Appears the writing is on the wall, as it were. Some years after Girard, Nassim Taleb riffed on a similar theme he called "suppressed volatility," where he started with risk being akin to a kind of energy that could not be created or destroyed, and the inevitable consequence of suppressing volatility was a kind of mean reversion or explosion on the other direction. I'd never consider Taleb as simpler or less wordy than anyone, but in this case, he seems more succinct than Girard on a similar topic.

Carnivals and festivals today are still role reversals, where some Burners described it to me as for a week in the desert, artists and working people become administrators and facilitators where in regular life they may have little formal authority in their own roles, but here they are the volunteer leaders and make the whole thing go, and then white collar people who spend their lives projecting an edgeless affect can walk around naked, anonymous, and high. No doubt it's more than that, but as something that puts the carnal in carnival, it was a useful description.

Personally, I think Girardian warnings of scapegoating rituals are late arriving words for a greater dynamic that appears to have been set in motion, as though if we've heard of his ideas and work, it's because we already needed to know them. The author's admonition that storm clouds are gathering is a pervasive sentiment in conversations I've had lately, but to extend the metaphor, everyone thinks they need to prepare for a storm, without considering that what they should be worried about is a flood and its aftermath.

I wish festivals could help relieve some of the tectonic social pressures of the last few years, but as he points out, whether they are sanctioned events with artists, or just riots and worse, they're going to happen one way or another.