Girard Predicts Apocalypse | Mimetic Theory

• René Girard’s final lecture argues that humanity is marching toward an inevitable apocalypse driven by violence, because Christianity exposed and dismantled the ancient mechanisms that once kept violence contained, while simultaneously unleashing forces that now make violence both more likely and harder to stop.

The Scapegoat Mechanism and Its Christian Unmasking

• For millennia, human societies maintained peace through the scapegoat mechanism: a four-step cycle in which a community descending into chaos would unconsciously select a relatively innocent victim, blame them for all societal problems, kill or expel them, and experience a cathartic peace so powerful that the victim was deified.

  • This founding murder was deeply ambivalent—an act of ultimate evil that produced worldly good by restoring order.
  • The mechanism required that its true nature remain hidden; the victim’s innocence had to stay concealed, or the entire system would collapse.
  • Myths grew from these events, and from those myths came the core institutions of pagan society: prohibitions (to prevent violence) and rituals (as controlled release valves for violence).

• Christ’s crucifixion exposed the scapegoat mechanism by revealing the innocence of the victim and the guilt and projection of the mob, giving humanity a moral framework to decode and free itself from religion altogether.

  • This is the “rupture” of human history: Christianity slowly strips away the ability to create myths out of deified scapegoats, and with it the legitimacy of prohibitions (now seen as oppressive) and the efficacy of sacrifice (now seen as cruel).
  • Christ’s intention was not destruction but liberation—freeing humanity from violence and lies so that genuine love and the kingdom of God could be possible.
  • However, expelling the scapegoat mechanism is necessary but not sufficient for the kingdom of God; it requires all people to unilaterally renounce violence and develop love. This is a logical possibility but a statistical impossibility—as unlikely as a randomly typing monkey producing the Bible.

• Christ’s famous statement in Matthew 10:34—“I came not to send peace, but a sword”—is taken by Girard literally: Christ came to cut down the pillars of worldly order, not for destruction’s sake, but to make the kingdom of God possible.

  • The tragedy is that humanity was given a choice between the kingdom of God and violent apocalypse, and we veered away from the kingdom. We were given the chance to choose love over violence, and we failed.

How the Scapegoat Mechanism Has Changed, Not Disappeared

• The scapegoat mechanism has not been fully expelled from modernity—only parts of it have been weakened. Each step of the mechanism has been transformed:

• Step 1: Mimetic contagion (groups falling into frenzy as rivalries multiply) has become more dangerous, not less, because modernity has destroyed two types of distance:

  • Spatial/temporal proximity: Technology and social media (e.g., Facebook’s “connecting the world”) make it trivially easy to compare yourself to anyone on the planet, turning everyone into a potential rival.
  • Social proximity: The breakdown of caste systems, aristocratic hierarchies, guilds, and gender norms in the name of equality means there are no longer barriers preventing metaphysical desire from spreading rampantly through the population. While Girard sees the ideal of equality as an extension of Christian love, he is deeply worried because it makes us far more envious and competitive.

• Step 2: Scapegoating (blaming a victim to achieve catharsis) has become worse, not better, because truth has made us less gullible:

  • We can no longer believe that one person is responsible for all of society’s problems—blaming a plague on Oedipus would only elicit laughter today.
  • But the level of catharsis needed for peace remains the same, so we must “up the dose”: we now need to blame entire categories of people to achieve the same calming effect.
  • The Soviet Union blamed an entire class; Nazi Germany blamed an entire race. As the power of the mechanism breaks down, sacrifices must be larger and larger in scale to achieve the same effect. “Before we could bring peace by sacrificing a goat or a few men, but now we must kill an entire race, religion, class. The eradication needs to be total.”

• Step 3: Divinization (deifying the victim to create lasting peace and myth) is no longer possible for two reasons:

  • The Christian moral paradigm replaced the pagan one: in paganism, the dominant distinction was powerful/powerless, so a victim could be both evil (causing the plague) and good (ending it). In Christianity, the dominant distinction is moral/immoral, so divinizing a victim would incriminate the persecutors—if the victim was essentially good, why was the mob killing them?
  • Even if we could still create myths, the Christian revelation allows us to decode the injustice of persecution after the fact. We may be caught up in the frenzy in the moment, but once the dust settles, the Christian suspicion of the mob and concern for the victim quickly exposes what happened. This is why we can now recognize the injustice of Soviet and Nazi terror.

• The net result: Christianity has stripped us of all our old tools for bringing peace. Mimetic contagion is more likely, scapegoating must be larger in scale, and we can no longer create lasting peace through myth, divinization, or ritual. Both the brakes on violence and the solutions for violence have crumbled.

The Modern Institutions That Contain Violence: Law, Capitalism, and War

• If the old tools are gone, why haven’t we already collapsed? Girard argues we’ve developed new institutions that channel, contain, and direct violence: law, capitalism and global trade, and war. These are not identical to pagan institutions but serve analogous functions.

Law as Katechon (That Which Contains)

• Law is the modern descendant of ritual, serving the same function of preventing reciprocal violence from destroying society.

  • In early human societies, if one person injured another, it was left to the injured party to seek vengeance, leading to infinite escalation. Ritual and law both address this by (1) prolonging the time of response to prevent escalation, and (2) clearly demarcating what violence is justified and what isn’t.
  • Examples: Aztec sacrifice channels violence to a single victim; the festival of Bakana contains violent energies to a single day; Germanic trial by combat narrows vengeance to a single time and place.

• The crucial difference between ritual and law is that law can punish the guilty party, while ritual punishes an innocent bystander or no one in particular.

  • Example: The Chukchi people of the Arctic practice a ritual where, if one tribesman kills another, the tribal leader chooses someone unrelated to the initial incident to kill—never the actual killer. This is because the guilty party is at the center of the mimetic contagion, socially charged with people rallying for and against them. Killing them would spawn new vengeance.
  • Law can punish the guilty because there is an entity with a monopoly over violence: the state. If you try to take justice into your own hands, the state threatens you with its own violence in turn.

• Analogy: In a casual pickup basketball game without a referee, disputes are settled by rituals like “ball don’t lie” (shooting a three-pointer to decide a call). Everyone knows the ball does lie—the outcome has nothing to do with justice—but without a monopolistic force, it’s the best you can do. A referee with the power to eject players is far more effective, just as law is far more effective than ritual.

• The cost of law’s efficacy is total restraint: the state must govern every type of action to snub out even the beginnings of violence.

  • Relationships that were once governed by social bonds (parent-child, husband-wife, business partners) are now governed by the intermediary of the state through law: employment contracts, prenups, inheritance law, defamation penalties.
  • This makes societies with strong rule of law feel cold and atomized. The transition from secure employment to the gig economy is a microcosm: more freedom, less social congeniality; more contracts, fewer relationships.
  • We’ve given up big prohibitions (caste systems) only to find ourselves surrounded by a million small ones (employment interview regulations, HR codes). This “atomization of virtue” means you must treat every person like a potential lawsuit rather than a human being.

• Paradoxically, total restraint allows greater freedom: because the state’s restraining force is always present, modern people can interact with total strangers with extraordinary informality, flexibility, and audacity. The coldness and the freedom are joined at the hip.

• Law increases potential violence while decreasing actual violence: by allowing us to interact much more frequently as equals (we can now desire what the president desires), law increases the buildup of violent energies but stops them before they become kinetic. This is the distinction between potential violence (the buildup) and kinetic violence (actual violence). Steven Pinker’s claim that the world has never been safer only measures kinetic violence; the potential violence is enormous and growing.

• The shift from ritual to law changes the logic of punishment:

  • In ritual, the focus is the wronged party (to give them cathartic release), and the philosophy is retribution—the wronged person deserves to get even. Rituals work through catharsis and prestige (the social pressure to respect the outcome, seen as the will of a god).
  • In law, the focus is the guilty party (to take them out of commission and break the chain of reciprocity), and the philosophy is guilt—they deserve punishment in and for itself. Law works primarily through the threat of more violence (the state will come after you if you seek revenge), with catharsis and prestige playing only minor roles.
  • Girard’s relativistic conclusion: we didn’t start punishing the guilty because it was more just—we started because it was more effective, and then backed into the notion of justice as punishing the guilty. “Either justice is revenge, in which case our system is the most just because we conform closest to vengeance, or justice is just some relativistically made up term.”

• Law is the katechon that contains apocalypse, but it only works through the threat of more violence. This is pivotal because law breaks down where there is no central monopolistic power—namely, in international affairs and global trade.

Capitalism and Global Trade as Katechon

• Capitalism is the modern descendant of gift-giving, and understanding this genealogy reveals its violent underpinnings.

  • Pre-currency societies did not operate on barter but on gift-giving. While some gift-giving was about material aid, the dominant logic was about spirit, not appetite—what the gift said about the giver, not how it helped the receiver.
  • Example: Among the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Northwestern Indigenous tribes, great chiefs demonstrated superiority by giving away their most precious possessions to competitors, trying to outdo each other in contempt for wealth. This “strange game” institutionalized the destruction of goods and was driven by pride and prestige, not material need.
  • Modern philanthropy (putting your name on a university building) follows the same logic: outwardly about the cause, actually about the pride and social display of the giver.

• Gift-giving had two crucial features that capitalism has destroyed:

  • A temporal gap between gift and counter-gift, showing trust in the relationship and allowing spirited energies to cool off. Immediately settling accounts implies the relationship isn’t strong enough. (Example: close friends don’t Venmo each other after every dinner; the need to zero the balance sheet immediately signals a breakdown of the relational bond.)
  • Gifts of differing but not wildly different value—exactly equal value implied wanting to end the relationship.

• Money atomizes exchange: it is both instantaneous and exactly equal in value, breaking the relational bond and preventing violent escalation in individual transactions, just as law atomizes human relationships.

  • Capitalism, like gift-giving, is still mostly about social display and competitive energies, not material goods. The same drive that drove Achilles to kill Hector and Caesar to conquer Gaul underpins the modern economy.

• Capitalism channels violence productively: it is an outlet for the same energies of pride, desire for conquest, and rivalry that once fueled warfare.

  • “The United States never relapsed into totalitarian contractions because of, among other reasons, its social fluidity, its extensive mobility both in geographical and in social terms. The modern Western economy is the first civilization that has learned to use memetic rivalry positively. It is known as economic competition.”
  • People who would have raised armies a few hundred years ago now satisfy their conquering drives by creating better products and services. Many entrepreneurs who were criminals in high school channel their destructive energies into the pursuit of profit.

• But capitalism is dependent on law, and law depends on a monopoly over violence. Within a nation, this works (e.g., Jeff Bezos suing Elon Musk and accepting the verdict). Between nations, where there is no monopolistic power, capitalism becomes a generator of conflict.

  • Girard’s 2007 prediction about China: At the peak of Sino-American optimism, the dominant view was that economic liberalization would bring harmony. Girard argued the opposite—that similarity, not difference, causes rivalry. As China and the U.S. become more similar forms of capitalism, they will compete more intensely, erecting false differences. The very mechanism others thought would bring them together (global trade) would be the exact point of conflict. He anticipated the trade wars of the 2020s and warned that trade conflict could transform quickly into military conflict.

War as Katechon

• War was once an institution with built-in checks and balances, not the unrestrained violence we associate with it today.

  • The Iliad ends with a 12-day truce for Hector’s burial. Greek city-states fought with phalanxes in a ritualized manner, like a rugby match—rival leaders agreed where and when to fight, and the fight ended when one side started to lose ground, not when they were exterminated.
  • Even in World War I, there were impromptu Christmas truces where rival soldiers played soccer in no man’s land.

• War has two elements: the abstract concept of war (instant escalation to extremes) and the frictions that prevent it from conforming to that abstract concept.

  • The abstract concept comes from Clausewitz: “War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale… each side compels its opponent to follow suit—a reciprocal action which must lead in theory to extremes.” This is the Hegelian duel: instant escalation ending only in death or complete domination.
  • Frictions prevent this escalation: (1) technological/terrain frictions (the time needed to move troops, communication delays) and (2) cultural frictions (rituals and prohibitions governing warfare).

• The “gentleman’s wars” of the 17th–18th centuries were governed by powerful implicit rules:

  • Armies campaigned in set seasons (March–September) and went into winter quarters in autumn. Officers traveled home through enemy territory and were granted safe passage.
  • Assassinating officers was considered scandalous. Colonel Patrick Ferguson had George Washington in his sights during the American Revolution but refused to fire at the back of “an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty.” After learning who it was, he was “not sorry” he let him go.

• Napoleon destroyed the institution of war and inaugurated the era of total war:

  • Three radical changes: (1) the prestige and power of the old nobility diminished, (2) war came to be seen as a barbaric aberration rather than a normal state of affairs, giving people greater normative justification to commit atrocities in the name of ending wars, and (3) an apocalyptic view of war as either total victory or total defeat replaced the earlier dignity given even to losers.
  • The levée en masse of 1798 introduced total mandatory conscription for the first time in modern history. War became total—married men made munitions, women created clothes, civilian casualties increased, scorched Earth policies emerged, and Spanish guerrilla warfare gave birth to modern terrorism.

• Modern technology has eliminated frictions: instant telecommunications and paratroopers allow forces to be deployed in rapid succession. But nothing eliminates frictions like the nuclear bomb.

  • What is unique about the nuke is not its destructive power (the firebombing of Tokyo was comparable) but that it forces rivals to utterly destroy each other at the first glimpse of provocation. There are no frictions—you just press the button.
  • Nations used to fight wars like a boxing match, with time to maneuver and rest between blows. The nuke allows them to fight like a duel: instant, fatal escalation. It’s worse than a duel because it allows the dead party to shoot back (nuclear submarines can avenge a destroyed nation post-mortem).

• The Cuban Missile Crisis as proof: On October 27, 1962, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo was targeted by an American carrier group dropping depth charges. The crew had lost contact with Moscow for days and believed war had broken out. Two of three senior officials voted to launch the nuclear torpedo. Only one officer’s stubborn refusal prevented an almost certain nuclear exchange and likely world-scale Armageddon. “The will of one man was all that stood in the way.”

The Apocalyptic Conclusion

• Girard’s eschatological paradox: The very conditions that make the kingdom of God possible (equality, freedom, truth) are the same conditions that make mass violence inevitable.

  • Equality (the breakdown of caste systems) increases competition and mimetic rivalry.
  • The exposure of unjust sacrifice means we have no resources left to resolve violence.
  • The abandonment of prohibitions means war has taken on a total character.
  • The desire for truth means we can no longer believe in the noble lies that once brought lasting peace.
  • “All men are already equal, not just under law but in fact.” We are already in the perfect social-historical conditions. If we can’t love each other now, we can’t love each other ever.

• Prohibition, ritual, law, and capitalism are all insufficient katechons: they decrease the actuality of violence while increasing its potentiality. Unlike the sacrifices of old, there is no real peace—only superficial peace covering an ocean of violent energies. We are in a state of suspended polarity that could burst at any moment. The potential energy, if it hasn’t already, will engender war at the point where law is impotent: global trade between nations. And a war without cultural or technological frictions would see rapid nuclear escalation bringing about literal apocalypse.

What Ought One Do? Girard’s Solutions

Against Political Action

• Girard has an inherent suspicion of all collective political action because immersion in a group necessarily involves losing authenticity and justifying violence or expulsion.
  • His rejection of political action is not categorical but contingent on our social-historical moment. He believes nothing is left to be done on the political level because we have already realized the ultimate ideals humanity can strive for: equality, freedom, and truth.
  • Political action is impotent because we are already at the most ideal state. What is required is not political change but a radical transformation of spirit.

Conversion

• Conversion is Girard’s term (broadly, not just religiously) for the process of becoming disillusioned with metaphysical desire: seeing through the vanity of mimetic rivalry, renouncing futile violence, developing genuine identification and love for others, and being imbued with newfound creative energy.

  • His canonical examples are literary writers, not necessarily religious figures. It is a fundamental transformation of spirit where one is no longer prideful, energies are channeled into creative pursuits, and one develops genuine concern for others.
  • Recognizable in everyday life: letting go of a competitive career to spend with family, realizing the vanity of status games and stepping away.

• But conversion is not a reliable or reproducible solution for three reasons:

  • The requirements are extremely specific and intimate: the victimage delusion must be vanquished “on the most intimate level of experience,” collapsing or shaking to their foundations one’s core conceptions of self, ego, and personality. It is a Copernican event, comparable to Nirvana in Eastern spirituality, and cannot be prescribed.
  • The conditions for conversion cannot be pursued directly: one must suffer a genuine fall—a heartbreak, a loss, a failure of intense metaphysical desire. Since the fall is defined by failure, it cannot be worked toward; it must result from genuine desire that is inevitably thwarted.
  • Even when both conditions are met, conversion is still not entirely up to us. The choice to deepen pride or renounce it, to enact violence or seek reconciliation, is determined in large part by the models we were exposed to at a young age. Old habits die hard and old models haunt us.
  • “Conversion then is an act of Grace given to the fortunate, but not something we can make meaningful strides towards ourselves.”

Withdrawal

• For those not lucky enough to receive the gift of conversion, Girard’s actionable prescription is simple: withdraw from the world.

  • Proximity is the problem of modernity. We can’t do anything about social proximity (we’re all equals now), but we can create physical distance by leaving society altogether.
  • Girard’s exemplar is the 19th-century poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who retreated into a tower for the last 40 years of his life, cutting himself completely off from society. Despite Hölderlin’s extreme pride and strong metaphysical desires (he wanted to be Goethe or nothing), Girard attributes to the withdrawn Hölderlin a quiet mysticism, tranquility, and even holiness.
  • If withdrawal works for even such a memetic person, it must work for everyone.
  • Girard sees withdrawal as a defining characteristic of Christ: “Christ withdraws at the very moment he could dominate.” At the resurrection, when his divinity was apparent to all and he could have founded an empire, he left. So too must we refuse to imitate and refuse to be imitated.
  • “The first commandment to direct one’s gaze towards God is incomplete without the tenth commandment to divert one’s gaze away from others.” Only at a distant and withdrawn place can we see truth and practice love.

• Withdrawal is deeply unsatisfying, and Girard seems to recognize this:

  • Hölderlin’s contemporaries found him far from holy—devoid of companionship, characterized by anxiety rather than peace.
  • It’s not clear that withdrawal protects us from the coming apocalypse.
  • Girard ironically succumbs to the same escapist flaws he criticized in Eastern religions: “The non-violence of Eastern religions is the search for a position outside of violence, Nirvana, etc., but this comes at the price of all action—this search abandons the world to itself.” These are the exact problems his own prescription runs into.
  • What good is whatever love we manage to develop if we are withdrawn from the world and unable to help others?

The End Is Here

• Girard does not give us worldly solutions because there are none. The kingdom of God will not be established on Earth, but perhaps we can preserve ourselves to be worthy of it in heaven.

  • When asked “What is to be done?” in the 1980s, all he said was: “We might begin with personal sanctity.” During a lecture in Paris, asked the same question, he simply answered: “Pray.”

• Girard does not predict a specific date for the apocalypse (he dismisses such predictions as unhelpful). Instead, he points to Matthew 24: nation rising against nation, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, persecution, false prophets, iniquity causing love to grow cold.

  • The ecological challenges are the earthquakes and pestilences. The geopolitical fault lines and trade conflicts are the rise of nation against nation. The persecutors in the name of victims are the false prophets. The increasingly toxic cultural landscape is the iniquity that causes love to grow cold. Girard’s own work is the last preaching of the gospel for an unreceptive world.
  • “The end is not near. The end is here.”

• His final book ends with: “In 1815 the Congress of Vienna was still able to put an end to the war of the sixth coalition. That era is over. Violence can no longer be checked. From this point of view, we can say that the apocalypse has already begun.”