Scapegoating: the myth, the reality, the lie

We are in an upside-down world, and it's not quite in a way we are conditioned to believe

I am going to start and end this story with videos of John Trudell, you’ll see why, and how it all connects. If the only thing you do is watch them, I have done my job. But if you read my humble ponderings and connect the dots, I’ll be even happier, they are from my heart, and they are about a topic that may sound lofty but it is actually is a very practical topic that offers a partial answer to the question about how we got broken, and how to start swimming in the direction of being whole. (The link to Friday’s call is at the end.)

“Scapegoating”: reality vs. lie

This morning, as I was washing dishes and thinking about how the world works and what I want to write about, something exciting dawned on me. Remember I mentioned earlier that I wanted to write about scapegoating and how the psychological principle behind the alleged “pagan” ritual behavior is always interpreted through the modern, largely institutional  (“designed by the higher-ups for the peasants”) theological psychological lens? (If you missed the original discussion, see my interview with Celia where we talked about René Girard.)  

Well, that deliberately misleading interpretation of where the principle of scapegoating came from is, for one, a massive psyop, and for two, an emotion that lies at the very core of the great imbalance in the world that our sorry arses are suffering from today!!

We’ve been lied to (well, that is shocking, lol). Seriously though. The psychological principle of scapegoating as we understand it today (loading negative energy on an innocent animal and killing it in cold blood), the principle that is being ascribed to “pagans,” is certainly in existence in the world of today but it’s recent and has nothing to do with “pagans” at all.  I will go into detail of my seemingly counter-intuitive claim in a sec but I can say that I tried to figure it out for many years, and once I started realizing for had been done to us, I just wanted to scream.

My belief is that  the tactic of harming innocent victims—vampiring them, in a way—and making them comply with being “sacrificed” by authorities, based on their, victims’, learned emotional helplessness (usually based on the feeling of defectiveness of some sort)—is a part of the metaphorical centuries-old spell, a part of the Mother of All Psyops. It seems like that particular spell was invented the people with not-so-good intentions for the purpose of, what else, taking over the world.  And they treacherously put the words in the mouth of God and harmed a lot of innocent people this way.

But wait, before we continue with the topic of scapegoating, let us take a step back and talk about the most important thing in the world.

I believe we are here for love

What is our life on Earth about? I believe that our life on Earth is the Creator’s experiment in which the mysterious non-dogmatic Creator, whom we can’t understand, wanted to see what happens to perfect Love when it goes on a potentially difficult journey to an imperfect world, with its struggles, confusions, and of course, free will.

Love is easy under perfect conditions in the spiritual world where things make sense. But what happens to our Love when we face oppression, injustice, pain, loss, betrayal, abandonment, or abuse? How will Love that we carry behave when we do good, and it is sometime met with bad? I believe that this world is kind of a stress test for Love. At least, that’s a theme that appear in different cultures, and I am subscribed to that idea. (An important thing to remember is that acting on love is not at all the same as being a door mat.)

As we express our love, insist on love, defend our love, or temporarily betray our love, we, the spirits on a mission, partake in the Creation, and change the world. We are not victims. We can’t be victims.  We are on an important mission, where a part of the mission depends on being able to swim  through uncertainty and pain and defend our love in the dark. But at any point in time, even when it hurts, we aren’t anyone’s victims, our mission is important and authorized by the Creator, we are dignified.

Thus, in the so called “pagan” cultures, at least the few I am a little bit familiar with, the general philosophy and “feel” of life are much different from how we are trained to feel in today’s world. There is no guilt, no begging, no defectiveness in the institutional theological sense. Like John Trudell puts it in one of the videos, there is no guilt but there is a sense of responsibility for doing our job.

Free will

I have written about it a coupe of times, including in the story where I made a logical case for throwing the fear out. It’s a reference to a myth that appears in a number of old cultures from around the world.

To remind you, the idea is that before we decide to come to Earth, we choose a destiny (a “task list” of sorts, a general circumstance and a list of things we promise to do), get it approved by the Creator, and then go get born.

According to the myth, we still remember our home in the spirit world while we are in the womb but then we get so traumatized and shocked by birth that we forget where we came from and end up learning about life from scratch, as if we were just people on Earth. In older cultures, they practiced methods that would help one eventually (usually during puberty) remember their purpose and their home in the spirit world. The idea was to remember, get one’s bearings, and then spend the rest of one’s life living as happily and harmoniously as possible, while doing the work.

To me, this is beautiful. Think about it. If you chose to be here, what does it mean? It means that you are not an accident, and not a victim of anyone. It means that you are here with an ability to overcome whatever challenges may face you, to deal with any potential abuse, with any potential betrayal—and come out victorious and satisfied. It means that you arrived here not to suffer but to be fully able to get through any unavoidable suffering on your path, heal, connect to your soul and the whole infinity of loving spiritual forces, remember to walk relaxed and tall, and, before you go back, be able to create the change to this world that you were so passionate about creating when you were just planning your trip.

You came here not to suffer but to make the world more beautiful—and when that means that you need to get off your knees after being hurt, you get off your knees after being hurt because you have the strength, the love, the self-respect, and the motivation to do so!!

Here is a metaphor. If you chose to become a firefighter, you come to work, they send you to a burning building with your gear, and somewhere on the way you forget that you are a firefighter, you may end up concluding that God is punishing you by making you fight fire in this horrible burning building. But you only feel this way because you forgot for a second how you ended up here!

Problem-solving from a place of love is very different from begging or being scared

And so, when there is a problem, it is understood that there is an imbalance, and the problem is a symptom of an imbalance. In order for the problem to go away, the balance needs to be restored. Sometimes it requires an expansion of one’s understanding, sometimes it requires leaving behind behaviors or psychological patterns that are in the way of progress, sometimes it requires acknowledges a wrongdoing and making amends, but the focus is always on making spiritual progress and doing it justly, by God.

Animal sacrifice in older cultures

When it comes to the animals who are killed for food, the myth says that before coming to Earth, some spirits who are coming as animals chose to give their life for people’s good. When self-selected animals are slain for food (assuming it’s done appropriately), it’s a fulfillment of the animals’ will. My feeling of it is that it’s about love. According to the same myth, the people made a collective promise to give gratitude to the animals who had made that choice, and to not take more than they need. If the promise is broken, the animals will hide or go away.

My subjective feeling is that there is also an element of “play” in this, too, this on Earth and real and symbolic at the same time. Things are obviously very real, and joy is real, and pain is real, but as spirits, we are engaged in an exchange of symbolic gestures that need to be real because we are here, things need to be serious, that’s the deal.

So, our ancestors in older cultures ate meat just like many people today do. By the way, they were far more humane about how they killed the animals for food, and they knew to honor the spirit of the animal and thank it for the love it was acting upon. They were not hanging cows upside down on a mechanical conveyor and killing them cruelly after making them live in torturous conditions all their lives!

When it comes to what the missionaries interpreted as “scapegoating,” it was not scapegoating. What our ancestors did was dedicating the communal meal to good spiritual forces and thanking them or asking them to help fix any imbalances, which is a completely different psychological feel than harming the innocent against their will or loading negative energy onto them and killing them off.

There is a universe of a difference between the free-will-based, love-based approach that was practiced by our ancestors in older cultures and the neurotic, dysfunctional, predatory philosophy and practice of sacrificing the innocent against their will. The latter is an invention of the people with not-so-good intentions who have slandered the proverbial “pagans” (“rurals” in Latin) to maintain the lie about “human nature being innately bad,” etc. That’s called rewriting history. And sadly, that metaphorical spell of defectiveness and helplessness is harming a lot of people to this day!

Okay now, one thing that always comes up is the Aztecs, etc. I did not spend a whole of time studying the Aztecs, it is possible that at one point, their leaders got corrupted, and somebody somewhere broke the free-will-based, love-based principle that had existed before, and decline ensued. All things come from somewhere. People of all times always have the potential to choose love or destruction, and in every culture, there are people who choose bad.

Personally, I don’t know enough about the Aztec culture, and I don’t trust any interpretation I can possibly read. What I’ve seen in my studies of other cultures is that the only way to get even remotely close to understanding any culture is to talk to the living people who understand it, or to read books by the people who have the spiritual integrity and sensory ability to understand what they are talking about. On the other hand, when it comes to the leaned men (the missionaries of the past and the anthropologists of today), I don’t have many kind words about them, and the reason for that is that because there was a time in my life when I was involved in anthropology a bit. I am fully recovered by now. :)

PS. We will discuss the implications of this psyop—and hope—during tomorrow’s Philosophy Club call for paid subscribers (Friday March 29, 2pm EST). The zoom link to the call is behind the paywall after the video of John Trudell.