What is the Root of All Violence?
Peter Thiel is famous for “competition is for losers” quote and the essence of this saying was inspired by Rene Girard, a 20th Century philosopher — the book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World is a book by Girard Peter helped popularize as well. This book has implications far beyond the start-up world. Despite the criticism of the theory, it has a startling revelation about human nature transcending multiple disciplines to their failures to understand the fundamentals of our nature. We are inherently violent and it is due to our nature.
Our Nature: Mimesis and Violence
If it were to be summed up by one sentence, no other than Aristotle is to the rescue: “man differs from the other animals for his greater aptitude for imitation”
Girard states that all violence stems from our innate desire for imitation: we only desire what the other person desires. From these identical desires, competition emerges to acquire the same things of desire — further escalating the competition — erupting in violence and exposing our true nature in the process. In this article, I describe examples of this mimetic behavior leading potentially to violence. Violence, in other words, is from the mimetic conflict.
Luckily, under the right mechanisms, a culture can be created to prevent violence. This mechanism is sacred victimization.
How to Prevent Violence: Victimization
This may appear as an oxymoron: victims are a product of violence. Girard posited the opposite: to avoid the mimetic crisis from going to competition to outright violence, a victim or “sacrificial lamb” would have to be chosen from among the disputers and be murdered in order to bring the community of competitors together and squash their differences. The victim becomes the scapegoat by getting blamed for the violence and must be violently killed. This system is effective because if competitors forget their differences, they forget their individuality and do not seek revenge if factions are born out the community. In other words, if the one victim symbolizes the mimetic crisis (subconsciously), this scapegoat has no one for his or her behalf to carry out a vengeance. The violence stops. And to solidify this peace, prohibitions and rituals commemorating the killing of the victim while worshiping this now sacred figure, are enacted and help to maintain the peace.
Implications for our Times: Do we Have Victimization to Prevent Violence?
If Rene Girard is right and conflicts derived from mimesis resulting in violence is true, then this has worldly implication and begets the question: are we or do we still use victimization to prevent violence?
Unfortunately — without going into much detail on this topic — the process of victimization no longer occurs in modern societies due to the Judeo-Christian revealing of the violence prevention mechanism of victimization. Empirically, we can conclude that violence has not disappeared and thus the victim scapegoat no longer occurs. However, one could argue that maybe the closest we have come is the murder of Adolf Hitler. His death did usher a Nazi defeat and subsequent implementation of a world order of peace, but wars of a smaller scale inevitably still take place. Violence in various forms like man slaughter have not been eradicated. Violence is omnipresent.
Could this be due to our absence of the victimization process while retaining our innate human mimetic nature?
