With No Release Mechanism But War

“Not only can we no longer believe, with the Aztecs, that our victims are gods, but the belief that our victims are incarnate devils is one we can sustain only for as long as the social contagions that so designate them last. ‘As early as the next morning’ we begin the process of coming to our senses. We have no sacrificial mechanisms that can convert all our mimetic passion into social unanimity, psychological stability, and a renewed sense of moral rectitude. We can no longer save ourselves from our own mimetic passions — adulation, envy, resentment, rivalry — by joining in occasional acts of unanimous violence, but we have learnedly begun to calculate the implications of this. We live in a world inundated by these mimetic passions. What we call ‘modernity’ is a world of feverishly mimetic desires and fascination” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 108).