Scapegoats and the crisis of distinctions

While many people cite René Girard’s mimetic theory in order to champion the cause of scapegoats — real ones as well as imposters — very few today note Girard’s dire warnings about what he called “the crisis of undifferentiation” — a world in which mimetic desires override the most undeniable distinctions and throw everyone into a madhouse of make-believe, an Orwellian world where words cease to have concrete meaning.
Our culture is now officially under the control of people who actually believe that saying something makes it so, and we have a president who has based his presidency on exactly that same belief and encouraged it in his ideological adulators. All this will not end well, as René Girard said long ago, and the mendacity at the very heart of what’s left of the Left will drag many of those who have managed to remain sane and honest into a terrible cultural crisis.

“No, Dolezal’s story isn’t comparable to Jenner’s. Dolezal’s is, in fact, more credible. Culturally and biologically, she’s blacker than Bruce Jenner is female. …
“Biologically, the answer is easy. Even transgender activists would say that he was ‘assigned’ a male sex at birth. He’s a man, and plastic surgery no more makes him a woman than amputating his feet and replacing them with webbed prosthetics would make him a duck. There is no chromosomal change here, just cosmetic alterations — alterations far less physically convincing than Dolezal’s dark tan and elaborate, ‘black’ hairstyles.
“If you’re looking for logic in this distinction, you’ve come to the wrong movement.”