.5.Desire
Spend enough time around any university and you’ll come across certain clusters of smart people drawn to the intellectual life of the university without necessarily partaking in it. Their groups don’t involve faculty, or if there are faculty in attendance, they seem confused and faintly embarrassed to be there. There are never any students at their meetings, a fact that the moderator will inevitably lament in a tone that leaves no doubt that it’s the students’ fault. The audience is made up of retired members of the community, people whose affiliation with the university extends to their having a gym card but not a library card, and people who have the general air of donors, even though they’re never actually seen donating anything.
The preoccupations of these circles will vary from university to university, but they’re inevitably things the institution is, according to the circle’s members, too cowardly or small-minded to teach. The very fact that it’s the same aging visiting scholars and retired local dentists chewing over the master’s work week after week is taken as a sign of the iconoclasm of the work done here. There’s a general undertone of pique to the proceedings. The fact that they have to meet here, in the alumni center, in the room behind the chapel, is the most visible symptom of an unconscionable disregard. The type of thinking these sorts of gatherings are drawn to is invariably bold and inevitably bogus. They are drawn to theories of everything that wind up explaining barely anything, that tend to become self-revealing rather than world-changing.
On Stanford’s campus, one of these groups is the Girardians, followers of René Girard, a scholar of religion and literature who passed away in 2015. Girard was an unlikely evangelist for Silicon Valley. He was an academic writer, and not the most lucid one. He didn’t teach courses on subjects budding techies would take a natural interest in, nor did his work touch on technology very much. Moreover, he was most famous in his native France, where he became a member of the Académie Française in 2005, won prestigious prizes, and was a noted public intellectual.
His books, like Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1982), had a broad impact across the academy—in religious as well as literary studies, in departments of anthropology and philosophy. But this impact was concentrated largely on university campuses and in Catholic seminaries. Girard therefore comes to matter to our story for primarily geographic reasons: he became a bit player in the intellectual history of Silicon Valley when he accepted a professorship in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford in 1981. He would stay in Palo Alto for the rest of his life.
The students that Girard, a magnetic lecturer and far-ranging thinker, inspired there were part of the generation that made Silicon Valley into what it is today. Some of them, including and above all Peter Thiel, became extremely successful and used some of their wealth to spread the gospel of Girard. As Thiel has described, when he arrived at Stanford in 1985, “it was one of these ideas that was starting to percolate in the underground that there was this very interesting professor with a different account from the world.” And while Thiel doesn’t regard higher education particularly well, he seems to have only happy memories of Girard. He’s expressed his belief that “when the history of the twentieth century is written circa 2100, he’ll be seen as truly one of the great intellectuals.”
The Thiel Foundation, set up in 2006, has taken an active role in disseminating Girard’s “mimetic theory”—it is one of the foundation’s three central tasks, along with the Thiel Fellowships and an incubator program for small companies. The Imitatio group within the foundation funds book series, periodicals, and conferences. Thanks to the foundation’s money, the Girardians’ reach is far. They are well connected within Stanford’s fabulously wealthy Hoover Institution. More recently, the Imitatio crew provided intellectual cover and manpower for Donald Trump’s transition team—suddenly, people you’d see around Stanford’s campus trying to put together panels to discuss Girard’s work seemed to be taking up offices in Trump Tower. A strange trajectory for any academic theory, let alone one in the humanities.
So what, exactly, did Girard teach? Be prepared to be further mystified, because although what follows is not at all uninteresting, the path from Girard to the Thiel Foundation to Trump Tower is not exactly a straight line. Girard believed he had discovered that all human desire is mimetic—anything you desire is a mirror of another person’s desire for that same thing. Our desires are not ours; they are born from neither our autonomous whims nor any feature of the desired object. Girard calls the stories we tell ourselves about our desires, and how they come from either our objects or ourselves, the “romantic lie.” All our desires come out of a network of copied desires—we like what others like. Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that someone drawn to this theory saw value in Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg first made his pitch.
Since we necessarily desire the same objects as other people, conflicts over those objects are not so much unfortunate accidents as inherent in the nature of desire itself. In any society, mimetic desire thus creates constant competition and conflict. But every society also finds a huge number of ways to continually displace onto new victims the violence generated by mimetic desire. According to Girard, the primary way in which society does this is the scapegoat mechanism: the omnipresent mimetic rivalry gets displaced on a purely innocent object—a sacrificial lamb. Most ritual and culture, according to Girard, consists of mechanisms by which this displacement is accomplished. Only in rare instances is this endless
