[zgao]

I always wondered what special genius people saw in Girard.

The observation that people want what each other want is not new and doesn't require philosophical genius to observe -- "keeping up with the Joneses" is what it's called by normal people.

What about "avoiding competition is good so chase blue oceans?" That's certainly a decent fund thesis, sure. Is it a genius one? Certainly seems like the returns come from the application of the maxim and not the maxim itself.

The real insight would've been to propose a fun way out of this "mimetic hell" for society. Girard's observation is that this usually takes violence against a scapegoat -- certainly not a fun way out.

[angelzen]

The background. Modern world imagines it can p-hack itself straight into Utopia. Girard may be articulating old wisdom, trouble is modern world has lost its connection to old wisdom altogether.

> The real insight would've been to propose a fun way out of this "mimetic hell" for society. Girard's observation is that this usually takes violence against a scapegoat -- certainly not a fun way out.

Not sure people are familiar with the New Testament story arc?

[Lammy]

The novel part isn’t the observation but in thinking up new ways to exploit it.

[rsj_hn]

> The observation that people want what each other want is not new and doesn't require philosophical genius to observe -- "keeping up with the Joneses" is what it's called by normal people.

"keeping up with the Joneses" refers to wanting what your neighbor has. If your neighbor gets a new car, then you also want to get a new car. It's about envy.

Girard is talking about wanting what your neighbor wants, which is profoundly different. E.g. your neighbor's daughter declares she wants to be a Princess, and then suddenly your daughter decides she wants to be a Princess. But your neighbor's daughter is not a princess. It is a contagion of desire - a preference cascade. And Girard claimed that all desire was mimetic in origin.

This challenges the notion that we are autononomous beings who follow our own inner course. But if all desire is mimetic, then who is patient zero and what is the first desire? This is where the theory of original sin comes in, the first desire represented by the serpent in the garden.

And it suggests that if someone can break out of that and want something genuinely novel for himself, then others will start wanting what he wants! This would be the miracle of the second desire.

Then we can ask, how do you break out of that chain of contageous desire? And that's when we get to Girard's Christianity. That is, we can't just decide "I don't want this. I want to be different." There must be a struggle in which we genuinely try to realize our desires. This struggle produces conflict and death, and the community places the death on the scapegoat, at which point the community is no longer struggling against each other, but against the scapegoat. In this way the scapegoat unifies the community, as they all blame him, and they all desire to kill him. This mechanism to extinguish conflict is religion -- it is "the sacred" in pre-Christian religions.

But now the kicker comes that Christianity comes along and declares that the scapegoat is actually innocent. The scapegoat was one man who was blameless. Oops! As this teaching seeps slowly into society, the more we empathize with the victim, the less the scapegoat is able to be effective at unifying the society, and becomes even a point of division!

This makes us more susceptible to mimetic contagion, not less, and on a much bigger scale than before Christianity. Thus empathy for scapegoats creates even mimetic rivalry as to who is the biggest victim - who is most like the scapegoat? Causing endless war and conflict in proportion to how empathetic society becomes. In such a society, the greatest violence originates in the desire to help the underdog, the outcast, and the unfairly put upon.

Thus Christianity does not free us from mimetic hell, but it "desacralizes" the post-Christian society. Girard was one of the first gloomy thinkers to predict that the seeming outbreaks of compassion in the West would lead to tremendous violence with no apparent resolution.

But there is an escape hatch, which is that even though we no longer want to kill the scapegoat, we may now be infected by him -- that is to die ourselves, wanting what he wants. The scapegoat can be the genuine second desire.

There is a lot to explore here. Suffice it to say, this is not just "keeping up with the Joneses"!

Yes, it's a terrible bastardization to try to turn Girard's theories into some list of 10 weird tricks of startup success.

IMO, that is not what motivates Peter Thiel. It would be like looking at Steve Jobs, noticing that Bob Dylan's music was important to him, and then writing blogs about Bob Dylan's secrets for product-market fit.

That's just gross - even if you don't like Bob Dylan. So even if you don't like Girard, the idea of this website is pretty gross.

For Peter Thiel, this is (I suspect) a religious journey, but one that makes him appropriately cautious of the dangers of psuedo-Christian empathy, in which case it would be an important source for his conservatism, but not an important source for his business success.