René Girard
Based on Wikipedia: René Girard
Here is the most unsettling idea you'll encounter this week: you don't actually want what you think you want. Your desires—for that job, that relationship, that possession, that lifestyle—aren't really yours at all. They're borrowed, copied, imitated from someone else. And this simple truth, according to the French thinker René Girard, explains everything from playground squabbles to genocide.
Girard spent his career developing what he called "mimetic theory," from the Greek word mimesis, meaning imitation. The theory begins with a deceptively simple observation about human psychology and spirals outward until it encompasses violence, religion, myth, and the very foundations of human civilization. It's the kind of grand unified theory that academics usually dismiss as overreach—except that Girard kept finding evidence for it everywhere he looked, from Dostoyevsky's novels to Greek tragedy to the Hebrew scriptures.
The Triangle of Desire
Most theories of desire imagine a straight line between a person and the thing they want. You see a beautiful house. You want the house. Simple.
Girard said no. Look closer.
Why do you want that particular house? Probably because someone you admire—consciously or not—has a house like that. Maybe your successful older brother. Maybe characters in films you've watched. Maybe the idealized image of success that permeates your social class. The house isn't desirable in itself; it becomes desirable because a model has marked it as desirable by wanting it themselves.
This creates a triangle: you, the object you desire, and the model whose desire taught you to want it in the first place. Girard called this "triangular" or "mimetic" desire. We copy our desires from others, and most of the time we don't realize we're doing it. We tell ourselves elaborate stories about our authentic preferences and individual tastes, but scratch the surface and you'll usually find a model lurking underneath.
This idea struck Girard while teaching French literature in America during the 1950s. He noticed that the great novelists—Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoyevsky—all understood something that theoretical psychology had missed. Their characters don't pursue objects directly. They pursue objects because someone else pursues them. The novels are full of what Girard called "tricks of desire": the rationalizations, self-deceptions, and elaborate denials that people construct to hide the imitative nature of their wanting from themselves.
When Models Become Rivals
Girard distinguished between two types of mimetic desire, and this distinction makes all the difference.
"External mediation" occurs when your model is distant enough—socially, temporally, or fictionally—that you can't actually compete with them. A young writer who idolizes Hemingway can try to write like Hemingway without any risk of conflict. The model is unreachable. This kind of imitation is relatively harmless and can even be productive.
"Internal mediation" is where things get dangerous. This happens when the model is at your own level—a colleague, a neighbor, a sibling, a friend. Now the person who taught you to want something is also your competitor for that same thing. The model becomes an obstacle. And here's the terrible logic: the more the model resists your attempts to acquire the desired object, the more valuable the object appears, and the more intense your desire becomes.
Think about romantic jealousy. Often what inflames desire is precisely the presence of a rival. The beloved becomes more desirable because someone else wants them. Remove the rival, and sometimes—disturbingly—the desire fades too. Girard saw this dynamic everywhere in literature, and he believed it reflected a deep truth about human nature.
The subject doesn't really want the object. Not ultimately. What the subject wants is to be the model—to possess whatever quality or essence seems to make the model so worthy of imitation. The object is just a medium, a way of trying to capture something that can never actually be captured. This is why Girard called desire "metaphysical": it's really a desire for being, for fullness, for ontological completeness. And it can never be satisfied.
The War of All Against All
If mimetic desire operated only between individuals, it would be troublesome enough. But Girard argued that it's contagious. Mimesis spreads.
Imagine two people fighting over the same thing. A third person sees the intensity of their conflict and concludes that the object must be extraordinarily valuable. Now three people want it. Then four. The conflict escalates. But something strange happens as it escalates: the object gets forgotten. The antagonists are no longer imitating each other's desires; they're imitating each other's hostility. What started as a struggle over something becomes a struggle against someone.
This is how violence spreads through communities. Mimetic rivalry creates a crisis of "undifferentiation"—everyone starts to look the same, because everyone is copying everyone else's aggression. In such moments, societies teeter on the edge of what the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the war of all against all, a state of generalized violence that threatens to tear the community apart.
And here Girard made his boldest leap. He claimed to have discovered how early human communities solved this problem—and why that solution gave rise to religion, sacrifice, and civilization itself.
The Scapegoat Mechanism
Picture a community in crisis, torn apart by mimetic violence. Everyone is everyone else's enemy. The aggression is universal and directionless. Society is dissolving.
Then something happens. By chance—or by the peculiar logic of mob dynamics—the hostility of the group begins to focus on a single individual. Maybe someone who is different in some way: a foreigner, a person with a disability, someone who violates social norms. The accusations pile up. The violence that was scattered everywhere suddenly has a target.
The community kills this person. Or drives them out. And then—miraculously—the violence stops.
A moment ago, everyone was at each other's throats. Now peace reigns. The tension has been discharged. The community is unified again, united by its collective act of violence against the one. From the perspective of the crowd, the victim appears to be the cause of all the trouble—and also the source of this mysterious restoration of peace. The victim becomes sacred.
This is what Girard called the "scapegoat mechanism." He believed it was the foundational event in human culture. The first gods were victims of collective murder, elevated to divine status because their deaths seemed to possess miraculous healing power. The first rituals were attempts to recreate this primal scene through sacrifice—killing a substitute victim to restore social harmony when tensions rose. The first myths were stories told to justify and conceal what actually happened: transforming arbitrary victims into guilty criminals or willing martyrs.
Consider the founding myth of Rome: Romulus kills his brother Remus, and on this act of bloodshed a great civilization is built. The Greek myths are drenched in violence—gods battling titans, heroes slaying monsters. Girard read these not as primitive fantasies but as records, distorted but still legible, of actual events: communities creating order through violence against victims, then mythologizing those victims as monsters who deserved what they got or as gods who gave their lives willingly.
The Bible as Counter-Narrative
If Girard had stopped here, his theory would be dark enough—a vision of human culture founded on murder and maintained through cycles of sacrificial violence. But he went further, in a direction that surprised his secular academic colleagues.
Girard argued that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures systematically expose and subvert the scapegoat mechanism.
Most myths, he observed, are told from the perspective of the persecuting community. The victim is guilty. The violence was justified. Order was restored. But the Bible consistently tells stories from the victim's point of view. Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery—and the text makes clear that Joseph was innocent. Job suffers terribly, and his so-called friends insist he must have done something wrong—but the text vindicates Job. The Psalms are full of innocent sufferers crying out against their persecutors.
And then there's Christ.
In the Passion narrative, Girard found the scapegoat mechanism laid bare. Jesus is accused by an angry mob, condemned by the authorities, abandoned by his followers, and killed. All the classic elements are present: the unanimous violence of all against one, the charges of disrupting social order, the complicity of both Jewish and Roman authorities (representing the entire human community), even the strange alliance of former enemies like Herod and Pilate, united by their common victim.
But the Gospels refuse to say the victim was guilty. They refuse to transform the murder into something noble or necessary. They tell the story from the victim's perspective and declare him innocent—indeed, divine. In doing so, Girard argued, they reveal the scapegoat mechanism for what it is: arbitrary violence against innocent victims, dressed up in the language of justice and sacred necessity.
Once this revelation enters human consciousness, the mechanism can no longer work the same way. We start to suspect ourselves when we find unanimous agreement about someone's guilt. We create institutions to protect the accused. We become haunted by the possibility that our victims might be innocent. The scapegoat mechanism, exposed, begins to lose its power.
A Life Between Two Worlds
René Girard was born on Christmas Day 1923 in Avignon, the ancient city in southern France famous for its papal palace and medieval bridge. His father was a historian, which perhaps explains something about Girard's lifelong fascination with origins—with recovering the hidden events that shaped the present.
He studied medieval history at the École des Chartes in Paris, writing his thesis on private life in fifteenth-century Avignon. But in 1947, at age twenty-three, he crossed the Atlantic on a fellowship to Indiana University—and never really went back. He would spend his entire academic career in the United States, moving through a series of universities: Duke, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, SUNY Buffalo, and finally Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.
There's something fitting about this transatlantic existence. Girard always stood somewhat outside the intellectual currents of his time. In France, structuralism and then poststructuralism dominated the human sciences. Girard was present at the birth of the latter movement—he helped organize the famous 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that introduced Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan to American audiences. But he never really belonged to their camp. While the poststructuralists celebrated difference, fragmentation, and the play of signifiers, Girard kept insisting on universal structures and foundational truths. He was deeply unfashionable in this way.
He was also unfashionable in his religious turn. Girard had been an agnostic, but while researching his first book on the novels of mimetic desire, he experienced a conversion. Reading Dostoyevsky closely, he became convinced that the Russian novelist had grasped something true about human nature and salvation—and that this truth was the truth of Christianity. Girard became a practicing Catholic and remained one until his death.
In the secular academy, this was a liability. Scholars who might otherwise have engaged with his ideas dismissed them as crypto-theology. The religious implications of his later work made many uncomfortable. Yet Girard insisted that his arguments were anthropological, not confessional—that he was making empirical claims about human nature and history, not simply expressing religious beliefs.
The Paradox of Peace
Girard's vision of human existence is not comforting. At its heart lies a paradox: the very thing that enables human society also threatens to destroy it.
Mimetic desire makes culture possible. We learn by imitation. We acquire language, knowledge, and social norms by copying others. Without mimesis, there would be no education, no tradition, no accumulated wisdom. But this same capacity for imitation also generates rivalry, envy, and violence. The same mechanism that unites us also tears us apart.
And the solution that human communities discovered—the scapegoat mechanism—is not really a solution at all. It's a temporary fix that requires new victims. Peace built on the bodies of scapegoats is always fragile, always demanding more sacrifice.
Some scholars have applied Girard's insights to contemporary conflicts. The political scientist Roberto Farneti, for instance, analyzed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a Girardian lens, arguing that the two peoples have become trapped in mimetic rivalry, each imitating the other's hostility until they become what Farneti calls "Siamese twins"—enemies so intertwined that they can no longer see how similar they've become.
This is perhaps the cruelest aspect of mimetic violence: it erases the differences it claims to defend. Communities go to war insisting on their distinctiveness, their unique identity, their special victimhood—but the process of conflict makes them mirror images of each other. The more they fight, the more alike they become.
What Does It Mean to Know This?
If Girard was right about the scapegoat mechanism, what changes? Can we escape the logic of mimetic violence simply by understanding it?
Girard was cautiously hopeful. The revelation contained in the Gospels, he believed, had genuinely transformed human history—not immediately, not completely, but progressively. We live in a world increasingly suspicious of unanimous condemnations, increasingly protective of victims and minorities, increasingly aware that our accusations might be projections of our own violence. This is new. For most of human history, such thoughts were almost unthinkable.
But Girard also saw dangers in this new awareness. When the scapegoat mechanism stops working, communities lose their traditional safety valve. Violence can no longer be discharged onto sacrificial victims and forgotten. It accumulates. And without some other way of achieving reconciliation, it threatens to spiral into apocalyptic destruction.
Girard spent his later years writing about the "escalation to extremes" that he saw in modern warfare and terrorism—mimetic rivalry unbound, with no sacred mechanism left to contain it. He didn't offer easy solutions. The same biblical revelation that exposed the lie of sacrifice also removed its pacifying function. We can't go back to innocent scapegoating. We have to find another way forward.
In 2005, at the age of eighty-one, Girard was elected to the Académie française, one of the forty "immortals" who guard the French language and honor French intellectual achievement. It was a remarkable recognition for a thinker who had spent his career in American universities and had never quite fit into French academic fashion. He died a decade later, in November 2015, at his home in Stanford, California.
The Inheritance
Girard left behind a body of work that continues to generate controversy and inspire research. The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, founded in 1990, holds annual conferences exploring mimetic theory across disciplines from theology to economics to psychology. The John Templeton Foundation has funded research projects applying his ideas. His books remain in print and continue to find new readers.
Yet his thought also has influential critics. Some anthropologists argue that his theory of the scapegoat mechanism is unprovable—a just-so story about prehistoric events that left no direct evidence. Some biblical scholars dispute his readings of scripture. Some philosophers find his claims about desire too sweeping, too reductive of human complexity.
Perhaps the strongest objection is simply that mimetic theory explains too much. Once you start seeing triangular desire everywhere, you might be guilty of the interpretive overreach that finds patterns whether they're there or not. Every theory that claims to explain human nature in its entirety should be treated with suspicion—including, perhaps especially, one that teaches us to be suspicious of unanimous agreement.
And yet. There is something that rings true in Girard's analysis of desire. We do borrow our wants from others. We do construct elaborate rationalizations to hide this from ourselves. We do intensify our desires when we encounter resistance. We do seek scapegoats when tensions rise. We do tell ourselves stories that justify our violence and obscure our complicity.
Whether or not Girard's theory is true in all its details, it offers a powerful set of questions to ask of ourselves and our communities. Whose desires am I imitating? What rivalries am I escalating? Who am I blaming? What violence am I participating in while telling myself I'm innocent?
These are uncomfortable questions. Girard would say that's exactly why we need to ask them.