{"id":34149,"date":"2025-07-12T04:37:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T04:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=34149"},"modified":"2025-07-12T04:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T04:37:11","slug":"what-i-could-have-learnt-from-rene-girard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=34149","title":{"rendered":"What I could have learnt from Ren\u00e9 Girard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> \n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description o3-type-body-base\">Your guide to what Trump\u2019s second term means for Washington, business and the world<\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=66f718fa-bc61-4d56-80ab-480c6d3ea661&amp;newsletter-id=65b8fec772badb00166eafc6\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>In the seaside town where my parents had a weekend place, having a shiny car was risky. Wild turkeys lived in the marsh. If they wandered into your driveway, one might see its own image in your door panel and pick a fight with it. This left your car with beak marks and could wound the turkey too.<\/p>\n<p>Ren\u00e9 Girard might have found metaphorical use for this. The French theorist\u2019s great idea was that religion and culture grow out of what he called mimetic rivalry. Human beings, uniquely, choose the objects of their desire largely on the basis of what other people desire. \u201cThere is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation,\u201d he writes. But while mimesis helps us learn, it also leads to escalating competition, and ultimately violence. Religion evolved as a means for containing rivalry by projecting communal violence on to an arbitrarily chosen sacrificial victim, the scapegoat.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I like Girard\u2019s theory because I tried and failed to come up with it myself. Some decades ago, I wrote a notably bad PhD dissertation arguing that the English-speaking enlightenment philosophers were mistaken in thinking that rational action starts with pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. That\u2019s too individualistic; we learn what to want by watching others. I was a proto-Girardian without having heard of him (Anglo-American philosophy departments discourage the reading of French social scientists). I got my degree, but I was no philosopher and switched to finance.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"n-content-pullquote o3-editorial-typography-pullquote n-content-pullquote--no-image\" aria-hidden=\"true\">\n<p>Choose your enemies carefully; you will resemble them before very long<\/p>\n<footer class=\"o3-editorial-typography-pullquote__author\"\/><\/blockquote>\n<p>I first heard of Girard a few years ago on an economics <a href=\"https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2018\/03\/contributions-rene-girard.html\" data-trackable=\"link\">blog<\/a>. Reading him, I felt a rush of satisfaction that someone had made it down the road on which I got lost. And I think about Girard often now because in the US we live, more and more, in the political world that he described: a stark rivalry in which each side envies, then attempts to appropriate, the other\u2019s sources of value and identity.<\/p>\n<p>This has been going on for a long time. What is the \u201crevolutionary\u201d anti-government conservatism that began in the 1980s, if not a hijacking of the anti-government politics of the 1960s and \u201970s? Anti-woke campaigners respond to left-wing censorship by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/03\/28\/us\/politics\/naval-academy-diversity-affirmative-action.html#:~:text=Naval%20Academy%3A%20The%20school%20said,and%20remove%20them%20from%20circulation.\" data-trackable=\"link\">removing \u201coffensive\u201d books from libraries<\/a>. The left comes after Trump through the institutions of justice; Trump does the same in return. My gentle liberal friends buy guns and canned foods like the rightwing preppers they once mocked. Most tellingly \u2014 as Girard observed at the end of his life \u2014 the status of victim or scapegoat becomes itself the object of mimetic rivalry. \u201cThere is never anything on one side of a rivalry which, sooner or later, will not be found on the other,\u201d Girard writes. Read him and you start seeing this stuff everywhere. Choose your enemies carefully; you will resemble them before very long.<\/p>\n<p>The point is not that the two sides of the American political divide are interchangeable; the distinctions between them are morally important. The point instead is the inevitability of irrational escalation. People caught in mimetic rivalry can only see literal or rhetorical violence as originating with the opposite side. \u201cViolence is always perceived as being a legitimate reprisal,\u201d Girard writes. \u201cNo one ever feels responsible for triggering it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Girard is having a moment. There is a new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=L-vB1HaBsog\" data-trackable=\"link\">documentary<\/a> about his work. In the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/d3328872-a826-4dcf-ba51-3f8ddcf9e8ff\" data-trackable=\"link\">FT, Orlando Reade<\/a> has described how the theory has special appeal to intellectuals on the right. Trumpers cast themselves as scapegoats, and see the Christian exceptionalism and occasionally apocalyptic tone of Girard\u2019s theory as justifications for anti-government nihilism. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=esk7W9Jowtc\" data-trackable=\"link\">Peter Thiel<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/thelampmagazine.com\/blog\/how-i-joined-the-resistance\" data-trackable=\"link\">JD Vance<\/a> are both fans.<\/p>\n<p>As always happens when an intellectual becomes popular, distortions have followed. The main problem, though, is not misinterpretation. It\u2019s omission. What is often left out of discussions of Girard is the most challenging part of his theory, about how we break the cycle. Here he turns to one of the firmest messages of the gospels: the injunction to love our enemies. Girard knew, as we all know, that renunciation and mercy are almost impossibly hard, and quite alien to human culture. Yet he argues that it is the moments when the mimetic crisis has reached a hysterical crescendo, when \u201cthe vanity and stupidity of violence have never been more obvious\u201d, that it is possible to see our enemies in a new way. Might we not be living in such a moment right now?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Robert Armstrong is the FT\u2019s US financial commentator and writes the Unhedged newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Find out about our latest stories first \u2014<\/em> <em>follow FT Weekend on<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/ft_weekend\/\" data-trackable=\"link\"><em> Instagram<\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/ftweekend.com\" data-trackable=\"link\"><em>Bluesky<\/em><\/a><em> and<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ftweekend\" data-trackable=\"link\"><em> X<\/em><\/a><em>, and <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/ep.ft.com\/newsletters\/subscribe?newsletterIds=56d42625a2b6c30300fd5748\" data-trackable=\"link\"><em>sign up<\/em><\/a><em> to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><script async src=\"\/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/66f718fa-bc61-4d56-80ab-480c6d3ea661\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free Your guide to what Trump\u2019s second term means for Washington,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":34150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}