Mimetic Rivalry is the Root of Evil

The human ego doesn’t know what it wants, and it lacks essential being. So it’s not satisfied. But because it doesn’t know what desire will satisfy it, it finds someone who it projects on as being very successful, or popular, or someone who is very intelligent or talented, or whatever it is that one projects that makes the other feel like “they’ve got it and I want it. I covet it.” Then there becomes what Girard calls a “mimetic rivalry.”

You all remember the term, “mimesis”? We’ve studied that before. It means “imitation”. So one will imitate the other, either in their qualities, or talents or their possessions. One will buy clothes like they have. One will wear the same styles. One will try to steal from them and claim whatever it is that they have that you think is the source of what you think is their happiness. And so this leads to a kind of rivalry because now the one who has taken those qualities for their own, now, because of a state of envy—and the ego is always in a state of envy of certain others upon which it projects that positivity—that envy will cause them then to both look up to them, but then also want to defeat them in rivalry and make the other envious of them by stealing whatever it is that the other has used or expressed or developed in order to make them feel like they are at peace with themselves. And therefore, one then wants to scapegoat that other in order to win the rivalry and eliminate the rival, and then to idolize those qualities as they now appear in one’s own version of them. And this mimetic rivalry, he says, is the cause of all conflict.

Now, Lacan agrees that all desire is the desire of the other, which is basically what Girard says. But Lacan says it starts with a non-mimetic relationship of the child to the mother. The child doesn’t love the mother because the father loves the mother, and therefore the mother is desirable. No. She’s desirable because she is the giver of life, and of the attention and love that are needed in childhood.

But later on, there is a mimetic rivalry, especially from the Freudian perspective. The son’s rivalry with the father for the love of the mother. And that love triangle becomes equivalent to what Girard has called this mimetic rivalry. So they’re not that far apart. But Girard then says this goes far beyond the family system and is responsible for the whole structure of society at large. And because of that structure, there are scapegoats. And those scapegoats in earlier societies which have been called “primitive”, result in a crisis, a mimetic crisis, because there is a contagion in which everyone becomes rivalrous for a particular person who has something that the others don’t have, or they all want something that’s in short supply. And the rivalry becomes so intense that the society is about to fall apart or be in total chaos and conflict with one another. And they have to find a scapegoat to sacrifice. And that sacrificial victim then, after they’re dead, there’s peace again for a time in the society or the tribe. And then that peace is then also projected onto the one who was sacrificed, who then is remembered as the founding father or mother or being who can then be idolized because they’re dead.

We see that in the modern world. There are people who become too famous for the ruling elite, and they’re assassinated. And afterwards they have holidays named after them. So I think that’s a pretty common kind of phenomenon. And that’s how you get rid of dangerous opponents of, let’s say, a false paradigm that has become tyrannical.

We see a situation where in the modern age, this tyrannical control has gotten out of control. There used to be checks and balances on the ability of a ruling elite or a government to enforce a certain belief system. But the freedom of thought, the freedom of speech has been lost. It’s been eroded. And we have now even more such scapegoated victims who are giving information that will be called misinformation, etc.

And the mimetic desire is, of course, made use of by the advertising field. Cliché—you’ll see ads for tennis shoes that are worn by a basketball star, and those who want to be a basketball star will buy those tennis shoes. It won’t make them a star. They still won’t shoot better than they did before and get more baskets. But they believe that wearing those shoes, because that star has sponsored it and claims that this is an important piece of equipment for them, makes it desirable. And companies do this kind of thing in order to make money.

It can also be used for more nefarious purposes, because mimetic desire can cause the population as a whole to want something that actually isn’t good for them, but is claimed to be by celebrities in different fields, who, for example, in recent times, you may remember, recommended certain medical interventions as being “safe and effective”. And therefore, it became mimetically desired by masses of people who discovered to their chagrin that it wasn’t the case. And this is the kind of thing that we see operating more and more. And because of the structure of mimetic desire, people can easily be trapped into doing things that are not in their best interests, because they believe that another desires it, and that other would be smart enough to know if they could trust the science or trust whatever it was that they were basing this desirability on. But, of course, most people can be very easily fooled because they are not scientifically trained, nor have they developed critical thinking or the ability to overcome that structure of mimetic desire.

OK? So Girard says that that is the essential problem and cause of resistance within the ego. And the ego today doesn’t see too many people desiring liberation from the ego. It doesn’t see too many people in rapture. There’s a few on the wall. Most of them are dead, you know. There’s very few that we could find that would be examples that would be acceptable to produce a desire to emulate. OK?

Now, Girard, who discovered this by reading novels, he was a literary analyst to begin with. And he discovered the mimetic triangle in Shakespeare. He discovered it in Dostoevsky and Proust and many, many different works of literature. And he realized that this was, in a sense, what literature was trying to teach. And when he read Dostoevsky in particular, he said it struck him that the change in this mimetic scapegoating came with the New Testament, with Christ, who was scapegoated and crucified in the same way for the same reasons. But the New Testament was written from the perspective of the scapegoat, not from the perspective of those who killed him. And because of that, it became revealed that the scapegoat was innocent. And from then on, they couldn’t get away with that kind of sacrificial social order that would keep the peace by scapegoating occasional sacrificial victims in a ritual manner. And that led, actually, to the unfortunate consequence that instead of a ritual sacrifice of one person who is often either the weakest and least influential and powerful, or sometimes the most and the most envied, which was the case of Job, for example, in the Old Testament. But it’s also the one who can’t fight back, or who won’t fight back. And so what Jesus represents is the being who refuses to enter into that mimetic contagion and refuses rivalry, and refuses violence, and is willing to die, but will not lose his honor, his true nature, his connection to God. And so is willing to go through a crucifixion because he or she, because many women—probably more women—have been scapegoated and murdered, executed, burned at the stake over our historic time than men, like Marguerite Porete, for example, and all the women called witches, who were not following the order of the social society, but found a deeper wisdom within their pagan traditions, etc. So the willingness to know that you are an eternal being whose body can be killed but your spirit cannot, is willing and able to go through life with dignity and empowerment and divine beauty and wisdom, and the power to speak the truth, regardless of how one is opposed or attempted to be silenced.

And that this is the role model to be emulated, and the only way out of the trap of mimetic desire. And if you read the New Testament, after Jesus is taken by the Romans…

Audio File Mimetic Rivalry is the Root of Evil.mp3