Get behind me, Satan, for you are a scandal to me.
Jesus Christ (Mt 16.23)

French philosopher Rene Girard has a fascinating theory of mimetic desire and the single victim mechanism (scapegoating).

All desire is inherently mimetic. We want what other people want. This is most evident in today’s society, when we are barraged with advertisements for things and lifestyles that will supposedly make us the shiny happy people smiling that at us from the TV screen. However, as anyone who’s pursued this way of life knows, this approach is not sustainable. As newer better things come into production, the old lose their value, and given enough time, what once made you the most popular person on the block, can turn you into an object of ridicule. What’s worse, though, is that chasing these material dreams locks us in mimetic rivalry with each other. We compete with our neighbor in perpetual one-upmanship, trying to have the better house, car, computer, as if having better things than the next guy will make us happier. Further, studies reflect that relative income is more important to happiness than absolute income. This is the mimetic cycle, the work of Satan the Seducer.

Because our neighbor is the model of our desire, he is also our rival. We try to protect ourselves with laws and prohibitions, but in time they are inevitably transgressed. This leads to mimetic crisis and scandal ensues in a community. There is all this tension and frustration between people, since they are competing with each other in a never-ending race. Befuddled, they look for someone to blame. This is the time, when someone casts the first stone, the role of Satan the Accuser. A victim is chosen and blamed for all the problems plaguing the community. Once he’s isolated and defenseless, the anger of the many converges on the scapegoat, without the least fear of reprisal. Effectively, the community focuses the blame for thousands of scandals scattered throughout it on a single victim substitute. This ganging up of all-against-one unites a previously divided group, as they hunt, torture and destroy the accused individual. Since the group really believes the scapegoat to be the source of their problems, once he is eliminated, the community experiences a sudden harmony, purified of its tensions, divisions united. So, the single victim mechanism has a dark but logically explicable ability of restoring peace to groups ravaged by internal conflict. In the words of high priest Caiaphas, “It is better that one man die and that the whole nation not perish.”

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Rene Girard