In one sentence
Girard’s grand theory is too sweeping to function as a reliable explanation of all culture, but its central insight—that people learn desires from one another, turning models into rivals and crises into collective persecution—can reveal recurring patterns of political and social violence. Kriss argues that Girard should be taken seriously without being domesticated into either a business manual or respectable mainstream philosophy.
Overview
The essay begins with the apparent resemblance between Aztec sacrifice and Christian ritual, using it to introduce Girard’s search for a universal explanation of sacrifice. Girard’s mimetic theory says that human beings do not autonomously know what to want; they copy the desires of others. Shared desire produces rivalry, rivalry escalates toward generalized violence, and communities restore order by blaming and killing a scapegoat. The victim then becomes both criminal and sacred founder, while sacrifice institutionalizes the mechanism.
Girard applies this pattern to myth, literature, politics, and the Bible. He reads works such as Oedipus, Shakespeare, and the Gospels as records of collective violence. Christianity is distinctive because it exposes the victim’s innocence and thereby undermines the persecutors’ perspective—the cultural shift Girard associates with modern concern for victims and the mitigation of violence.
Kriss then examines Girard’s contemporary afterlife. Peter Thiel transformed mimetic theory into a source of business and technological insight, especially around monopoly and social media. The online right uses Girard to interpret progressive politics as a sacrificial cult and to recast conservatives as persecuted victims. Kriss sees this as an ironic repetition of Girard’s own warning: victim-centered morality can become another mechanism for persecution.
The conclusion defends Girard’s eccentricity. His theories are not presented as empirically secure or universally sufficient, but their extreme focus can expose real dynamics that narrower explanations miss.
Core ideas
Desire is learned, not autonomous
Girard rejects the “Romantic” picture of the self as an independent source of desire. Once basic needs are met, people look to others for models of what is worth wanting. The desired object matters partly because someone else’s desire confers value on it.
Mimesis turns models into rivals
Imitation is initially productive: it teaches people how to desire. But when several people imitate the same model, they converge on the same object and begin competing. The model becomes a rival, and rivalry spreads through imitation of both desire and hostility.
Scapegoating restores order
When conflict becomes generalized, a community can redirect its violence toward one person or group—often a foreigner, outsider, impaired person, or otherwise vulnerable target. The unanimous attack temporarily ends internal conflict, making the victim appear responsible for the crisis and strangely sacred for resolving it.
Sacrifice is institutionalized collective violence
Ritual sacrifice preserves the stabilizing effect of the original mob murder while controlling its recurrence. Myths conceal the victim’s innocence and justify the killing; rituals repeat the event in regulated form. Kriss presents this as Girard’s proposed explanation for recurring sacrificial structures across cultures.
Christianity reverses the persecutor’s viewpoint
Girard reads the Gospels as resembling traditional sacrificial myths while making a crucial change: Jesus is declared innocent and the crowd guilty. Christianity therefore reveals the mechanism rather than simply legitimating it, encouraging identification with victims and weakening the old mythic justification of persecution.
Modern victim politics can reproduce persecution
Girard’s later thought warns that concern for victims does not automatically end scapegoating. People may accuse others of being persecutors and thereby justify new exclusions. Kriss connects this warning to contemporary political conflicts in which competing groups define themselves as the truly persecuted.
Thiel turns a warning into an instrument
Peter Thiel’s interest in Girard illustrates a tension in the theory’s reception. Girard treated mimetic desire as a dangerous force to contain; Thiel recognized that competition, imitation, and network effects could be exploited for wealth and power. Social media intensifies precisely the contagious desires Girard feared.
The online right uses Girard as a politics of victimhood
Kriss argues that Girard gives reactionaries a sophisticated vocabulary for interpreting cultural conflict. Instead of describing themselves as merely resentful, they can portray themselves as targets of an objective sacrificial process. This converts subjective grievance into an apparently universal theory of social reality.
Practical takeaways
- When a conflict seems to involve radically different opponents, look for imitation beneath the surface: similar rhetoric, gestures, ambitions, or moral postures may be generating the hostility.
- Ask who benefits when a complicated crisis is explained through one guilty person or group. Scapegoating often simplifies systemic breakdown while creating temporary solidarity.
- Be suspicious of movements that define themselves primarily through persecution. Victimhood can be morally real, politically useful, rhetorically exaggerated, or transformed into permission to persecute others.
- Separate the usefulness of a model from its claim to explain everything. Girard may illuminate a particular escalation without proving that all religion, politics, or culture originates in sacrifice.
- In online environments, notice how platforms turn imitation into infrastructure: people copy tastes, opinions, enemies, and emotional styles at enormous speed.
- When reading political criticism, compare what a movement says it opposes with what it imitates. Girard’s strongest insight is that enemies often become mirrors.
Caveats and counterpoints
- Kriss presents Girard’s theory as powerful but “slightly mad”: its universal claims about religion, prehistory, and culture are sweeping and not established here through systematic evidence.
- The essay is a review and intellectual portrait, not a neutral scholarly assessment of Girardian anthropology. Kriss’s descriptions of the online right and contemporary politics are interpretive and polemical.
- The account risks reducing distinct historical practices—such as Aztec, Christian, Greek, Jewish, and Chinese sacrifice—to one recurring mechanism, potentially flattening important differences in theology, institutions, and social context.
- Girard’s claim that Christianity progressively weakened sacrificial violence is morally and historically complicated; the essay itself notes that Christian societies also produced crusades, witch-hunts, inquisitions, and pogroms.
- The scapegoat framework can become self-sealing: almost any accusation, protest, or punishment may be redescribed as persecution, making it difficult to distinguish justified accountability from mob violence.
- Kriss’s claim that the particular “Girardian moment” had passed reflects the essay’s 2023 political judgment and should not be treated as a timeless conclusion.
Questions worth revisiting
- When does collective blame identify a genuine wrongdoer, and when does it function as scapegoating?
- Can a society respond to real wrongdoing without creating a persecutory mob dynamic?
- Does identifying with victims necessarily weaken violence, or can victim-centered politics become another source of rivalry?
- Which parts of Girard’s theory could be tested empirically—for example, the spread of desire, imitation of enemies, or crisis-driven blame?
- Is social media merely amplifying mimetic rivalry, or does it create qualitatively new forms of desire and collective violence?
- What would a political movement look like if it consciously refused to define itself through enemies and victimhood?
Return to this when…
Return to these notes when a political conflict feels unusually contagious, when rival groups appear to mirror one another, or when a public crisis is being condensed into blame directed at a single person or minority. Also revisit them when evaluating claims that a movement is uniquely persecuted, or when considering how online platforms convert imitation and outrage into power.