Moral Certainty and the Illusion of Inclusion

The first loss is not dignity, nor even safety, it is the world itself, the quiet expectation that the world will still hold. Trust is relational and pre-reflective, it is the background assumption that others, groups, figurations, institutions, and shared space will not suddenly turn the body into an isolated site of pain. Violence is the first blow that collapses trust in the world (Améry, 1986). From that first blow onward is as if the mind must reduce complexity in order to survive what has become possible and the world is approached as vigilant, narrowed, and often curiously blinded.

Violence so often arrives with a story that sounds moral. Violence rarely presents itself as restoration, as duty, as justice. The community’s revulsion toward murder becomes the very energy that organizes punishment, the felt necessity to respond so that order can return, and the response, even when formal, public, legal, retains the logic of retaliation. Something is stopped, the private spiral of counter blows is interrupted, and yet the principle that pain answers pain remains intact, even regulated, and authorised. The moral vocabulary can intensify it by producing a surplus of certainty, doubt is complicity and hesitations are weakness. So that the only decent position is to join the righteous action.

There lies a triangular structure at the heart of desire. We desire what the admired other desires, and because the other is admired, their desire becomes an instruction, a map of value. The admired other, then shifts, often without either person noticing, from model to obstacle, because the object is now contested, and the relationship becomes ambiguous, charged, and symmetrical, each mirrors the other’s insistence. From there, violence spreads contagiously, as mimetic in the sense of imitative, quickly transmissible, and capable of recruiting whole groups into a shared escalation. When differences that usually regulate rivalry lose their binding force, symbolic distances, distinctions, hierarchies, taboos, procedural separations, the group moves toward a crisis of undifferentiation, the many against the many, an atmosphere where everyone can become everyone’s rival, and therefore no one feels safe (Girard, 1972).

The scapegoat or the pharmakos becomes a solution that feels like justice. A confused, multi directional conflict is transformed into a single line of guilt. The many against the many becomes the many against one. The relief is immediate, because unanimity returns, the community experiences itself as coherent again, and the story of guilt offers a common ground that does not ask for further thinking. The “true” guilt and the “false” guilt, differ less by evidence than by the silence of dissent, when no voice is raised, the explanation hardens into myth, not necessarily a narrative with gods, but a shared certainty that becomes untouchable. What looks like moral clarity can therefore be a social technology of cohesion, and the cost of cohesion is often a person, a subgroup, a minority position, a tone, a style, a disturbance that can be expelled.

In that point the illusion of inclusion becomes clinically and socially decisive. Inclusion can be offered as a representational layer, rituals of belonging, invitations, vocabulary of openness, procedural warmth, and yet the conditions that would make belonging metabolically real can remain structurally withheld. The crucial difference is influence. A group can say “you are in,” while keeping the generative core protected, decisions remain elsewhere, risks are carried elsewhere, consequences fall elsewhere, and the newcomer’s presence functions as evidence of openness rather than as a co-author of meaning. In such arrangements, cohesion and moral legitimacy are both preserved, the group appears fair, modern, progressive, and the anxiety that true inclusion would release is kept at bay, anxiety about conflict, redistribution, exposure of incompetence, historical guilt, or the need to mourn an older identity.

When inclusion is representational, power rarely needs to speak loudly. It speaks through humour, agenda setting, expertise, unwritten norms, who gets interrupted, whose difference is turned into diversity. Conflict introduced by difference is treated as a threat to harmony rather and not a resource on thinking. The included person is encouraged to be thankful, protected and secured and the group is relieved of guilt by being generous. A mutual defence is formed, as a contract of reassurance, and over time the excluded part of the included person’s experience accumulates, returning as cynicism, withdrawal, somatisation, or sudden protest. That protest is then used as proof that full inclusion would be dangerous, and the boundary is retroactively justified.

The body is never absent from this. Violence is not only a social concept, it is a reality of flesh, and vulnerability is its condition. There is no violence without vulnerability, and vulnerability is mutual. My skin is permeable, the other’s skin is permeable, the world is built from this exposure. Yet violence takes that mutuality and weaponizes it, it turns exposure into isolation. When trauma is humanly inflicted and intentional it breaks the validating connection between self and humanity, it damages the relational fabric through which experience becomes shareable (Brison, 1999). One can feel how the scapegoat mechanism, even when it produces a community, tends to produce the wrong kind, a community of spectators, a community held together by fear and righteousness, rather than by mutual trust and reciprocal risk. Victims and perpetrators may be forced into proximity, yet the relation is not symmetrical, it is structured by domination, and the social bond is distorted around the site of injury.

Violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice although a surplus of morality is an excess of certainty that closes thought. When a group must protect its self- image or identity, morality can become a weapon that converts complexity into guilt. Justice can become a public version of retaliation, meant to stop the spiral, while leaving the retaliatory principle untouched. Inclusion can become a theatre of signs, meant to reassure everyone of decency, while keeping voice and consequence asymmetrically distributed. In each case, the surface promise is protection, and the hidden cost is that the group sacrifices its capacity to think and then finds a person to carry the unthought.

What makes inclusion real rather than theatrical is therefore simple to state and difficult to bear. The criterion is whether the included presence can alter decisions, narratives, and norms without being punished, pathologized, or cosmetically absorbed. Another criterion is whether conflict introduced by difference is treated as a resource for thinking, and whether the group can tolerate the mourning that follows revision of an older identity. These criteria are operational, and they are moral in the deeper sense, because they measure whether a group can share consequence.

In a time when institutions often seek legitimacy through displays of openness, and societies are pressured by rapid moral polarisation, the scapegoat mechanism becomes easier to activate and harder to recognise. The temptation is always to restore unity by simplifying, by tightening procedure, by shaming tone, by turning criticism into a flaw of character, by demanding gratitude. The analytic task, in the clinic and beyond it, returns to the same question, what costs are being paid for cohesion, who is paying them, and what kind of world is being built when the group chooses certainty over thinking.

05.03.2026

References

Améry, J. (1986) At the mind’s limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities. New York: Schocken Books.

Brison, S.J. (1999) ‘Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self’, in Bal, M., Crewe, J. and Spitzer, L. (eds.) Acts of Memory.

Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, pp. 39–54.

Girard, R. (2010 [1961]) Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Y. Freccero. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girard, R. (2013 [1972]) Violence and the sacred. Translated by P. Gregory. London: Bloomsbury Academic.