Scapegoat Mechanism

The "Scapegoat Mechanism," as deployed in Rollins's The Orthodox Heretic, names the psychosocial operation by which a subject or community displaces its own failings, guilt, or constitutive lack onto an external victim, thereby achieving a spurious sense of integrity and self-coherence. The condemned figure — the scapegoat — absorbs and carries away what the community cannot own in itself, functioning as a receptacle for the externalized negative content that would otherwise force a confrontation with internal division. In Rollins's argument, this mechanism is not incidental but structurally bound to the problem of theological speech: the "heresy of orthodoxy" — the dogmatic claim to possess accurate, undistorted God-talk — requires exactly this kind of projection, because the heretic who is excluded and condemned serves to incarnate the distortion that orthodoxy disavows in itself.

Theoretically, the scapegoat mechanism operates at the intersection of identification and the logic of the big Other. When a community cannot tolerate the knowledge that its own discourse is irreducibly impure or distorted, it constructs an external figure to bear that impurity. The condemned man is thereby made to embody the community's own failings — he becomes the carrier of what is, in Lacanian terms, extimate to the group: the threatening kernel of distortion that is most intimate to it yet must be expelled as radically exterior. The mechanism thus enacts a false resolution of the constitutive lack in the Other: by scapegoating, the community produces the fiction that the Other (its symbolic order, its theology) is whole and consistent, that impurity belongs to the expelled figure and not to the structure itself.

This concept appears in rollins-peter-the-orthodox-heretic-and-other-impossible-tales-paraclete-press-20 (p. 183) as a supporting mechanism in Rollins's broader argument about the epistemics of theological speech. Its single occurrence sits within the contrast between "orthodox heresy" (the honest acknowledgment of theological distortion) and the "heresy of orthodoxy" (the dogmatic claim to pure, accurate God-talk). The scapegoat mechanism is invoked specifically to explain what makes the heresy of orthodoxy ethically dangerous: it generates a victim — the condemned heretic — who must absorb the distortion that the orthodox community refuses to acknowledge in itself. In this respect, it functions as a specification of the Identification concept: rather than the productive, constitutive identification through which a subject takes on a signifying trait, the scapegoat mechanism describes identification-in-reverse, a negative identification whereby the community constitutes its own purity by projecting impurity onto an expelled other.

The concept is also intimately tied to Extimacy and The Other of the Other. The failings externalized onto the scapegoat are precisely extimate to the community — they are its most intimate content, located at its core, yet experienced as alien and expelled. The scapegoating move is thus a denial of extimacy: an insistence that what is inside is only outside. Similarly, the mechanism compensates for "there is no Other of the Other": by producing a heretic who embodies error, the orthodox community manufactures the illusion of a self-consistent symbolic order — a theology with no constitutive gap — and temporarily fills the void left by the absence of any ultimate meta-guarantee of Truth. Rollins's "orthodox heresy," by contrast, refuses this compensatory move, accepting the irreducible distortion that the scapegoat would otherwise be made to carry away.

The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible TalesPeter Rollins · 2009 (p.183)

Instead of people being able to externalize their own failings onto another, thus rendering the condemned man into a scapegoat

The phrase "externalize their own failings onto another" is theoretically loaded because it names the precise movement that the scapegoat mechanism performs: the transfer of an internal negative content (failings) to an external bearer (the condemned man), thereby constituting the extimate as purely exterior. The word "rendering" is equally significant — it signals that the condemned man is not naturally a scapegoat but is actively produced as one by the community's projective operation, underscoring the constructedness and ethical violence of the mechanism.