The Far-Right is Satan, The Far-Left is Anti-Christ | Girard's Mimetic Theory

• This lecture examines modernity through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory, arguing that Christianity has unleashed four powerful forces into history—love, truth, innovation, and violence—three of which are analyzed here as genuine triumphs of the modern world, though each is deeply ambivalent and prone to perversion.
  • Girard frames modernity as both a radical rupture from and a stubborn continuity with pagan society: the cultural conditions have shifted (we now protect victims, value truth, and reject myth), but human psychology—mimesis, metaphysical desire, resentment, the need for scapegoating—remains unchanged, creating a fundamental tension that explains many of modernity’s characteristic problems, especially hypocrisy.
  • The central metaphor used is a rocket that has launched but not yet reached escape velocity: there is a clear break from the past (victim protection vs. scapegoating, reason vs. dogma), yet the gravitational pull of human nature—our need to persecute, to conform, to deify—still governs us, and our future is binary: either the kingdom of God or violent apocalypse, with no stable middle ground.

The Force of Love

• Christian love (agape) vs. pagan love (eros): Girard contrasts the Christian conception of love with the Greek notion of eros, arguing that Christianity introduced a genuinely new and transformative form of love into human history.

  • Eros is marked by two qualities: it is fundamentally a concern for oneself disguised as concern for the other, and it is limited to select individuals or groups. Modern romantic love often exemplifies this—dating can become transactional, where one chooses a partner not for who they are but for what they do for one’s self-image, much like buying clothes to project status.
  • Christian agape, by contrast, is a concern for the other for the other’s sake, and it is undiscriminating—it extends to all humanity. This love stems from the collapse of social hierarchies and arbitrary distinctions (caste, class, nationality) that Christianity introduced: we are no longer primarily Brahmin or Shudra, German or Italian, but first and foremost human and equal.
  • The love predicated on social difference (a lord’s concern for his serfs, a serf’s loyalty to his lord) is really eros in disguise—limited in scale and rooted in self-conception and pride. Christian equality enables agape.

• The pervasive influence of Christian love on modern institutions: Girard argues that what appear to be secular values and institutions are, at their core, downstream of Christian moral intuitions.

  • The concept of human rights traces back to the biblical idea of Imago Dei—that every person is made in the image of God and therefore has inherent worth. The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” is not self-evident in a pre-Christian framework; it is a Christian inheritance.
  • The modern suspicion of concentrated power—“big Tech,” “big Pharma,” “big philanthropy”—reflects the Christian moral paradigm of protecting the victim and the little guy, so deeply embedded in Western culture that even the most secular and anti-religious people are often its most passionate defenders, not realizing the theological roots of their convictions.
  • Girard identifies the concern for victims operating across domestic institutions (humane law, penal legislation, judicial practice, individual rights—all evolving toward mitigation of punishment and greater victim protection since the High Middle Ages) and foreign affairs (wealthy nations feeling obligated to send aid after global catastrophes, a form of international mutual aid that has no precedent in pre-Christian eras).
  • Even the modern refusal to acknowledge Western superiority—the taboo against claiming civilizational achievement—is itself an achievement of the Christian concern for victims, stemming from fear of tyrannical pride and humiliation of less privileged nations.

• Theatre: love as conformist performance: Girard offers a sober critique, noting that much of what appears to be compassion in modern society is not genuine agape but theatrical performance driven by vanity and mimetic conformity.

  • People volunteer, donate, and post on social media not from grounded belief but because it is fashionable—they want to be seen on the right side of history. The action may differ from pagan conformity (helping victims rather than stoning them), but the form is the same: blind imitation.
  • This is still somewhat laudable, because in any social community authentic individuality is rare compared to the forces of mimesis, and conforming to love is better than conforming to violence. But it reveals that humans have not fundamentally changed—drop the same people in a different cultural environment and they would readily join the persecutors.

• Hypocrisy: the most dangerous perversion of love: Beyond mere theatre, hypocrisy represents a deeper and more pernicious mutation that actively persecutes victims in the name of protecting them.

  • The Christian revelation exposed our evil tendencies toward persecution, creating a culture that sides with victims. But human nature still demands persecution, so the only acceptable reason to persecute is to stop persecution—the wolf must don sheepskin.
  • A personal example illustrates this: a college acquaintance who espoused progressive economic values out of genuine concern for the poor was actually motivated by localized resentment of his wealthier peers. His progressivism was not universal benevolence but a way to paint money-making as immoral and gain the moral high ground against those who made him feel inferior. As Girard puts it, “The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors.”
  • This is not trivial: hypocrisy leads to what it claims to prevent—the persecution of victims. The tragedies of the Soviet Union, grounded on protection of the victimized proletariat, and the potential for similar totalitarianism in modern victimhood ideology, represent what Girard calls “the Inquisition in the name of victims” and “the persecution of persecutors.”
  • The deeper danger is that hypocrisy delegitimizes love itself. Because people naturally feel repelled by hypocrites, if most of those espousing love are hypocrites, love as a cultural value loses prestige and people are pushed toward the opposite pole. Girard draws on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism to show how bourgeois hypocrisy in Weimar Germany—publicly parading humanitarian values while privately pursuing ruthless acquisition—made the Nazis’ open consistency seem refreshing and delegitimized liberal values, paving the way for totalitarianism. The same dynamic threatens today with “woke capital” and progressive hypocrisy.

The Force of Truth

• The triumph of truth in modernity: Girard identifies the proliferation of truth as one of modernity’s great achievements, encompassing scientific mastery, victory over disease and starvation, the dispelling of myths and illusions, and the way reason has gained prestige as the basis for legitimacy in law, politics, and knowledge.

  • Social and political theories gain legitimacy not through divine mandate or hereditary lineage but through appeal to reason. The knowledge economy rewards reason and the pursuit of knowledge more than almost any previous civilization. We are far from the Garden of Eden’s prohibition against the tree of knowledge, far from the intellectual humility of Job, far from the lesson of Oedipus that knowing more can lead to disaster.

• Christianity as the source of truth: Girard’s counter-intuitive argument is that Christianity is responsible for the modern proliferation of truth, both negatively and positively.

  • Negatively, Christianity dispelled myth by exposing the deceitfulness of worldly foundations—scapegoating, deification, arbitrary prohibitions. It desacralized the real, freeing people from magical causalities (e.g., no longer seeing storms as caused by witches, enabling scientific meteorology). Christianity was the original truth-seeking discipline that sought to dispel false religions, and in this sense modernity’s concern for truth is more Judaic than Athenian. Science is the “patricidal son of Christianity”—patricidal because it unjustly scaped Christianity as a whole rather than just its religious form, but a son because it continues Christ’s tradition of accessing truth and dispelling myth.
  • Positively, love is a necessary precondition for truth. Girard argues for a strong causal relationship: “Love is at one and the same time the Divine being and the basis of any real knowledge.” The New Testament contains a genuine epistemology of love.

• The epistemology of love: Girard’s argument that love is necessary for truth rests on the mimetic nature of human cognition—our relationships with other people mediate the truths we access.

  • If I resent someone, I will be nudged away from their positions regardless of their truth; if I unduly fetishize someone, I will adopt their positions regardless of their merit. The college acquaintance’s economic progressivism was distorted by resentment of rich peers; German society’s turn to Nazism was not a pull toward Nazi values but a push away from bourgeois hypocrisy.
  • Christian agape—concern for the other for the other’s sake, with no self in the picture—dissolves the self and removes the distortions of metaphysical desire. When we love indiscriminately, we become freed from mimetic mediation and can pursue truth, whether in genuine desires or objective scientific inquiry.
  • Personal examples illustrate this: the speaker dropped out of college to start a company out of fetishized admiration for entrepreneurs (positive mimesis pulling him from his truth), then renounced the world for philosophy and Buddhism out of resentment toward successful peers (negative mimesis pulling him from his truth). Only after resolving these deformed relationships—making peace with a younger, more successful philosopher-entrepreneur without envy or exaggerated admiration—could he access his authentic desires. Similarly, in heated arguments, reason becomes a lawyer for one’s side; only after letting anger pass and developing affection for the other party can truth and reconciliation be accessed.
  • Society-wide, polarization—the absence of love, seeing enemies in the other—limits not just the exchange of ideas but the very formation of ideas. Certain ideas become off-limits not just to share but even to entertain because they are associated with the hated other side. Even in Nazi Germany, theoretical physics was devalued as “Jewish science,” showing that even the most objective disciplines are susceptible to subjective biases based on who is associated with them.
  • Girard’s famous dictum—“the invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch hunts; the ceasing of witch hunts is the reason science was invented”—must be understood in this light: in a violent world, truth and science cannot bring about love; only in a loving world where we have stopped killing witches can science and reason flourish.

• The Church of Science: truth deified into dogma: Just as love becomes hypocritical, truth in modernity becomes dogmatic through the deification of science and reason.

  • Since the Enlightenment, there has been an intellectual founding murder: religion has been expelled and reason and science have been divinized. People now believe in atheism with the fervor once reserved for religion, making it perhaps “our last mythology.”
  • The deification of science means that even traditional divinities now seek legitimacy by associating with science—a college course on Buddhist meditation was named “contemplative science,” and a church on Fifth Avenue called itself the “Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist.” The gods of yesteryear once snuggled close to the arts; now they snuggle close to science.
  • The problem with deifying science is twofold: first, it designs society for what we want humans to be rather than what they are; second, it makes science unquestionable and allows political agendas to wrap themselves in a veneer of science to become equally unquestionable.

• Science’s susceptibility to narrative and mimesis: Girard argues that science is not as objective as we believe and is deeply susceptible to the same mimetic forces that govern all human activity.

  • The Gibraltar skull example: the first half-man, half-ape skull was discovered in 1848 and passed unnoticed. Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859. Only after biologists had been converted by Darwin’s narrative—not by direct evidence—did they begin looking for and finding humanoid skulls. It took 35 years after Origin of Species for scientists to start really looking, then Dubois went out and found what he was looking for. The direct evidence did not convert biologists; the narrative did. This mirrors Planck’s principle that science progresses not because people change their minds but because old generations die and new ones with different views take their place.
  • Peter Thiel’s observation—“if we look for oppression, we’ll find it everywhere”—applies even to objective facts: facts become distorted by the narratives we hold. We are not truth-seeking creatures but creatures who can believe in myths, lies, and narratives if others around us believe them too.

• Eugenics and other disasters disguised as science: History is littered with examples of scientific hubris where political agendas were dressed up as science.

  • Eugenics was tremendously popular and prestigious in the early 20th century—supported by Nobel laureates like Hermann Müller, political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, and housed in a chair at University College London. It was grounded in the most prestigious science of the day, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, and produced genuine statistical innovations (correlation coefficient, significant tests). The facts that population differences between races exist are real; what people chose to do with those facts was narrative dressed up as science.
  • Eugenics was not defeated by scientific victory but because its narrative lost prestige through association with the Nazis. Much of the same science continued under different names: Britain’s Annals of Eugenics became Annals of Human Genetics, the American Eugenic Society became the Society for the Study of Social Biology, and Eugenics Quarterly was renamed Social Biology.
  • Other examples include Malthus’s prediction that living standards would return to subsistence, the 1970s wave of climate science predicting an inevitable Ice Age (championed by major publications), and a January 1970 Life magazine report predicting that by 1985 air pollution would reduce sunlight by half. In these cases, the science was not faked but was extremely limited and open to narrative interpretations selected for mimesis, prestige, shock value, career advancement, and political agendas.
  • The hypocrisy is that we disguise subjective opinions, public dogmas, and mere narratives with the prestige of objectivity. Just as European conquest of the Americas was legitimized through appeal to Catholicism, modern political pursuits are legitimized with a sprinkle of reason and a dab of science. Those who disagree with politically charged, questionable science are called “anti-science”—a conversation stopper that makes deified science a blocker to truth and genuine inquiry.

• The blind spots of science: systematic rejection of important truths: The deification of science leads to a systematic rejection of whole categories of truth essential to human flourishing.

  • Science confuses its epistemic limitations for an ontological theory: the defining method of science (verification) limits it to the study of objective, external, material phenomena. As science became more successful and prestigious, it applied this criteria to domains like psychology and social theory, categorically rejecting introspection, intuition, subjective experience, and religious revelation as legitimate sources of truth.
  • Behavioralism (John Watson, B.F. Skinner) exemplifies this: it held that human behavior can be fully explained by externally observable phenomena, treating mental states, emotions, and representations as causally irrelevant or non-existent. This crude materialism has captured much of society—the default position in Silicon Valley is “we’re just atoms squirting chemicals”—leading to nihilism and existential despair.
  • Just as the historical Church had a monopoly on what sources counted as legitimate truth (scripture), the Church of Science has its dogmas on what types of truths it considers legitimate. We have given up the types of truths that matter most to humans (from meditation, introspection, philosophical inquiry, subjective experience) in exchange for truths that can be reproduced, falsified, and verified.
  • Girard’s surprising conclusion: just as those who claim to fight for victims are the real persecutors, the staunchest rationalists and scientists are the most religious and dogmatic of all people in modernity. Girard is not anti-science—he considers his own anthropological work to be science in the tradition of Darwin—but he warns that deifying reason and science leads to poor societal design, exposure to disastrous political narratives, and systematic ignorance of truths quintessential to human flourishing.
  • The ultimate fear is that politicizing and deifying science will delegitimize science altogether, just as liberal hypocrisy spawned Nazism. The rampant anti-intellectualism of today may be a response to the hypocritical parading of scientific dogmas, threatening to push people away from science and reason entirely and toward a new Dark Age.

The Force of Innovation

• Christianity as the cultural firmware for innovation: Girard argues that Christianity is responsible for the modern capacity for innovation because it provides the necessary cultural conditions.

  • The main prerequisite for real innovation is “a minimal respect for the past and the mastery of its achievements”—i.e., mimesis. This sentence contains two key ideas.
  • Minimal respect (against reactionary idolization of the past): An exaggerated worship of the past—the idea that our best days are behind us and we should blindly imitate tradition—is not conducive to innovation. In the West up until the 18th century, the word “innovation” had very negative connotations, practically synonymous with heresy, because it implied deviation from a sacred, static ideal provided by myth. Christianity frees us from blind worship of the past by tearing down myths and revealing what we once thought of as immutable to be arbitrary. Silicon Valley exemplifies this future orientation and hubris—people there are freakishly intelligent and know a great deal about the world but surprisingly little about the roots of their own industry, unlike slower-changing industries like oil where people deeply understand their history.
  • Respect (against progressive rejection of the past): Importantly, Girard does not say disrespect. We must have enough reverence or curiosity to see history as worthy of engagement, because this respect allows us to imitate the past and master its achievements. Real innovation always proceeds internally within a system—we never create anything meaningful ex nihilo. Tradition has a degree of wisdom and coherence that we must rely on to build meaningful things; we must stand on the shoulders of giants, just as a plant cannot grow with its roots in the air. The obligation to always rebel may be more destructive of novelty than the obligation never to rebel.

• Innovation as continuous with imitation: Girard’s most interesting claim is that innovation and imitation are not opposites but are deeply intertwined—in a truly innovative process, it is often so continuous with imitation that its presence can be discovered only after the fact.

  • Historical examples: Germany in the 19th century was thought capable only of imitating the English, yet at that precise moment it surpassed them. Americans were seen by Europeans as mediocre gadget makers, yet they took world leadership. The Japanese were seen as pathetic imitators after World War II, yet they became leaders. Korea and China are now following the same pattern. These consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance.
  • Jack Ma and Alibaba were initially dismissed as copycats of eBay and Amazon, but transplanting a business model to a different country with different customs, needs, and regulatory environments necessitated considerable adaptation and innovation. By the 2010s, Alibaba was building entirely new business models, and Silicon Valley careers are now made by observing Chinese tech trends and seeding similar companies in the U.S.
  • Einstein’s general relativity is considered truly original, but he did not create it ex nihilo—it was the product of years of studying, training, and mastering classical physics, which he then improved upon. Study and imitation lead to mastery, which leads to genuine innovation.
  • The speaker’s own project of interpreting Girard exemplifies this: philosophical training involves reconstructing arguments within the canon, not philosophizing from an armchair. But reconstruction is not mere regurgitation—interpretive freedom means restructuring, excluding, highlighting, adding, and giving examples, such that genuine innovation emerges from interpretation.

• Fashion: the perversion of innovation: In modernity, innovation becomes perverted into “fashion”—the fetishization of originality and change that produces the most derivative conformity disguised as rupture.

  • Fashion in the colloquial sense illustrates the logic: clothing fashion derives its value from being original, from not being owned by others. But this distancing is conformist because it is determined by the other (negative mimesis). An example: a friend wore two different-colored shoes so that no one else would wear shoes that way—but this negative fashion is more arbitrary than pure conformity, since traditions like wearing matching shoes usually exist for good reasons. Fashion is also conformist because everyone tries to differentiate in the same way, as illustrated by the business card scene in American Psycho where all the bankers wanted to stand out but ended up with nearly identical cards.
  • Fashion represents a desire for innovation for its own sake and a strong distaste for imitation. It has permeated society more than ever: we want to be individuals and original, but since this is absolutely impossible, there emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. People are obliged to turn their coats inside out and announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few bizarre things.
  • The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis: for two thousand years the arts were imitative, and it is only in the 19th and 20th centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic—and as a result, quality has been traded for originality. Modern art tries so hard to be original that it has become aimless and nihilistic, whereas pre-modern art pursued beauty and accuracy.
  • Fashion also turns people off from innovation itself: the public is growing sour on the technology sector partly because of how much it exaggerates its own originality. The most trivial and derivative companies are painted as radical innovations (“Uber for dogs,” “Facebook for nannies”), and this hypocrisy makes innovation somewhat of a laughing stock and delegitimizes it as a cultural value.

An Ephemeral Triumph

• The ambivalence of modernity: Girard’s analysis captures both the highs and lows of modernity and explains why they are intimately conjoined. The forcefulness of love makes our hypocrisy unpalatable; the importance of truth makes our dogmas frustrating; the heights of innovation make our fashions laughable.
  • Using the rocket analogy: love, truth, and innovation are the divine trajectory Christianity has laid out; hypocrisy, dogma, and fashion are consequences of the gravitational pull of corrupt human nature.
  • Despite the perversions, Girard is a champion of modernity. From the birth of science to the expansion of global aid, he affirms these positive forces wholeheartedly. Like Tocqueville, who did not mince words on democratic shortcomings precisely because he was an ally of democracy, Girard’s criticisms are severe because he desperately wants modernity to succeed.
  • Girard’s achievement is his ability to make sense of and speak across the entire political spectrum: he legitimates progressives’ championing of victim concern, justice, science, truth, and innovation, while warning them against hypocrisy, dogma, and fashion that would delegitimize these very forces. He understands reactionaries’ distaste for progressive hypocrisy—nothing is more disgusting than championing evil under the banner of good—while warning them to separate their dislike of hypocrites from the fundamentally good values the hypocrites promote.
  • Violence lurks behind all three forces: hypocrisy of love engenders and legitimizes violence; truth tears down the rituals and prohibitions that kept violence in check; innovation arms violence with increasingly powerful means. Violence is the fourth and final force, and it will be the central topic of the next lecture, where the triumph of modernity will show itself to be fragile and ephemeral—and the conclusion to Girard’s theory will also be the conclusion to the story of mankind.