Responsible for Everything, Guilty of Nothing: Manufacturing the Scapegoat in the Capitalist System

Crime and Punishment gives the scapegoat mechanism the very concrete form of an employment contract. An actor is hired to embody the failings of an institution that thereby channels anger away from those truly responsible: the real decision-makers remain out of reach while an available body takes the blows. The repeated confrontations turn the office into an arena and social violence into a grotesque ritual. By gradually internalising the role imposed on him, Jérôme shows how an assigned identity can eventually produce the very behaviour it was originally meant merely to represent.

The satire uses the bank as a microcosm of a capitalist system in which responsibility moves up the hierarchy while guilt moves down. Christian imagery gives this crisis management its true sacrificial dimension: the model employee becomes a martyr so that the institution can preserve its innocence. It seeks neither to repair the harm it has caused nor to compensate its victims; it merely needs to designate someone who will publicly atone for it. The final nightmare thus suggests that absurdity is not an anomaly of the economic world, but one of its ordinary methods of governance.