A series of diverse sects formed around charismatic leaders such as Simon Magus, Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion, and Mani. [...]
A divine spark remained in the human soul that sought to return to a transcendent good god. The remembrance of this divine spark required gnosis: a special type of knowledge of the divine mysteries of the world. This knowledge is reserved only for an elite.
Gnosticism:
The ancient belief system may be the key to understanding modernity. (Lee Trepanier, March 26, 2025, Conservative Encyclopedia)
I've read this book twice, listened to it twice, thought about it endlessly and puzzled over what to say about it. So, first of all, as the forgoing makes obvious, it's an incredibly worthwhile read. Second of all, it's topic--the adoption of Girardianism by venture capitalists, lead by Girard's former student, Peter Thiel--is even more timely now that Thiel-acolyte J. D. Vance has been chosen to run with Donald Trump. But I'm still kind of perplexed by what it is precisely that these folks see nr seek in the theories of Rene Girard.
Mr. Burgis offers a helpful entry point to the thought of this professor/philosopher by trying to make it a practical tool for business and life. It is very nearly a self-help book. He marshals myriad instances from the business world and from his own career in VC to try and illustrate how Girard's two key propositions--the universality of mimetic desire and the persistence of the scapegoat theory--impact every day life. But these two theories seem deeply dubious.
Girard’s fundamental concept is ‘mimetic desire’. Ever since Plato, students of human nature have highlighted the great mimetic capacity of human beings; that is, we are the species most apt at imitation. Indeed, imitation is the basic mechanism of learning (we learn inasmuch as we imitate what our teachers do), and neuroscientists are increasingly reporting that our neural structure promotes imitation very proficiently (for example, ‘mirror neurons’).
However, according to Girard, most thinking devoted to imitation pays little attention to the fact that we also imitate other people’s desires, and depending on how this happens, it may lead to conflicts and rivalries. If people imitate each other’s desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects. Girard usually distinguishes ‘imitation’ from ‘mimesis’. The former is usually understood as the positive aspect of reproducing someone else’s behavior, whereas the latter usually implies the negative aspect of rivalry. It should also be mentioned that because the former usually is understood to refer to mimicry, Girard proposes the latter term to refer to the deeper, instinctive response that humans have to each other.
So say my neighbor is high-school drop-out who went back to community college to learn computer programming, wrote an algorithm that Google bought along with hiring him, and worked his way up to a key role managing the company. Now I see the Ferrari parked in his driveway so I want one too, but I want it because I'm simply imitating what he desires? And I'm not interested in imitating him in any other way, not the education, the inventiveness, nor the hard work. If I saw that car in another driveway, and had no idea who owned it, would I not desire it? If we were really just imitative creatures would I not imitate his behaviors in order to be like him? One of Girard's most peculiar examples of mimetic desire involves the notion that we desire mates only because others desire them. But how many of us marry a friend's ex or want a friend's current partner? Rather few of us, after all, live out the drama of Mike Kekich and Fritz Petersen. Revealingly enough, many of the examples of mimesis that Mr. Burgis provides from industry generally and his own career specifically do indeed involve imitating behaviors, not just wanting similar stuff. Venture capitalists don't necessarily want a male partner, like Peter Thiel, but they do try to build lucrative companies. Mimetic desire appears rather thin gruel.
Part of the problem here is that Girard was propounding an essentially literary theory, rather than a scientific one. He developed his theories on the basis of reading classic texts for a course he was required to teach. This led him wildly astray, nowhere more so than in his misinterpretation of human sacrifice. He came to believe that human societies had nearly universally practiced such sacrifice as a way to cleanse themselves and that they chose victims who were somehow outside the mainstream of the culture. One might think that the example of Isaac, beloved son of Abraham, or of Oedipus, King of Thebes, would be sufficient to trigger some doubts. But nevermind these literary examples, even more problematic is that sacrifice seems to have often been ">viewed as a high honor rather than a punishment for social stigma. Girard's putative insights don't withstand even minimal scrutiny.
Girardianism is hardly the most bizarre belief system of the Right, but the reason for their adoption of it is less apparent than something like eugenic/Darwinian ideas. What's going on here? Personally, I concluded that it is mostly just a form of bragging. People must want to imitate you, right? And if you get yourself sideways with society we're just making you a scapegoat, even though you're completely innocent!
Okay, stop the presses. The great essayist Tara Burton has an explanation of what's going on with these guys:
In this, Thiel appears to be following the playbook of the German-Jewish twentieth-century philosopher Leo Strauss: on whom he has written, and of whose works he has often spoken approvingly. (Earlier this year, after Thiel spoke at a New Criterion event, he was presented with a special gift: a rare edition of one of Strauss’s books). Among Strauss’ most influential ideas was the conviction that the world’s greatest thinkers—from Plato to Hobbes—intentionally obfuscated their ideas through layers of irony and abstraction, to be understood properly only by a knowing, superior few.
The medium is the message, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said. And it is precisely in Thiel’s Straussian ambiguity—the vibes that his speeches and spending alike elicit—that we can better understand his message: one that transcends the easy binary of “Burning Man libertarian” and “Trumpian conservative.” To do so is urgent.
Thiel’s ideology is, increasingly, becoming the ideology of much of Silicon Valley and the New Right alike. It is a conflation of libertarianism, reactionary sentiment, and instinctive anti-wokeism, that characterize Thiel and Silicon Valley fellow-travellers like Elon Musk. It is, at its core, a religious mission, although—despite Thiel’s close partnerships with Christian organizations and his ambiguous statements about his own Christianity, Thiel described himself as “religious but not spiritual” during the talk—it is not a Christian one.
Rather, Thiel, like many others in Silicon Valley, appears to advocate for a kind of Nietzschean techno-vitalism: a faith not in genuine ideals but in their power to shape and subdue a fundamentally stupid and innately violent populace: a populace who know enough only to want whatever it is they think that other people want: the cornerstone of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.
Despite the purported title of Thiel’s talk—“Nihilism is Not Enough”—it is a fundamentally nihilistic vision. On this view, humans fall into two categories. On the one hand, you have the clear-eyed quasi-divine mages of technology, like Francis Bacon (who, Thiel reminds us, “saw that mastery in science was inseparable from the mastery in control of all things.”). Or, say, like Thiel himself. On the other hand you have the fools, the sheeple, the so-called NPCs, or “non-playable characters” who can be controlled by those who know how to control their desire. For Girard, Thiel’s former teacher, mimetic desire was downstream of sin: a perversion of our desire for God, warped by our yearning for what other people want, be it money, sex, fame, or online clout. For Thiel, who was an early investor in Facebook, mimetic desire appears to be a useful strategic tool. Control the memes and you can control the world.
This makes the self-help nature of this book entirely appropriate, if rather insidious. It's basically an attempt to inject the nonsensical Girardian memes into business culture in order to control the narrative. They aren't even necessarily supposed to be coherent as long as you can get the right sorts of folks to buy into them. Thank goodness we don;t have to take them seriously.
