daughter against her mother, etc. The loss of sacrificial protection transforms the most intimate relationships into their exact opposites so that they become relationships of doubles, of enemy twins. This text enables us to identify the true origin of modern "psychology."
I then picked up what I thought to be unrelated reading--Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I was stunned by the following passage.
Of course the activists--not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic--had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing somthing important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. The are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.
Finally I spent several hours watching Hotel Rwanda and the documentaries attached to it. I was cut to the heart by Paul Rusesabagina's compassionate excuse making for the West. Here is a man who has every reason to be bitter and cynical about Western values and Western peoples, but he is explaining our failure to us in the kindest terms. He expresses hope that we will learn from it and that we will not fail again. Here is a portion of his remarks as I transcribed them. Please forgive any errors in my transcription.
I think the world turned its back on Rwanda because what happened in Somalia. You know America had had a very bad experience in Somalia and this experience was still very fresh in mind. That is why in the Security Council America opposed intervention on having its munitions in Rwanda. And also they had a bad experience of the ten soldiers who were murdered. That is one of the reasons they left us down. A second one is maybe because Rwanda is not worth too much because it doesn't have anything. Rwanda does not produce anything. It has got no diamonds. It has got no gold. It only survives on cofee and tea, the only product to be exported. So, that is maybe why Rwanda was left down. One, some of the reasons why Rwanda was left down, left on its own.
Where is the red cord in the window of the prostitute's house? I find myself desperately seeking it.
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