René Girard and Internet Influencers

Roger Berkowitz

René Girard was one of the great social theorists of the 20th century. His book Violence and the Sacred is a classic account of the problem of violence in society, the way that so many of our religious and legal rituals are designed to quell the human urge for violence and reassert peace. The rituals of sacrifice and the ritual of legal punishment allows a community to exercise its desire for violence legally and with priestly sanction on one person or one sacrificial animal–a scapegoat. The scapegoat can’t be innocent, we must believe our violence against the scapegoat must be justified, even sacred. Legal punishment is, for Girard, the modern version of ancient religious sacrifice that allows society to reassert a belief in the sacred as it satisfies its violent urges against one scapegoat through a trial and punishment. The socially accepted violence against a scapegoat is a “mechanism” in Girard’s theory for unloading pent-up communal violence on one person. Cynthia L. Haven looked back at Girard recently to help understand the culture of internet influencers. She writes: 

Girard  foresaw the perils of combining human nature with a globally connected world. 

“When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match,” predicted French theorist René Girard. 

He wrote: 

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. World’s fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride.

The longtime Stanford professor of French language, literature, and civilization explored envy, imitation, crowd behavior, and reciprocal violence, starting in the 1950s. He first developed his insights not by poring through datasets or running a social science lab, but surprisingly, from a deep study of great novels. 
Novels tell us the truth, he said. One of the aspects many people find so compelling about his work is that he could extrapolate theories of real-life behavior from made-up stories—from Cervantes, Proust, Dostoevsky, Flaubert. The competitive salons and social climbing of Proust’s world led Girard to theorize about the origins of human rivalry. The self-destructiveness of Dostoevsky’s characters sparked Girard’s ideas about the desire to escape our limits and even become someone else. 

Now, nine years after his death, people in the fields of anthropology, business, history, literature, popular culture, psychology, religion, and even the hard sciences, are taking greater interest in his ideas about the forces that drive much of human behavior. Silicon Valley, in particular, is fascinated by his thinking. But it all began with literature.

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire describes our fundamental compulsion to want what others want or have. “We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires,” he said at a Stanford lecture in 2007. “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths—but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.” 

As an example, Girard observed that the most mimetic institution of all is a capitalistic one—the stock market. He said in an interview: 

You desire stock not because it is objectively desirable. You know nothing about it, but you desire stuff exclusively because other people desire it. And if other people desire it, its value goes up and up and up. Therefore, in a way, mimetic desire is an absolute monarch. . . 
Inevitably, there will be a collapse, which is also lacking in objectivity. Just as a fashionable woman in Balzac, when she’s abandoned by a lover, may be abandoned by all potential lovers at the same time. It’s a total disaster for her. She becomes like a stock that has lost its value.

Girard did not live to see the rise of a profession that epitomizes his theory—that is, the social media “influencer,” whose sole purpose is to provoke mimetic desire in others.

But that desire is just part one of his theory. Part two is what our imitative cravings inspire: covetousness and competition as we come to desire what others cannot or will not share. This creates conflict. Even as we insist that we are ineradicably different, we become more alike as we fight—using the same weapons, trading the same insults, inflicting the same injuries against the demonized “other.”