Rene Girard 'invented' "mimetic desire"

I think what the tweet thread author learned about mimetic desire is not quite the same thing as I think Girard describes:

> "Your desire, the desire I’m imitating, could have been insignificant at first, maybe it didn’t even have much intensity. But when I go for the same object as you, the intensity of your desire increases. You thus become my imitator, just as I am yours. What’s essential is this feedback process that makes it so that any two desires can become a sort of infernal machine. " - Rene Girard, When These Things Begin (2005).

> “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” - Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory

Girard's scapegoat mechanism is quite interesting.. it works like this:

1. one day, there is widespread chaos in society - e.g. the black plague

2. people identify a scapegoat

This directs the -- otherwise highly entropic and contingently-distributed -- totality of individual agency unto a single focal point - the scapegoat who is to blame for inviting or causing this calamity, the scapegoat who victimizes society

e.g. the Spanish inquisition, House Un-American Activities Committee, etc.

3. vitriol bubbles over into violence, the scapegoat is murdered by a mob in some fashion

e.g. the assassination of Martin Luther King

4. some go "maybe we went too far", the victim is elevated into some kind of posthumous saintly angelic figure who was themselves the victim of society's ills

e.g. also Martin Luther King.. apparently he was intensely disliked shortly before his assassination "in 1966 -- the last Gallup measure of King using this scalometer procedure -- it was 32% positive and 63% negative." In 1999 he was the 2nd most admired American[0] [1]

Interestingly, it seems like the majority of people thought King's approach was hurting the cause for racial equality:

"Less than a year after the march, Americans were even more convinced that mass demonstrations harmed the cause, with 74% saying they felt these actions were detrimental to achieving racial equality and just 16% saying they were helping it." [2] Racial equality, I assume by the framing of the question, being an outcome that the majority of Americans did want.

5. If the problem just 'fixes itself' (which is not so unusual - easy come, easy go) as time passes.. it's like society-scale operant conditioning on the logical implication operator p → q: (violence against scapegoat) → (society improves). p is false, q is true, so p → q.. what does this mean? This violent cycle continues over and over again.. the mob believing in the illusion that persecution healed the world.

The scapegoat mechanism is a trope that is pretty unscientific. It's not falsifiable, as far as I can tell. But I swear to God I see some kind of version of this loop almost every single day..

And, yeah, notably, Peter Thiel is an avowed Girardian

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/20920/martin-luther-king-jr-rev...

[1] There is definitely a bit of a selection bias in this example bc I'm not talking about the people that remained popular after their death. But whatever.

[2] https://news.gallup.com/vault/246167/protests-seen-harming-c...