Lecture I: Introduction to Mimetic Theory | René Girard's Mimetic Theory

Lecture 1. Introduction to Mimetic Theory No philosopher has influenced my thinking more than Rene Girard.

He showed me how I was caught up in meaningless status competitions, and how much I was driven by desires that weren't even my own. And I wasn't the only one. Too many of my peers were miserable pursuing things not because they actually wanted them, but because society told them to. And sometimes I look back and and wonder how I ever functioned without Gerard's ideas. I see how swept up I was in vain pursuits.

Pointless social games and status signaling, which Gerard exposed and rescued me from. And if there were ever a set of ideas that radically changed my life.

The journey of acquiring these ideas, however, was a long, long and painful struggle. Gerard's writing is is hard to understand, his theories seem antiquated and abstract, and his books jump from idea to idea without an apparent structure. And this is why the series exists. Over the next seven lectures, we're going to cover the entirety of Girard's system in a structured and understandable way. While exploring the relevance of his ideas and for the contemporary world.

My name is David Perrell, and I'm going to be moderating these lectures, which are made possible by the generous grant of Tyler Cowan's Emergent Ventures Program. As your host, I'll be listening and learning here with you. And with that, I'd like to introduce our lecturer, Jonathan B. Jonathan, I know you're busy. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for having me. If you're gonna do all the hard work of setting up and I can just ramble on philosophy, you can have me any time of the week.

Well, I'm glad you could be here. And before you introduce us to Gerard, I'd like to introduce you to our audience. And I wanna start with how we met. I was Hosting a philosophy discussion group in New York City. And at the time, we were reading Augustine's City of God. And I remember you being on the other side of the room, and you start sharing, and I was so impressed with the rigor and the intensity of your discussion. I was like, who is this guy?

And so we became fast friends. I audited your philosophy class at Columbia. Now we both live in Austin, Texas, where we must have dinner together two, three nights a week. And in that time, I've been very impressed, and what stands out the most is just the discipline and the thoughtfulness that you bring to philosophy. And what I would like to do now is talk a little bit about how you got here today.

So you were born in China, where you were raised between Beijing and later moved to Vancouver, and you spent most of your formative years training in Olympiad mass. At fifteen, you won a Canadian gold medal in the Pascal Mathematics Competition. At seventeen, you're an invitee to the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad. At 18, you were awarded a full ride scholarship at Columbia, where you studied computer science as one of the top 20 Eggleston scholars in a class of over 2,000 people.

At 20, you finished your computer science degree, and that's when you were introduced to Girard. And because of Girard, you pursued a second degree in philosophy, where you focused on continental social philosophy and Buddhist theory. At 22, immediately after graduation, you started building a fintech startup with Joe Lonsdale, which you've been working on for the past year. Now, did I get that right?

Yeah, I I think factually that is uh correct, although I don't know about the exact ages. I'm a bit worried that you've hyped me up a bit too much. Uh perhaps not unlike our equity markets, you set me up so high that there's only one direction that I can go from here and that's down.

To no fault of your own, because no one gives introductions this way.

That are relevant to my engagement with Girard. And those are all the the personal failures and the suffering that that I've had along the way that really led me to Girard. I suspect this is probably a much broader point that when you give an introduction to a Girardian, That you should highlight perhaps their failures, just as much, if not more, than their successes, because it's often their failures that really drive them to draw.

I don't think Girardian insights are rewarded, shall we say, in the victory of a triumph, but you have to go out there and scavenge them from your fields of defeat. And so it wasn't out of a mindset of achievement, or even a leisurely strolling into Gerard, out of theoretical curiosity, that I was acquainted with him, but I crawled to him, out of a desperate uh existential necessity. Hmm.

So then how did you find your way to Gerard? Yeah, well like I mentioned, it's mostly personal uh personal suffering and strife. Uh but maybe to be a bit more specific Like many other teenagers, uh certainly ambitious teenagers, I was struggling quite a bit in my first years at Columbia, not academically, not professionally, not socially, but in a deep personal and existential sense.

As a freshman at at an elite college, I if you'll excuse a funny metaphor, think you kind of end up in a zoo with two thousand other hyper conscious, status-oriented, prestige-seeking teenagers And the one word that I think which captures the existential problem of such a community well is hollowness.

And now this wasn't true for everyone, but most of us weren't really doing things, I think, for their own sake, but out of what Girard would call mimesis, our natural capacity and tendency to imitate. I mean think about it like this. two thousand of allegedly some of America's smartest and most independent

kids all end up after college wanting to go into four fields finance, tech, law, and then medicine. And during college we're supporting political causes we didn't care about to fly the right colors. We hung out with the right people, we wanted to scene dating the right person, and we worked our asses off, hustling for prestigious internships that a lot of us actually secretly loathe.

And I think what made this all so much more perverse was that we had to lie to ourselves to sustain these pursuits. that if we just squinted hard enough and intoxicated ourselves in the equally drunken rhetoric of our peers, that we could uh fool ourselves into thinking that this path of prestige is the right one for us to really be on.

And what was so existentially depressing, if you will, about such a life was not the presence of wrong. You know, we weren't being tortured, we weren't starving, but it's the absence of right.

that even the victories felt so hollow and meaningless. Like getting a prestigious internship. That was a one-day or three-day buzz that went away as fast as it came. And I think these victories were so meaningless Because they weren't out of our own genuine desires, but a product of mimesis, what we felt like we had to do out of some kind of social pressure.

And what was the wake up call for me was in my sophomore year, seeing where this path of Mises was leading me down towards. I was talking with adults, some of them alumni living in working in Manhattan, and these were the guys who had made it, right? They had the right postal code, they had the right job, they had a hot partner.

But they were fundamentally plagued with the same type of existential problems. They were making money they didn't need, to buy shit that they didn't want, to impress people they didn't particularly like. And in them, I saw the same despair and hollowness. But in some sense. even worse because it's developed a bit further out.

And how can one not be hollow when you're living life in in such a way where you're motivated not by a core strong uh impetus of genuine desire, but this external shell of social activity? Yeah, I see this all over the place. I see the influence of emetic theory in so many aspects of society. You see it with people who take out a loan to buy some fancy car and they don't have the money to do it. Right. You see it in the way that management consultants, you'll be talking to them

and they'll talk about the director level title at the company as if that's the salvation that's gonna make them happy forever. They get it, now they're no happier once they get that. But the worst kind of mimetic competition that I saw was in high school And there was this weird thing where the parents would be really competitive and conniving. over where their children would go to school. It's like a status competition among them.

And they wanted their kids to go to Ivy's, these prestigious schools, and the trophy at the end was those bumper stickers on the back of the Mercedes with the university logo. And I saw how through mimesis that people had lost their own way and they weren't even aware of the nature of their own desire.

And I think it's this lack of awareness that if you don't have a proper understanding of these forces, makes it so easily for us, especially in today's c m uh modern society, to get caught up in these forces. And I I think throughout college, I started gaining a more and more intimate awareness of the logic behind all of these phenomena that you experience. Not because I was above the fold. If anything, I was so aware of it.

Because I was the most guilty, that I was the most mimetic of them all. And what was so frightening to me was the realization as a sophomore that I could live my entire life like this, fundamentally not from life. I knew I had to change before it was too late. And I knew that there was a point where it was gonna be too late, where the ship was gonna get too much speed, where, if you'll humor another metaphor, the dagger is too deep in the old king's heart. Fortunately.

In the pits of my despair, I was introduced the work of Rene Gerard. And so Gerard saved me, and I really do mean that in a very literal sense of the term, in the same way that Virgil saved Dante, by exposing to him the manifestations and the mechanisms behind human evil, as well as guiding his purging of more milder forms of perversion.

Now Gerard saved me by presenting to me a theory of human nature that explained the true origin of desire and its terrifying consequences if not directed properly. He gave me a more accurate map with which I myself could slowly unravel and untangle myself from the mimetic web. And with this lecture series, my hope is to be able to gift this map to you and our listeners as well.

So Jonathan, I gotta ask you, is the power of Gerard's ideas that they're gonna stop making us be mimetic? Or do you still feel like you're still as prone to chasing prestige and Envy as before. Yeah, you're definitely right. It's definitely the latter. Um, Gerard's ideas do not work on us by magically making us stop being mimetic and social creatures.

In the same environment I would say I'm just as susceptible to mimetic forces as I was before. But he his theory does have practical personal benefits. And let me explain with an analogy. I think there was a military theorist by the name of John Boyd, and he said something uh I'm gonna have to paraphrase here, I don't know the exact quote. Like Superior fighter pilots use their superior judgment to make sure they get into situations where they never have to use their superior skill.

And the idea under that line is that what's perhaps more important than the ability to deal with that situation. is the foresight and judgment to fundamentally not get into those situations. And I think the same is true for what Girard has done for me. When I am say Already deeply envious or deeply prideful. The battle's already lost. There's nothing that understanding Girard and mimetic theory rationally can do for me.

The medic theory, however, gives me a framework to avoid situations which inspire debilitating envy, which ignites uh sort of unproductive pride. It tells us what type of person to avoid and who to have close. It teaches us how to construct a social environment that is relatively sober and how to identify ones that are prone to mimetic contagion.

Mimetic theory does not give us the power to resist damaging instances of mimesis in the moment, but it does give us the foresight to avoid them altogether.

So do you think Gerard is worthy of engagement because of how therapeutic he is, how how he can rescue us from suffering? Yeah, I I would say the answer is probably yes and no, but perhaps let me answer that with with an anecdote. One of Girard's collaborators was asked that similar question that why he was a Girardian. And he answered because it's cheaper than psychoanalysis.

Now, this is supposed to be humorous, and the literal and perhaps uninteresting interpretation is that you don't have to pay anyone uh to study Gerard's ideas, but it can still have a therapeutic effect of solving your problem. But there's a much more interesting reading, I think. That cheaper here means economic, being able to explain much more phenomena with much less assumptions. And not just personal therapeutic phenomena, but social historical as well. Take the example of uh

Freud in psychoanalysis, if you're familiar with that, he had this idea of the Oedipus complex, right? Where the son is rivalrous with the father and he the son desires the mother. That's a very heavy, heavy assumption that we all have this. inbuilt desire to have sex with mom. And it can only explain one set of phenomena. Gerard's a memetic theory takes the same example, but sees humans as naturally imitative and desire as contagious between people, including between father and son.

And as a result, the medical theory can explain not only the Oedipus complex But a much broader set of psychological, social, historical phenomena where people desire similar things and then enter into rivalry. Hence memetic theory is cheaper than psychoanalysis, doing much more with much less.

So I think Gerard, to answer your question directly now, is probably only so therapeutic because he hits on fundamental truths of the human condition. Truths which are overlooked, or perhaps even more provocative. systematically hidden by modernity. And these truths help us not only understanding ourselves, but understanding the world and even the trajectory of history.

I think Gerard's ideas help us navigate the world and help us see opportunity where others may see barren land and see danger where most people have already let their guard.

Let me let me give you a direct example here that I prepared for later on, but I think it's a very fitting example here. And it'll sh go to show the unique predictive power of Gerard's theory in the social world beyond just personal therapy, because I don't want us to trivialize the medic theory. The example I'm gonna give is quite timely. It has to do with the relationship between China and America, the Sino American relationship. Uh against the crowd, Gerard in two thousand and seven.

Anticipated the deterioration of the Sino-American relationship. And you have to recall and remember how contrarian and unlikely such a prediction was in 2007. I mean, remember that in the 2000s and certainly in the 90s, a dominant view was that China's relationship with the West was only going to get better and better through economic liberalization. And I think such a view, which obviously seems hopelessly naive these days, was grounded on two flawed premises that were accepted.

The first one was that China's rise would sort of lift the boats of the world economy and make most people in the West richer through cheaper goods and therefore much happier. They would people in the West would be happy with China's rise. And the second point, the second assumption, that this optimistic view is grounded on was that the increasing similarity between China and the West would lead to political harm.

The deal went something like, you know, as Chinese people started watching Western movies, as they started idolizing American sports, as they wanted to send their kids to Ivy Leagues, that their values would be much closer aligned to that of the Americans, and therefore much less conflicting. Now Gerard's mimetic understanding of human nature enabled him to see through the flaws of both assumptions. On the first point, we are not rational, utility maximizing.

But social creatures, prone to relativistic comparison. For Gerard, America would be more unsettled, even if it were richer, but its gap between China had closed down. The absolute increase in goods matter little to humans compared to a change in relativistic social standing. And on the second point, Gerard believes that it's similarity rather than difference that causes individuals and nations to enter into conflict.

Desiring a similar set of objects would open up the two nations to a larger surface area of competition and therefore potential conflict and even violence. And so, at the peak of Sino-American optimism in 2007, and this was right before 2008, where the congeniality between the East and the West had never been greater, Gerard stood against the crown and warned us of such a conflict.

A conflict that will come from the very mechanism that most thought would establish peace, trade. Let me read you a quote directly from Gerard. A conflict between the United States and China will follow. Everything is in place. But it will not necessarily occur on the military level at first. Trade can transform very quickly into war. From this point of view, we can reasonably fear a major clash between China and the United States in coming decades.

This looming conflict between the United States and China has nothing to do with a clash of civilizations. In fact, the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar. Of course, fifteen years later, Gerard proves depressingly correct. We are in the midst of this very trade war, and relationships have deteriorated beyond what most could have possibly imagined in the two thousand.

So I hope this is a satisfying, albeit somewhat startling answer to your question of why Gerard is worth engaging. Not only does he help us understand and I think manage the part of ourselves most important, but previously opaque to us. I think his theory also enables us to understand the world and human society in a different and often much more predictive way.

But uh before we jump too far ahead, if it's okay with you, I'd like to give an overview on the structure of these lecture series as a whole. Please do. Why don't you take the lead and I'll jump in with questions and comments. Great. I have two goals over the next seven lectures, one theoretical and one practical.

Theoretically, I aim to give you an encompassing overview of Gerard's entire theory, from his psychology to his theology, from his theory on human evolution to predictions for apocalypse, from readings on Greek literature to his critique of modern institution. I will present to you the entirety of Gerard's system. Practically, I wish to show you how this theoretical system applies to your life in modern society through bountiful historical and contemporary examples.

We're going to analyse through a Girardian lens, of course, celebrity advertisement, romantic related. Ritual sacrifice, the relationship between COVID and social unrest, the invention of coinage, social media, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the genesis of law, modern victimhood culture, the philosophical basis of innovation, and much, much more. My goal is not to leave you stranded with sterile intellectual concepts.

Let's give you a map with which you can identify the Gerardian forces animating our world and your life in order to navigate its relatively choppy waters. Now I've prepared these lectures. For a public audience at a intermediate undergraduate difficulty, that is to say, it's not going to be a walk in the park, but no prerequisites are necessary to understand these levels.

Now, we are going to engage quite frequently with the Western philosophical canon, the Hegel's and Plato's and Rousseau's of the world. We're also going to be engaged, perhaps even more frequently, with the world literary mythical canon, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hindu hymn to Perusha, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Sophocles, Shakespeare. But rest assured, all of these

along with core Girardian concepts, will be properly contextualized and introduced. There's no prerequisites for these series of lectures other than interest.

Now specifically, the ordering of these lectures are set. This lecture, lecture one, will give an overview of Girard's life and his work. It is a condensed summary of this entire lecture series for people who are short on time but still want to get a brief taste of Girard, if you will.

And then moving on for lecture two and three, we're going to discuss Girard's psychology. Girard focuses on, as you probably can already tell, the mimetic parts of human nature, our capacity and tendency towards imitation. Now, with this psychological grounding, in lectures four to seven, we will dive into Gerard's philosophy of history.

Which starts from the very beginning, man's evolution from ape, and goes to the very end, our imminent apocalypse. Girard thinks the world is literally gonna end very Now, given that we're going to be talking about such weighty concepts such as apocalypse, the literal end of the world, I wanted to throw out a quick disclaimer here so that I don't receive either undeserved credit or misdirected anger.

All of the ideas I'm about to share with you are not mine, but the most charitable reconstruction to Girard. This is not me, but my interpretation of Girard. Now I have many theological, methodological, psychological disagreements. Strong points of contention withdrawal. And I could do a whole lecture series just on my reasons for those disagreements. But this is not interpreting B. It's interpreting Gerard. I will present to you the most charitable interpretation of Girard I can muster.

Even if I privately disagree with them. Some of them at least, because I've been taught in a philosophical pedagogical tradition that sees the lecturer, me, not as a door to door salesman of a single product, but as a wandering merchant with a whole caravan of goods. I shouldn't be in the business of knocking down your door and shoving my single ideas down your throat, regardless of what your needs are. Instead, I should open up my little merchant caravan of ideas.

And try to argue the best I can for each idea in my inventory, for why they are attractive, so that you, the listener, can have agency to make that decision.

But before I show you my Girardian wear, so to speak, let me give you a brief introduction about the man behind the theory. On december twenty fifth, nineteen twenty three, Rene Noel Theophiles was born as the the second of five children to a Catholic, learned mother and an anticlerical archivist father in Avignon, France. Gerard's father had served, he'd lost a brother, he'd been wounded himself in World War I, and passed his views on the meaninglessness of

Of conflict onto Girard. And I think this view was further corroborated as Girard spent his formative adolescent years in France under Nazi occupation. Now of course, as anyone in that place in that time period, the cruelty of the Nazis left an imprint on Gerard. So did the cruelty of the French resistance.

You see, once they had been liberated by the Allies, the French resistance, now in control of France, started scapegoating and persecuting anyone who had tangential affiliations to the Nazis during the time of occupation. Often these victims were innocent. Many innocents, mostly women too vulnerable to defend themselves, were scapegoated by the French mob, blamed for Nazi collaboration. They were humiliated, dragged around on the street, and often killed without trial on groundless accusations.

Let me let me read you of the vivid scenes depicted by Gerard's biography. Some of them were young mothers with no means of support, motivated by hunger and need rather than by treason or even desire. Some were unmarried school teachers who were forced to meet with German soldiers in their homes. Others were restless teenage girls who just flirted with the foreign soldiers.

One was a charwoman who cleaned the German military headquarters. There were no trials, only stylized rituals of retribution. a shameful carnival that often included stripping these women to their underwear and loading them onto trucks to drive around the town. They were exhibited to the sound of drum rolls, shouting and casting. as if the trucks were tumbrels, in seventeen eighty nine the French Revolution had come alive again. And

these scenes of innocence being scapegoated will leave a lasting imprint on Gerard, and be a common thread throughout his work. Both the meaninglessness, deceitfulness, and arbitrariness of conflict And the perennial need of troubled human societies to find innocent victims to blame and murder for Cafe.

Now, Girard's intellectual trajectory, on the other hand, could be described as anti-institutional and unorthodox through and through. He was always an outside. He was an outsider from the very beginning. Unable to bear regular school, he had to go to a private tutoring program, reading as at his heart's content, and not to the dictates of any syllabus. He was trained in Indiana University in history, but his generative curiosity soon overflowed the boundaries of his diploma.

He made little contributions to history and was self taught in an outsider in all the major fields that he did actually contribute. First, he made his mark in literary theory by articulating the idea of mimesis through close readings of literature. Next, he jumped disciplines into anthropology, where he shed light on the need for scapegoating. And then he jumped disciplines once more to theology, mounting a serious defense for Christianity.

Now, despite being accepted into the prestigious French Academy and holding professorships at Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, and Stanford, Douart still remains to some extent an outsider in all of these discussions. The literary theorists have a beef with him for not respecting the methods and conventions and fashions of the day.

The anthropologists distrust his liberal use of evidence and lack of fieldwork, and even parts of the Christian community have shunned him for his quite unorthodox reading of the crucifixion.

So the title of this lecture series is called Interpreting Gerard: Exeget of Apocalypse. Why do you call him an exeget? Why not philosopher? Or maybe something more provocative like like profit? Yeah, yeah. Well tha that's a good question. We're we're not in the business of drama here, so I I think I skipped profit, but Mostly I called him an exeget because that's what he called himself, and I wanted to have respect for his self conception.

You see, he explicitly in interviews rejected both terms, philosopher and prophet, and I think it'd just simply be too narrow to call him a literary theorist, an anthropologist, or a theologian. Now an exeget is someone who performs exegesis, the interpretation of scripture. And I think that is the most accurate way to understand Gerard's system and the vast terrain that he is forced to traverse.

You know, he's less a careful analytical philosopher, but a visionary expanding and articulating a moral insight informed by Scripture through all of these domains. I get a feeling that reading Gerard, for him, these vast domains weren't these divergent disciplines, these separate buckets that he was dipping his toes into, but simply different manifestations of the same core insight.

And I think Gerard's aim wasn't to revolutionize literary criticism, anthropology, or theology, but to articulate what he conceived to be the core insight of Christianity.

Now that we have some context on Girard the Man, let's move on to the meat and bones, the meat and potatoes of this lecture, which is a brief summary of Girard's distance. I will attempt to give a reduced and simplistic summary of this entire lecture series, which covers the entirety of mimetic theory. Sharing with you Gerard's key concepts and conclusions, but probably not the full reasons and repercussions behind these conclusions. Here I will trade precision for Brett.

Now for people who don't have the time for the full 10 plus hour lecture series, first, shame on you, but secondly, this could be a summary that should be sufficient for you to get a taste of Girard. Now for those who are embarking on the full journey with us, I think this summary can be a map for the expansive, tumultuous, and dizzying terrain ahead, for you to gain your sea legs and gain an orientation of the landscape.

The best way for me to give you a taste of Gerard's system in one telling is to give a comprehensive history of humanity, beginning from man's evolution from ape, all the way to population. I'll start by summarizing Gerard's psychology, how he thought humans were psychologically different from animals, then I will articulate the problems this unique psychology created for early human societies and their respective solutions.

And after that, I will detail how Christianity represents a meaningful rupture for Girard from these early societies. And lastly, I will articulate how Christianity brought us all the way here to modernity and how it will imminently deliver us to violent abuse.

So let us begin with psychology. Girard's apocalyptic conclusions begin with a rather innocuous observation. What defined for Girard, our evolutionary breaking away from our great ape cousins is not reason. It's not truth. It's mimesis, our gradually increasing capacity and tendency for imitation. Now the best metaphor I can think of to explain nemesis is that of co-vibrating violin string.

Now when you put two violin strings together in close proximity, as you flick one, a similar frequency of vibration will translate to the other. And I think in a like manner, Gerard identifies a species of human behavior. And here I use behavior for the lack of a better word, in largest sense possible, uh sen actions, experiences, judgments, intentions. that proceed also from copying an external instance of that behavior.

Now humans are social animals through and through, prone to this type of co-vibration, just as strings on a violin aren't independent, neither are we. Mimesis is the fundamental capacity and tendency to to gain access to the subjectivity of others, as well as to reproduce objective cultural forms. In other words, mimesis is what constitutes us as social beings and makes us different from other animals.

Mimesis, this tendency to ingest the behaviors and values, what have you, of those around us, is why perhaps prestige and recognition matter so much to us humans. You know, when a majority of a social group that you're immersed in believes something is good or beautiful or believe something should be done in this way or that, we tend to slowly take on and ingest those positions as well through And I think our everyday notions of prestige already have an understanding of mimesis.

When we say something is prestigious, we are perhaps also saying that on its own, it does not deserve the value we attribute to it, right? When we call prestigious Rolex, Harvard, Bentley, Corn maybe not Cornell, but the other actual prestigious things. Partially what we're saying is that the value we attribute to it is not fully accounted for by the objects themselves, but that there's some surplus value where the object doesn't deserve.

Gerard would say that that surplus value does not come from the object, but our peers valuing it, and us ingesting their opinions through mimesis. Now for Gerard, mimesis isn't everything, but everything to some degree is mimetic.

the rush of adrenaline that infects you in a roaring and lively sporting stadium, the tribalism of politics, the madness of cults and how they sustain each other's delusions, the passing on of accent, even as animal, as an activity of replenishing ourselves, drinking water. We may still call to mind however subtly how our favorite athlete drinks Gatorade, right? That's the purpose of those commercials, to get that in your head. This is how broad and all-pervasive mimesis operates.

Humanity for Gerard would be completely unrecognizable without

The species of a mimetic behavior that most concerns Gerard in both senses of the word is desire. It's fine and dandy when what mimesis transmits is accents or cultural codes, but when mimesis converges the desires of people. Well that invites them into competition, conflict, and often violent effort. Gerard separates the entirety of human desires into two species the desire to be, which he terms metaphysical desire, and the desire to experience, which he terms physical desire.

Metaphysical desire is directed at what objects say about me. Physical desire is directed at an experience confirmed by the qualities of the object itself. Let me give you a few examples to clarify. I can pursue, for example, sex for the experience out of physical desire, and what I would be after there would be pleasure or intimacy, feelings in the moment. But I can also pursue sex for being.

what having sex with a certain type of person really says about me. Right? And this is a real psychology that people have. This is the psychology of the Don Juan or the coquette. For these people, sex is no longer about sex, but something more core to their identity. They are not out there to experience something, but to prove

Or take another more trivial and mundane example. I can buy a car for the experience, the trouble it would save me from walking everywhere, but I can also buy a car because I want to be a certain type of person, because I just want to have the coolest card on the block. and have people admire. Uh you, for example, David, I must applaud you.

Because clearly from your car I can tell that you're a very saintly man. Clearly you do not care what the car says about you. You are freed from metaphysical desire in this domain. Congratulations. I don't want to hear it. My turn is beautiful, John. Just just don't please don't stop driving there. A reductive but hopefully illuminating way to put this is that physical desire aims at utility, whereas metaphysical desire aims at identity.

Now certainly this boundary between experience and being, between utility and identity, is not so clear. You know who we conceives ourselves to be colors our experiences, as much as our experiences, if ever so subtly, shapes our self-conception. But just think about how drastically different these experiences are. Right? Think about pursuing a profession because the work is engaging versus doing it because it's the right job to have. Or dating a person because you like spending time with them.

Versus dating some person because you like to be seen with them. Or traveling to a place because you're interested in the culture. Or because you just want to be seen in the coolest locale. Clearly, the distinction that Gerard has drawn here, if a bit muddied, is nonetheless meaningful, especially at the end of the

This desire to be at the heart of metaphysical desire is aimed at a fullness of being. We want to exist, Gerard believes, in great measure. Metaphysical desire takes form as a pursuit of objects, in the broadest sense of the term. Wanted to climb Mount Everest, wanted to build a unicorn company, wanted to study at an Ivy League, or, more mundane, buying a particular car, dating Sally instead of Susan, enjoying a fancy restaurant.

But in in all of these experiences, Gerard would say it's never objects we are really acts. I don't think this is a foreign concept to our thisworldly, achievement-focused consumer society. We want to acquire objects to bolster and back up our identity. And the way we go about choosing which objects to go after.

Gerard believes, is imitating individuals whom we already consider to possess this fullness of being. Celebrities, parental figures, entrepreneurs, an outstanding co-worker. We take on their desires as our the objects they value as the objects we also strive. The faulty logic here, being that it must be the acquisition of these objects that grant these models the fullness of their being. Yeah, this reminds me of uh celebrity advertisements.

It does indeed, right? You see a celebrity and you want what they want. That's the whole logic behind these advertisements. And I think the one line in Celebrity Advertisement that gives it all away is the tagline for Jordan, Michael Jordan sneakers. Be like Mike. What it's promising you isn't just a product or utility, but the being and prestige of Michael Jordan, so that you can have a piece of that as well.

It's not jump like Mike. It's not score like Mike. The advertisement of basketball shoes doesn't talk about anything of the most important physical qualities of the basketball shoes, the lightness, the grip, the bounce. It's promising you something you want all the more. Being be like. Dracht's central thesis is that what often appears to be a subject pulled towards an object due to the intrinsic value of that object is really the subject wanting to acquire that object to be like some model.

What we are really after isn't the object, but the being of the model. Whereas we think of desire as unidirectional, flowing from subject to object. Girard thinks it's actually triangular, proceeding from subject through a model to the object. Now, because what is at stake in metaphysical desire is our identity, it is the strongest drive in the human motivational repertoire.

I think it's quite obvious when we are motivated by such a drive, because we can become obsessed and compulsive. We think that achievement, obtaining the objects that metaphysical desire wants, will fully transform us. I think in different stages of our lives, metaphysical desire usually directs us towards a limited set of eyes.

You know, for me, first it was a specific toy that I really wanted, and then a weapon in World of Warcraft, and then dating a person, and then an Ivy League, etc. etc. I think we're always oriented at different stages in our lives towards something. And these are the objects. Pointed to by metaphysical design. These are objects in each period of our life that take on a disproportionate weight, such that you define progress as inching towards the object.

And whenever it slips away, however subtly, however minutely, your heart just thuds and you feel a deep existential. Romance. provides a good example here. Hmm. Often you won't even be after the woman that you're interested in, and you won't be that interested. And what'll happen is all of a sudden there's another suitor who comes along and they

are interested in this woman. And all of a sudden you get excited about this person too. And it is in that competition that we are inflamed by the mimetic spirit. But then there's a second point here about this existential dread that we can feel. You ever feel those tremendous highs and lows in the early stages of of talking to a woman or something? And you'll be so excited because the texting is going well, you'll be skipping down the halls.

And then all of a sudden she won't respond. And you're freaking out. You're texting your friends what's going on here. You can't sleep that night. And you wake up in the next morning, your alarm clock goes off, and you see a text. And she's responded, now you jump out of bed and you wake up faster than a double shot of espresso.

That's precisely the right example to think of. In fact, Gerrard would commonly go to romance as his canonical examples of metaphysical desire. And these two qualities you mentioned. First, the object, not contributing anything or too much to desire, as well as these bipolar swings, all make romance, or at least the iterations you've described, as textbook examples of beneficial desire.

And look, Gerard's point is, even in as intimate a domain as romance, our desires are, if you'd excuse a pun, helplessly penetrated by those of others. Even our desires for our partners tend not to be informed fully by our partners, but by people around them. Gerard's point is if even such a personal desire can be so external in origin. Then the same must also be true for other domains as well.

Career choice, political orientation, aesthetic taste, philosophical opinions. This is a full-scale attack on the modern conception of individuals who can form their own decisions. With the reason to have an authentic core of desires to tap into. Now, if this attack was not already threatening enough, Gerard's next point will make it all the more so and further problematize authenticity.

Just as mimesis and metaphysical desire can make people conform, they can also make people diverge. Put in another way, even a breaking away from the group in a so-called carving one's own path can be radically socially determined. I mean think about it like this. The logic of metaphysical desire is to pursue the objects associated with those who do have a fullness of being, right?

And so a natural continuation of this logic is to avoid or distance oneself from objects associated with those we conceive to be as having a deficiency in being. We both want to be like the cool kids, but also distant and be different from the social outer. Here's an example. The tech elite with their plain t shirts are not independent from Gerard's perspective from the status games of finance finally addressed elite.

Even though they appear to be rejecting that game, in reality, it's merely the continuation of the same game in a more accelerated form. I mean think about it like this, showing up with a five dollar t shirt. To a dinner where everyone was wearing$500 suits is in some sense much more of a power play than showing up with a$5,000 suit at the same dinner. Because it's saying that I'm so much better than you.

That we aren't even playing the same game. That I take your highest values, what you hold most dear, is vulgar as nothing. This is the logic of the negative phase of mimesis, to distance oneself in order to show one's superiority. This breaking away from a group is no more authentic or independent than conformity, because your choices are still made for what they say about you and not the object itself.

Now, in my own life decisions, if I may share a bit of a personal story, I think I've been led astray by both the positive and the negative forces of Mimisa. You know, I grew up idolizing entrepreneurs, you know, the Steve Jobs of the world, and as soon as I got into college, I felt like I had to drop out and start a company, ASAP. And so I did. My freshman spring, I dropped out, I raised us it raised a small round, and the company crashed and burned, had a vanity.

And it's not that I didn't enjoy building companies, that's not why I was led astray by Mimis. But the degree to which I desired it, and the urgency of which I felt like I had to achieve it, not unlike your romance example, was disproportionate to the value of the object itself. In other words, I desired being an entrepreneur and not necessarily the processes of building a company. Now, when I did go back to school as a sophomore a semester later.

Out of resentment for my peers who had dropped out and did build successful companies, I think I went the other direction. Rejecting the worldly altogether, switching from CS to philosophy, going to a Buddhist monastery. For three years I didn't do that much at all in industry out of resentment.

Now, rejecting industry and building companies was my moral weapon to secure victory over my more successful peers, to turn my failure into a triumph. But this was equally, if not more, inauthentic and perverse. Now, the same story goes. It's not that I didn't enjoy philosophy in Buddhism. The degree to which I pursued it, and certainly the degree to which I renounced the world, was not genuine. It wasn't reflective of how much I liked philosophical and meditative practice.

And certainly not how much I dislike the worldly active life of industry. And I think I really did miss out on valuable career opportunities because I was too resentful to engage. This carving of my own path was just as socially determined. It was a form of coping so that I didn't have to feel lesser than my more successful peer. As a society,

I think we all recognize this first move of conforming to this dropout culture as socially determined, as prestige-seeking, as not authentic. But I think the second move of rejecting the group is just as socially determined. in that it was still primarily the relationships with people that determined my choices, not for the choices themselves. Admiration led me to converge in the first case, and resentment led me to diverge in the second. The direction is different, but the essence

But of course, in our society, to break away from the group, to carve one's own path, so to speak, is thought to be a sure sign of independence. But that is not so. Dirard here is trying to tear down what he conceives of as the romantic lie. The lie goes something like this. At the bottom, we are all individuals with a core of what we can call the authentic self. And then there are these layers of social constraints, one on top of the other, with the origins external.

The way to access authenticity, so this romantic lie goes, is by following one's heart with a bolt breaking free of the group, uh peeling away of these social layers. Gerard says not so fast. This breaking free from the group can be just as socially determined as rigid adherence. You're confusing difference for autonomy, you're confusing distance for independence, and you're confusing originality for freedom.

The reality is we can just as easily be socially determined by rejecting a group out of resentment as we can by conforming to the group out of admiration or peer. The mesis operates positively and negatively. Mimesis and metaphysical desire then entrap us in every direction. Both in conforming as well as in breaking free, man is shown to be a social creature through and through.

If you take one thing from Girard's psychology, it is this. The most powerful and explanatory element within the human psyche is our sociality, our values, our political orientation, aesthetic taste, and even philosophical positions. are heavily, often primarily determined by others in deep and often unconscious ways, and not chosen for their own sake.

We may think our desires are our own. We may think we desire our spouse just because of who they are, or at the very least, because of their physical attractiveness, but Gerard shows that even this turns out not to be the full extent of the story. We may think reason can hold the reins and guide our decisions, but this social dimension of ourselves is often much, much stronger.

Reason pretends to be its steward, but in reality is its lawyer and spokesperson, engaged in, more often than not, post-hog rationalization. Oh yeah, of course, you know, I want to be an entrepreneur because I want to change the world for the better. Or on the other hand, of course I would never be an entrepreneur because industry is vulgar and capitalism is immortal.

The reasons we give for our decisions often come after we've already sworn allegiance to those decisions due to ulterior social motives. Now, for Girard, our mimetic natures, the extent to which we are socially determined, is what differentiates us from animals and the main direction of human evolution from age. This direction of evolution is not, as commonly thought, the increase of our ability to reason and grasp truth.

After all, Gerard would say, other animals engage in truth-seeking behaviors as well. There's echolocation, there's tapping into magnetic fields, there's night vision, these are all truth-seeking activities. But we are the only animals who create God. Who tells stories? Who spin up fictions, who would go to war for an abstract conception of honor which we can neither taste nor smell nor touch.

who would trade food and shelter for pieces of paper, who would die for myths and gods that clearly never even existed. Animals are the sober ones. We are the nut jobs. What makes us unique for Girard is not our ability to determine truth. but our capacity to believe in lies insofar as others around us do as well.

For the modern mind, this is a deeply alien conception of human nature, and it opens a Pandora's box of questions. What does it mean to protect individual freedom if we, like co-vibrating violin strings, are never truly free to begin with? How can we follow our own authentic desires if every part of our psyche is so helplessly external in its origin? How is the democratic process not as arbitrary as the whims of a single dictator if we are so easily influenced and swayed by the mob?

These will have to remain questions for now, wrestled with over the course of the next seven lectures, because Mimesis presents us a much more pressing and threatening problem in this evolutionary story that we must now turn to.

Everything we've talked about up until this point, what we've discussed so far, are the core psychological faculties that define humanity. Now, let us jump back into Girard's history to see the unique challenges which this psychology brings about. We are officially moving from psychology to history. As early humans evolved to be more and more mimetic, the simple dominance hierarchies that were able to contain animal groups started breaking down. The idea is to go something like this.

Dominance hierarchies, where there's a clear chain of alpha to beta to gamma all the way to omega, works fine if there's little mimesis. Insofar as the the beta doesn't desire what the alpha has, and the gamma doesn't desire what the beta has, then all is well. But the mimetic tendency of early humans started to become so strong that there started to be frequent cross pollinization of desires across the higher.

Metaphysical desire, at least the strength of it, is unique to humans, and this lets subjects to enter into rivalry with their model. converging and competing metaphysical desires would rip social groups apart in wars of all against all, destroying all those societies that were involved.

Drug reasons that the only hominoid groups that survived and formed lasting cultures were ones that stumbled upon a unique cultural technology to stop this escalating conflict. And that he called the scapegoat mechanism. Now in the midst of such a war of all against all, think a civil war, a French Revolution, when society is in utter chaos.

Societies, Gerard observes, often converge upon a single victim or a small set of victims, attributing to them all the blame and frustrations of the chaos that they are in. Now is this like a rational process similar to the way that a jury sentences a victim? Or what should I have in mind here?

Yeah, it's not a rational process. It's not a committee that say picks the victim, but a somewhat random process where certain accusations against certain people just start gaining steam until the whole group falls under its spell. Think about the randomness of the French Revolution rather than a calculated drone strike. I think that's what you should have in mind here. This victim, if not fully innocent, certainly does not deserve the extent of the blame leveled on him.

This group is always deceitful, and their certainty is only bolstered by unanimity, the fact that everyone believes in the victim's guilt. This victim will be expelled, often murdered very brutally, as the group gains a cathartic release and peace is restored.

There are, unfortunately, too many examples of innocent scapegoats throughout human history. Think about Socrates' trial and death at the hands of the Athenian jury. Think about the Black Death, which is blamed on witches and witches. Think about the Nazis scapegoating the Jews for German decline. Think about McCarthy-era witch hunts persecuting innocents under the crimes of communism.

It's not enough, Gerard reasons, for us to find guilty parties, but we want to find one radical source of evil to blame everything. With the scapegoat mechanism, Gerard is highlighting the perennial need of human societies in times of chaos to identify a single source to blame and murder. Truly establish a peaceful society in a time of turmoil. This murder must be maximally cathartic, and as a result, has to be maximally violent and deceitful.

often blaming a singular victim for the entirety of the society's problem. Gerard thinks that this murder is wrong, that it's based on a lie, that it's regrettable, that it should not be done, but it worked, and it was the only thing that worked which kept early human societies alive.

Now to make sense of Gerard's claim here, because this is quite a radical claim on the violent foundations of society, we must go back and think about Gerard's psychology. For every social philosophy, I would wager that we must ask who the subject is. Right? For Marx, the subject is class. For fascism, it is the nation state. For Augustine, it is the Christian soul. For liberalism, it is a rational age. Gerard's subject of his social philosophy is the spirited animal.

Not one who thinks in terms of utility and numbers, but vengeance and pride, honor and being, who experiences envy and resentment. Now, for such a social creature, the primary mechanisms that govern him isn't consensus. It's not the mandate of heaven. It's not the common good. It's certainly not rational political disciples.

For Gerard, we aren't rational agents interested in a systematic analysis and nuanced solution, but social spirited creatures needing a cathartic release against a radical evil. In moments of extreme turbulence, we aren't interested in truth, but a grand lie and founding murder that can grant us catharti.

The lie, however, goes even further. While this no longer happens in modernity for reasons that we'll have to explore a bit later on, in early pagan society, the peace that descended unto the crowd would be so miraculous, so instantaneous and unbelievable, that people would struggle to make sense of what had just happened. H How did we go from being at each other's throats to being fully reconciled?

And so, just as deceitfully as the crowd would blame the victim for causing chaos, they now deceitfully praise the now dead victim for ending the chaos, turning the victim, paradoxically, into a god. Dward's point is that the scapegoat mechanism is such a unanimous process. People feel so justified in their expulsion that they don't even feel their own agency.

And so they don't see themselves as bringing peace. All they have in view is the victim, and reasons that it must be the victim that has brought us that peace. The victim must be a god. These pagan gods are all powerful with the power to begin and end destruction. These gods are seen as both good and evil. The example Gerard will point to is the story of Oedipus, as told by Sophocles. Now we're going to spend an entire lecture with Oedipus, but let me give you a very, very brief outline.

And Oedipus is a new king of Thebes that is being ravished by a plague. Oedipus is guilty of having committed both patricide, which is the killing of one's father, as well as incest, of having sex with one's mother. Now, because of this, the entire city blames Oedipus for causing the plague and expels him. The people get their catharsis and the plague goes away. Now Oedipus wanders the Greek states, and as time progresses, something very, very strange happens.

Rather than only being an object of scorn that everyone wants to expel to disagree. People are now competing to invite Oedipus into their lands. See, a prophecy has gained momentum in Greece, that wherever Oedipus's remains will be buried shall be granted lasting peace. And in this Oedipus myth then we see both movements of the scapegoat next.

Right, first we see the scapegoating. Oedipus might have been morally bankrupt for patricide and incest, but it was certainly an exaggerated lie to think that he was the cause of the entire plague. His expulsion was a groundless lie. Second, we see the movement of divinization. As Oedipus' expulsion brought about lasting peace through Catharsis, he started to gain a dual character, still evil for causing the plague, but also radically good with the power to end plagues and bring peace.

Oedipus at the end of the story has been divinized, or at least fetishized. Gerard's claim is that in all pagan religions we can find traces of a once victim turned god at the foundation of the culture.

We will investigate in due course across this entire lecture series. The Nordic myth of Baldur's death that resembles a collective expulsion, the Greek myth of the birth of Zeus and its yeery similarities to murder, and the Hindu hymn to Perusha, where a Genesis deity is sacrificed with his remains giving birth to the To hindu society and its cat. It's not just religions, however, that are born from the scapegoat mechanism.

But pagan culture and society as well. I mean, take the example of Julius Caesar, who is the victim, turned god of the Roman Imperium. In the story of Caesar, we also find the key movements of the scapegoat mechanism. Right, first, Roman society is in a state of utter chaos and civil war. Julius Caesar is famously scapegoated, blamed, and collectively murdered on the Senate floor. Now peace does not come immediately to Rome indeed.

But it does come at the hand of another Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Julius' nephew. And so with Augustus' victory, Julius Caesar is literally deified, recognized as a literal god by the Roman Senate, and becomes a fountainhead of Roman legitimacy and prestige. From then on, rulers derive their legitimacy from their relationship to Caesar, often explicitly, right, by bearing their name, calling themselves Caesars. That's why there's so many Caesars in the i in in the history of leaders.

The victim turned God, captured through myth for Gerard, is what lies at the heart of pagan religion in society. But of course, we needed much more than stories to run a society and keep the peace. So out of these myths and founding murders, two sets of real institutions were derived, prohibitions and rituals. The logic of prohibitions is to prevent chaos from erupting by creating social difference between people so that metaphysical desire does not spread as easily.

caste systems, gender roles, guild lineages, however oppressive, these served a crucial function in pagan society to keep people from competing with each other. Now, when prohibitions fail, another set of institutions must be used, and these are rituals. Rituals aim to enact the founding murder in a constrained way to generate a similar level of catharsis as the founding murder.

Ritual incests, debaucherous festivals, human sacrifice, however cruel, these institutions also served a crucial function in pagan society, to generate catharsis in order to keep the peace. They are a release fact. To summarize then, the scapegoat mechanism proceeds from a real cataclysmic event where a troubled society murders an innocent victim, gains cathartic release, and receives a set of new gods.

This real event is dramatized and captured in myth, and then translated back into real institutions in the form of prohibitions and rituals. This arc, going from real event to myth, to real institutions, is not only how pagan gods and religions have been made, but also how all human societies and cultures are founded.

Now of course. These societies and myths are based on lies through and through. Both the scapegoating and the deification are equally deceitful. Because the victim neither has the power to cause or end the chaos. It's all psychological projection by the crowd, grounded on nothing but unanimity. And importantly, this deceitfulness is always occluded by myth, because myth is written from the perspective of the persecutor.

The persecutor writes from a position of the crowd, and from that vantage point all will seem real. The blame, the praise, the deification are all deserved and not mere projections. But more importantly, none of this could be revealed. Because if they were, then gods would lose their powers if people realize that it was they themselves who through unanimity projected the power onto them. It's all deceitful and all arbitrary.

This explanation of pagan religion by Girard then begs an important question. Why is Girard a Christian? Prima facia, Christianity perfectly conforms to this logic that he attributed to false pagan religions, right? There's civil unrest in Jerusalem, where Christ eventually gets crucified. There's obviously Christ's unjust scapegoating and murder on the cross.

There's the resurrection and divinization, there's the mythologization through the Bible, and then there's the institutionalization through the Catholic Church and many of its prohibitions and rituals. The question is this, how can the Christian story be true for Gerard, but the pagan religions be false? Gerard's answer is that the Christian story is indeed going to have the same structure as pagan religion because Christ is going to be scapegoated. But there is one crucial difference.

Christianity will be the first story told from the perspective of the victim. Remember, pagan myth always sides with the murderers. It always believes in the guilt of its victims. Sophocles' telling of Oedipus affirms the judgment of Thebes that Oedipus was indeed responsible for the plague because of his patricide and innocence. Or take the founding murder of the Roman Republic.

That of Romulus and Remus, where Romulus kills Remus to establish Rome. The canonical telling here again paints the killing as, however, regrettable. as justified by Remus' hubris and transgression from ignoring Romulus' city's boundaries. What the Bible is doing then is to tell the same type of story as pagan religion, but from the other perspective. not the perspective of the persecutor, which all pagan religion has been told from, but the victim

I mean think about it. What does the Bible tell us? He tells us that Christ is not guilty. Even his sentencer, Pontius Pilate, declares his innocence. The mob that convicts Christ is shown to be arbitrary, the true source of evil. The sentencing of Christ is depicted as unjust through and through, with the charges against Christ nothing more than psychological projections by the crowd. This is what that story tells.

And of course, the whole story is written down and told to us by the disciples, the side of the victim and not the person. Christianity tells the story of scapegoating, but from the opposite truthful side. We are like jurors who have been hearing the criminals' lies for so long in pagan religion, suddenly exposed. The truth of the victim. The crucifixion exposes the lies of all religions to show that the mob is deceitful.

The victim is innocent. There is no sacred pagan power that is merely projection. This is the fundamental resounding message that comes out of the crucifixion for Gerard. And it is a message that will expose and begin to tear down the scapegoat mechanism, slowly but surely. From this moment on, we will be reading myths in the light of the gospels, which allows us to see through their lives.

Christ's innocence and unjust persecution through the proliferation of Christianity becomes the dominant lens through which we will view the world from then on. We will always be looking out for unjust persecution. We will always be siding with the victim. We will always be aware of the deceitfulness of the mob.

Christ knows that reason alone, that an analytical articulation of the scapegoat mechanism like the one I just provided you, is not enough to shake societies out of this perennial cultural practice. What we need is an equally compelling story that shakes us into a radically new mode of seeing. To your point, I'm always surprised by how much of our secular world is grounded on Christian concepts. I think of

I think of the Protestant work ethic, our concern for victims, human rights, you know? Yeah. And this is how powerful the Christian story is. We are all, in a sense, Living in a Christian paradigm, even if we're not explicitly Christians, because Christianity grounds the fundamental philosophical intuitions of modernity.

Christianity then for Gerard is the religion to end all religions, the myth to end all myths, the founding murder to end all founding murders, by exposing their violent, unjust, and deceitful order. The right metaphor to think about Christianity and pagan religion then is the relationship between a vaccine and the original disease.

The efficacy of a vaccine to neutralize the original disease lies in its proximity, not its radical difference. Right? Structurally, the COVID vaccine is very similar to the original COVID disease, just with a few tweaks. And it's that similarity is what makes it an effective COVID vaccine and not like a polio vaccine, for example. The Bible then for Gerard is a myth. Vaccine. And so, the strategy of many modern Christians

to show that the Bible has nothing to do with the myths of Yor, that it is radically different, is misguided. I mean, take the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first known myths of Mesopotamia. Modern Christians blush at the similarities between this myth and the Bible. Right? There's a a quest for a fruit of immortality from the tree of eternal life. These are things that both exist in the Bible as well as the myth of Gilgamesh.

There's a deceitful snake eating a fruit and robbing us of our immortality. And there's also great floods from which the chosen are protected. George would say, look, don't blush and don't try to distance the Bible from these myths. The Bible is effective because and not despite of its proximity to myth. The Bible is a Trojan horse that frees us from pagan religion from within. Draart's surprising conclusion is that Christianity is a demystifying force here to end all religion.

The Christian moral paradigm takes away the core foundational bedrock of all early human society. Slowly but surely, Christianity allows us to decode and escape from the scapegoat mechanism, which cannot function if people know that the victim is innocent.

If the victim is shown to be innocent, then catharsis cannot be achieved. Without catharsis there's no peace. Without peace there's no deification. Without deification, pagan worldly institutions lose their prestige, and without prestige they can no longer properly. Christianity takes humanity out of cyclical time, demarcated by these relativistic moral paradigm shifts, and accelerates us towards a linear trajectory.

Now, the direction of this linearity is defined by four key forces that Christ lets loose on human history. Love. Truth, innovation, and surprisingly, drawing things. Violence. As with all things, Girard, even his analysis on the worldly effects of Christianity, are deeply inbilent. Within this Pandora's box of forces that Christ has just let loose on human history, we have the good, love, truth, innovation, but also the apocalyptic violence.

They are both growing and have broken free all at the same time. What's more, even within these individual forces, Draard's analysis is deeply ambivalent. Love often manifests as hypocrisy. Becomes dogma. And innovation degenerates into fashion. And even in violence, Gerard sees a key motivational force that has brought forth the most enviable living conditions of man when channeled productively. Let's examine each of these forces in terms of

The first force that Christianity unleashes on history is love. Love is the force that has made all of our institutions like law so much more humane. It's the force that sees developed nations competing for the prestige of helping troubled nations. It's the force that has freed us from cruel practices of human sacrifice and bloody ritual. It's the force underpinning the modern political ideals of human rights and equality.

Gerard believes that Christ is responsible for all this because that was his key message renounce violence, turn the other cheek, develop love, love thy neighbor as thy child. We are so concerned with the poor and the dispossessed these days, we naturally side with victims in the same way that pagan societies might have sided with the strong, because Christ's story is about the innocence and the moral purity of victims.

Culturally, we are radically different from pagan society with their worship of power and disregard for the weak, but in some sense, stubborn human nature still refuses to bud. Gerard thinks we still need to persecute, but the only acceptable way to persecute is now in the name of victims, in the name of stopping persecution.

In a way then, Gerard isn't convinced society has really changed that much at all that we've really given up persecution. Rather, perhaps the better reading is that it's a mere superficial switch of who we think is acceptable to persecution. Because of our victim concerned culture, anyone who looks like a traditional victim is completely off limits. Ethnic minorities, the lower classes, women, the disabled, and Gerard thinks that's a great thing.

But the problem is that we've flipped it on its head. Now we feel warranted, nay, maybe even compelled, to persecute all types of privilege. White privilege, ableist privilege, class privilege, male privilege. Gerard has this to say, I'll give you a quote Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty. End quote. Gerard accuses modernity of hypocrisy, and he reminds us of the terrible atrocities committed in the name of protecting victims. Let me give you another quote.

Hypocrisy is dangerous then because it leads to what it claims to prevent the persecution of victims. Anyone familiar with the tragedies of the Soviet Union grounded on protection of the victimized proletariat? should look at America's caught up in victimhood ideology with trembling fear. This other totalitarianism, this inquisition in the name of victims is the form that arbitrary, unjustified violence takes place today. the persecution of persecutors. End quote.

Now, that's love. And this same ambivalent story could be told for the second force of Christianity: truth.

Gerard asks us to look around in the modern world, more so than any almost other civilization. We value truth and believe in our ability to obtain it. Far are we from the Garden of Eden's prohibitions against the tree of knowledge? Far are we from the intellectual humilities of Job, far are we from the lessons from Oedipus that knowing more can lead to disaster, and far are we from witch hunts and superstitions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, Drar takes the crowning achievement of truth, science, to be engendered by Christianity. This might seem ridiculous, but let me give you a first pass at his argument. Christianity paved the way for scientific inquiry by expelling myth and clearing the ground, as it were. This should already be a familiar idea at this point. Christianity exposes the deceitfulness of worldly foundations and begins to tear down prohibitions, rituals, and all pagan religions.

And it is only when we cease to look for truth in myth does reason even have the fertile ground to bear the fruits of truth. After all, if something is already explained by a wildly prestigious myth that is fatal to question, then reason will not even want to begin to investigate it. Gerard's interlocutor sums up his view quite nicely here. Let me quote again. It is really Christianity that makes science possible by desacralizing the real, by freeing people from magical causalities.

Once we stop seeing storms as being triggered by the machinations of the witch across the street, we start being able to study meteorological phenomena scientifically. End quote. Now, I need to say a lot more, and I will to convince you of this point. But before we celebrate too early, the same problem with love occurs with truth. Just as the protection of victims is the banner which persecutors rally under, we love science so much that we have fetishized it into an unquestionable religion.

But what's what's the problem with science gaining an immense prestige? What's wrong with that? Gerard's answer is this By being deified, science can become unquestionable, which can silence opposing voices and justify terrible political advances. Think about Malthus in the eighteenth century. He reasoned that living standards will go back to subsistence because population growth grows geometrically, while food increases arithmetically.

Now, in the 1970s, there was a whole wave of ridiculous climate science championed by the Times, the New York Review, uh Columbia, Brown. They were publishing articles about an inevitable ice age that just seems ludicrous from today's perspective. And of course, the terrors of the Nazis were justified on the latest science of the day, eugenics.

Far from a pseudoscience, eugenics enjoyed enormous prestige in the early twentieth century. It was grounded on Darwin, the latest evolutionary biology of the day, and responsible for the development of statistics. There was a University College London chair of eugenics in the same way there might be a chair for biology today. And eugenics was supported by Nobel laureates like Hermann Mueller and political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt.

So I hope the problem of deifying science is clear. Dorard thinks the reason that it is dangerous to deify science is the same reason it was dangerous to deify edicts of the Catholic Church. Just as the bloody European conquest of the Americas was at least partially legitimized through the appeal to Catholicism as spreading the gospel. Today, we too legitimize our often questionable political pursuits with just a th sprinkle of reason, a little dab of science.

And just as whomever used to disagree with the Catholic Church, we called heretics. We call those today who disagree with politically charged, questionable signs as anti-signs. Someone whose positions we don't even have to contend with. When deified, science becomes a blocker to truth and genuine inquiry because it becomes a conversation stopper. Therein lies the Now, the third force of Christianity is innovation, and it has been engendered by Christ in a very similar way that science.

By tearing down mitt from the we are freed from an exaggerated idolation of the past, and we are enabled, empowered, to imagine its future. The idea that Gerard has in mind here, might be better approximated by thinking about the negative case. What is certainly not conducive to innovation is the reactionary idea, not uncommon throughout most of history. Most famously, perhaps, among the Confucians and perhaps many Christians, that our best days are behind us.

Right? And such a view lends to the practical orientation that the best we can do is to blindly imitate the past and press the brakes on the downward trajectory of history. Under such a worldview, the very word innovation had negative connotations in the West up until the 18th century.

Its connotations were negative because innovation implied a deviation from a sacred, albeit static and rigid ideal provided to us by the myths of Yore. Innovation before the 18th century was synonymous with heresy. Now, such an exaggerated respect of the past is often grounded on a religious belief in a mythologized past. Christianity frees us from this blind worship because it is a force, according to Gerard, of course, that tears down mythologization.

It reveals to us what we once thought of as immutable, as arbitrary, so we are free to experiment and innovate. One of the surprising things that I've seen is this weird anti-correlation between mythologizing the past and innovation. And I started to get this hunch when I would spend time around Silicon Valley type. And you have dinner with them and they boast about their knowledge of the world. But then you start talking to them about the history of their own industry.

And it's not something that they think or talk about a lot. And I compare that to the people I've met in the oil industry or the finance industry, these older and more established industries where the people who I meet there, they know the history of their industry's cold. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, and that's a very interesting observation that there is a negative correlation between how innovative

uh an industry or a person is uh against how much they know about history or at least seem to respect it. Yes. And I think Gerard would say that the difference between uh the tech industry and the oil industry is the same difference. between modernity and pagan society, that we are much less idolatrous and concerned with the past, and as a result, much more oriented towards the future due to Christianity. Now As we are freed from the grips of the past,

Innovation has brought about drastic technological and social change. Clearly, if you just look around our world, right? There's the mastery of travel and land, air and sea, there's the victory over disease and starvation, the political systems, gender norms, money. Western civilization, at least in the past few h few hundred years, is defined by and prides itself at the change. Now the problem with innovation is the same problem with love and truth, hypocrisy.

We've now fetishized innovation. We are conforming to contrarianism. We are obediently rallying under the banner of originality. Gerard has this to say. It's so good that I'll quote it in full. The modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible. there soon emerges a negative imitation that's sterilized.

More and more, often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and with great fanfare announce some new epistemological rupture that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate creative and enriching innovations, the fewer of them there are.

For 2,000 years, the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the 19th and 20th century that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exercise imitation. The problem that Girard is identifying here with categorically rejecting imitation and idolizing innovation. is that imitation and meaningful innovation are often inseparable

You need to imitate and gain mastery first before you can make any real innovations. History is littered with examples where repetition, replication, imitation is a necessary precondition for innovation. Think about Goethe, who was a master of reproduction, reproducing the great poetic form. before he pioneered his own. Think about the industrial powers that started off as mere copycats, but grew into innovators in their own right. Let me read Gerard again.

It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed. It continued with the Americans, in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget makers, who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese, who after World War II were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority.

It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance, and Gerard's point here is that by fetishizing contrarianism, innovation, originality, and by rejecting repetition, replication, imitation, We paradoxically doom ourselves to never make any meaningful innovations whatsoever, because innovation is dependent on image.

Now, as you can see, even the three quote-unquote good forces of modernity are deeply ambivalent. Culture has fundamentally changed. There's never been a society as loving, truthful, and innovative as ours. But stubborn human nature refuses to bust. We still need to persecute, to deify, and to conform. And so the perversities of modernity for Girard all take on the shape of hypocrisy.

Persecution under the banner of protecting victims, rigid adherence to scientific dogmas under the guise of free intellectual exploration, the most derivative of imitations, packaged as radical innovation. The metaphor then that best captures this radical break as well as stubborn continuity is a just launch rocket. Struggling to reach escape velocity. I mean, think about it. Such a rocket is clearly a radical break from it was stationary.

But it is also in a continuity because it is still governed by the pull of gravity. The same perhaps can be said for the point of history that we're in now. There's a clear radical break between our culture that protects victims and all the ones that have come before, which made them to escape. But the stubborn gravitational pull of the human condition remains the same. We still need to persecute and find victims to blame.

It's this tension between cultural advancement and the constancy of human nature that plagues Moderna.

Now, our rocket ship of modernity is already in trouble, but the fourth and final force of Christianity will send it crashing towards the ground. Violent. You may be surprised that Gerard conceived of violence as one of the forces coming out of Christ defeating the scapegoat. But given Gerard's understanding of how worldly peace is brought about, this conclusion in some sense should flow quite naturally.

After all, if worldly order, a peaceful society, is founded on a deceitful, violent act of catharsis, then truth and love, which Christianity has unleashed, must be threatening, if not harmful, for this foundation. Right, the scapegoat mechanism is a deeply morally ambivalent process for Girard. It is deceitful, it is wrong, but it's also so damn effective.

Just a single innocent man has to be murdered for the entire community to be saved. Sacrifice one for the peace of all. Limit the freedom of the parts for the stability of the whole. And so, we might say, in a highly reductive fashion, That the scapegoat mechanism is a worldly good, but ultimate evil, whereas Christ is ultimately good, but brings forth worldly destruction. Gerard constantly reminds us that Christ himself says as much. Matthew ten thirty-four. Christ has this to say.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. Christ's sword is aimed at the scapegoat mechanism, which lies at the foundation of worldly order. Now, while the consequences of the Christian revelation for Gerard are violent and destructive, Christ's intentions surely are not. Christ did not cut down the worldly order for the sake of cutting down worldly order, but only so we may be freed from violence and lies, such that we can love each other.

Christ took off our training wheels so that we may be freed, yet we've simply fallen and stumbled. Without the scapegoat mechanism. We no longer have our old prohibitions to stop metaphysical desires from running rampant, nor do we have sacrificial rituals to bring about catharsis. So, to put in other words, we've lost both our tools to prevent and resolve fire.

So why haven't we gotten bust yet? After all, the world looks pretty peaceful to me. Gerard responds Don't confuse the lack of the actuality of the world. With the lack of the potential for violence. Violent energies have been building up and increasing, but they've been contained and productively channeled for now by two new institutions of modernity. The first institution is capital.

Capitalism is the channel that absorbs and productively directs violence. Now let me be clear that when Girard says that capitalism is a channel for violence, he doesn't have in mind, you know, whipping slaves to build the pyramids.

but that the same violent competitive energies of glory, of pride, of desire for conquest, are the dominant ones driving capitalism today. Girard reminds us, I quote, It is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business, once heroes and warriors went out of style. Gerard's point is that when we peek behind the motivational curtains of actors in capitalism, we shouldn't expect to find a desire to help others.

We shouldn't even expect to find a materialistic greed. Instead, what people are really after are the same social goods recognition, honor, prestige, glory. The princes and heroes of yore, who would have amassed armies, now find themselves competing to make products and services. Gerard warns as such don't be fooled by the altruistic aims that capitalistic actors so desperately advertise.

It's the same drive that drove Achilles to kill Hector, that drove Germany to invade France, that drove Caesar to capture Vercingeterix, that underpins our world economy today. It's funny, you're referencing ancient stories there, but even today, I'll look at my friends who are successful entrepreneurs, and a shocking percentage of them were criminals in high school. Right. And I think that the same energy that drove them to be criminals, what capitalism does is it

redirects that energy towards entrepreneurship. Yeah. And I think this is both. a deep critique of capital, right? That it's fundamentally driven off these spirited by irrational forces, but also a depraise of capitalism, right? What a miracle it is today that people who seek revenge, who seek glory, who seek domination, who seek an outlet for their criminal energy. have to do so. Not not by killing millions in zero-sum wars as people have done for thousands of years.

But they have to compete in making better products and services for others. What a miracle. Gerard's analysis on capitalism is deeply ambivalent. Now, capitalism can only properly function in this way when it is supported by law. Law is the second important institution of modernity that contains violence. For Gerard, law only works in situations where there's an entity with a monopoly over violence that can arbitrate between disputing parties.

Law does not bring about peace through catharsis, nor are the edicts of law justified on the prestige of some deity. It keeps peace by threatening with you with more violence. If you, the injured party, aren't satisfied with the outcome of a trial and seek private vengeance by killing or hurting the criminal who injured you, then the state, right, will come after you and punish you with more violence.

Law only functions when there is such a powerful entity with a monopoly over violence that can easily overpower disputing parties. That's where its efficacy stems from. This is why, within a single nation, laws are often inviolable and sacrosanct, yet between nations, right? think uh uh the laws of the UN or the Geneva Convention. These laws without an entity, without a monopoly over violence, are so often transgressed with little consequences.

For Gerard, capitalism is this bubbling skew of violent competitive energies that must be contained by law if that violence is not to overflow. That is why. Gerard thinks the dike will break where capitalism intersects the weakest points of law in between nations. in global trade. Global trade is where national pride and competitive energies are piled up, yet there is no monopolistic force of violence to arbitrate law between partners.

Under this light, let me read you Gerard's startling predictions fifteen years ago once more. He said this again at the height of Sino-American optimism, when popular wisdom all believed that relationships between China and the US would only get better through trade. I quote to you again. A conflict between the United States and China will follow. Everything is in place, though it will not necessarily occur on the military level at first.

Trade can transform very quickly into war. From this point of view, we can reasonably fear a major clash between China and the United States in the coming decades.

Now, if such a war between colossal nation-states were to actually happen, it could very well be the last war. With the invention of nuclear weaponry, Girard thinks we genuinely do live in an apocalyptic moment. where the entire world can go up in flames in mere minutes. What is unique about the nuke isn't its singular destructive force. Right? The firebombing of Tokyo, the Mongol mass murders, I think are all comparable to the devastation of a singular nuclear strike.

What is unique about the news? Is that it forces rivals to utterly destroy each other at the first glimpse of provocation. Unlike firebombing or a Mongol horde that takes time to maneuver through terrain, there are no frictions to unleashing your entire nuclear arsenal. Before the nuke, nations fought wars like a boxing match, taking time to maneuver, resting in between, with fatal blows rare and after taking a very long time.

The nuke allows nation states to fight wars like a duel, an instant and fatal escalation. In many ways, it's worse than a duel because it allows the dead party to shoot the person who is alive. Even if you nuke my entire landmass into oblivion, my nuclear submarines can still avenge me post-mortem. This is what it means by mutually assured destruction. Framed in this light, Gerard's worries of apocalypse is less theological speculation than deja vu.

On october twenty seventh, nineteen sixty two A Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo was located and targeted by an American carrier group, dropping a signaling depth charge, essentially like underwater bombs, intended to destroy the submarine. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the crew in that submarine had completely lost contact with Moscow for days and thought that a new world war had broken.

They were debating and considering whether to fire the nuke, believing that they were under direct attack. Now, this submarine required all three senior officers to agree to launch the strike. Two of them decided to do something. Only one officer's stubborn refusal prevented an almost certain nuclear attack and likely Armageddon. This is how close we were. The will of one man was all that stood in the way.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spectre of apocalypse has long faded from the public imagination, but Gerard prophesizes that this ghost of Yor will soon return to haunt us once more. If the end of the world had a beginning, I think we could do far worse than attributing it to the invention of the nuclear.

So how ought one live in the end times? With apocalypse around the corner, what ought one do? Gerard's answer is brief as it is unsatisfactory. Withdraw. Withdraw from the world. Leave it all behind. Tend to your own garden. There's nothing you can do to stop apocalypse. You're only gonna muddy your own moral character by trying to get involved in such a mess. Withdraw.

Stay away from it all so that you can nurture your soul. The kingdom of God will not be established here on earth, but perhaps we can preserve ourselves to be worthy of it in heaven. On november fourth, twenty fifteen, Gerard passed away peacefully in his home in Stanford, California at the age of ninety one, leaving us in deafening silence.

Stranded in an apocalyptic moment with nothing but the advice to withdraw. This is how Trad's story ends and where our lectures will also come to a screeching end. Hopefully, I've given enough reason already to engage with Gerard and continue with these lectures. I fear that as time progresses, Gerard will prove to be, if you'll entertain another metaphor, a seismograph of his.

able to feel the slight tremors that would balloon to tectonic shifts before others even know that we are standing on a fault. Gerard begins his final work as such. This is an apocalyptic work. It will become more understandable with time because, unquestionably, we are accelerating swiftly towards the destruction of the world. End. Unfortunately, his most unlikely prediction of worsening Sino-American relationships has already been made more understandable with time.

On the topic of apocalypse, I desperately hope Gerard is wrong, but I fear that he is wrong. If he is right, then Girard is worth engaging because he is one of the only guys to help us navigate the end time. One of the few Virgils left who still take apocalypse literally and seriously. However,

I would be a deceitful merchant of ideas if I also didn't share with you why you shouldn't engage with Gerard or continue with these lectures. There's a common metaphor given about philosophy. Philosophy is often compared with medicine, that it has the power to cure our souls and societies, and I think that's a quite apt metaphor, but just not taken far enough. Because just as medicine has side effects, so do philosophy.

And I wish that philosophers wrote on the side of their books the unwanted side effects of their philosophies as pharmaceutical companies did on their drugs. Warning, disdain for the material world if you take too much of these platonic dialogues in one sitting. Caution. More than one dose of Nietzsche a day makes patients with pre-existing health conditions descend into uncontrollable rage.

Side effect, erectile dysfunction if you take these Buddhist sutras too seriously, attention, inability to form coherent sentences if you read too much Adorno in one sitting. Just as a drug will course through your veins and infiltrate your entire system. Gerard's ideas will latch themselves onto your psyche and colonize your worldview. So we must ask. What are the side effects of engaging Girard?

I've presented to you the red pill, but as any honest merchant, I must also tell you why you should take the blue pill instead. The likely but not necessary side effects of Girard are threefold. Alienation. Gerard will likely show your most intimate, long-held desires, ones that your entire identity have been staked on as external and alien.

The career you've always wanted since you were four, the type of person you wanted to marry since childhood, the political cause that you've dedicated your life to, your core desires will likely be thoroughly alienated and shown to be external and perhaps Even perverse.

Mimetic theory could also alienate you from others. From this point going forward, you will have trouble fully participating in any political or collective activity, always aware of the deceitfulness of mimesis and the madness of crime. Second, inaction. Girard is the most ambivalent writer that I've ever come across. What should we do with the scapegoating? Well, on one hand, it's a huge lie, you're killing innocents, but on the other, it is the only way that pagan societies have brought peace.

Should we fight to remove caste systems? Well if you don't then you will subject people to arbitrary distinction, meaningless oppression, grounded on nothing but lies. But if you do, you open them up to competition of all against all. Metaphysical desire will burn through their communities and set it ablaze. Should we participate in capitalism? Capitalism is a competitive cesspool of violent energy. That has brought about the most lovely, prosperous, and peaceful society known today.

If you are looking for clear-cut answers or even answers at all, you've come knocking on the wrong door. Go to a Marx or Hegel instead. The extreme ambivalence in all of Girard's ideas, in addition to his deep pessimism on the human condition and history, tends to incapacitate those who've digested them a bit too thorough. Third, and certainly not least, the side effect of Gerard is hopeless.

By now the point should be familiar. Apocalypse is imminent. There is nothing you nor I nor anyone can do about it. If you do wish to remain hopeful after understanding and digesting Gerard, just know that that hope is gonna have to come from you and not. You are gonna have to dig yourself and all of us out of this apocalyptic hole. Gerard really has nothing left to offer.

Turn back while you still can. I have warned you thus. Now, to those stubborn or perhaps morbidly curious enough to continue, I can only heed one last time against continuing on these lectures. By echoing what Dante inscribed on the gates of hell, abandon all hope.