Part one:
In every house and city there is a sewage system, in the human body there is a similar drainage system, it is operating through the skin and lower organs.
In the old days the idea of drainage was legitimate and in the open, the sewage was streaming outside, it was in the back yard, even the restrooms were in the back yard or in nature. Today the Sewage pipes deep in the ground, and even the disposal of garbage is through big sealed containers, the garbage trucks come early in the morning and disposed the garbage far away from the city centers.
Even in the human plain all the drainage of stresses, pressures and personal lust for power – was exposed and legitimate; there were slaves, servants and they were the subject for the drainage of anger, aggressions and the like. Today, in a superficial look, it seems that there is no seen external human pipes, which brings about the immediate hope that the load of such negative emotions are less today (for there are no visible drainage channels.
But of course they are far from disappearing, the delusion about their disappearance is typical to a society which is not attentive to the inner dimensions.
Well, today we don’t wash dirty laundry outside, the drainage pipes has been moved inside; the external appearance got ‘cleaned’ on the account of the inner dimension, that now collected to itself the stains that the outer mask does not contain anymore.
Once they killed people physically, the brutality was external, today it is inside, in hidden messages we send unknowingly to others. The external killing is left for criminals, soldiers, secret agents and mercenaries. Another area is discrimination; once it was externa and physical, today it is more subtle, concealed; a person comes in and out of society, everyone is talking to him, but he feels discriminated. The massages are sophisticated, hidden. The removal of brutality, discriminations and the like, is done by two agents: suppression and projection.
Suppression is pushing inside what does not fit our self-image.
And projection is an act of pushing outside what we could not live with. In suppression the place of it is our subconscious, in projection the object is the other.
And here, we find the concept of scapegoating;
Generally Scapegoat theory refers to the tendency to blame someone else for one’s own problems, a process that often results in feelings of prejudice toward the person or group that one is blaming. Scapegoating serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one’s positive self-image.
What causes scapegoating?
When people cannot find an explanation or wish to avoid attributing blame to the actual cause, sometimes they turn to a scapegoat. The process of scapegoating can be a long and extensive one. … People are more likely to engage in scapegoating when they are stressed, experiencing oppression, or afraid.
And so we find two scapegoats through which we get rid from our internal garbage; one such scapegoat is our inner child and it is done by suppression. The second scapegoat is the other, who is weak, or highly sensitive, or just a stranger, an outsider, on which we load our shadow, the ugly self, and this is done by projection.
All this is done with great discretion, here we will concentrate with projection; turning the other into a victim to that that the strong cannot live with; making him to a scapegoat.
The scapegoating could be done in a family, towards the weakest link that becomes the drainage pipe for the frustrations and stresses of the rest in the family.
And what about society? Well, generally, the higher is the status of a person or the more he is dominant – thus there are around him more scapegoats who drain his sewerage and thus keep him ‘clean’.
One of the main reasons of people to hold an executive position or a position of high status, or to be rich – is that others (who are below them – statues wise). And this might be the reason to power struggles between close people, in essence they are about: who will become the drainage pipe for whom.
The more the dominant or powerful person is cruel and brutal – the greater will be the damage to the scapegoat.
It happens in personal relations, between married couples, between friends and between parents and children. In the end the venerable, the highly sensitive and the gentle – become scapegoats.
Things look clean an ordered on the outside but it could be completely different on the Meta level (A Meta level is the degree (of understanding, existence, etc.) which is higher and often more abstract than those levels at which a subject, etc., is normally understood or treated; a level which is above, beyond, or outside other levels, or which is inclusive of a series of lower levels).
Indeed couple relationship begin with blessed mutuality, but at a certain stage comes the moment where in the Meta level the question rises up: who will drain for whom? It is also the case between the governing majority and the minority – in a country, or between the citizens of a flourishing country and the immigrants, foreign workers. On the surface it seems that simply the country needs the dish washers and cleaners so that those who are capable will continue to develop the country.
But the problem is not economic or material but in the emotional psychological level. A society which needs people in a lower economic state that will drain for it – is a society that has reached a stalemate from the standpoint of values, morals and spiritual level of things.
The Jews in the holocaust were a drainage pipe for the Germens through which they channeled hatred, rage and hostility. But it reached such extreme levels that the drainage pipes could not contain it and the drainage broke out to the surface, in mass killings of the Jews and only the destruction of the Jews remained the only way that will drain the Germen drainage.
So far about the phenomenon generally, but in order to understand it further, there the need to concentrate on particular segment, the criminals.
Part two:
One of the more common drainage channels in every society are the criminals and the outlaws. On the external rational level they victims of lack of progress and ignorance, but on the Meta level, they have got a drainage function; every government tries to fight this, but is it really so?
In the depth level they can overcome crime, but they might have a hidden interest to maintain the existing order as it is.
The truth, in the Meta level, is that society, in fact, does not want to cut off completely this phenomenon, instead it prunes it every once in a while, and as strange as it may seem, it is actually strengthening the roots of the criminal phenomenon.
Society keeps crime in fixed proportions, so that she could live with it.
The criminals maneuvers within the borders that society allows them; few years in prison, few years outside, one could live with that; raise a family, by a flat – part of life. The status quo can be maintained in this way.
If society really want to eliminate crime altogether she can do it, even in a short time, but underneath society needs this phenomenon, society keeps criminality on a low fire.
Criminal’s actually represent the parts of our life that we don’t want to be associate with. For crime has got a role, it is supposed to personifies and drain what the so called dissent society hides, in other words, the criminals are acting as a sewerage system to society. Through which it drains the crime potential in everyone towards the criminal that like a scapegoat, which is being punished not for his crimes but for the crimes in thought and emotions that people repressed into the darkness of his subconscious. In this sense it is like the catharsis that a theater goer experience n he watches actors who give expression to what he is afraid from giving it expression.
In this way a report in the newspaper about a rape or a murder gives a psychological release to the little clerk which brings flowers to his wife every birthday.
The criminals has got a function in society; they are doing for her a service. Society does a projection of it’s illnesses on the criminals and they drain it out by their actions.
One of the ways to notice the amounts and the degree of stresses that one carries within him, even from many years ago, is called: psychodrama; Psychodrama is an active and creative therapeutic approach that uses guided drama and role playing to work through problems, stress and traumas. Developed by Dr. Jacob Moreno. During each psychodrama session, participants reenact specific difficult scenes and stressful experiences with guidance from a therapist. These scenes may include traumatic past situations. In a group setting, other participants play the roles of significant others or the audience, offering support and bringing to the surface underlying stresses and traumas.
This system causes the emptying of personal ‘garbage’ on the head of a volunteer from the group and unbelieved amounts of stress are evacuated out in this way.
But usually one goes on with this inner residues and the existence of criminals are one way to live with the residues successfully. If there would be no more criminals in society then it will become the sewage pool of herself.
But criminals are only one drop from the ocean of marginal people that became the drainage pipes to the self-satisfied bourgeoisie. One most common example for being a scapegoat is the child in a family, children who suffer, latter on in their life from neurosis, emotional instability, being an outsider, this are usually very fragile, highly sensitive and thus very venerable children, they find it difficult to have a steady work place, a steady marriage, a steady home and generally to settle down and integrate in life as it is.
One who wrote a lot about it is R.D. Laing, here are one quote of him: “Insanity — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”.
And back to the scapegoat childe; one of the burdens that parents load on the highly sensitive child is the burden of what the parent could not accomplish in his own life, he puts this load on his child, to accomplish in his life what the parent could not accomplish. This heavy load could break the back of the child if he is not strong enough.
Another burden is a scapegoating is the one the child takes upon himself, voluntarily; the tensions and gaps between the parents, puts the sensitive child in a position of what is called: ‘a gate keeper’, he makes himself responsible for his parents relationship downfalls, he takes upon himself the unsolved tensions of his parents and they become a heavy load upon him, which do not allow him to find his actualization in his own life.
So far about the scapegoat in service to his masters, so to speak, but what happens to the scapegoat if he realizes the function that he fulfils in relation to the domineering factor in his life? The function of a victim. When he realizes that what he considers as something wrong in him is a symptom for him being a victim, at that moment he turns from a victim to a rebel, and then the direction of the sewerage goes back to it’s origin. And that is what happened to great rebels; the moment they will realize the the master will never give up using them as scapegoats – they no longer will continue being a victim and a scapegoat.
He understands that he needs to be erect and to stand against this usage of him as a scapegoat, he also understands that his bad feelings of himself about his life is not his fault, but is an unfair accusation by the strong on what perceived to be a weak individual. And then he revolts. He does not need to become an active rebel, it is enough that he carries it in him as a deep rooted knowing, and this will free him from being a scapegoat anymore.
*
“Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.”
― Henry Thomas Buckle
“We are all murderers and prostitutes –no matter to
what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter
how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”
R. D. Laing
“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
“In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
Gabriel