Saturnin, spécialiste du sujet dont on parle
2024-11-10 19:43:27 UTC
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Vance’s attempts to understand the self-destructive behavioural patterns
that he witnessed in such communities have partly been informed by his
study of French Catholic philosopher René Girard (1923-2015), to whose
work Vance was introduced by billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur
Peter Thiel. Vance has credited this exposure to Girard as a major
impetus for his conversion to Catholicism.
Girard is best known for his “mimetic theory”, which is nothing less
than a full-scale attack on the Enlightenment’s core understanding of
human beings as free, autonomous individuals capable of making rational
decisions. For Girard it is mimetic desire, not reason, that drives our
decision making, whereby far from human desire working independently and
being entirely subjective, it is derived from the desires of others and
hence is mainly responsible for the human condition’s capacity to
believe in lies.
This mimesis applies across the whole spectrum of human experience –
whether it be our political opinions or aesthetic tastes.
Oscar Wilde understood it when he once commented how “most people are
other people”. He explained: “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion,
their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Mimetic behaviour acts in the manner of a triangular relationship
between the subject, the object and a third party (the person or group
whose desires are imitated), whereby the subject is pulled towards an
object, via the third party, in the belief that the gaining of the
object will lead to a transformation of the subject. But if the mimetic
desire is frustrated then a sense of deep, existential despair is
experienced by the subject, which is why mimetic behaviour leads to
violence.
According to Girard, pre-Christian societies used the “scapegoat
mechanism” to overcome the violence that is engendered in society by
mimetic desire being thwarted. Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire and
its connection with the “scape goat” mechanism hit home with Vance
because of his experience of social media and how it “captured so well
the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged
inhabitants” as everyone sought someone to blame.
“Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and
digitally punched,” Vance comments. “We were keyboard warriors,
uploading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.
We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t
fight for them at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I
had lost the language of virtue.”
He concludes: “This all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating
and focus on what I could do to improve things.”
In pre-Christian communities beset by violence, an innocent victim would
be identified for sacrifice; the sacrifice of that innocent victim
ultimately leading to a cathartic experience and a restoration of peace.
Through the Christian revelation, however, of the innocence of the
victim, starting with Christ, Christianity brought about an end to the
“scapegoat mechanism”.
The Gospels reveal that the “guilt” borne by Christ was actually the
psychological projection by the crowd. Christianity is, therefore,
argued Girard, the religion to end all religions.
When Christ said: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I
came not to send peace, but a sword,” he did so because he knew that an
ultimate consequence of the ending of the “scapegoat mechanism” would be
increased levels of violence. This was because, despite Christianity’s
ending of the “scapegoat mechanism”, mankind’s stubborn inclination to
persecute would remain.
So though Christ showed that patterns of violence can only be truly
defeated through the exercise of love, Girard points out the intervening
problem of how love often masquerades as hypocrisy. This helps explain
why so many nowadays persecute in the name of the victim, as opposed to
the victim themselves seeking a more justified retribution.
Our desire to persecute remains as strong as ever.
Girard believed that the reason the world has not already collapsed,
despite the undercurrents of continuing extreme violence, is because in
the modern world we have discovered new ways of channelling that
violence: most especially through capitalism and the law.
Capitalism, Girard argued, is a magnet for criminal instinct and a
seething mass of violent energy. Capitalist activity is only rendered
peaceful because of the activity of the law which brings about peace
between disputing parties through negotiation, rather than through
catharsis.
Girard urges us not to be fooled by capitalist claims to altruism and
“corporate responsibility”. He points out that global trade – especially
at the intersection between trade and law – can go very quickly from
being a conduit for peace and well-being to being a catalyst for war. By
the time Girard died in 2015, he had become especially preoccupied by
the prospect of a war, triggered between China and the USA.
Girard believed that the new “church” of science and reason, and held
aloft by modernism, actually threatens to drive us all away from science
and reason into a new dark age.
Mankind’s ability to connect with truth again, Girard reasoned, will
only be possible if it ends its fetishisation of science and learns how
to love. Without love there can be no truth, and it will only be through
the exercise of love that the chain of violence created by mimetic
desire will be broken.
Because of all of this, in Girard’s view, we live in apocalyptic times,
and the only viable option now is to withdraw from the world and develop
our capacity for love.
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