considered a therapeutic, purifying measure for the society, perhaps harking back to the times when only if “one member [of the pack], preferably a marginal, weak, or sick member, falls victim to the beasts [could] the others escape’ (Burkett, 2004, p. 84). Interestingly, the word that was used for the scapegoat, pharmakos (φαρμακoζ), while etymologically related to magic (Harrison, 1903), is of the same root as, and perhaps a form of, pharmakon, drug or poison (Hughes, 1991), meaningfully echoing the hypothesized reasons for illicit drug use. With the notion of the outcast, castaway, embedded in human mentality, the societal rules are obeyed not only because of the conscious fear of punishment, but because they constitute part of the social structure and are thus assimilated indeed akin to Kant's categorical imperative. (To be sure, this assimilation is imperfect, as humans are not a eusocial species like communal bees, with a biologically hard-wired social structure.) Similarly, factors other than lack of fear contribute to violations of those rules, and the covariation between such violations across early childhood evaluations is almost entirely of genetic origin (Petitclerc et al., 2011).
