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Car crushing and the Scape-goating Mechanism

Over the last week days I've had some incoming links from readers of Whale Oil Beef Hooked coming over to this more quiet and serene part of the Blogosphere to see what type of site I hail from. Most of them flee; one look is enough as far as I can tell from StatCounter.

I'm not really encouraging them, beyond a link I made last week to an old post of mine on car crushing and why I found it disturbing. After reflection, I think the post is now inadequate to my position three years later. In it, I wrote of the logical reasons as to why car-crushing is wrong, but the visceral were not mentioned.

Fr Barron's discussion on The Hunger Games movie (currently running at the theatres here in NZ)and it's connection to the scape-goating mechanism where he says:

...by this mechanism we choose someone to blame, someone to isolate, someone to ostracise, at the limit, someone to kill. We discharge our anxiety, our tension, our fear onto that person or that group. In that process ... we come to a kind of peace. Which is precisely why this kind of activity is sanctioned so often by the state, and by religion.
... made an internal connection for me as to why car-crushing is so disturbing. The car becomes the scape-goat for all our problems. When it's crushed, we feel something has become sacrificed and we come to a sort of peace whereby we feel all is right in the world again. The baying for the "blood" of the car made that desire for vengeance on it clearer, even though the car itself has done nothing wrong. This crushing and the fact that people wanted the crushing is the potential beginning of worse scape-goating victims to come. We start with cars, who knows what is next? Maybe garden centres that refuse to stay closed when the law decrees they should? No, it'll will be something that belongs to a marginal group that the vast majority of the population feels will never touch them. I hesitate to predict what that something might be.

Related links:
Wrong car seized for crushing ~ Radio New Zealand
Stupid boy ~ Whale Oil Beef Hooked

ZenTiger's definitive post on this: House Crushing


Comments

  1. Try Dotcom. Disgracefull forfeiture of his assets and business by the police and FBI. NZ taxpayers are up for a huge liability. Hope it sends Collins and Keys hair snow white. They are simpletons.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It fits with the mantra of guilty until proven innocent, Viking. And if innocent, don't let them have any money available to defend themselves.

    Car crushing is another warping of a justice system that took hundreds of years and thousands of lives to build, only to be torn down one Subaru at a time.

    ReplyDelete

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