The Sublime Object of Hatred

The hated enemy as an eternal category

The central challenge of the human experience is “figuring out how to be less miserable”. One of the core obstacles in this endeavor is the human tendency to hold on to our misery and make it mean that we’re better than other people. This isn’t the only obstacle, but I think it’s an overlooked one - I recently made a video about it, which you can check out here. There, I referenced two socio-political thinkers, René Girard and Carl Schmitt, and made a sort of existential-psychological appropriation of their key ideas. I’m going to expand a bit on their ideas here, going into a bit more depth about their thought, the overlap, and what I think you should take home with you. 

Let’s recap the ideas that I touched on in the video:

Girard's scapegoat mechanism, a cornerstone of his broader mimetic theory, posits that social order is maintained through the collective violence against a sacrificial victim, channeling internal conflicts outward to preserve group unity. This process, Girard argues, is fundamental to the development of human culture and religion.

Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, articulated in his seminal work "The Concept of the Political," defines the essence of politics as the differentiation between friend and enemy. For Schmitt, this distinction is not merely a metaphor - it’s the very foundation of political identity and action, conceptually preceding all other political categories like ‘government’ and ‘justice. 

Both Girard and Schmitt recognize the centrality of opposition and conflict in shaping group identities, the unifying power of a common enemy or victim, and the persistent threat of violence underlying social relations.

Now for a deeper dive:

René Girard's scapegoat mechanism is an emergent component of his broader ‘mimetic’ theory, where he works to explain human desire, violence, and cultural formation. Mimetic desire, according to Girard, asserts that human beings do not desire objects or goals spontaneously and autonomously - our desire is formed through imitation of the desires of others. We don’t just desire the same categories of objects as others, we also desire the same particular objects as others - this imitation leads to rivalry, as individuals compete for the same objects of desire. So rivalry-driven conflict is baked into the human condition, which threatens to destroy the social fabric of communities and erupt into widespread violence. 

The scapegoat mechanism emerges as a non-conscious collective solution to this cyclical crisis. The community, faced with the threat of all-against-all violence, unconsciously redirects its aggression towards some single individual or minority group - the scapegoat. This scapegoat is typically someone who is perceived as different or marginal or otherwise bearing some mark that makes them easy targets for collective blame.

Crucially, Girard argues that this process is fundamentally misunderstood by its participants. The community genuinely believes in the guilt of the scapegoat and the righteousness of their actions. This misrecognition is essential for the mechanism to function effectively. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding means that the relief and cohesion generated by the scapegoating process is short-lived, that rivalry-driven tensions will emerge once again and the process will have to begin anew.

According to Girard, the scapegoating process is fundamental to human culture and mythology. Violence against the scapegoat, retrospectively interpreted as a sacred necessity, becomes the basis for sacrificial rituals that serve to periodically renew social bonds and prevent the outbreak of uncontrolled violence. He also argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its narrative centered on the innocent victim rather than the redeemed perpetrators, has played a critical role in revealing and unraveling this mechanism. 

We’ll leave Girard here for now and come back to him later. Although they never interacted, his scapegoating mechanism finds many powerful parallels in the friend-enemy political distinction of Carl Schmitt, which we’ll turn to next.

Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, most fully articulated in his 1932 work "The Concept of the Political”, forms the very essence of politics. For him, it serves as the criterion which separates political action from other spheres of human activity. Our political identity is formed through opposition to an other - it is by identifying who we are against that we come to understand who we are. This oppositional dynamic, according to Schmitt, is what gives politics its particular character and intensity.

This distinction is at the core of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, which seeks to establish universal norms and neutral processes. For Schmitt, this attempt to transcend the conflict intrinsic to politics is in vain, as liberalism merely changes the language with which people label friends and enemies and the absence of an external enemy merely leaves society open to internal conflict. Schmitt also argues that the sovereign power in a political entity is defined not by universal norms but by its ability to decide who the enemy is, a decision always based on concrete situations and the sovereign's judgment.

So, for both, we have a vision of social life defined by opposition - we define ourselves by who we are not, by our fight against the particular people and particular groups who we see as evil. These fights are arbitrary and illusory - defeating one enemy leads to us finding another enemy to unify against, since what matters is the fact of having an enemy more than who that enemy happens to be. Picking enemies is something we just can’t help doing, and defeating our enemies will never bring us peace.

I think about this every time I hear a contemporary progressive say something like “We believe that all human beings are worthy of love! And if you disagree, FUCK YOU!!” I think about this when I look at the French Revolution and the USSR, societies founded on universal human brotherhood which nevertheless found plenty of internal enemies to decapitate and torture.

Of course, conservatism is itself also rife with this tendency - the current order isn’t to be justified on its own merits, but against the depravity of those proposing change. The saved aren’t saved on their own terms, but saved against the damned. The normal is against the fringe. Consider G.K. Chesterton, a leading light of 20th century Christianity and an inspiration to many, who wrote a book called “Orthodoxy” - he declares at the beginning that his intention is to follow another book called ‘Heresy’ by spelling out his views on his own terms, and he then proceeds to spend half of the book snarling at the worthless idiots who disagree with him. Many, like him, cling to tattered rags of some authority because it leaves them feeling like they have something to strike people with. My dad can beat up your dad. 

Wherever we are on the political spectrum - i.e., whomever we see as our enemies - what’s even more interesting to me is how this all gets internalized. We see our suffering as put there by our enemies, and therefore as proof of their corruption, and therefore as proof of our superiority. Taking full responsibility for our lives would mean taking responsibility away from our enemies, which would feel like letting them win and would risk rejection from the enemy-defined groups we find ourselves in.

This is a terrible tragedy, one that I think can really only be overcome by distinguishing it. Once we start to see how we get stuck on evading responsibility by blaming our enemies then we can start to take responsibility for doing this. We can seek alternative, clear-eyed outlets for our inescapable desire to blame and defeat other human beings - outlets like sports or kink dungeons. 

Whatever it is that we do with it, acknowledging that it’s there is always going to be the first step.