This lecture introduces René Girard’s mimetic theory through a structured overview of his life, core psychological insights, anthropological claims about the scapegoat mechanism, and his interpretation of Christianity as a historical rupture that unleashes both progress and apocalyptic violence.
Jonathan Bi’s Path to Girard
Jonathan Bi discovered Girard not through academic curiosity but existential necessity after experiencing the hollowness of mimetic prestige competition at Columbia University.
Surrounded by high-achieving peers all chasing the same four careers (finance, tech, law, medicine), he realized their desires were imitated, not authentic, and that victories brought only fleeting satisfaction.
Seeing successful alumni still trapped in the same despair — making money they didn’t need to impress people they didn’t like — convinced him the mimetic path led to a life fundamentally not his own.
Girard’s theory gave him a map to untangle himself from the mimetic web; it does not eliminate mimetic susceptibility but provides foresight to avoid environments that trigger debilitating envy and pride.
Bi compares Girard to Virgil guiding Dante: the theory exposes the mechanisms of human evil and offers a purgative path, not a magical cure.
Why Engage Girard? The Case for Mimetic Theory
Mimetic theory is “cheaper than psychoanalysis” — it explains a broader range of psychological, social, and historical phenomena with fewer assumptions (e.g., it explains the Oedipus complex without positing an innate desire for the mother, using only mimetic desire and rivalry).
Girard predicted the deterioration of Sino-American relations in 2007, when consensus held that economic integration and cultural convergence would bring peace.
He argued humans are relativistic comparators: absolute gains matter less than relative standing, so a richer America would still feel threatened by a rising China.
He argued similarity breeds conflict: converging desires create a larger surface area for rivalry, making trade a potential catalyst for war rather than a guarantor of peace.
The prediction has proven accurate: trade tensions escalated into a sustained conflict, validating Girard’s claim that mimetic dynamics operate at the geopolitical level.
Structure of the Lecture Series
Seven lectures total: Lecture I is a condensed summary; Lectures II–III cover Girard’s psychology (mimesis, metaphysical desire); Lectures IV–VII cover his philosophy of history (human evolution to apocalypse).
No prerequisites; engages Western philosophy (Hegel, Plato, Rousseau) and world literature/myth (Gilgamesh, Iliad, Shakespeare, Hindu hymns) with full contextualization.
Bi presents a charitable reconstruction of Girard, acknowledging his own theological and methodological disagreements but aiming to give each idea its strongest case.
Girard’s Biography: The Outsider Shaped by Violence
Born December 25, 1923 in Avignon, France, to a Catholic mother and anticlerical archivist father wounded in WWI; formative years under Nazi occupation.
Witnessed the French Resistance’s post-liberation scapegoating of mostly innocent women — humiliated, paraded, killed without trial — which left a lasting imprint: the arbitrariness of collective violence and the perennial need of troubled societies to find innocent victims.
Intellectual trajectory was unorthodox: trained in history at Indiana University, self-taught in literary theory, anthropology, and theology; made contributions in each while remaining an outsider to disciplinary conventions.
Elected to the French Academy and held posts at Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, and Stanford, yet literary theorists, anthropologists, and parts of the Christian community all rejected aspects of his work.
Bi calls Girard an “exegete” (interpreter of scripture) rather than philosopher or prophet, respecting Girard’s self-conception: his aim was to articulate Christianity’s core insight across domains, not to revolutionize disciplines.
Mimesis: The Fundamental Human Capacity
Girard identifies mimesis — the gradually increasing capacity and tendency for imitation — as the evolutionary break from great apes, not reason or truth-seeking.
Metaphor: co-vibrating violin strings — when one is plucked, the other resonates at a similar frequency; humans “ingest” the behaviors, values, judgments, and intentions of those around them.
Mimesis constitutes us as social beings; it explains why prestige and recognition matter: we attribute surplus value to objects (Rolex, Harvard, Bentley) not from their intrinsic qualities but because our peers value them.
Mimesis operates pervasively: from the adrenaline of a stadium crowd to political tribalism, cult dynamics, accent acquisition, and even drinking water while recalling an athlete’s Gatorade commercial.
Metaphysical Desire: Triangular Desire and the Pursuit of Being
Girard divides desire into two species: physical desire (aimed at utility/experience confirmed by the object’s qualities) and metaphysical desire (aimed at identity/being, directed at what the object says about the self).
Examples: sex for pleasure vs. sex to prove one’s desirability (Don Juan); a car for transport vs. a car to be admired; a profession for engaging work vs. a profession for the “right” status.
Metaphysical desire is triangular: subject → model → object. The subject imitates a model perceived to possess fullness of being, adopting the model’s desires as their own.
The faulty logic: acquiring the model’s objects will grant the model’s being. Celebrity ads exploit this — “Be Like Mike” promises not better shoes but Michael Jordan’s being.
Metaphysical desire is the strongest human drive; its objects (Ivy League, unicorn startup, romantic partner) take on disproportionate weight, generating obsessive highs and crushing lows.
Even romance, seemingly intimate, is penetrated by others’ desires: a rival suitor inflames desire; texting dynamics produce bipolar swings — all textbook metaphysical desire.
This attacks the modern conception of autonomous individuals with authentic cores; reason acts as lawyer for decisions already made by social motives.
The Negative Phase of Mimesis: Rebellion as Conformity
Mimesis operates positively (convergence through admiration) and negatively (divergence through resentment); both are socially determined.
Example: Tech elites wearing $5 t-shirts to finance dinners in $500 suits — not independence but a power play signaling “your highest values are vulgar to me.”
Bi’s personal arc: dropped out to start a company (positive mimesis of Jobs), failed, then rejected industry for philosophy and a Buddhist monastery (negative mimesis/resentment toward successful peers) — both moves driven by what choices said about him, not the choices themselves.
Girard calls the “romantic lie” the belief that authenticity lies beneath social layers and is accessed by breaking free; in reality, breaking free can be just as mimetic as conforming.
Core psychological claim: humans are social through and through; values, politics, tastes, and philosophical positions are heavily, often primarily, determined by others in deep, unconscious ways.
The Scapegoat Mechanism: The Violent Foundation of Pagan Society
As early humans became more mimetic, simple dominance hierarchies broke down: cross-hierarchical mimetic desire triggered wars of all against all.
Only groups that stumbled upon the scapegoat mechanism survived: in mimetic chaos, society randomly converges on a single victim (or small group), unanimously blames them for the crisis, and expels/murders them.
The process is irrational, deceitful, and cathartic: the victim is innocent or disproportionately blamed; unanimity creates certainty; the murder brings instantaneous peace.
Examples: Socrates, Black Death witches, Nazi scapegoating of Jews, McCarthy-era witch hunts — societies need a single radical source of evil to blame everything on.
The peace feels miraculous; the crowd, not sensing its own agency, attributes the peace to the victim, who is then paradoxically deified (both cause of chaos and source of peace).
Oedipus: blamed for Thebes’ plague, expelled, then later invited by cities because his burial was prophesied to bring peace — the scapegoat becomes a god.
This pattern recurs across pagan foundations: Norse Baldr, Greek Zeus, Hindu Purusha, Roman Julius Caesar (murdered, then deified, source of imperial legitimacy).
From the founding murder arise myths (written from the persecutor’s perspective, occluding the lie) and real institutions:
Prohibitions (caste, gender roles, guilds) create social difference to prevent mimetic convergence.
Rituals (human sacrifice, festivals) re-enact the founding murder in constrained form to generate catharsis.
The arc: real event → myth → institutions — all based on deceitful projection, sustained by the persecutor’s perspective.
Christianity: The Myth Vaccine That Exposes the Mechanism
Christianity has the same structure as pagan religion (unrest, scapegoating, death, resurrection/divinization, mythologization, institutionalization) but with one crucial difference: it tells the story from the victim’s perspective.
Pagan myth always sides with the murderers (Sophocles affirms Oedipus’ guilt; Romulus’ killing of Remus is justified); the Bible declares Christ innocent, Pilate declares innocence, the mob is shown as arbitrary and evil, the disciples (victim’s side) write the account.
The crucifixion exposes the scapegoat mechanism’s lies: the mob is deceitful, the victim innocent, pagan “sacred power” is mere psychological projection.
Christianity is a “myth vaccine” — its efficacy lies in structural proximity to pagan myth, not radical difference; it is a Trojan horse that frees humanity from within.
By revealing the victim’s innocence, Christianity makes catharsis impossible (you cannot achieve peace by murdering a known innocent), undermining the scapegoat mechanism and the prohibitions/rituals built on it.
Christianity ends cyclical time (relativistic moral paradigms) and accelerates humanity toward a linear trajectory defined by four forces: love, truth, innovation, and violence.
The Four Forces of Christianity: Love, Truth, Innovation, Violence
Love and Hypocrisy
Love humanized institutions: law, human rights, equality, abolition of human sacrifice, concern for the poor and dispossessed — all stem from Christ’s message (turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor).
But human nature refuses to budge: we still need to persecute, now only acceptably “in the name of victims.”
Modern victim-concern culture makes traditional victims off-limits (minorities, women, disabled) but flips persecution onto “privilege” (white, male, class, able-bodied).
Girard: “Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.” Hypocrisy leads to what it claims to prevent — persecution of victims (e.g., Soviet terror in the name of the proletariat).
The “persecution of persecutors” is the modern form of arbitrary violence.
Truth and Dogma
Christianity de-sacralized the real, clearing ground for science: once storms aren’t witchcraft, meteorology becomes possible.
But science becomes fetishized into an unquestionable religion; deified science silences dissent and legitimizes political agendas (Malthus, 1970s ice-age predictions, Nazi eugenics — grounded in Darwin, supported by Nobel laureates and presidents).
“Anti-science” becomes the modern “heretic” label; deified science blocks genuine inquiry, replicating the Catholic Church’s conversation-stopping authority.
Innovation and Imitation
Christianity tore down mythologized pasts, freeing innovation: pre-18th century, “innovation” meant heresy (deviation from sacred static ideals); now change is celebrated.
Negative correlation: innovative industries (tech) ignore history; established industries (oil, finance) revere it — mirroring modernity vs. pagan society.
But modernity fetishizes originality: “never say what others say, never think what others think” — impossible, so negative imitation emerges (turning coats inside out, announcing fake epistemological ruptures).
Girard: meaningful innovation requires imitation first (Goethe mastered forms before innovating; Germany, US, Japan, Korea all started as “imitators” before surpassing models).
Rejecting imitation paradoxically dooms real innovation; the rage for originality produces paralysis.
Violence and Apocalypse
Christ brings not peace but a sword (Matthew 10:34) aimed at the scapegoat mechanism — the foundation of worldly order.
The scapegoat mechanism is worldly good (effective peace) but ultimate evil (deceitful murder); Christ is ultimate good but brings worldly destruction.
Without the scapegoat mechanism, we lost both tools to prevent violence (prohibitions) and resolve it (rituals).
Violence has been contained by two modern institutions:
Capitalism: channels violent competitive energies (glory, pride, conquest) into productive competition — “the same drive that drove Achilles to kill Hector” now drives entrepreneurs. Bi notes many successful founders were “criminals in high school”; capitalism redirects that energy.
Law: contains violence via a monopoly on force; works within nations but fails between nations (UN, Geneva Conventions lack enforcement).
The dyke breaks where capitalism meets the weakest law: global trade. Girard predicted Sino-American conflict would escalate from trade to war.
Nuclear weapons make this apocalyptic: they enable instant, frictionless, mutually assured destruction — war as a duel, not a boxing match.
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962): a Soviet submarine officer’s single refusal prevented nuclear launch; we were one man’s will from armageddon.
Girard’s advice for the end times: withdraw, tend your own garden, nurture your soul — the Kingdom of God is not of this world.
The Case Against Engaging Girard: Side Effects
Alienation: your deepest desires (career, spouse, political cause) are revealed as external and perverse; you can no longer fully participate in collective movements, seeing the deceit of crowds.
Inaction: Girard is radically ambivalent — every solution creates new problems (caste systems oppress but prevent mimetic war; capitalism is a violent cesspool but brings prosperity). No clear answers; deep pessimism incapacitates thorough digesters.
Hopelessness: apocalypse is imminent and unstoppable; Girard offers no hope — any hope must come from you, not him.
Bi echoes Dante’s gate of Hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” — but for the stubborn or morbidly curious, the lectures continue.
