Sublime

It’s deceivingly difficult to figure out why you bought certain things; it’s extraordinarily hard to understand why you strive toward certain achievements. So hard that few people dare to ask. Mimetic desire draws people toward things.4 “This draw,” writes Girard scholar James Alison, “this movement … [is] mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity

THUS THE EXPRESSION “scapegoat” designates (1) the victim of the ritual described in Leviticus, (2) all the victims of similar rituals that exist in archaic societies and that are called rituals of expulsion, and finally (3) all the phenomena of nonritualized collective transference that we observe or believe we observe around us.

We see these patterns and they don’t, because nobody likes to believe that they are operating under some kind of compulsion beyond their control. It is too disturbing a thought.

One of the most profound intellectual influences on Peter Thiel is a French thinker named René Girard, whom he met while at Stanford and whose funeral he would eventually speak at in 2015. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what

Eine solche Form von Neid wird durch ein mimetisches Begehren geschürt, wie der französische Philosoph René Girard dies nennt.60 Das Begehren ist stets triangulär, weil wir nie eine Sache selbst begehren, sondern das, was andere begehren, und weil andere es begehren. Durch diese trianguläre Struktur des Begehrens wird die Fantasie der Gleichheit, d

This is how the gospels worked. For the first time in history, the story was told from the standpoint of the victim. Girard sees this as a definitive turning point—the moment when the scapegoat mechanism began to lose its absolute power. The story forces people to come to grips with their own violence.