René Girard on Why Your Desires Aren't Really Your Own

In today's episode, we're exploring the life and ideas of René Girard — the French intellectual who cracked the code behind human desire, rivalry, and conflict.

This is the story of a thinker who challenged us to think what if our desires aren't our own — but borrowed, imitated, and quietly copied from the people around us? And what if that one insight explains everything from petty jealousy to world wars?

Girard's theory of mimetic desire doesn't just illuminate history and literature — it's a mirror held up to your own life. Once you see it, you can't unsee it: in your career, your relationships, and every goal you've ever chased.

 If you've ever wondered why you want what you want — and how to choose the right models, orient your desires, and build a life of genuine meaning — this episode is for you! 

Transcript

Rome’s Founding And Mimetic Rivalry

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Picture the founding story of Rome, one of the greatest civilizations in history, two twin brothers, Romulus and Remus. They're raced together, shaped by the same experiences, driven by the same ambitions, and that sameness, that perfect mirroring of each other, becomes the source of their rivalry. They want the same city, the same throne, the same glory. But what they're fighting over can't be divided. There's no splitting it down the middle, no compromise, no deal to be made. And because they're equals, because neither has any claim the other doesn't also have, the tensions have nowhere to go but up. Romulus kills Remus and builds his city, Rome, on that act. Rene Girard looked at that founding story and dozens like it across every culture and every era, and he couldn't help but notice that the founding myth of one of the greatest civilizations in human history is a story about two people imitating each other's desires. They're escalating rivalries and violence. And that this story is not particularly unique to these two individuals, and that we see patterns of this everywhere in other founding myths, and still to this day in our everyday lives. We imitate the desires of the people around us. The imitation breeds rivalry and envy, and if left unchecked, it sows the seeds of violence. Hello and welcome to the Built to Last podcast. Built to Last is about people who did it right. People who competed at the highest levels in business, leadership, sports, and politics, and one, but who also built their lives on a solid moral and faith foundation that helped shape every decision that they made along the way. Foundations and values that you and I can learn from to make real incremental improvements to our daily lives and to build a life of meaning and purpose. So let's get into it. Today I'm looking at the life and ideas of the French intellectual René Girard. And for source material, I've used his biography by Cynthia Haven, which is called Evolution of Desire. And I also used some of his own books. René Girard had humble beginnings in the medieval French city of Avignon before he came to the United States to be in academia. He's known for his work on how desires come about, how the desires can cause violence in society, and the mechanism ancient societies used to overcome that violence and to restore peace. His main contribution was overturning three widespread assumptions about the nature of desire and violence. So, first, um, that our desire is authentic in our own right. And second, that we fight from our differences rather than from our sameness. And third, that religion is the cause of violence rather than an archaic solution for controlling violence within a society, as he would assert. His work almost holds up, you know, the proverbial mirror to our wants and desires, our jealousies, our capacity to be vindictive, even violent, and above all, to really be able to hide all of that from ourselves. And that's why I thought his work would be an excellent addition to this podcast as we think about building a life of meaning and purpose, even you know, if our human condition and our predicament may seem tire. But

Girard’s Early Life And Academic Breakthrough

SPEAKER_00 3:47

before I delve into his ideas, I wanted to take a look at his early life and how he got his start. Um, so as I said, he was born in France in Avignon on Christmas Day in 1923, so the early 90s. His dad, Joseph Girard, was uh lieutenant in World War I, and he, you know, received a shrapnel wound in his head, and that injury brought him really close to, you know, close to death, and and he was solidly anti-war for the rest of his life. And that made an impression on Girard as well, right? So he noted that uh that his father's saying that he was aware of the stupidity of it all. Um, his mom was a very good Catholic who took the children to various churches around town on Sundays and holy days. Um, but about by 12 or 13 years old, Rene Girard had stopped attending service or mass. He described a childhood that centered on a serene and comfortable environment and a very normal family life. And he inherited a good deal from each of his parents, and both sides were to play out in his nature. Um, his deeply Catholic mom and his anti-clerical Republican father also reflected much in the history of the city, Avignon itself. Um, Catholicism was a negative to positive, a positive to negative current running throughout the lives of this region, um, as it was also the seat of the papacy for a long time. And that leaped over the centuries, and it was a really highly charged topic. Um, but aside from that, just like a lot of other people that we've read on this podcast, he had a love for books from a very young age and was a verocious reader. His mother also loved the arts and literature, and she read to all the children. Um, but for most part, he found his own taste. From a young age, he showed a lifelong penchant for taking his own path, uh, almost a solitary education, really, that was formed by his own enthusiasm and intuitions. Um, he says, I began working on my own very early. When I was a child, I could not stand the atmosphere of schools. So my mother woulddrew me from the small lycée, which is school in French, to take lessons at home. So even as a child, you know, he was really forming himself outside the crowd on his own terms. Um, he was also, you know, homeschooled for a while. The books that he read in his childhood, which is Cervantes' uh Don Quixote and Rudyard Kipling's jungle book, had a very formative impact on his theories. You know, he found in them an impressive description of um of a term he's gonna explain later, which is scapegoating, um, with pervasive themes of mob violence, you know, imitative monkeys, and the lynching of a lame tiger. Um, within Rudyard Kipling's book, he really began to discover how we rewrite our stories to make the victim look guilty and so as to conceal our own collective guilt. Gerard often said that he had been an outstanding student until his later years, you know, just about the time puberty would have set in. But he described himself as an undisciplined cut-up, not exactly who you'd call the ringleader, but perhaps a known troublemaker. Um, but, you know, and the one most likely to be held responsible. But by 1939, Germany invaded Poland and France declared war. So for the next few years, the great disruptions of World War II would start to frame the next chapter of his life. You know, between 1940 and 1941, he completed his baccalaureates, which is first a standard degree, and then second, he did um did one in philosophy, which he did with distinction. And in 1941, he traveled to another French city called Lyon to prepare for the entrance exam to École Normale Supérieure, which is a really prestigious institution of high higher learning in France. But you know, he left after a few weeks. Um and instead he started preparing for entry into a highly specialized school for training archivists and medieval historians in Paris, which was called École des Chartes. Um Paris was still occupied by the Germans at this time, and France had been you know partitioned into an occupied zone and an unoccupied zone. And amidst this, in 1942, Girard arrives in Paris and he begins his studies, um, which is specializing in medieval history and paleography. Um so he was on his way to become a scholar. So then in 1947, you know, he finishes his dissertation, he graduates, and then almost immediately he leaves France for America. The American universities at the time were, you know, flooding with veterans, and uh as a relatively rich country at the time, they were looking abroad for help and snapping up teachers wherever they could find them. Cynthia Haven writes here, the culture shock when he arrived at Indiana University in 1947 must have been dizzy. Suddenly the post-war privations and bitterness were behind him, and he found himself in a spacious, tree-filled campus with limestone 19th century buildings. When he got to the US, he very much clung to his French identity, and even more so his identity as a French intellectual. Something he later said was a recipe for snobism. So he got pretty comfortable in his newfound life, and you know, that sense of superiority, unfortunately, was setting him up for a fall. You know, he'd finally had found his motivation and inspiration, which was again still generously seasoned with content. Um, but when he began writing, it was a little too late. He was fired from Indiana University, and it was um a rough introduction to the cutthroat nature of academia. And he writes, I no longer appeared to be a promising young man, and it was necessary to get rid of me. Um Cynthia says here, publish or perish is a cliche, but the number and eminence of scholarly articles and books mattered enormously in academic advancement. So, you know, he regretted his lack of inattention to the demands of academia, and he writes, It is under this principle that I started to write. Around 1950s, after two or three years devoted essentially to female students in cars, I was too ignorant of the system and too disoriented to lend an ear to the warnings of my department chair, which became more and more direct, even brutal, as his patients ran out. So now he was paying the price and he had to find another position quickly, but he was fortunate enough to land a job with the help of another um French academic at Duke University. So in 1952, he goes there. He stays there for a year, and then from there he goes on to Brynmore for four years and then goes to John Hopkins after, which is really where his career blossomed.

Mimetic Desire And The Myth Of Autonomy

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Um, during his teaching of literature, he started observing, and this is going back to what we talked about at the beginning of the episode, he started to observe recurring themes on the serious consequences of mimetic, is what he calls it, or you know, imitative behavior. At Hopkins, he wrote his first book, which is called Deceit, Desire in the Novel. And that book looked at themes of mimetic or imitative behavior in great works of literature. Um also during this time, he had two very strong conversion experiences around 1958, and the experiences were strong enough that his children were baptized and he renewed his wedding vows with his wife Martha. So Girard, you know, described himself as a reluctant convert. And it's interesting, you know, when he started in academia, he was very much distant from his Catholic faith, and which is which was also very trendy at the time. Um, as his colleague put it, he was very interested in Sartre, Albert Camus. He was very much, in a French way, a leftist, really, nothing Roman Catholic about him. So, you know, he experiences this intellectual vision, you know, that leaves him with an enduring sense of poise and direction, and he, you know, goes and gets his children baptized. Um, and one of his co-authors actually put it this way: he says, he explained meeting with whoever, in other words, his own meeting on the road to Damascus. This is very important. It explains much of his psychology. He has a certainty and quietness and peacefulness that doesn't exist in normal people. Almost when Moses met God, he was never the same. So what followed his intellectual conversion, which was, you know, as he says, a rather comfortable experience, was what he thought was a near-death experience. He was diagnosed with a form of skin cancer, which he thought was deadly, but his doctor had failed to tell him that it was curable. So that experience, which is very intellectual, is um, you know, now transformed into something that's on a next level. And he writes here, Renee Girard, he says, So my intellectual conversion, which was a very comfortable experience, self-indulgent even, was totally changed. I could not but view the cancer and the period of intense anxiety as a warning and a kind of expiation. And now this conversion was transformed into something really serious in which the aesthetic gave way to the religious. So it's interesting, you know, he had this experience, but uh his um, you know, return to religion or his discussions or his um theories on religion didn't really make way into his first book. Uh the first book really just focused on this theory of mimetic desire. So I just want to talk to you a little bit about it because I think it helps understand his progression of thought. So at the heart of um the book is the argument that our desires are imitative, or the word he likes to use, mimetic. So you'll hear that word a lot. Um, that he says that imitation is basically, you know, inescapable. It's how we learn, it's how we, you know, why we don't eat with our hands, it's why we communicate using languages or beyond grunts. He says that we envy and imitate others obsessively, um, unendingly and often ridiculously. You know, we want what others want because we believe the other or the other person possesses an inner perfection that we do not, and I think it's very relatable even today, especially in the age of social media and all the influencers. And, you know, he says we become consumed by the wish to be the god like others, be you know, and we hope that by acquiring their trappings, you know, whether there's cars or their circle of friends or, you know, whatever bag they own, whatever uh whatever clothing they have, we will acquire their um, you know, their metaphysical goods, um, meaning, you know, their authority or their wisdom or their autonomy, self-fulfillment, uh, which again, you know, are sort of of our own making. So he says, all desire is a desire for being, and that and the being we long to become um becomes wrapped up in a person who we idolize at first, and then that person becomes almost like a rival because we're envious of them and we become locked in an impossible conflict for, you know, it's an object or an honor or a promotion or a lover, right? Which is which is in itself a shorthand um for a bigger battle with bigger forces, which he's going to discuss in his later books. So the myth that he's trying to dismantle with this book is that of personal autonomy or the authentic self, which was really dear to some of the thinkers at the time, like Rousseau. And he challenged the concept that the hero wants something, that it is really he who wants it, and that he's unaffected by others as if, you know, he's not slave to public opinion and the approval of his family and friends. Girard was saying that there's always an inevitable third person in these transactions, the one who the hero is modeling his desires after, and who really taught us to have the desire in the first place. Um, so that's the theory with his first book, right? And it was interesting in the mid-1990s, the the scientists, some scientists discovered um mirror neurons, which um are basically, you know, essentially mimesis built into the human brain. And it was a great moment for validating his theory because they offer a deep physiological level explanation for why we cry when someone else is cry someone else cries. Um, and research has found that, you know, when let's say one man drinks a glass of water, the same part of an observer's brain are activated. So those are like the mirror neurons. And I think if we are honest with ourselves and look at our everyday behavior, you know, whether that's like keeping up with the Joneses, um, I think it's pretty evident that we do tend to imitate what other people are doing and our desires come from there as well. So while most think that Girard was thrown into the limelight by his first book, which came out in 1961, um, which is, you know, Deceit, Desire in the Novel, Girard's colleague said that he was in ascendancy long before it came out. And he writes um his colleague Gossman, who says, Yes, we were all tremendously attracted to Renee before the book came out. I thought of him as fearless. He had a tremendous self-confidence in the best sense. He knew what he was, what he wanted, and what he thought. He never felt threatened by people who had different ideas. He was a very powerful intellectual presence. And I think that's another great hallmark of successful people. They're confident in their skin, but they don't have a limited mindset, but a growth mindset that allows them to learn from others without feeling threatened by the knowledge of those around them. And that personality really served him well as he began to define himself really in opposition to the prevailing winds. So in the wake of his intense conversion, you know, again, that didn't make its way to the first novel, but you know, it will eventually. So he really seemed to be, you know, picking up the torch from some of the older French thinkers, um, such as Blaise Pascal or Simone Weill, people again who weren't afraid to use the word God, you know, without irony. And so after about 10 or so years at Johns Hopkins, he left to go teach at Buffalo in 1968, and he had a lot of freedom to write and teach whatever he wanted, and the course load was relatively light.

Scapegoats, Contagion, And Social Breakdown

SPEAKER_00 20:18

So in 1972, now, right, roughly about 11 years after the first big book came out, he published his groundbreaking work of violence and the sacred. So that's a book in which he developed the idea of scapegoating and sacrifice in cultures around the world, and showed the connection between imitation or mimeticism, mimeticism, and violence. Um, desire, he says, being imitative in nature, spreads contagiously, but that can lead to a conflict. So he says, you know, the that society carefully regulates marriage and property, for example, matters that are likely to trigger envy and imitation, um, which proliferate and then can threaten, you know, the peace of a society. So, as an example, he says, you know, one woman, uh, not necessarily the most attractive in a village, inspires the desire of one man, and then two, and then by imitation or contagion, all. And this is what he's calling uh mimetic crisis. So as the rivalry spreads over this one woman, he says, something strange happens, which is the rivals start to resemble each other, you know, their differences resolve. The very things that made them distinct, their identities, their social roles, they begin to blur. And what's driving them now isn't who they are, but it's what they want, which is the same woman. And, you know, this isn't very different from the also familiar love triangles, but he says normally in a society like customs. And laws would act as guardrails and they would keep people from chasing the same things, the same symbols, the same status. But in a mimetic crisis, in a mimetic contagion, those guardrails start to fail. And when tensions have been simmering for a long time already, the situation really spirals into cycles of revenge, retaliation, and counter-retaliation. And a well-ordered, differentiated society starts to collapse. And you end with what Girard calls the war of all against all. And at some point, the chaos needs to land somewhere. The violence needs a target. And almost inevitably the crowd begins to converge on one person or one group who seems to be responsible for all of it. And this group or this person is the scapegoat. And that selection isn't random, he says. The scapegoat is almost always an outsider, a foreigner, a minority, a woman, or someone at the margins of power. And the logic is that they can't fight back. Targeting the scapegoat really stops the cycle of revenge because there's no one left to retaliate. And just like that, the war of all or the tensions amongst a society becomes the war of all against one. A mob convinced of someone's guilt is an overwhelming force, and that individual or that minority group really stands no chance. And the tragedy is that the crowd genuinely believes they're restoring order. So, you know, this may sound a little bit vague and abstract, but it's crazy how relevant this is. So a good example or a recent and deeply personal example for many of us is COVID, right? Almost overnight, the pandemic created exactly the kind of societal crisis that he's describing here. You know, the customary rules and hierarchies that hold or held our society together, they really collapsed and people were stripped to fighting for the basics, you know, scrambling for medical equipment, essential supplies, toilet paper, facing economic ruin and enduring lockdowns that really generated a lot of, you know, enormous psychological and social strain and really flared up those tensions. So even as the vaccines were being rolled down, the lockdown, the lockdowns still persisted and the tensions still kept escalating and simmering. And it's not hard to see how these tensions came out on many scapegoats. You know, whether that was the police with the Black Lives Matter movement or it was the ramping up of cancel culture, where many conservative voices or, you know, voices of those that were not vaccinated were actively punished in the hope that, you know, it would restore peace. And the mob was genuinely convinced in both cases that it's scapegoating and punishing of those chosen victims, like the police or the unvaccinated, would restore peace. And Girard tells us that's precisely how the mechanism works and why it's so dangerous. And the same thing can be found in pre-World War II Germany, which was you know struggling with inflation and economic distress, and then there comes someone called Hitler who's able to bring people together by scapegoating the Jewish people. So the scapegoat can be killed, you know, exiled or otherwise isolated or punished, and suddenly for a while, René Gerard argues there's peace. You know, no one wants to see himself or herself as a murderer or as an unthinking participant in this mob violence. But at the same time, unanimity is important. Everyone must throw a stone because nobody commits the murder, because everyone does. And the outcome is pinned on some sort of inexplicable fate, a combination of circumstances or divine will. And the victim is first perceived as guilty, then as a savior or a god responsible for the return of the peace that had been interrupted. And when the seasons roll around again or the problems resume, a society reenacts the right with the real or symbolic victim. And that is the connection between mimetic contagion or mimetic crisis and violence and scapegoating and religion. So, again, you know, you watch a reality TV show or your Twitter X feed, and you notice how there's almost always someone who gets cast as the villain, the outsider, the one that everyone cancels or turns against, and the audience bonds over it. The ratings climb. And that's the sacrifice, sacrificial impulse. You know, it's ancient and instinctive, but it's instinctive, but it's still at work. Um, but the problem is that the piece is typically short-lived, and we resume back into our old patterns. Girard argued that archaic societies didn't just stumble into this pattern once, that they repeated it deliberately, ritually, because it worked, or at least it seemed to. And the whole point of ritual is to faithfully reenact what he called this surrogate victim mechanism, to replay the crisis, to recreate the moment, when collective violence against a single victim somehow restored peace, and to keep doing that so that the peace holds and keep the violence outside of the society. So Rene argued that these rituals are really the foundation of human societies, and that the foundations of the city were sometimes literally built on human sacrifice. The victim may become the worshiped guardian of the city as well as the reason for its existence. And human society begins from the moment symbolic institutions are created around the victim. That is to say, when the victim becomes sacred. And thus religion mingles with murder and a guilt so deeply hidden that it's not experienced at all. Um, the culpability or the wrongdoing of the victim basically goes unchallenged, and the victim's wrongdoing becomes part of the ritually repeated story. And the important point that he's making now is that the story always gets told by the survivors, by the community that did the killing, and that the victim's version never really makes it into the record. So he writes, the community is both attracted and repelled by its own origins. It feels the constant need to re-experience them, albeit in veiled and transfigured form. By means of rights, the community manages to cajole and somewhat subdue the forces of destruction. But the true nature of and the real function of these forces will always elude its grasp, precisely because the source of the evil is the community itself. In short, he's saying violence is the secret soul of the sacred. That the real purpose of sacrifice is not to appease transcendent beings, but rather it is to ensure the survival of these people. So I know there's a lot there, but to summarize, you know, with this book, he was forging the connection between our imitative behavior, um, which lead to a mimetic crisis when people want the same thing that can't be divided, kind of like in the example of Rome, of Romulus and Remus. And then the connection from there between the violence that mimetic crisis generates and the sacred. So a society in conflict and with its rivalries resorts, unleashing its violence, you know, on a scapegoat, on someone who's chosen and who is at the margins of the society because that person will not retaliate. And then the community, you know, can't live with what it has just done, which is commit violence on this scapegoat. So then it transforms that violence into something holy and divine. And the sequence is often repeated either as is or in a veiled form, in as a ritual, to keep, to really keep the destruction that came from that initial violence outside the society and to restore peace. So that was that was the key takeaway from his book, Violence in the Sacred, which is really establishing a relationship between violence in the societies and how that relates to archaic religion and sacrifice in archaic religions and what purpose that served, because that the ritual of human sacrifice has always eluded the grasp of anthropologists and um and historians is to understand what was the purpose of that sacrifice, what purpose did it play in ancient religions and ancient societies. So while you know Girard had his conversion before Violence in the Sacred came out, he really was still hesitant to talk about Christianity in that book.

Christianity And Exposing The Scapegoat Lie

SPEAKER_00 31:59

And in 1978, he came out with another book. So this is some you know six odd years after Violence in the Sacred, and this book he wrote with French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Ougourien, hopefully I said that right, and Guy LaFort. Um, and they published a book uh called Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, and this is one of his most well-known books. It was a book-length conversation in which he discusses his mimetic theory in its entirety. And this book was a bestseller in France. It had three sections. Uh, one was on anthropology, the second was on Judo-Christian scriptures, and then the third was on interdividual psychology. And it's interesting because before this book came out, he was already, Girard was already a big star in French academic circles. But this book, even though it was a bestseller, it completely ostracized him from the French academic community. Because in Things Hidden, he did something the French intellectual, French intellectual establishment really considered not worthy of serious intellectuals, which is to take religion or Christianity seriously as a body of work that contained genuine, discoverable truth. And in fact, on both sides of the Atlantic, things hidden since the foundation of the world marked the turning point where some of his followers really turned back and they said, you know, they they felt like they had been lulled by earlier books into believing that Girard didn't take his Christianity all that seriously, or that at least it was less important than the values that drive most academics in search of a reputation. So with this book, he came out of the, let's say, intellectually unfashionable Christian closet, and some supporters felt betrayed. But Girard's new position wasn't designed to make a splash, and this is a quote from Cynthia Haven's book, nor did it include a public relations strategy to minimize the punches he was going to take from critics. He simply moved in the direction his thoughts were taking him. And I think that this is super interesting because this really does uh is is, you know, show the mark of someone who's building something that lasts. The people that we talk about on the show that I really tried to feature are the ones who have built careers and lives of genuine meaning, uh, share this quality that they are not indifferent uh to what other things, they're human, but they have something stronger than the need for approval driving them, right? They have a commitment to truth and they have a commitment to a set of values that they refuse to negotiate, um, even if that means you know being ostracized or sort of not, you know, not getting the reputation that you think you deserve. And so I think that that's something that's extremely impressive. Um, in this book, he you know continued his reflections on scapegoating, on sacrifice, and on the founding myths of societies or the beginning of societies, and he writes, in effect, our most essential discovery is precisely the zero hour of culture, which is also the sacrifice, the hour of sacrifice, or the founding sacrifice. So he found new patterns in the Old Testament, and you know, despite all of the blood and the vengeance that you see in the Old Testament, the Jews start to do something that's completely different than other archaic tests, which is they begin to take the side of the victim. And that's completely revolutionary because in all of the other ancient myths, whether that's the Oedipus uh myth that he looks at or the founding of Rome as an example that we talked about, where you never really hear the story of the victim, you only hear the story of the survivor, or from the the perspective of the survivor, you start to see a different perspective in the Old Testament, which is the texts talk about the victim, whether that's you know, Abel, Joseph, or Job. For example, Cain and Abel, right? The rivalry of the two brothers, it leads to Cain murdering Abel, but the story tells us that Abel is innocent, and that we've never seen before in other ancient texts. So sacrifice is still justified as the need of a jealous God, but it's defended with less and less conviction. So sacrifice is exposed in the Old Testament, but it's not yet fully given up. And really in the New Testament, you see that Jesus' crucifixion reveals the sacrificial mechanism in its full totality, right? Because it gives you the detail of how brutal the process is. And it also shows how some participants, you know, whether that's Pontius Pilate, um, who voice their awareness of the scapegoating process, even if, even as they are participating in it. So it becomes, you know, it starts to do something very different than what he's seen and what he's observed in some of these ancient sacrificial myths. Um and Rene Girard says here, you know, having a scapegoat is not an ordinary concept. Instead, it is something almost paradoxical. Because a prince, it's it's a principle of illusion almost, where whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. You know, every myth that we encounter maintains that its single victim or its scapegoat is in fact guilty, right? Oedipus is guilty. Each ratifies the accusation of that guilt, and it justifies the lynching, right? Or the violence committed on the scapegoat. And if the victim is later divinized, which also happens in a lot of these myths, he remains above all the culprit of the preceding face. So myths, you know, myths attribute their appeasement to the victim, but they also divonize him without ever discovering the miscarriage of justice of which the society is guilty. So, you know, if you think about any time you turned on someone, right, or on the crowd, or the crowd turned on someone in social media on Twitter or X, as an example, you know, if we look at when people went after a whatever, some vaccine critic around the cut time of COVID on Twitter or X, you know, ask yourself this did anyone in that crowd really believe the vaccine critic was justified in their beliefs and wasn't actually causing societal harm? No, everyone was canceling the person because they genuinely believed that the vaccine critic was causing real harm to real people. And that's why the said person was being canceled, because people genuinely believed that canceling or sidelining or silencing the voice of the vaccine critic would restore peace and order and get us out of the chaos that was COVID. But the moment someone in the crowd says, stop, wait, that person hasn't done anything wrong, that that person's not the reason why we have this, that spell that you know, that that argument loses its power and the spell is somehow broken and the scapegoating process loses its power. And that's what Renee Girard is sort of realizing or trying to point out in the Christian text, which is to have a scapegoat is to not know that you have one, and that's why it works. So that's why the scapegoating process worked in the soci ancient societies because people didn't know they were scapegoating someone, they were just doing it. But as soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, as soon as you know that you know you're just putting the blame of your problems on someone else, and in fact you're the cause of the problem, that scapegoating process loses its power. And that's precisely what the Christian Gospels begin to do, according to Rene Gerard. He says the Gospels are built exactly like a myth with one exception, that a few people see secede from the crowd to say, it's not true, stop everything. It's not too late, stop everything, the victim is innocent. So instead of representing unanimous voice violence from the point of view of the mob, the account of the crucifixion shows it for what it truly is, and that's the first time it really happens in the history of religion. The emergence of this truth begins well before the gospels in the Hebrew Bible, which already, you know, rehabilitates a lot of scapegoats, you know, for example, Joseph and Job, who voice their anguish before the mob closes in on them. And this is the true difference, Rene Gerard says, between the mythical and the biblical. He says the mythical remains to the end the dupe of scapegoat phenomena, and the biblical exposes the lie by revealing the innocence of victims, and that the biblical and evangelical slowly deprive humanity of its last sacrificial crutches because they confront us with our own violence. So there you have it. You know, in this book is really where he finally makes the connection between his theories on mimetic desires, on violence, and how sacrifice evolved in in ancient societies and what purpose is solved and how Christianity really um displaced that mechanism, right? By giving us the truth about the victims and how um how they're targeted. So, you know, with all of this, I think he lays bare the human condition, right? Which is that we we do imitate desires of other people and we do envy each other, and that is you know what gives us our violence streak. But

Choosing Models And Breaking The Cycle

SPEAKER_00 43:03

the question I think that that comes from all of this is right, so what is this what is one to do, right? This is is this is how we're built, right? So how do we how do we get out of that cycle? And Girard says that the way to break the cycle of this violent imitation is what he calls a process of imitatio christi or imitating Christ, of renunciating or or of renunciation of violence. And this is you know not a this is not a Christian evangelical podcast, but I think it's very, very instructive, right? To understand how we're built and what we can do to be better members of society and to also help ourselves. So he says that, you know, the way is to turn the other cheek to love one's enemies and pray for those who persecute you, even unto death. And he says. Lump love triumphs over violence eventually, but it may not be the peaceful transition some may imagine. So he's very practical about it as well. He says, Since they do not see that human community is dominated by violence, people do not understand that the very one of them who is untainted by any violence and has no form of complicity with violence is bound to become the victim. I mean, you can look at that in any part of the world where there's, you know, either genocides or terrorist attacks where or, you know, mass shootings, for example, that the people who had no form of complicity with the violence become the victims. So he says, but you know, we must see that there's no possible compromise between killing and being killed. Our blindness is not innocent. Humankind has a huge stake in violence, and people fail to understand that they are indebted to violence for the degree of peace that they enjoy today. And you know, think about the peace we enjoy today, whether that's in the United States or in the most part of the modern world, that peace was hard won through revolutions, civil wars, world wars, where many innocent perished. And, you know, I think a lot of us forget about that today. And so, you know, going back um the to the books, the dynamics of all against one, again, linked to the central Christian imperative to love one's neighbor as oneself, he writes, it is absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns Jesus. There is no other cause for his death than the love of one's neighbor lived to the very end, with an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes. So, you know, he says the crucifixion did not represent a sacrificial death, but rather a death to end sacrifice altogether. It is the murderers who carry on the sacrifices and holocausts that Yahweh no longer wishes to hear of. God is not to be blamed, but rather all mankind and mankind alone. And so I know this is a lot of this is very dark and maybe even a little bit morbid and pretty dense, but I wanted to bring his work back to what it means for us in our lives today as I close, right? What does it mean for our hardwired mimetic desires and along with it that come, you know, the attendant violent instincts, because our predicament would appear to be hopeless, right? Wherein this is free will or with unshakable resolve, you know, the ability to relinquish our rivalries and our our envies. So he Girard says to us, you know, I would say that mimetic desire, even when bad, is intrinsically good in the sense that far from being merely imitative in a small sense, it's the opening out of oneself. Yes, extreme openness. It is everything. It can be murderous, it is rivalrous, but it is also the basis of heroism and devotion to others and everything. He says we don't escape memesis, we can only observe it, and in observing it, loosen the grip that envy has on us. And while, you know, we may be doomed to memesis, we do have a choice, at least in picking our role models intentionally through, you know, through our ruling faculty, or else, you know, let them happen accidentally through social media or the secondhand idols of our friends or our rivalries. So he said that, you know, even the most advanced technologies thrust our culture back to the archaic age of sacrificial polytheism, and you see that with mass media, with Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. And when he was asked, you know, what is to be done in the light of our mimetic crisis and the failure to resolve it, either with scapegoating or peaceful alternatives, he said, you know, we may break we may begin with personal sanctity and pray to avert disaster. And he said that, you know, kindness escalates and turns into what we call love, which obviously animals don't have, but it escalates the other way too. And it turns into deadly violence, which animals don't have either. But whether you exchange compliments, niceties, greetings, or insinuations, indifference, you know, meanness, bullets, bombs, it's always an exchange. You always give to the other guy what he's giving to you, or you try to do so. So, you know, this episode has been a bit different from what I typically do, which is on successful people and how they get there. But um, I thought the concepts that Renee Girard talk about are almost the why of this podcast, right? Because they talk about the human condition and and in learning about our desires is such an important thing as you think about the kind of life you want to build and the people you want to emulate. And it's also a great construct for understanding the world around us. I mean, Peter Thiel, who's a billionaire investor and was an early investor in Facebook, was actually a student at Stanford of Renee Girard. And when he saw the idea for Facebook, I think he instantly understood the mimetic impulse that would be at work in Facebook and that it would make that would make it an instant hit. So um, so I think it's a great framework to be aware of and to know. And more concretely for you and I, I think the key takeaway from Girard and the good news, and what I want to leave you with is that once you see the mimetic impulse or the mimetic desire at work, once you realize this mechanism is at play, it's very empowering, right? Because you realize you have a choice, which is you can be intentional about who you model your life after. And that's really what this show is about is finding and showing you and talking to you about the right models to emulate. People who point you towards something higher, or, you know, said from a religious angle, who teach you to sanctify your life. You know, if you're a Catholic or Christian, Jesus and the Saints are a great place to start. So, with that, you know, it's a wrap for today's episode.

Final Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_00 50:41

I hope that this show gave you a lot to think about. For me, his work has been absolutely um transformative. I think it's so enlightening. And if you made it this far, genuinely thank you for listening. And if it resonated with you, share it with someone uh you think would enjoy it. Until next time, thank you.