René Girard's thesis (developed across Violence and the Sacred and subsequent works): human culture originates in a single mechanism—collective killing.
In pre-cultural state (Girard imagines), humans are caught in mimetic desire: everyone wants what everyone else wants, creating escalating conflict. The group faces dissolution through internal violence.
The solution: the scapegoat mechanism. A random member is selected, blamed for all collective problems, and killed by the group collectively. In the killing, two things happen simultaneously:
Unified violence: The group's fragmented violence coalesces into collective action. Violence becomes ordered rather than chaotic.
Supernatural experience: The relief that follows the killing is interpreted as divine intervention. The community attributes the solved conflict to a transcendent power. The scapegoat's death becomes sacred.
This mechanism founds culture. Religion emerges from the need to perpetuate the scapegoat mechanism (through ritual sacrifice) without recognizing its true nature. Sacred ritual reenacts the original killing while hiding what it is doing.
Where Burkert traces sacrifice to hunting, Girard traces it to violence-management. But both arrive at similar conclusions: sacrifice is foundational to civilization, and sacrifice involves killing as communal practice.
The convergence is significant: different theoretical starting points (Burkert: hunting as formative; Girard: violence-management as formative) both require killing as central.
For Gigerenzer, this convergence strengthens the claim: multiple independent approaches to anthropology/sociology arrive at sacrifice as essential. The convergence suggests something real.
Girard's later work becomes increasingly theological. He argues that Christianity reveals the scapegoat mechanism while claiming to abolish it.
Christ is the ultimate scapegoat—innocently killed by the collective. But Christ's resurrection reveals the injustice: the scapegoat was innocent. This revelation disrupts the mechanism's power. The mechanism requires belief in the victim's guilt to function.
Once revealed as murder (through Christ's innocent victimhood), the scapegoat mechanism cannot function in its original form. This is the Christian breakthrough: the exposure of what culture is founded on.
But—and here Girard's analysis becomes darker—modernity has not yet learned to live without the scapegoat mechanism. We have lost faith in its religious forms, so we practice it in secular forms: witch hunts, genocides, the pathologized violence that defines modern history.
Gigerenzer takes Girard seriously but diverges at a crucial point. Girard treats the scapegoat mechanism as a problem to be transcended through revelation and grace. Gigerenzer treats it as an expression of something real: the soul's need for sacrifice.
Where Girard sees only pathology and blindness, Gigerenzer sees also the soul's genuine requirement. The mechanism reveals how consciousness actually works—not how it should work.
For Gigerenzer: the fact that killing repeatedly becomes necessary suggests that consciousness structurally requires it. The scapegoat mechanism is not merely a defense; it is the soul's way of actualizing what it needs.
What Burkert and Girard together reveal: sacrifice is not incidental to civilization. Sacrifice is essential to both:
Social order: Sacrifice creates the unity and structure that prevents chaos. Without the mechanism (or its equivalent), society dissolves.
Psychological/spiritual development: Sacrifice marks transitions, creates initiations, transforms consciousness.
These are not separable. The social mechanism and the soul-operation are one. Killing establishes order because killing is how consciousness differentiates itself.
Girard's scapegoat mechanism is a social explanation for sacrifice. But it describes something that is simultaneously psychological. The collective killing is a social event and a psychological transformation.
Understanding this simultaneity requires both perspectives: the social structure (Girard) and the psychological meaning (what Gigerenzer emphasizes).
The handshake: Sacrifice cannot be understood as merely social ritual or merely psychological transformation. The social mechanism and the psychological operation are identical. Studying one without the other produces incomplete understanding. The scapegoat mechanism is simultaneously society founding itself and consciousness actualizing its requirement for killing.