This lecture completes the Girardian psychological picture by explaining mimetic rivalry (internal mediation) and negative mimesis, showing how human desire inevitably generates pathologies like fetishization, alienation, bipolarity, masochism, oppression, and inequity — and why this amounts to a theodicy that explains evil as rooted in human nature rather than social arrangements.
Internal and External Mediation
Mediation can be unidirectional (external) or bidirectional (internal), depending on the distance between model and subject.
External mediation: the model is distant (spatially, temporally, or socially) and mediates the subject’s desire without reciprocation — e.g., a fan desiring Michael Jordan’s shoes; Jordan does not desire the fan’s objects.
Internal mediation: model and subject are close enough to desire and compete over the same objects, mediating each other’s desires reciprocally — this is mimetic rivalry.
Two types of distance prevent internal mediation: spatial-temporal distance (physical exposure) and social distance (differences in class, caste, gender, guild, or even minor status gradients like sophomore vs. junior).
Historical trends — communication technology, air travel, the ideal of equality — have collapsed both distances, making mimetic rivalry more pervasive and contagious.
Social distance is especially potent: envy operates between similars; we envy the 23-year-old peer more than the billionaire because we identify with the peer’s self-conception.
Mimetic Rivalry
Mimetic rivalry inflames metaphysical desire (desire to be) and crowds out physical desire (desire to experience), making us obsessed with identity over utility.
Three mechanisms drive this inflation:
Reciprocal mediation: each rival copies the other’s copy of desire, creating a feedback loop that intensifies desire ad infinitum — like a contagious disease rather than a one-time injury.
Competition produces winners and losers; losing generates shame, which deepens the sense of lacking being and fuels even stronger metaphysical desire.
Resentment: the rival becomes both the instigator of desire and the guardian forbidding its fulfillment, acquiring a dual character as good (possessing the object) and evil (causing shame).
Resentment transforms the logic of desire: the aim shifts from acquiring the object to stealing it from the rival and diminishing their being — vengeance becomes an end in itself.
Historical illustration (via David Graeber): in ancient Greece, rising citizen wealth closed social distance with aristocrats, turning unidirectional mediation into bidirectional rivalry. Aristocrats imitated citizen commerce while resentfully devaluing money and elevating honor; citizens imitated aristocratic pederasty while banning it — each class admired and sabotaged the other.
Mimetic rivalry operates even in positive-sum arenas (investing, academic publishing, subscriber counts) because the threat is to self-conception, not material resources: similarity in self-conception makes the other’s success feel like a diminishment of one’s own being.
Conflicts are most brutal between those with shared admiration and similar self-conceptions (master/apprentice, Ajax/Odysseus, Romulus/Remus) — “it is easy to love someone distant and much harder to love thy neighbor.”
Doubles
Rivals become doubles or “warring twins”: symmetrical, approaching each other as desire intensifies, each believing they are separated by a bottomless abyss while an outsider sees them as indistinguishable.
Fighting creates proximity: rivals are forced to adopt similar tactics — Meiji Japan imitated the West to resist it, adopting constitutional politics, science, and eventually colonization, culminating in WWII.
False Differences
Rivals repress their similarity and fixate on trivial “false differences” (tiny distinctions in taste, rhetoric, or procedure) to justify hatred and resentment.
Example: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC appear identical to outsiders (same format, dramatics) but industry insiders exaggerate minor differences to legitimize mutual hostility.
American Psycho’s boardroom scene epitomizes this: indistinguishable bankers (same title, same card stock) obsess over microscopic card variations (bone vs. eggshell, Silian Rail vs. Romalian type), perceiving radical difference where none exists — false differences legitimize Bateman’s murderous rage.
The Negative Phase of Mimesis
Negative mimesis: we avoid objects associated with those we deem deficient in being, just as we pursue objects associated with those we deem full of being.
Example: Italian futurist aesthetics were rejected not for their qualities but for their association with fascism — the association, not the object, drives rejection.
Personal example: a college acquaintance’s economic progressivism was motivated not by benevolence but by resentment of wealthier peers; he secretly desired wealth, renounced it publicly to gain moral high ground, and later became an investment banker.
The perversion of positive mimesis is pettiness (bickering over business cards); the perversion of negative mimesis is hypocrisy (rejecting what one secretly desires).
Conforming to Contrarianism
Breaking from a group can be as socially determined as conforming to it — mimesis operates positively and negatively.
The “romantic lie”: we fetishize difference as authenticity, believing radical breakaway reveals the true self. In reality, becoming a progressive to spite conservatives is no less mimetic than becoming one from progressive peer pressure.
Modern culture celebrates rebels (underdogs, disruptors, starving artists), but often we merely “conform to contrarianism” — seeking difference for difference’s sake, like Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One who rebels against “whatever you got.”
Humans are “co-vibrating violin strings”: our values, politics, tastes, and philosophies are deeply, unconsciously shaped by others; reason acts as lawyer for spirit, not its steward.
This challenges modern social theory: if we are never truly free, what does “individual freedom” mean? Are personal decisions really self-expression? Can democratic consensus be legitimate if driven by tribal spirit rather than reason or self-interest?
The Psycho-Social Pathologies of Man
Girard treats common “abnormalities” as necessary, universal pathologies on a continuum with regular psychology — we are all, to some degree, fetishizing, alienated, bipolar, masochistic, oppressed, and inequitable.
Fetishization
Fetishization = attributing morbid, disproportionate value to an object via metaphysical desire (e.g., Kanye’s $100 white t-shirt). Insofar as we experience metaphysical desire, we are fetishizing creatures.
Alienation
Alienation = externalizing our highest ideals (reality, persistence, self-sufficiency) onto objects we chase. The very act of metaphysical desire creates a lack: “only when I get this will I be whole” means I am not whole now.
Naval Ravikant: “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
Bipolarity
Because the external object holds our projected fullness, we oscillate between mania (proximity to object) and despair (distance from it) — pride and shame, mania and depression.
Everyday example: early romance texting — elation when they reply, panic and self-loathing when they don’t. We are all on the bipolar spectrum due to metaphysical desire.
Masochism
Masochism = confusing the difficult with the good. Two mechanisms:
Metaphysical desire is never satisfied by attainment; only unobtained (difficult) objects retain allure. Prestige correlates with difficulty because easy objects reveal their deficiency.
Mimetic rivalry correlates object value with intensity of competition, forging an unconscious link between struggle and worth.
Extreme form: desiring exclusively unavailable partners. Girard sees this as a continuum, not a radical break.
Oppression
Oppressive prohibitions (caste, gender roles) can serve a paternalistic function: removing objects from mimetic competition.
Liberation removes these barriers but enables a subtler oppression: mimetic rivalry coerces us “out of our own volition” (e.g., bulimia as vomiting for others’ gaze, steroid use for competitive physique).
Parents restricting teens’ social media: oppression preventing a greater mimetic oppression. Modern man is enslaved precisely where he thinks he is free.
Inequity
As real inequalities (caste, gender) shrink, subjective experience of inequity balloons — Tocqueville’s principle: “When everything is virtually on a level, the slightest variations cause distress.”
We face a choice: real inequality (differences in essence) or psychological inequity (suffocating comparison). Current moment: objective gaps narrow while cries of injustice intensify.
Hegel’s Theodicy
A theodicy explains evil’s origin, defines the good, reconciles us to the world, and tells us how to feel/act toward injustice.
Hegel: evil = deviations from rational institutions (nuclear family, civil society, nation-state), not systemic perversions. “The actual is rational and the rational is actual.”
Shape of the good: already realized in current institutions. Reconciliation = affirm the world’s essence. Action = institutional reform, not revolution. Conservative implication.
Rousseau’s Theodicy
Evil = human nature improperly channeled by society, not human nature itself. Human nature is corruptible but not fallen.
Shape of the good: not yet actualized, but possible through social reorganization (e.g., experimenting with polyamory). Reconciliation = hope for a fully hospitable world. Action = progressivism, experimentation. Father of progressivism.
Girard’s Theodicy
Evil = metaphysical desire (original sin), essential to human nature, not accidental to social arrangements. Pathologies are inevitable.
Shape of the good: limited. No social redesign can eradicate these pathologies. “Whatever familial design we try, we will always have these pathologies plaguing us.”
Reconciliation = tranquility, not affirmation (Hegel) or hope (Rousseau). Evil is unavoidable and intensifies historically; we are freed from the obligation to fix the world.
Girard’s peace comes from pessimism about possibility: he isn’t paranoid hunting scapegoats because evil stems from human nature, not guilty individuals. Rousseau’s optimism breeds paranoia when reality disappoints; Girard’s pessimism breeds contentment.
A Critique of Critique
Theodicies shape expectations, not just normative judgments. Modern political disagreements are often about what we can expect from society, not what is good.
Girard’s theodicy inoculates against “critical theories” that move from pathology description directly to emancipatory action.
Marxism as example: Marx identified capitalism’s pathologies (fetishization, alienation, oppression, inequity) but mistook the channel (production relations) for the root cause (human nature).
Soviet communism redirected, not eliminated, these pathologies: fetishization → charismatic leaders; alienation → state apparatus; oppression → central planning; inequity → party hoarding.
Same pattern: private property → new ball and chain; patriarchy → hippie commune horrors; internet → surveillance and lies; crypto → extreme Gini coefficients.
Girard does not preclude all progress — pathologies vary in intensity, and we can ask how they are channeled, who is harmed, how to limit inflammation, what side effects change brings. But these conversations differ from critical projects that treat pathology description as revolutionary force.
Girard = converse Marx: “Philosophers have tried too hard to change the world. The point is to interpret.”
