1/ I just published a summary and notes of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard - taylorpearson.me/book-review/mi… 
2/ Like pretty much everyone else I know that has read this book, I read it because Peter Thield said it was his favorite book ever and he seems pretty smart so I figured there was something there.
3/ Things Hidden is Girard's most famous work on Mimetic Theory.
4/ Mimetic theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them.
5/ As more and more people want something and that object remains scarce, there is a conflict.
6/ This began as a natural phenomenon: animals and humans naturally learn by imitating other members of their groups, mimesis.
7/ But, neither humans nor animals are able to differentiate between non-acquisitive mimesis (learning skills from others in your group) from acquisitive mimesis (desiring scarce objects – money, fame, power, someone else’s mate, etc.)
8/ Girard believed that human societies managed mimetic conflict through the scapegoat mechanism. If the conflict over a scarce object became too intense, the community subconsciously choose a scapegoat which was sacrificed (literally or metaphorically).
9/ The obvious example might be literal sacrifice in "primitive" societies, but Girard extended it to present day.
10/ CEOs are sacrificed after too many bad quarters in a row, coaches after bad seasons and presidents after stock market collapses.
11/ The purpose of the scapegoat mechanism is not that it is correct, but that everyone believes it is correct.
12/ The data is very clear that presidents have very limited impact on the stock market but the voting public broadly believes that they do and so voting out a president after a market downturn produces the needed catharsis and belief that things will turn around.
13/ Girard would say that the backlash against Google and Facebook is not so much because they are actually the source of the problem, but because they are being scapegoated.
14/ Indeed, Girard believed religions and rituals were ways of transforming the scapegoat mechanism into institutions (companies, governments, etc.) which could then be used over and over to resolve the mimetic conflict.
15/ According to Girard, all of human culture is built on top of the scapegoat mechanism and its ritual repetition.
16/ Some interesting/helpful takeaways from Girard:
17/ Understanding social situations in terms needing a scapegoat to sacrifice for some kind of resolution and catharsis. E.g. Firing the assistant coach after a bad season. Shows the fundamental drive bad/manipulative political and economic pundits tap into.
18/ Understanding the importance of “mimetic desire,” namely the desire to copy others, and why it is not always an entirely peaceful process (becuase we desire that which is scarcity).
19/ Seeing violence as a chronic problem of all human societies, rather than as the result of a bug in particular societies.
20/ Christian gospels as the deconstruction of Jungian/Campbellian mono-myth rather than another example of it.
21/ The view of institutions as emergent from the rituals and myths designed to prevent mimetic conflict as opposed to the modernist/structuralist view which sees institutions as primary and ritual/religion as emergent.
22/ High modernists a la Plato see religion as a parasite that grew on human institutions whereas Girard see the reverse.
23/ Mimetic theory would suggest that as society has gone more global and universal, strife would increase because more and more pople can see the “top of the pyramid” and want it.
24/ My main criticisms of Girard would be
1. Less $4 words would be great. No reason to use "polyvalence" when it just means "variety"
2. Girard seems to think that this is the end-all-be-all-theory-to-end-all-theories-of-human-nature which seems a bit of a stretch.
1. Less $4 words would be great. No reason to use "polyvalence" when it just means "variety"
2. Girard seems to think that this is the end-all-be-all-theory-to-end-all-theories-of-human-nature which seems a bit of a stretch.
