Lessons from Rene Girard

René Girard (1923-2015) was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher whose work offers a powerful and comprehensive theory of human culture, desire, and violence. His insights, often described as "mimetic theory," provide a framework for understanding everything from individual envy to societal collapse and the role of religion in human history.

Core Learnings from René Girard's Thought

Desire is Imitative (Mimetic): Contrary to the modern belief in spontaneous, authentic desire, Girard argues that most of our desires are copied from others. We desire what others desire, and this "other" becomes a model for our desires. [1][2]
Mimetic Desire Leads to Rivalry: When we imitate the desires of a model who is close to us in social or physical space (internal mediation), we inevitably end up desiring the same objects. This turns the model into a rival and an obstacle, leading to conflict. [3][4]
The Scapegoat Mechanism Resolves Social Crises: When mimetic rivalries escalate to the point of threatening the existence of a community (a "mimetic crisis"), societies unconsciously converge on a single individual or group—the scapegoat. This victim is blamed for the crisis and is expelled or killed, an act that miraculously restores peace and social order. [1][5]
Mythology is the Story of the Scapegoat Told by the Persecutors: Myths are the narratives that justify the collective violence against the scapegoat. They conceal the victim's innocence and the arbitrary nature of the community's violence, presenting the scapegoating event as a necessary and just act. [6]
Religion is Founded on the Scapegoat Mechanism: Archaic religions, with their prohibitions and rituals, are built around the scapegoat mechanism. Ritual sacrifice is a re-enactment of the original founding murder, designed to periodically release social tensions and prevent a return to all-against-all violence. [7][8]
The Bible Reveals the Innocence of the Victim: Girard argues that the Bible, particularly the Gospels, represents a radical break from mythology. For the first time, the story is told from the perspective of the innocent victim (e.g., Abel, Joseph, the prophets, and ultimately Jesus), exposing the violent mechanism that underpins human culture. [3][9]
The Crucifixion Exposes the Scapegoat Mechanism: The passion and crucifixion of Jesus reveal the scapegoat mechanism in its entirety. Jesus is the perfectly innocent victim, and the Gospels make it clear that the crowd's violence is a product of mimetic contagion, not divine will. [9][10]
Knowing About the Scapegoat Mechanism Diminishes its Efficacy: By revealing the innocence of the victim, the Gospels make it increasingly difficult for societies to use the scapegoat mechanism to restore order. Once we know we are scapegoating, the process loses its power to unify us in a shared, false belief of the victim's guilt. [6][11]
Modernity is a Consequence of the Gospel's Revelation: The scientific spirit and the modern concern for victims are by-products of the Gospel's unveiling of the scapegoat mechanism. However, this has also led to an increase in mimetic rivalries, as the traditional sacrificial systems that once contained them have been dismantled. [6]
We Live in an Apocalyptic Time: Because the sacrificial protections of archaic religion have been weakened by the biblical revelation, humanity is now in a more dangerous position. We are prone to escalating, global rivalries without the traditional means of resolving them, leading to the possibility of large-scale, self-inflicted destruction. [3]

Key Quotes from René Girard

On Mimetic Desire

"We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack." [9]
Source: BrainyQuote
"The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to desire their desires." [6]
Source: Creatosaurus
"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires."
Source: Attributed to Girard, commonly cited in secondary sources.
"Henceforth men shall copy each other; idolatry of one person is replaced by hatred of a hundred thousand rivals." [12]
Source: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure*
"The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe." [5][12]
Source: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure*
"Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version." [5]
Source: The One by Whom Scandal Comes*
"Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it."
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"All desire is a desire to be." [2]
Source: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (paraphrased in Wikipedia)
"Mimetic desire can blind us to our own authentic desires and lead us astray." [1]
Source: Bookey
"Human beings are driven by mimetic desire, constantly imitating the desires of others and getting caught up in a cycle of rivalry." [1]
Source: Bookey

On Violence and the Sacred

"Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them." [5]
Source: The One by Whom Scandal Comes*
"The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research -- namely, practical action." [5][7]
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"For religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed. To drive the monster from its secret lair is to risk loosing it on mankind." [5][7]
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred."
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone." [5]
Source: The One by Whom Scandal Comes*
"I believe that in intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away." [9]
Source: BrainyQuote
"The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception." [7]
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"Religion, then, is far from 'useless.' It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger..." [7]
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him – but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed." [13][14]
Source: Violence and the Sacred*
"Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion." [3]
Source: Battling to the End*

On the Scapegoat Mechanism

"Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one." [9][11]
Source: BrainyQuote, What Should I Read Next?
"A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt." [9]
Source: BrainyQuote
"The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims." [5][15]
Source: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning*
"Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution." [6][11]
Source: Creatosaurus, What Should I Read Next?
"In myth, violent death is always justified." [5][6]
Source: Creatosaurus, Goodreads
"Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat. I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats." [2][16]
Source: BrainyQuote
"Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate." [2]
Source: BrainyQuote
"The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented." [6]
Source: The Scapegoat*
"The scapegoat is society's way of preserving itself in the face of its own violence." [17]
Source: BookBrief
"We create scapegoats to divert our attention from the real problems we refuse to confront." [17]
Source: BookBrief

On Christianity and Revelation

"The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth." [6]
Source: Creatosaurus
"If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology." [6]
Source: Creatosaurus
"The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence." [10][18]
Source: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning*
"If we ceased to desire the goods of our neighbor, we would never commit murder or adultery or theft or false witness. If we respected the tenth commandment, the four commandments that precede it would be superfluous." [9][15]
Source: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning*
"Christianity is a founding murder in reverse, which illuminates what has to remain hidden to produce ritual, sacrificial religions." [10]
Source: Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre*
"What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible." [5][10]
Source: Goodreads, In My Father's House Blog
"Humankind is never the victim of God; God is always the victim of humankind." [18]
Source: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning*
"Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power." [5][15]
Source: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning*
"The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and 'radicalizes' the concern for victims in order to paganize it." [5][15]
Source: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning*
"Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father... To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it." [2][11]
Source: BrainyQuote, What Should I Read Next?

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