rené girard on violence and the contemporary situation

...the process that leads to the discovery of the victimage mechanism cannot possibly be a smooth, peaceful process. At this point we already know enough about the paradoxical and violent cultural remedies for violence to understand that any increase in our knowledge of the victimage mechanism, anything that tends to disengage or reveal violence, represents considerable progress, at least potentially, in intellectual and ethical respects, but that also, in the short term, it will mean a terrible recrudescence of that same violence, often in odious and atrocious forms, since sacrificial mechanisms become progressively less efficient and less capable of renewal. One can imagine that human beings, confronted with this situation, will be tempted to restore the lost effectiveness of the traditional remedy by forever increasing the dosage, immolating more and more victims in holocausts that are meant to be sacrificial but that are progressively less so. The always arbitrary but culturally real difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence will weaken. Its power of illusion diminishes, and henceforth there are only enemy brothers to confront one another in its name, which all will claim to embody but which in reality no longer exists; cultural difference will be distinguished less and less from the mimetic crisis to which it returns. Any sense of legality will be lost.