The Rooster, the Soup, and the Scapegoat

I was reading to my son and daughter the other night, working our way through a collection of fables by Janosch. We hit this one story about a rooster and a hen that stopped me in my tracks. It seemed like a standard animal tale at first, but the underlying themes are surprisingly deep and relevant to current times.

The setup is casual in that fairy tale way. A rooster and a hen go out to the yard, and for no apparent reason, the rooster pecks the hen right in the eye. The farmers rush out, furious, and demand an explanation. The rooster defends himself immediately: “I only pecked her because the dog bit my tail!” So the farmers confront the dog. The dog claims he only bit the tail because the pig stepped on his paw. The pig blames the goat, who blames the cat… and so the questioning goes, round after round. At last, the final animal justifies his actions by claiming he was tripped by none other than the hen herself.

Alas, the hen—the victim—is the source of the spiral of violence! But the logic of who started what doesn’t matter to the mob. The farmers promptly kill the rooster, make soup out of him, and each of the animals receives one of his feathers. Peace is restored, the soup is eaten, and the story ends.

I couldn’t get this story out of my head. Apart from wondering if it was really appropriate for a five and a two-year-old, I kept thinking about the depth and the implications of this seemingly simple fable. The way peace was restored through a single act of collective violence felt eerily specific. I don’t know if Janosch was familiar with the works of René Girard, but this apparently innocuous story perfectly encapsulates one of the core mechanisms described in his works: the Scapegoat.

You see, Girard was obsessed with the origin of desire. He noticed that unlike most animals, humans don’t really have a built-in instinct for what to want once our basic survival needs are met. A cow is pretty straightforward. It sees a patch of green grass and is perfectly happy to munch on it for hours, day after day. It doesn’t look at the cow next to it and think, “Wait, her grass looks much tastier than mine.” But humans are complicated. We don’t just want things; we learn what to want by watching other people. Girard called this mimetic desire. We copy our models. It’s actually what makes us human. It allows us to learn languages, build cultures, and cooperate in ways animals never could.

But it’s a double-edged sword. Because as soon as I want something because you want it, we aren’t just peers anymore. We become rivals. If we both reach for the same object, conflict is inevitable (so much for the Freudian Oedipus theory). It’s no accident that the Tenth Commandment explicitly forbids coveting—desiring what your neighbor has—rather than just the illicit act itself. It tries to cut off the violence at its root.

Girard takes this further, suggesting that civilization treads on a very thin rope. We are constantly balancing the benefits of mimesis—our ability to learn and work together—against the risk of falling into a mimetic crisis, where that same imitation turns into a contagion of violence. When this violence starts spreading, it threatens to tear the whole community apart. Through his study of history and myths, Girard found a recurring character that stops this chaos: the Scapegoat.

When the tension gets too high, the group unconsciously unifies against a single victim. It’s usually someone on the margins, someone who can’t fight back—or in Janosch’s case, the noisy rooster who is handy for a pot of soup. They blame this person for the disorder, pile all their anger onto them, and expel or kill them. And the terrifying thing is that it works. The violence is discharged, the group feels united again, and peace is restored at the cost of one life.

If you are interested in a recent example of a documented case in which a scapegoat halts a mimetic crisis in its tracks, I highly recommend the documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor. The documentary shows the Waodani people of Ecuador, who were trapped in a homicidal cycle of vendettas—a classic mimetic crisis where death demanded death. It stopped not through law or reason, but through the spearing of five missionaries. Instead of retaliating, the families of the victims refused to kill. That refusal to copy the violence, combined with the “sacrifice” of the missionaries, broke the spell.

Now back to our fable, what can we learn from it? We certainly live in different times, and our modern, developed legal systems will certainly safeguard us from falling into a mimetic crisis, right?

Well, unfortunately, that is hard to believe. We are constantly operating under the mimetic framework, and today, the mechanism has just moved online.

Take the recent viral spectacle of the “Coldplay CEO.” A tech executive was caught on a concert Jumbotron embracing a colleague who wasn’t his wife. When Chris Martin cracked a joke about it from the stage, the clip hit TikTok and exploded. Within hours, millions of people who had never met this man were dissecting his body language, doxxing his family, and cheering for his resignation. It was a digital stoning. The internet mob felt a collective rush of moral superiority, a unification against a “guilty” party, despite having zero personal stake in the affair.

We see the same dynamic in the saga of “West Elm Caleb,” the serial dater who was doxxed and hunted across TikTok. What started as women sharing warning stories about a bad date morphed into a global witch hunt, where thousands of users—who would never even be in the same city as him—joined the pile-on to feel part of the “justice.”

This brings us to a darker realization about our institutions. In a functional society, we outsource our vengeance to the state: the courts, the police, the law. These institutions are supposed to break the cycle of mimetic violence by acting as a neutral third party. But as trust in these institutions erodes, we are reverting to the primitive. When we don’t trust the system to punish the “bad guys,” we do it ourselves. We form electronic mobs. We find a rooster, and we demand soup.

However, Girard’s final conclusion in his last book, Battling to the End (Achever Clausewitz), is deeply pessimistic. He argues that the scapegoat mechanism is actually breaking. For thousands of years, it worked because we didn’t know what we were doing; we truly believed the witch caused the plague. But Christianity and modern humanism have revealed the innocence of the victim. We know the scapegoat is just a scapegoat. And because we know it, the magic trick doesn’t work anymore. Killing the victim no longer brings lasting peace; it just pauses the chaos for a moment before the hunger for violence returns, stronger than before.

Girard feared that without this safety valve, and without a genuine turn towards non-violence, we are left with “apocalyptic” violence—a runaway escalation with no way to stop it. In that sense, Janosch’s rooster got off easy. He was made into soup, and the farm went quiet. We, on the other hand, keep making soup, but we’re still hungry.