A crowd in chaos will do almost anything to feel peace again, and sometimes that “peace” is bought at the cost of blaming one person. We start with Palm Sunday, the opening of Holy Week, and then follow René Girard’s big idea: mimetic desire. When we copy what others want, rivalry spreads, tensions rise, and groups can slide into the scapegoat mechanism where “unanimity minus one” feels like the only way out.
From a toy-grabbing toddler to the ancient Greek “pharmakos” ritual, we connect the dots between anthropology, psychology, and theology. The group brings the conversation into everyday life with stories of bullying, social media pile-ons, and the way modern politics and identity fights keep searching for a target. We also name what many listeners have seen firsthand: anti-Semitism showing up in unrelated spaces, turning ordinary posts into an excuse for hatred.
We then tackle the hardest territory carefully: the crucifixion as a classic scapegoating pattern, and the long history of misusing Passion language to scapegoat Jews. Along the way, we ask a question that won’t go away: if the West learned to honor victims through the Judeo-Christian moral imagination, why does victimhood now feel like a status some people chase for power and credibility?
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