We’re Burning Witches Again, and Joe Rogan Is One of Them

When scapegoats like Rogan become the sacred center around which a culture turns, actual rationality takes a back seat

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A segment of the public, whipped into a frenzy by baby-boomer musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, demanded that music streaming giant Spotify sacrifice popular podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant vaccines. Faced with the crime of giving a platform to guests who question the science—seemingly the best practice for advancing the state of scientific knowledge—Rogan pledged more balance, and Spotify said it would place a mandatory disclaimer before each show. This witch wasn’t so much burnt as singed, and the stock market responded to this irrational act of sacrifice as one might expect in an increasingly irrational age: Spotify’s stock rebounded in the wake of Rogan’s apology.

As we regress to a superstitious, quasi-pagan world of witch burning, civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating, and our science will ultimately suffer. But why is this so? The big answer, as I argue in my book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, is mimetic desire, the phenomenon that philosopher René Girard summarized as “desir[ing] what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Girard perceived a close connection between mimetic desire and violence. “People everywhere today are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance,” he wrote.

The mimetic contagion of anger and moral outrage is always dressed up as exceedingly rational: There are good reasons for it, in the minds of the accusers, just as there were in the minds of those who were burning witches in 17th-century Salem. There is an inverse relationship between science and sacrificial rituals because the rituals lock people into a kind of hermetic incomprehension that prevents true knowledge. The only way out for those caught up in it is not through; it’s seeing themselves as rivals to the very object of their outrage. And that is a level of self-awareness that few seem capable of reaching.

“More and more … modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises,” Girard wrote. These small, interpersonal conflicts function as a microcosm of the instability that threatens the foundations of the entire world—and the world of 2022 is exceedingly unstable, at least by modern standards.

In his famous work Violence and the Sacred, Girard explained that past human societies turned to sacrifice to stave off mimetic conflict. They would expel or destroy a chosen person or group—a scapegoat—and this action would have the effect of preventing more widespread violence. By discharging their anger onto the scapegoat, societies achieved a temporary resolution of their conflict.

Girard saw this violent process as the fundamental basis of all culture. But it was an awareness of the scapegoating process and its innocent victims, particularly as described in the Old and New Testaments, that gradually altered our collective understanding of these stakes. We reached a point where victims had to be protected at all costs—sometimes even at the expense of the societies that might have been preserved by their sacrifice.

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Scapegoating originally brought order out of chaos—but the resulting order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order.

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For the most part, that’s an admirable sentiment. But this shift in understanding changes the fundamental way the scapegoating mechanism operates. Scapegoating originally brought order out of chaos—but the resulting order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos shakes up the “orderly” system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change it.

In today’s world, everybody seems to at least tacitly recognize the role—and the power—that victims play in effecting cultural change. James G. Williams summarized Girard’s thinking on this point: “Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power … [and] one claims victim status as a way of gaining an advantage or justifying one’s behavior.”

Self-appointed victims drawn together through mimetic desire can now fashion new scapegoats of their own choosing. Those who today seek to wield the accompanying economic or spiritual power alighted on a pair of highly visible targets in Joe Rogan and his corporate paymasters at Spotify.

In a time of confusion and uncertainty regarding the simplest of COVID-19-related messaging—the efficacy of cloth masks, the reliability of so-called “booster” shots—from official government agencies, Rogan’s social crime is readily apparent. He transgressed by using his sizable entertainment platform to host scientists and medical professionals critical of the supposedly established yet ever-shifting scientific discourse around COVID-19.

Although questioning the science is what advances scientific understanding, and charitable hearings of alternative viewpoints constitutes the bedrock of free and open civil dialogue, this isn’t what the crowd clamoring for Rogan’s head for months cared about. These people needed a sacrifice, and Rogan had gotten too big. He was willing to question nearly every cultural shibboleth in his gentle, stoner-bro way. Never mind that one of the voices that lit the pyre belonged to Neil Young, himself guilty of far more heinous remarks about gay men at the height of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The biography of the messenger was irrelevant; the fulfillment of mimetic desire and resulting implementation of the scapegoat mechanism was what mattered.

Rogan left this affair chastened but with his show and Spotify deal intact. But that likely doesn’t matter in the long run. Mimetic outrage will eventually catch up with him and many other scapegoated dissidents and contrarians. “We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats,” wrote Girard. “Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat.”

The real lesson here—the one most people will choose to ignore because it requires both grace and humility to appreciate—consists of stepping back and candidly examining our own role in sustaining this violent cycle. We need not act in haste, serving up the rash accusations and recriminations required to fuel this feedback loop of mimesis. Instead, we should respond deliberately, opting for self-reflection and personal transformation over a chance to cast more kindling into a universe-sized fire pit, irrationally participating in the burning of mob-identified witches whose true relationships to us remain unknown and perhaps even unknowable.

Luke Burgis is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life and writes The Fourth Wall newsletter.