You can say the king should rule because someone must occupy the center, and the occupation of the center relies upon unanimous attention involving the suspension of resentment toward the center; and that the king occupies the center according to traditions and practices predicated on the exclusion of the rivalries expected to emerge once the transition to a new king is necessary, and that preserving these traditions and practices is more important than any preference any of us might have for one candidate over another. Here, rule and sacrality are one. But the identity of rule and sacrality cannot be maintained, because the divine king must be identified with the origin of the community, meaning that such an order rests upon human sacrifice. This is the trajectory of imperative exchange: the more the ruler stands in for the community, the more his life must be hostage to the community’s fortunes; the more the ruler is the source of all benefits, the more nothing less than human life can be given in exchange for such largesse. Metaphysics and scripture, each in its own way, exposes and prohibits human sacrifice or, more broadly, what we can call “violent centralizing.” In Gans’s account of the transition of the Mosaic to the Christian revelation in _Science and Faith_ , he develops the Girardian critique of scapegoating as embodied in the figure of Jesus. Once God is inaccessible through ritualized imperative exchange, we can only obey God in our treatment of fellow humans. The figure—the prophets of Hebrew scripture and then, most inclusively, Jesus—who insistently points out that God can’t possibly want all of the sacrifices offered to Him himself becomes the center of convergent and violent attention on the part of the community. The injunction that we all treat each “as we would wish to be treated,” or, we could say, as he or she who is not to be sacrificed, in essence accuses the rest of the community of doing precisely that, and the sacrifice or scapegoating of the “messenger” amply confirms that denunciation. This deifies the persecuted one, who has exposed, in the most practical and memorable way possible, the baselessness of our sacrificial practices, which serve only to avoid our terror of indistinction or mimetic crisis.
This is what creates the possibility for each and every one of us to become a center—that is, as
one who is not to be sacrificed or violently centralized. We owe the God who has revealed this to us everything, which is to say all that makes up our own centrality. The only possible repayment of this debt is to defer violent centralization wherever one sees it, including placing yourself between the violent mob and the victim. This is an intellectual or cognitive problem as much as it is a moral one—the two, in fact, cannot be separated. We can, perhaps, all recognize a violent mob when it is just about to descend upon its victim. It is more difficult, though, to identify that which, in the discourse of a potential mob, is marking the victim, perhaps in a preliminary way. Even harder is to trace the origins of violent centralizing further back to institutions that license, perhaps implicitly and unknowingly, the onset of mob-inducing discourses. Perhaps even harder than all this is to determine what would counter, expose or reform such institutions and practices. Once the sacrificial order has been exposed, people can devote their lives to answering these questions. The God to which we devote ourselves by pursuing these questions is clearly not one who can be embodied in a specific ruler. The ultimate failure of Christendom to establish the divine sanction of kings is evidence of this. It’s therefore easy to follow a line of thought that leads, ultimately, to modern liberalism and democracy, which seem to institutionalize the sanctity of the individual that germinated throughout the development of the medieval Christian order.
It’s also easy to see, though, that nothing has replaced, with any unanimity, the sacred aura of kingship. We can see modern politics as a series of replacements for that sacral legitimation, from “freedom” to “the people,” to “individual rights,” to the “nation,” some oppressed class or group, and so on. These terms are the source of endless arguments because they are in themselves nothing more than signs of resentment towards some previous form of sacralized empire, now marked as “tyranny.” If you ask someone what “equality” means, you will inevitably be told that it means someone can’t take something from you—the concept itself has no substance. It merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to actual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life, “dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are demands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the state, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further, that the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate leaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their rivals. Indeed, we can see that “equality” can’t really mean anything more than the same in relation to central power, and that for central power to treat everyone the same it must acquire ever more power over all of them. So, we see in the modern world, in democracy and liberalism, not the continuation of the repudiation of sacrifice enacted in metaphysics and (more completely) in scripture, but its revival, as violent centralizing is “laundered” through the institutions that, in purporting to balance powers against each other, actually unleashes them against each other. There will never be an end to finding new forms of tyranny being exercised over one’s own inexpressible centrality; indeed, one’s own inner self can be the internalization of such tyrannies, through the “colonization” of the mind. The means of self-centering are distributed to all of us equipped with various devices (we might say “apps”) for leveraging, mobilizing and activating those means to wind us up as proxies for various liberalizing raids.