Thread by @robkhenderson

René Girard:

“The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors.” johnathanbi.com/interpreting-g…

"Hypocrisy is dangerous because it leads to what it claims to prevent: persecution of victims. Anyone familiar with the tragedies of the Soviet Union grounded on protection of the victimized proletariat should look at America caught up in victimhood ideology with trembling fear"

Girard's four-fold process of the Scapegoat Mechanism:

"we live in a fundamentally Christian culture that identifies and tries to correct the flaws of our natural psychological tendencies...this incompatibility between our cultural ideals and our natural tendencies leads to hypocrisy"

"There's a clear radical break between our culture that protects victims and all the ones that have come before which made them into scapegoats. But the stubborn gravitational pull of the human condition remains the same. We still need to persecute and find victims to blame."

"adding 'big' to anything in our society automatically makes it bad: big tech, big pharma, big philanthropy. This goes to show how the Christian moral paradigm of protecting the victim, protecting the little guy is so steeped into our culture. It's really everywhere."

Girardian analyses of how Christianity has led individuals and nations to concentrate on helping victims, turning the care for the downtrodden into a prestigious act:

Stoning victims and helping victims: two different human expressions of Girardian mimesis

"Humans have not fundamentally changed...if you drop the same people who are sheepishly protecting victims in another cultural environment, they would readily join the stoners."

"it's no longer fashionable, as in the day of Achilles, to openly share our desire for conquest, vengeance, and hatred. We can only pursue these desires secretly...the only acceptable reason we can have for persecution is to stop persecution. The wolf must now don sheepskin."

"Girard isn't convinced society has really changed that much at all -- that we've really given up persecution. Rather, it's more a superficial switch of who we think it's acceptable to persecute...'Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.'"

A Girardian interpretation of the causal link between elite hypocrisy and the rise in popular support for the Nazi movement:

"Spirit precedes reason -- we are primarily social and not rational creatures...So what's most important is getting our relationships right. Truth does not have the power to engender love, but love has the power to engender truth."

Love as a necessary condition in order for science to flourish.

Girard: "The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch hunts, the ceasing of witch hunts is the reason science was invented."

"by being deified, science can become unquestionable and can justify terrifying political actions...Girard is deeply worried that political agendas are now wrapping themselves up in a veneer of science to be equally unquestionable."

"Even objective facts become distorted by the narratives we hold. We are not truth-seeking creatures, but creatures who are able to believe in myths, lies, and narratives if others around us believe them as well."

"science and facts are open to a whole host of narrative interpretations. The reason certain narratives get selected often has nothing to do with science at all: it has to do with mimesis, prestige, shock value, career advancement of the scientists, grants, political agendas."

The limits of scientific materialism and how it engenders nihilism and despair:

Tradition as a necessary condition to cultivate innovation:

My favorite part of this lecture. The absurd preoccupation with novelty.