Brig, Soren and Reidar-
People are social creatures, and their behavior is based on imitation to a much greater degree than generally supposed. How else to explain why a generation decides at once to pierce their tongues, or why stocks rise and fall? How to explain how a child learns language? Even our desires are not our own; we learn them from others.
“We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires,” Rene Girard said during a lecture at Stanford’s Old Union in February. “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths—but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.”
Envy and resentment are the inevitable consequences of this drive toward mimesis. These emotions, in turn, fuel conflict; it occurs whenever two or more “mimetic rivals” want the same thing, which can go to only one. It might be a woman, a presidency or a research grant. Many religious prohibitions are meant to regulate and control such conflict.
“When we describe human relations, we lie,” Girard said. “We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion.”
Brig, Soren and Reidar- Rene Girard has a deep understanding on the origin of malevolent , evil behavior (your mother is evil and malevolent), and the history of society repeatedly using scapegoats and the undescribable horrors when innocent people are sacrificed to appease their delusional fears. Terrible, terrible, terrible events happen.
