Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard

"When the world becomes globalized with mimetic desire, one match can set the whole thing on fire".

Commentary

I can't lie - this documentary had me heavy-lidded, transported straight back to fourth period, creaking AV cart stalled front and center, overhead fluorescents extinguished so a dim flood of blue could sedate the angsty class.

That said, this documentary is worth fighting through. Girard is the rare individual who rode the line between the intellectual and divine. His revelations regarding mimetic desire and scapegoating are blinding simplistic in hindsight, yet remain deeply profound. Once seen, they cannot be unseen.

The documentary sparked an unexpected contemplation: the interplay between agency and mimesis. When should we exercise our individual will, and when might we better serve ourselves - and the collective - by embracing the mimetic current? Mimesis often gets maligned when viewed through an individualistic lens, but its value to the collective survival feels increasingly apparent.

And speaking of intellectual resonance - because I’m currently re-reading Taleb's Incerto, I can't help but notice how his ideas might derive their power precisely from their anti-mimetic nature. This is speculation, mind you, but the revelation is too interesting to ignore. Another parallel is in Antifragile, Taleb warns us about the systemic dangers of inadvertently creating single points of failure. Then there's this eerie quote from Girard:

"When the world becomes globalized with mimetic desire, one match can set the whole thing on fire."

Grab your favorite caffeinated beverage and hunker down. The payoff is immense.

Highlights

So what Cervantes wants to show us  there is a character who is carried away by his dream, but his dream is not really his own.  His dream is borrowed from the books he’s read.

Aristotle famously said in the Poetica that  man is the most imitative of animals. We   imitate one another in behavior and  especially in our desires. We don't know what to desire. We need models.  And so we imitate good models and bad models. But between the subject and the  object of desire, there's a third party, a third entity, and that's the other: parents,  peers, society, media, the social other.

I started not only there to talk about mimetic  desire, but to say there are different types   of mimetic desire. If your model does not  exist, or if he is far enough from you, you preserve a certain independence. Don  Quixote is a happy man because he has no rival,   because the knights errant he imitates, he's never  going to encounter them in the field pursuing the  

same goal he's pursuing himself. Now, if you look  at many characters in the 19th century, they have   real models, live models. They see a gentleman  who has more money, more prestige, who's a little   bit older than himself. And they imitate him. And  they are going to fall in love with the same girl. If your model is your school friend, your  neighbor, you get into a world of dreadful  

competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy and so forth.  These bad sentiments are the same finally on both   sides, because as the model is imitated, he  starts imitating his own imitator. Therefore,   you have a vicious circle of imitation that  gets worse and worse between model and rival. Which is in a way typical of the world of  politics, even the world of scholarship,

much of my theory of human relations is  already there. What is hinted behind it   is a history of the Western world as more and  more competition, as less and less distance   between models and their imitators.

And  we feel we are constantly moving toward  more happiness as we become more equal. But in  fact, we're always moving towards more rivalry. And this history at the same time  is the history of what happens to   the Christian world, which becomes  less and less Christian with time,   which is a history of modern individualism,  which is a rebellion against religion.

my true conversion, had occurred  before my great Lenten scare. If it had occurred afterwards, I would never have  truly believed. My natural skepticism would have   convinced me that my faith was a result of the  scare I had received. God had called me to order   with a jot of humor that deep down was just what  my mediocre case deserved. I am convinced that   God sends human beings a lot of signs that have  no objective existence whatsoever for the wise  

and learned. The ones those signs don't concern  regard them as imaginary. But those for whom they   are intended, they can't be mistaken, because  they are living the experience from within

‘The title of hero of a novel must be reserved  for the character who triumphs over metaphysical   desire in a tragic conclusion, and thus becomes  capable of writing the novel. Therefore,   every conclusion is always a memory. It  is the eruption of a memory which is more   true than the perception itself. Every  novelistic conclusion is a beginning.’

And René Girard was able  to show how from the theory of mimetic desire you   can generate a theory of the origin of the sacred.  Human culture is fundamentally sacrificial.

So there we have a situation which is suddenly  one of peace, and the community rejoices. The   community is free from that crisis.  But that freedom is not going to last,   and very quickly mimetic rivalry will come  back. So then these people will remember that   a victim saved them. Therefore, they are  going to try to do it again, period. They  

are going to deliberately choose other victims  and kill them collectively in the hope that it   will reconcile them another time. And it does.  And this is the invention of ritual sacrifice. Robertson Smith, he says, tells us about  sacrifice, but he doesn't tell us anything   about sacrifice. Why are people doing it?  What is it about? And his analysis of it,  

which is that we need to do some kind  of violence in order to control our   own violence, so that we get a scapegoat and  we project our violences, and that heals us. The society is responsible for it,  the group is responsible for it,   was disrupted first and reconciled by the victim,  but it's going to project the whole trajectory of   events on that victim, saying, ‘That victim  tells us to do again what reconciled us.’

The scapegoating   is effective only if it is unconscious. If  you cannot call it scapegoating, but call it   justice.

One must  work towards success, but without illusions,   adding to the pure pleasure of working just enough  of an external goal to make the work more ardent.

The fundamentalist interpretation of  the apocalypse is just God destroying   the world. Of course, the atheists also think  of God as fundamentally violent. And Girard   would have said that the atheists and the  fundamentalists make the same mistake of   projecting human violence onto God. And so  the apocalypse is just nuclear weapons. It   is just runaway technology with humans to have  nothing but their death instincts to guide them. If there are people on Mars who are watching  us, they must be wondering why even though we have scriptures that talk about the destruction of  man by himself we pay absolutely no attention to   it now.

as René  said, when the world becomes globalized with mimetic desire, one match  can set the whole thing on fire.