Playwright Matthew Gasda observed with remarkable prescience: “We are all Girardians now – whether we know it or not.”
We are all Girardians, to be sure, because we now live in the most mimetically charged of worlds, the global village, in which the insidious dynamics of desire, so well described by Girard, become increasingly obvious to us. The online world, which, having brought us closer together, has also inevitably made us more distant from each other, is the ultimate end of the aggravation of mimetic undifferentiation that Girard perceives as the definitive mark of late modernity.
This is the most parsimonious – and most plausible – explanation of Girard’s appeal to a whole new generation. It’s impossible not to notice the fundamental insight of mimetic theory in the world of the internet: the very term influencer, the one who influences, which so much defines us, seems to flow naturally from it; making clear, almost by its very definition, the triangular nature of desire, that is, that I don’t desire an object spontaneously, but rather through another, the influencer, who directs my desire in a given direction.
From this fundamental insight, Girard would infer a host of at once fascinating and shocking consequences.
Girard’s thought is almost arithmetic, as if a fundamental axiom led to a series of developments which, although unpredictable at first, follow seamlessly from it once perceived. The fundamental axiom which set this equation in motion was triangular desire, or, as Girard would later call it, mimetic desire.
The idea is simple: we desire according to an Other. There is no such thing as spontaneous desire, the romantic lie par excellence, but rather infinite and invisible mediations of appropriated desire, layers upon layers, whose absurdly complex composition weave the immeasurable human drama – and whenever we think we want something spontaneously, what we are actually doing is further strengthening the concealment of the mediator (or mediators) of our desire, which makes us even more captive to this mediation, whose dominance over us will grow exponentially.
The world of universal mediation, however, is also the world of universal undifferentiation – a term central to Girard’s analysis of our times. In such a world, the social constructs that once sought to confine desire within specific dimensions, classes, or castes have vanished; and when meaningful social distinctions between people dissolve, so too do the barriers preventing them from desiring the same things as others. Everyone becomes a potential rival to everyone else. Violence runs unchecked.
Girard calls this state of affairs a mimetic crisis: “a situation of conflict so intense that on both sides people act the same way and talk the same way, even though, or because, they are increasingly hostile toward one another.” This happens because, in moments of extreme conflict, differences do not sharpen but blur, melting away entirely. The only way to resolve such conflicts, Girard argues, is by restoring some form of difference – though the means through which this occurs often defy rationality.
This anarchic violence1 is not resolved through peaceful social contracts negotiated amidst turmoil, as Enlightenment rationalists once believed, but rather through the immolation of a victim: through scapegoating. The cycle of violence is broken when a possible scapegoat is identified. Uniting in a collective act of violence, a community projects its internal conflicts onto an external victim that once expelled or killed, restores peace – at least temporarily. The community, previously trapped in a spiral of mutual aggression, finds unity in this new opposition. Over time, the expelled or sacrificed victim may even be divinized.
Thus, Girard argues, were ancient human cultures able to manage the vast heap of accumulated rivalries and hatreds that always threatened the very possibility of society. With the publication of Violence and the Sacred, Girard elucidates this process “that the people involved neither understand nor perceive”, recognizing it as omnipresent in all archaic cultures, albeit progressively obscured by their myths and rituals.
Violence, Girard believes, founds our fallen world. The biblical perception that the first city was built by Cain, a murderer, finds ample evidence in the historical and mythological records of various societies.
In his vast survey of the myriad of founding myths and ceremonial rituals of primitive societies, Girard uncovers ample evidence to corroborate his hypothesis. Yet among these narratives, one case particularly captivates him.
That same biblical intelligence narrating Cain as the founder of the first city, the father of society in this fallen world, also portrays him as a murderer. Girard discerns a crucial distinction between the Judeo-Christian understanding and the founding myths of other traditions. Rome was established upon the murder of Remus by Romulus, yet Romulus is glorified as a hero, the inaugural king and founder of the great empire. The killing is presented as a necessary sacred act that establishes a legitimate order amongst the previously ruling chaos. By contrast, the Bible explicitly depicts Cain as a criminal, the builder of a false, satanic order antithetical to God’s plan.
Jewish-Christian narrative subverts the traditional logic of scapegoating, giving voice to the victim instead of justifying its sacrifice as righteous. What myth seeks to conceal (the primordial sacrifice of an innocent victim) is continually revealed in Scripture, culminating in the figure of Jesus Christ.2
By recounting the scapegoat process from the perspective of the victims, the Bible demystifies it. That which remained hidden “since the foundation of the world” is unveiled in the Gospel: the violence against the scapegoat is not an act of divine justice but a collective blindness perpetuating a false, satanic order.
Christ’s resurrection thus marks far more than a theological event; it signifies the end of sacrificial violence’s dominion – an anthropological revelation. Rising again, Christ breaks the logic of scapegoating, proving that sacrifice is unnecessary to restore peace or to regenerate life, for God stands not with the persecutors but with the persecuted. While ancient myths sanctified murder, the Gospel reveals that true redemption comes only through recognizing and overcoming this destructive cycle.
The sacrifice of the Other transforms into the sacrifice of the Self.
The historical consequences of this revelation are immense.
“Christianity,” Girard tells us, “is the religion of disbelief,” for with it, a significant portion of humanity moved away from the ancient sacrificial authorities – powers long regarded as divine – that had always governed the world, founding their cosmos.3
Only by comprehending this profound revolution can we fully grasp our present era. We are incapable of sacrificing innocents, not because such acts are beyond our capacity, but because the Gospel has irrevocably altered our perception of victims. The crucifixion exposed the mechanisms of scapegoating, dismantling the illusion that the victim could ever be guilty.
As Tom Holland demonstrates in Dominion, tracing how Christianity reshaped not only Western civilization but also the very moral grammar through which we understand the world today, much of what we consider universal values – the equality of all men before God, the defense of the marginalized, the separation of Church and State, the idea of human rights – stems directly from the Cross. Even those who reject Christianity as a relic of superstition cannot escape its influence; they too speak the language shaped by the event of Calvary.
Yet, in emptying the sacrificial systems of its power, Christianity left humanity bereft of the ancient mechanisms that once contained mimetic rivalry. What Christ demanded of us – to forgive not merely seven times but seventy times seven, to turn the other cheek, to cease casting stones… – proved too great a burden.
We are Christian enough that scapegoating no longer holds its sway over us, but we are not Christian enough to embrace the radical demands of the Gospel. Therein lies our tragedy. Without reliable means of resolving conflict, we face a paradox: the very revelation that liberated us from the violence of ancient gods now threatens to overwhelm us with a new kind of unbridled violence.
Thus, the two definitive marks of our era, even if they seem utterly antithetical: compassion for victims, concern for the downtrodden, care for the marginalized; alongside the looming specter of mutual assured destruction, the product of two world wars whose bloodshed has no parallel in history.
Ours is a world where “we cannot distinguish the instruments of war from the instruments of peace”, a realm where nuclear Armageddon perpetually hovers on the horizon. The result is a world suspended between extremes; where compassion for victims coexists uneasily with the capacity for self-destruction, where ideals of justice vie with unprecedented structures of oppression.4
While exposing the lie at the heart of sacrificial systems, Christian revelation also created a vacuum that modernity struggles to fill. Freed from the false peace of scapegoating, yet unable to fully embrace the radical demands of the Gospel, we are caught in a liminal space where accumulated resentment finds no release, and rivalry escalates without resolution. That is, according to Girard, our true postmodern predicament: the apocalypse.
In his final work, Battling to the End, published in 2007 and co-authored with his friend Benoît Chantre, René Girard caps his intellectual journey with the proposition of an apocalyptic theory of history.
“We, the French and Germans”, Girard claims, “are responsible for the devastation that is underway because our extremes have become the whole world”. Yet, we don’t understand what we have done, how it is that “we set the spark to the tinder” because “we have not yet wanted to understand Clausewitz’s central intuition” – an intuition that Clausewitz himself was never willing to fully contemplate.
Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian strategist and general of the Napoleonic era who authored one of the greatest treatises on war, (appropriately) titled On War. According to Girard, in his tragic yet deeply profound pursuit to uncover the secrets of war, Clausewitz stumbled upon something he had not anticipated, a revelation so profound that it transfigured his entire understanding of warfare. War, he realized, is fundamentally a duel, “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”; therefore, any military endeavor, if it is to succeed, must direct its efforts toward the service of this force, whose action proves capable of suppressing competing forms of violence, subduing them.
Clausewitz’s discovery was that at its most fundamental level, war does not arise from external causes such as food scarcity, territorial disputes, or resource competition; instead, it emerges from humanity’s intrinsic passion for violence, a desire so deeply ingrained that it becomes heroic in our eyes. Subtly and often unconsciously, we fabricate quarrels over territory, resources, and ideologies, which serve as pretexts for our deeper yearning: the exercise of power and dominance over others.
Since we are acutely mimetic creatures, the emulation of others’ means of violence is not merely one characteristic among many but lies at the very core of our collective drama. As humanity perfects its methods and technology of warfare, it grows ever more committed to the possibility of mutual extermination. The arms race, as we call it today, reflects an ancient logic: opponents in war, locked in archetypal duels, gradually adopt identical practices, striving to outdo each other through ever-greater acts of destruction. The military history of the twentieth century bears witness to this, marked as it was by total war and the militarization of civilian life. If there is any discernible evolution in human history, it is one that leads inexorably toward self-destruction.
Clausewitz thus confesses, albeit tortuously, that politics submits to war rather than governing it. As the passion for violence escalates, the purely political dimensions of conflict become increasingly irrelevant. It is not war that arises as an extension of politics, as later thinkers would argue, but the reverse: the anthropologically foundational element is war itself, not politics. From the outset, we are violent creatures, our societies forged not through peaceful social contracts but through cycles of rivalry and domination. The social contract emerges afterward, an invariably weak and dated attempt to contain what cannot be ultimately contained.
This understanding, this acute and irremediable disbelief in the sufficiency of politics, is apocalyptic thinking. It is apocalypse: the revelation of immense historical-cosmic aggravations through the action of forces that are chaotic, disruptive, and, in theological terms, demonic. Confronted by such forces, we find ourselves powerless to act exclusively by our own means, which are invariably meager, if not outright counterproductive. It is as if we have only gasoline to extinguish the fire of our disputes – and yet, in a tragic irony, some Girardians themselves are the ones pouring it.
The Hobbesian “war of every man against every man”.
For Girard, this revelation transforms our understanding of culture and religion entirely. What was once concealed can now no longer be ignored. The process that was once necessarily suppressed is laid bare: “If you scapegoat someone, only a third party can become aware of it. It won’t be you, because you will believe you are doing the right thing. You will believe that you are either punishing someone who is truly guilty, or fighting someone who is trying to kill you. We never see ourselves as responsible for scapegoating.” This illusion lies at the heart of sacrificial systems. Were individuals to realize they were merely projecting their internal tensions and rivalries onto an innocent victim, the system would collapse. It is precisely for this reason that in ancient religions, sacrifice must remain shrouded in mystery and justified by sacred narratives. Christ, however, unmasks this logic by offering Himself as the ultimate and final lamb of God – thereby ending the sacrificial cycle and exposing its violent and homicidal foundation. Through His death, Christ reveals the truth about all innocent victims throughout history, those who were sacrificed in the name of false peace. On the Cross, He exposes the fact that the world has always rested upon a bloody lie, a system concealing its violence beneath the veneer of order and justice. He dies not only for us but also for all those innocent victims whose blood sustained this demonic order across millennia.
If the Father had compelled Jesus to sacrifice himself, he would have been no different from Baal or any other deity whose demands for bloodshed perpetuated cycles of violence. Instead, what we find in the Gospels is the exact opposite: God sacrifices himself out of love for humanity. In his farewell discourse, delivered before apostles still ignorant of the events to come, Jesus declares, “There is no greater love than this – that a man should lay down his life for his friends”.
As Charles Taylor poignantly observed, the twentieth century stands as both the era of death camps and Médecins Sans Frontières.
While I’m sure some might debate, this was a strong overview of his central thesis. I do sometimes question the logic that with Christianity we permanently reached some liminal zone between scapegoating delusion and Christian revelation. Do we not fall back and forth between these? I could accept the idea of cycles, and perhaps even the definitive power of Christianity as a worldwide and influential example of transcendence…but could the apocalypse of Girard actually be the egotism of a man who believes it was the French who finally ushered in Armageddon? Perhaps it is the Armageddon of the West, but not the final end. Though yes nuclear war etc I get it. I don’t know, it’s difficult to fully embrace the stark cynicism - especially when it now seems most weaponized by those selling the weapons.
Wow. This was great.