Thread by @eriktorenberg

Deep dive into some of Rene Girard's thoughts on mimetic desire, scapegoating, and Christianity 👇

Previous TLDR:

~All non instinctual desire is mimetic

We want things not because they are inherently desirable, but because someone else's desire for them has made them attractive to us.

We desire not so much someone's car or house as much as the quality of being that seems to belong to the people who have those possessions

Desire is never just a straight line between a subject and an object, but always has some other as its model.

Desire is shaped by imitation

Other animals imitate, but they don't imitate to the degree we do. We don't just imitate on a monkey see/do level. We imitate on a perception level. We imitate what we perceive our neighbor's desires to be. We don't first think & then desire—the opposite.

The more similar we are, the more we'll want the same things

And the more we want the same things, the more we'll tend to fight over the scarce good (or status)

And so we face a permanent threat of runaway violence

Conflict brings convergence, which then brings more conflict.

We want others to love what we love, admire what we admire, but when they do, we suddenly find that they have become competitors, leading to conflict

Mentor/mentee dynamic is a perfect example. Master wants pupil to imitate the master up until the pupil becomes the master.

The first cultures dealt with threat of runaway violence by transferring their violence to a surrogate victim, a scapegoat whose death/expulsion unites and ends violence

The antidote to chaos is the ritual scapegoating of a common enemy

"the foundational murder" / "noble lie"

And because the community owes its entire order to its victim, the victim is worshipped as scared

But at the same time, the victim is also believed to be guilty, and therefore deserving of the collective violence

Scapegoating worked in restoring order, so people kept doing it

People need something to blame to hide from the fact that they are angry out of endlessly imitating each other.

Need a safe space to place all their violence.

Scapegoating is the protection of the community against violence that it could not otherwise control

The scapegoat ritual addresses the threat of uncontrolled violence, which is endemic to human society b/c of runaway mimetic desire leading to conflict.

Rituals of sacrifice averted this crisis by reconciling everyone around a sacrificial victim.

It's a collective release.

However, scapegoating preserves social peace only so long as the scapegoaters think it's justified

That, after all, was the definition of scapegoating: persecution of an innocent victim believed to be guilty

Christianity, of course, inverts this myth. Now the victim's innocent

If you see the truth of that violence, suddenly that violence repels you

Jesus's cross instead of ratifying his guilt, proclaims his innocence

Before the cross, every violence is portrayed as heroic in literature

Now, not anymore. Scapegoating's no longer sacred. Left a vacuum

Jesus says, If you have to imitate someone, imitate me, because I won't imitate others and I won't become your rival. And imitate others who imitate me too.

Instead of eye for an eye, turn the other cheek.

Instead of sanctifying sacrificial violence, sanctify love and mercy.

Jesus introduced a new spirit of self-awareness & self-criticism

More so than anytime in history, we're aware of our faults. The west is the only place where we self-flagellate our own culture to gain status

Ironically, this is Christianity w/o Christ

Today, we see the violence of Christianity, we don't see the violence, Christianity has prevented all through history

Christianity didn't invent violence, but it did contribute to curbing it

Where did we get your sensitivity to violence, after all? Certainly wasn't Oedipus Rex

Eye for an eye today seems primitive, but at the time it was revolutionary. It advocated for reciprocal violence instead of escalation, which used to be the norm.

B/c we don’t want to renounce scapegoating, we keep attempting sacrificial violence, but it doesn’t bind us anymore

Remember, the importance of sacred sacrificial violence in the primordial past was that it bound us together. It prevented us from contagiously envying one another to the point where we’re obsessed with destroying each other rather than just getting on with life.

Ironically, as society became both more egalitarian and meritocratic, and hierarchies were less rigid, mimetic competition skyrocketed.

Where previously people were only competing with their own caste, now they were competing with everyone in the world, & expected to win. Chaos.

Nietzsche knew that Christianity was the reason why that resentment was building to such a deep level that once we killed the idea of a God that kept hierarchies stable, mimetic mayhem would ensue

Resentiment is a begrudging those who you perceive to have things that you desire

We didn't stop burning witches bc of the scientific method, we got the scientific method bc we stopped burning witches

If, say, ppl's crops were dying, & they burned a "witch", & then crops grew, they kept doing it

When they stopped, they could evaluate other reasons (science!)

People will always find scapegoats.

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause b/c that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation....They will struggle, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle"

Today it's this game of guilt, hot potato, where we're becoming more increasingly haunted by our guilt in collective violence. And we're trying to throw that hot potato onto somebody else

Scapegoating used to literally mean the transferring of sins to the goats. Now we do people

We’re half Christian.

We’re thoroughly within the fishbowl of Christianity, but we’re, only half Christian in the sense that we’re aware of victimization, but we don’t want to fully recognize how it affects what we do today, and so we justify violence in victimization's name

Today, we have new problems.

Jesus popped the scape goat bubble told us to imitate him, but we don't want to anymore.

Mob frenzies and scapegoating are society trying to purge itself of its own demons.

Secular Christianity imports from real Christianity what Nietzsche called “slave mentality”, the glorification of the victim. “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

And so if your sense of self identity and morality is all wrapped up in that, then any differential success you or other people may achieve is evidence of evil

And so the source of that evil must be identified and eliminated.

The cycle will repeat until either every possible scapegoat is dead or the movement burns itself out.

We all have the motivation to purge our sense of collective sin, independent of the guilt or innocence of the subject.

And the overpowering need to participate.

In a post-modern world, what's the answer?

Liberalism. Tolerance. Due process. Reason. Free speech.



These are more scattered thoughts than a deep dive, would welcome any follow up analyses or your own takeaways from Girard.