By Peters’ accounting, Girard’s analysis starts when the Moral Breakdown truly begins.  That is, the Moral Breakdown arrives when a cultural crisis obliterates the stable social differences produced by punishing the “representatives of the Moral Breakdown”, that is, the scapegoats.

Does this mean that the Moral Breakdown is always postponed, even at the moment of its arrival, by changing the “type of person” who goes into the empty slot of “scapegoat”.

Let us say that some Christians have convinced enough people to admit that the Bureaucracies of Modern Law and Welfare are travesties.  Then the Bureau and its attendant outlets in the Conformist Progressive Media will blame these Christians for – well, any number of things – in order to show that these Christians embody the Moral Breakdown (it would not be happening if not for them).  Mob action ensues. The Christians become scapegoats.

Justification^self(“state of being”(“with Cupid”)) becomes:

“The nominal ‘missions’ of the Bureaucracies of Law and Welfare are identified as ‘good’ and the questioning by Christians ‘bad’ in a rhetoric of sacrifice(the state of joy that comes from mob action (while craving for respectability))”

Girard’s model suggests that the Moral Breakdown has been going on since the beginning.