Introduction to Mimetic Theory | René Girard

• This is the first lecture in a seven-part series on the mimetic theory of René Girard, presented by Jonathan B and moderated by David Perrell. The series aims to make Girard’s dense, sprawling body of work accessible and relevant to contemporary life, covering his psychology, philosophy of history, theology, and apocalyptic predictions. Girard’s central insight—that human desire is fundamentally imitative rather than autonomous—is presented as a tool for understanding personal suffering, social dynamics, and the trajectory of civilization itself.

Why Girard matters: personal and social diagnosis

• Jonathan B describes his own path to Girard as born from personal crisis. As a high-achieving student at Columbia, he found himself and his peers trapped in hollow status competitions—pursuing finance, tech, law, and medicine not from genuine desire but from mimetic pressure. Victories felt empty because they were driven by social expectation rather than authentic want.

  • The wake-up call came when he saw alumni who had “made it”—right jobs, right neighborhoods, right partners—yet were plagued by the same existential hollowness, living lives motivated by external shells of prestige rather than internal desire.
  • Girard gave Jonathan a framework to understand the mechanics of this trap and begin disentangling himself from it.

• Mimetic theory does not magically eliminate mimetic behavior. Jonathan remains as susceptible to mimetic forces as before. But the theory provides foresight—the ability to avoid situations that trigger destructive envy or unproductive pride, to identify social environments prone to mimetic contagion, and to construct relatively sober ones.

  • He borrows an analogy from military theorist John Boyd: superior pilots use judgment to avoid situations where they need superior skill. Similarly, mimetic theory helps you avoid situations where you’d need superhuman resistance to mimetic pressure.

• Girard is “cheaper than psychoanalysis” in two senses: you don’t pay anyone to study his ideas, and his theory explains far more phenomena with fewer assumptions. Where Freud’s Oedipus complex requires a heavy innate assumption (the son desires the mother), Girard explains the same dynamic through imitation—the son imitates the father’s desires, including desire for the mother—and this same mechanism explains a vast range of psychological, social, and historical phenomena.

Girard’s predictive power: the Sino-American example

• In 2007, at the peak of Sino-American optimism, Girard predicted conflict between the United States and China. This was deeply contrarian at the time, when the dominant view held that economic liberalization and cultural convergence would lead to harmony.
  • The optimistic view rested on two flawed premises: that China’s rise would make Westerners richer and therefore happier, and that increasing cultural similarity would lead to political alignment.
  • Girard saw through both. Humans are not rational utility maximizers but social creatures driven by relativistic comparison—America would be unsettled by the narrowing gap with China even if it were absolutely richer. And similarity, not difference, causes conflict: desiring the same objects creates a larger surface area for competition and potential violence.
  • Girard warned that trade could transform quickly into war, and that the conflict would stem not from a clash of civilizations but from two forms of capitalism becoming more similar. Fifteen years later, his prediction has proven “depressingly correct.”

Structure of the lecture series

• The series has two goals: theoretical (a comprehensive overview of Girard’s system from psychology to theology to apocalyptic predictions) and practical (applying the theory to modern life through examples including celebrity advertising, romantic relationships, social media, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the genesis of law, modern victimhood culture, and the philosophical basis of innovation).
• The seven lectures are organized as follows:
  • Lecture 1: Overview of Girard’s life and work (this lecture)
  • Lectures 2–3: Girard’s psychology—mimesis and metaphysical desire
  • Lectures 4–7: Girard’s philosophy of history—from human evolution to imminent apocalypse
• The lectures are aimed at an intermediate undergraduate level. No prerequisites are required. Engagement with the Western philosophical canon (Hegel, Plato, Rousseau) and literary/mythological canon (Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Sophocles, Shakespeare) will be properly contextualized.
• A disclaimer: the ideas presented are Jonathan’s most charitable reconstruction of Girard, not his own. He has significant disagreements with Girard on theological, methodological, and psychological grounds, but this series aims to present Girard’s system faithfully before critiquing it.

Girard’s biography

• René Noël Théophile Girard was born on December 25, 1923, in Avignon, France, the second of five children. His father, an anticlerical archivist, had lost a brother and been wounded in World War I, passing onto Girard a view of the meaninglessness of conflict. Girard spent his adolescent years in France under Nazi occupation.

  • The cruelty of the Nazis left an imprint, but so did the cruelty of the French Resistance. After liberation, the Resistance scapegoated innocent people—mostly vulnerable women—accusing them of Nazi collaboration. They were humiliated, dragged through the streets, stripped to their underwear, loaded onto trucks, and often killed without trial on groundless accusations.
  • These scenes of innocent victims being scapegoated left a lasting imprint on Girard and became a central thread in his work: the meaninglessness and deceitfulness of conflict, and the perennial need of troubled societies to find innocent victims to blame and murder for catharsis.

• Girard’s intellectual trajectory was unorthodox. He was trained in history at Indiana University but was self-taught in the fields where he made his contributions. He first made his mark in literary theory (articulating mimesis through close readings of literature), then jumped to anthropology (scapegoating), then to theology (a defense of Christianity).

  • Despite being accepted into the prestigious French Academy and holding professorships at Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, and Stanford, he remained an outsider in all his disciplines—criticized by literary theorists for ignoring conventions, by anthropologists for lack of fieldwork, and by parts of the Christian community for his unorthodox reading of the crucifixion.
  • He called himself an “exegete”—an interpreter of scripture—rather than a philosopher or prophet. His aim was not to revolutionize individual disciplines but to articulate what he conceived as the core insight of Christianity across all domains.

Mimesis: the foundation of Girard’s psychology

• What defined humanity’s evolutionary break from great apes was not reason or truth-seeking but mimesis—the gradually increasing capacity and tendency for imitation. The best metaphor is co-vibrating violin strings: when one string is flicked, a similar frequency translates to the other. Humans are social animals through and through, prone to this co-vibration.
  • Mimesis is the fundamental capacity to gain access to the subjectivity of others and reproduce objective cultural forms. It constitutes us as social beings and differentiates us from other animals.
  • Everyday notions of prestige already contain an understanding of mimesis. When we call something prestigious (Rolex, Harvard, Bentley), we are partially saying the value we attribute to it is not fully accounted for by the object itself—there is surplus value that comes from our peers valuing it, which we ingest through mimesis.
  • For Girard, almost everything is mimetic to some degree: the adrenaline rush in a stadium, political tribalism, the madness of cults, the passing on of accents, even drinking water (we may subtly recall how our favorite athletes drink Gatorade). Humanity would be completely unrecognizable without mimesis.

Metaphysical desire vs. physical desire

• Girard divides human desires into two species:

  • Physical desire (desire to experience): directed at an experience confirmed by the qualities of the object itself—pursuing sex for pleasure or intimacy, buying a car to save time walking.
  • Metaphysical desire (desire to be): directed at what objects say about the subject—pursuing sex to prove something about one’s identity (the Don Juan or coquette psychology), buying a car to be the person with the coolest car on the block.
    • Physical desire aims at utility; metaphysical desire aims at identity. The boundary is not always clear, but the distinction is meaningful at the extremes.
    • Metaphysical desire is aimed at a “fullness of being”—we want to exist fully. It takes the form of pursuing objects (climb Mount Everest, build a unicorn company, attend an Ivy League, buy a particular car, date Sally instead of Susan), but we are never really after the objects themselves.

• Girard’s central thesis: what appears to be a subject pulled toward an object by the object’s intrinsic value is really the subject wanting to acquire that object to be like some model. Desire is not unidirectional (subject → object) but triangular (subject → model → object). We imitate individuals whom we consider to possess fullness of being—celebrities, parental figures, entrepreneurs, outstanding co-workers—and take on their desires as our own, with the faulty logic that acquiring the objects they value must be what grants them their fullness.

  • Celebrity advertisements make this explicit. The tagline for Michael Jordan’s sneakers—“Be Like Mike”—promises not utility (lightness, grip, bounce) but being and prestige. It’s not “Jump Like Mike” or “Score Like Mike” but “Be Like Mike.”

• Because metaphysical desire concerns identity, it is the strongest drive in the human motivational repertoire. It produces obsession and compulsion. We believe obtaining the objects will fully transform us. At different stages of life, metaphysical desire directs us toward a limited set of objects that take on disproportionate weight—defining progress as inching toward them and feeling existential despair when they slip away.

• Even in as intimate a domain as romance, desires are penetrated by those of others. You may not be particularly interested in someone until another suitor appears—it is in that competition that you are inflamed by the mimetic spirit. The bipolar swings of early romance (euphoria when texting goes well, despair when she doesn’t respond, ecstasy when she finally does) are textbook manifestations of metaphysical desire.

  • If even such a personal desire can be externally originated, the same must be true for career choice, political orientation, aesthetic tastes, and philosophical opinions. This is a full-scale attack on the modern conception of the autonomous individual with an authentic core of desires.

The negative phase of mimesis

• Just as mimesis can make people conform, it can also make them diverge. Breaking away from the group—“carving one’s own path”—can be radically socially determined.

  • The logic of metaphysical desire leads us to pursue objects associated with those who have fullness of being and avoid objects associated with those we conceive as deficient in being. We want to be like the cool kids and different from the social outcasts.
  • Example: Silicon Valley tech elites wearing plain t-shirts are not independent from the status games of finance—they are playing the same game in an accelerated form. Showing up in a $5 t-shirt where everyone wears $500 suits is a power play that says “I am so much better than you that we aren’t even playing the same game.” This is the negative phase of mimesis: distancing oneself to show superiority.

• Jonathan shares a personal story. He idolized entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, dropped out of college freshman year to start a company, raised funding, and watched the company crash and burn—driven by vanity, not genuine desire for the process of building. When he returned to school, he resented peers who had dropped out and succeeded, and swung to the opposite extreme: rejecting the worldly altogether, switching to philosophy, spending three years in a Buddhist monastery, and avoiding industry out of resentment.

  • Rejecting industry was his moral weapon to turn failure into triumph over more successful peers. But this was equally inauthentic. The degree to which he pursued philosophy and renounced the world was not genuine—it reflected his relationships with people, not his actual preferences. Admiration led him to converge in the first case; resentment led him to diverge in the second. The direction differed, but the essence was the same.

• Girard is attacking what he calls the “romantic lie”: the idea that we all have an authentic core self beneath layers of social constraints, and that authenticity is accessed by boldly breaking free from the group. In reality, breaking free can be just as socially determined as rigid adherence. We confuse difference for autonomy, distance for independence, originality for freedom.

  • The takeaway from Girard’s psychology: the most powerful and explanatory element in the human psyche is our sociality. Our values, political orientation, aesthetic taste, and philosophical positions are heavily, often primarily, determined by others in deep and often unconscious ways. Reason pretends to be the steward of our decisions but is really its lawyer and spokesperson, engaged in post-hoc rationalization.

The scapegoat mechanism: how early societies survived

• As early humans evolved to be more mimetic, the simple dominance hierarchies that contained animal groups began to break down. In animal hierarchies, if the beta doesn’t desire what the alpha has, all is well. But strong mimesis led to cross-pollination of desires across the hierarchy, and metaphysical desire led subjects into rivalry with their models. Converging and competing metaphysical desires would rip social groups apart in wars of all against all.

  • The only hominid groups that survived and formed lasting cultures were those that stumbled upon a unique cultural technology to stop this escalating conflict: the scapegoat mechanism.

• In the midst of a war of all against all (civil war, revolution, utter chaos), societies converge upon a single victim or small set of victims, attributing all the blame and frustrations of the chaos to them. This is not a rational process like a jury trial—it’s somewhat random, where certain accusations gain steam until the whole group falls under its spell.

  • The victim, if not fully innocent, certainly does not deserve the extent of the blame. The group’s certainty is bolstered by unanimity—everyone believes in the victim’s guilt. The victim is expelled, often murdered brutally, and the group gains cathartic release and peace is restored.
  • Examples: Socrates’ trial and death at the hands of the Athenian jury; the Black Death blamed on witches; Nazis scapegoating Jews for German decline; McCarthy-era witch hunts persecuting innocents under the banner of anti-communism.

• Girard emphasizes that this murder is wrong, based on a lie, and regrettable—but it worked, and it was the only thing that worked to keep early human societies alive. For Girard, the subject of social philosophy is not the rational agent but the spirited animal driven by vengeance, pride, honor, envy, and resentment. In moments of extreme turbulence, we are not interested in truth but in a grand lie and founding murder that can grant catharsis.

• After the murder, the peace that descends is so miraculous and instantaneous that people struggle to make sense of it. Just as deceitfully as the crowd blamed the victim for causing chaos, they now praise the dead victim for ending it—turning the victim paradoxically into a god. Pagan gods are seen as both good and evil, with the power to begin and end destruction.

• The Oedipus myth illustrates both movements of the scapegoat mechanism. Oedipus, king of Thebes during a plague, is blamed for the plague due to patricide and incest and expelled. The plague ends. As time passes, rather than remaining an object of scorn, Oedipus is competed over—a prophecy gains momentum that wherever his remains are buried shall be granted lasting peace. He is deified: still evil for causing the plague but radically good with the power to end plagues.

• Girard claims that in all pagan religions we can find traces of a once-victim turned god at the foundation of the culture: the Norse myth of Baldur’s death resembling collective expulsion; the Greek myth of the birth of Zeus with yearly similarities to murder; the Hindu hymn to Purusha where a genesis deity is sacrificed and his remains give birth to Hindu society and its castes; Julius Caesar, scapegoated and murdered on the Senate floor during Roman civil war, later deified by the Roman Senate, becoming a fountainhead of Roman legitimacy (rulers derive legitimacy from their relationship to Caesar, hence the proliferation of “Caesars” in history).

From founding murder to social institutions

• Out of these myths and founding murders, two sets of real institutions were derived:

  • Prohibitions: designed to prevent chaos by creating social difference between people so that metaphysical desire does not spread as easily. Caste systems, gender roles, guild lineages—however oppressive, they served a crucial function in pagan society by keeping people from competing with each other.
  • Rituals: designed to enact the founding murder in a constrained way to generate catharsis similar to the founding murder. Ritual incest, debaucrous festivals, human sacrifice—however cruel, they served as release valves to generate catharsis and keep the peace.

• The scapegoat mechanism proceeds in an arc: real cataclysmic event (murder of innocent victim) → catharsis and peace → mythologization (dramatization from the persecutor’s perspective) → institutionalization (prohibitions and rituals). This arc is how all pagan gods, religions, societies, and cultures are founded.

  • These societies and myths are based on lies through and through. Both the scapegoating and the deification are deceitful because the victim neither has the power to cause nor end the chaos—it is all psychological projection by the crowd, grounded on nothing but unanimity. The deceitfulness is occluded by myth because myth is written from the perspective of the persecutor.

Christianity: the myth to end all myths

• A natural objection: Christianity perfectly conforms to the logic Girard attributes to pagan religions. There is civil unrest in Jerusalem, Christ’s unjust scapegoating and murder on the cross, the resurrection and divinization, mythologization through the Bible, and institutionalization through the Catholic Church. How can Christianity be true if pagan religions are false?

• Girard’s answer: Christianity has the same structure as pagan religion because Christ is indeed scapegoated, but there is one crucial difference—Christianity is the first story told from the perspective of the victim.

  • Pagan myth always sides with the murderers and believes in the guilt of its victims. Sophocles’ telling of Oedipus affirms the judgment of Thebes. The founding murder of Romulus and Remus paints the killing as justified by Remus’s hubris.
  • The Bible tells the story from the other side. Christ is declared innocent even by his sentencer Pontius Pilate. The mob that convicts Christ is shown to be arbitrary—the true source of evil. The sentencing is depicted as unjust through and through, with charges against Christ nothing more than psychological projections by the crowd. The story is written by the disciples—the side of the victim.
  • Christianity tells the story of scapegoating from the truthful side. We are like jurors who have been hearing the criminals’ lies for so long in pagan religion, suddenly exposed to the truth of the victim’s testimony.

• The crucifixion exposes the lies of all religions: the mob is deceitful, the victim is innocent, there is no sacred pagan power—it is all projection. This is the fundamental message that comes out of the crucifixion for Girard, and it begins to tear down the scapegoat mechanism. From this moment on, myths are read in the light of the gospels, allowing us to see through their lies.

  • The proliferation of Christianity makes Christ’s innocence the dominant lens through which we view the world. We are always looking out for unjust persecution, always siding with the victim, always aware of the deceitfulness of the mob.

• The right metaphor for Christianity and pagan religion is the relationship between a vaccine and the original disease. The vaccine’s efficacy lies in its proximity to the disease, not its radical difference. The Bible is a “myth vaccine”—a Trojan horse that frees us from pagan religion from within. Modern Christians who try to distance the Bible from ancient myths are misguided; the Bible is effective because of, not despite, its proximity to myths.

• Girard’s surprising conclusion: Christianity is a demystifying force, the religion to end all religions, the myth to end all myths, the founding murder to end all founding murders—by exposing their violent, unjust, and deceitful origins.

The four forces Christianity unleashes on history

• Christianity takes humanity out of cyclical time and accelerates us toward a linear trajectory defined by four key forces: love, truth, innovation, and (surprisingly) violence. These forces are deeply ambivalent—each contains both good and destructive potential.

Love and hypocrisy

• Love has made institutions like law more humane, driven developed nations to compete for the prestige of helping troubled nations, freed us from human sacrifice and bloody rituals, and underpins modern political ideals of human rights and equality. Christ’s key message was to renounce violence, turn the other cheek, and love thy neighbor.
  • We naturally side with victims in the way pagan societies sided with the strong. Culturally, we are radically different from pagan society with its worship of power and disregard for the weak.
  • But stubborn human nature refuses to budge. We still need to persecute—the only acceptable way to persecute now is in the name of victims, in the name of stopping persecution. Anyone who looks like a traditional victim (ethnic minorities, lower classes, women, disabled) is completely off limits, but we feel warranted—even compelled—to persecute all types of privilege (white privilege, ableist privilege, class privilege, male privilege).
  • Girard: “Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.” Hypocrisy is dangerous because it leads to what it claims to prevent—the persecution of victims. The tragedies of the Soviet Union were grounded on protection of the victimized proletariat. America’s victimhood ideology risks a similar totalitarianism—“this inquisition in the name of victims is the form that arbitrary, unjustified violence takes place today: the persecution of persecutors.”

Truth and dogma

• Modernity values truth and believes in our ability to obtain it more than almost any other civilization. We are far from the Garden of Eden’s prohibitions against the tree of knowledge, far from the intellectual humility of Job, far from the lesson of Oedipus that knowing more can lead to disaster, far from witch-hunts and superstitions.
  • Girard takes the crowning achievement of truth—science—to be engendered by Christianity. Christianity paved the way for scientific inquiry by expelling myth and clearing the ground. By exposing the deceitfulness of worldly foundations and tearing down prohibitions, rituals, and pagan religions, it created the conditions for reason to bear fruit. Once we stop seeing storms as triggered by the machinations of the witch across the street, we can study meteorological phenomena scientifically.
  • But the same problem occurs with truth as with love. We have fetishized science into an unquestionable religion. By being deified, science becomes unquestionable, which can silence opposing voices and justify terrible political agendas.
    • Malthus in the 18th century reasoned that living standards would return to subsistence because population grows geometrically while food increases arithmetically.
    • In the 1970s, a wave of climate science predicted an inevitable ice age—ludicrous from today’s perspective.
    • The terrors of the Nazis were justified on the latest science of the day: eugenics, which enjoyed enormous prestige in the early 20th century, was grounded on Darwin and evolutionary biology, was responsible for the development of statistics, had a University College London chair, and was supported by Nobel laureates and political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt.
  • When deified, science becomes a blocker to truth and genuine inquiry because it becomes a conversation stopper. Those who disagree with politically charged, questionable science are called “anti-science”—their positions don’t even have to be contended with. The bloody European conquest of the Americas was legitimized through appeal to Catholicism; today we legitimize questionable political pursuits with a sprinkle of reason and a little dab of science.

Innovation and imitation

• Christianity engenders innovation by tearing down myths, freeing us from exaggerated idolization of the past, and empowering us to imagine the future. The reactionary idea that our best days are behind us (common among Confucians and many Christians throughout history) leads to the practical orientation of blindly imitating the past. Under such a worldview, “innovation” had negative connotations in the West up until the 18th century—it was synonymous with heresy.
  • Christianity frees us from blind worship of a mythologized past by revealing what we once thought of as immutable as arbitrary, enabling experimentation and innovation.
  • Jonathan observes a negative correlation between mythologizing the past and innovation. Silicon Valley types often know little about the history of their own industry, while people in older industries (oil, finance) know their industry’s history cold. The difference between tech and oil is the same as the difference between modernity and pagan society—we are less idolatrous of the past and more future-oriented due to Christianity.
  • But we have now fetishized innovation. We conform to contrarianism, rallying obediently under the banner of originality. Girard: “The modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs… Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything… This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis.”
  • The problem: imitation and meaningful innovation are often inseparable. You need to imitate and gain mastery first before you can make real innovations. Goethe was a master of reproducing great poetic forms before pioneering his own. Germany in the 19th century was thought capable of only imitating the English—at the precise moment it surpassed them. Americans were seen as mediocre gadget makers who weren’t theoretical enough for world leadership. Japanese after WWII were seen as pathetic imitators of western superiority. Korea and China followed the same pattern. “All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance.”
  • By fetishizing contrarianism and rejecting imitation, we paradoxically doom ourselves to never make meaningful innovations.

Violence and apocalypse

• The fourth force Christianity unleashes is violence. This may seem surprising, but it follows naturally from Girard’s understanding of how worldly peace is brought about. If worldly order is founded on a deceitful violent act of catharsis, then the truth and love that Christianity unleashes must threaten this foundation.

  • The scapegoat mechanism is morally ambivalent: it is deceitful and wrong, but it is also remarkably effective. A single innocent person is murdered and the entire community is saved. Sacrifice one for the peace of all. The scapegoat mechanism is a worldly good but ultimate evil, whereas Christ is ultimately good but brings forth worldly destruction.
  • Christ himself says as much: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Christ’s sword is aimed at the scapegoat mechanism at the foundation of worldly order. Christ did not cut down worldly order for its own sake but to free us from violence and lies so we can love each other. Christ took off our training wheels—and we have simply fallen and stumbled.
  • Without the scapegoat mechanism, we no longer have prohibitions to stop metaphysical desires from running rampant, nor sacrificial rituals to bring about catharsis. We have lost both our tools to prevent and resolve violence.

• Why haven’t we gone bust yet? Violent energies have been building up but have been contained and productively channeled by two modern institutions:

  • Capitalism: absorbs and productively directs violence. Girard does not mean literal violence (whipping slaves) but the same competitive energies of glory, pride, desire for conquest that drive capitalism. “It is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style.” Behind the motivational curtains of capitalism, people are really after social goods—recognition, honor, prestige, glory—not altruism or materialistic greed. The same drive that drove Achilles to kill Hector, Germany to invade France, and Caesar to capture Vercingetorix underpins our world economy.
    • This is both a deep critique of capitalism (fundamentally driven by spirited, irrational forces) and a deep praise (what a miracle that people seeking revenge, glory, and domination must compete by making better products and services for others rather than killing millions in zero-sum wars).
    • Jonathan notes that a shocking percentage of successful entrepreneurs were criminals in high school—capitalism redirects the same energy that drove them to crime toward entrepreneurship.
  • Law: keeps peace not through catharsis or divine edict but by threatening with more violence if the injured party seeks private vengeance. Law only works where there is an entity with a monopoly over violence that can overpower disputing parties. Within a single nation, laws are inviolable; between nations (UN laws, Geneva Conventions), without a monopoly over violence, laws are transgressed with little consequence.

• Capitalism is a bubbling stew of violent competitive energies that must be contained by law. The dyke will break where capitalism intersects the weakest points of law—in between nations, in global trade. Global trade is where national pride and competitive energies pile up, yet there is no monopolistic force of violence to arbitrate law between parties.

  • This is why Girard predicted the Sino-American conflict. Trade can transform very quickly into war.

• With nuclear weaponry, we live in an apocalyptic moment where the entire world can go up in flames in minutes. What is unique about the nuke is not its singular destructive force (the firebombing of Tokyo and Mongol mass murders are comparable) but that it forces rivals to utterly destroy each other at the first glimpse of provocation. There are no frictions to unleashing your entire nuclear arsenal. Nations no longer fight wars like a boxing match but like a duel—instant and fatal escalation. It’s worse than a duel because it allows the dead party to shoot back even after being destroyed (nuclear submarines can avenge post-mortem). This is mutually assured destruction.

• On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo was located and targeted by an American carrier group dropping depth charges. The crew had lost contact with Moscow for days and believed World War III had begun. Two of three senior officers voted to launch; only one officer’s stubborn refusal prevented a likely nuclear attack and armageddon. “The will of one man was all that stood in the way.”

How to live in the end times

• Girard’s answer is brief and unsatisfying: withdraw. Leave the world behind, tend to your own garden. There is nothing you can do to stop apocalypse; you will only muddy your moral character by getting involved. Withdraw so you can nurture your soul. The kingdom of God will not be established on earth, but perhaps we can preserve ourselves to be worthy of it in heaven.
  • Girard passed away peacefully at his home in Stanford, California, on November 4, 2015, at age 91, leaving us in “deafening silence, stranded in an apocalyptic moment with nothing but the advice to withdraw.”

Why you should (and shouldn’t) engage with Girard

• If Girard is right, he is worth engaging because he is one of the few who takes apocalypse literally and seriously—a Virgil for the end times. His final work began: “This is an apocalyptic book. It will become more understandable with time because unquestionably we are accelerating swiftly towards the destruction of the world.” His prediction of worsening Sino-American relations has already been made more understandable with time.

• But Jonathan, as an “honest merchant of ideas,” must also warn of the side effects of engaging Girard:

  • Alienation: Girard will show your most intimate, long-held desires—your career aspirations since childhood, the type of person you wanted to marry, the political cause you dedicated your life to—as external and alien. Your core desires will be thoroughly alienated. You will also have trouble fully participating in any political or collective activity, always aware of the deceitfulness of mimesis and the madness of crowds.
  • Inaction: Girard is the most ambivalent writer Jonathan has ever encountered. Should we oppose scapegoating? It’s a huge lie killing innocents—but it was the only way pagan societies brought peace. Should we fight caste systems? They are arbitrary oppression grounded on lies—but removing them opens communities to wars of all against all. Should we participate in capitalism? It’s a competitive cesspool of violent energies—but it has brought about the most prosperous and peaceful society known to date. If you are looking for clear-cut answers, go to Marx or Hegel instead. Girard’s extreme ambivalence and deep pessimism tend to incapacitate those who digest them too thoroughly.
  • Hopelessness: Apocalypse is imminent. There is nothing you can do about it. If you wish to remain hopeful after understanding Girard, that hope will have to come from you—Girard has nothing left to offer.

• For those stubborn or morbidly curious enough to continue, Jonathan echoes Dante’s inscription on the gates of hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”