In God’s offering up his own son to die as a scapegoat, the dynamic becomes spectacularly evident, and, in a way, backfires. What’s revealed, Girard thinks, are the workings of mimetic desire, and what they make human beings do. And the salvation that revelation promises consists primarily of self-knowledge: if we understand the structure of our desire and what makes that structure so dangerous, we can learn to overcome it. You can see what might appeal to theologians and anthropologists about this theory. It’s much harder to imagine what might have appealed to Stanford undergraduates with a pronounced interest in tech.
The first thing that may have attracted them: mimetic theory was boldly syncretic. Even among the porous disciplinary boundaries that have long defined Stanford, Girard’s thought ranged widely. Thiel calls him one of the “last great generalists who is really interested in everything.” Girard spoke to the energy of boldly jumping across established or traditional boundaries—between fields of study, between historical periods, between disciplines. And he suggested that the university was perhaps no longer the place for such boldness. Little wonder that a group of innovators, who sensed that in order to succeed they’d need to transcend all manner of boundaries that tradition had placed on them, were drawn to Girard’s big story.
Another idea Thiel could have gotten from Girard, but probably didn’t have to, was that people are basically sheep. For Thiel, mimetic theory revealed and explained “how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts”—something he thinks mimetic theory helped him break out of and manipulate at the same time. That people are herdlike may not strike you as a particularly original point. But by drawing this insight from a fairly niche theory rather than from, say, behavioral psychology, Thiel could reframe, as he did in a 2009 interview, what is arguably a cliché as rather “knowledge that is generally suppressed and hidden.” In other words, Girard provided for Thiel a mystical knowledge that was, when stripped of its rarefied vocabulary and references, really not that different from the common sense of his particular milieu.
But there was a political dimension as well to Thiel’s embrace of Girard. By the 1980s, the academy at large had abandoned the big narratives, and in 1987, Stanford, under pressure from activist groups and even from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, decided to get rid of its Western Civilization course sequence. People like Thiel found in Girard a traditional reader of the old European-centered canon—one, moreover, who could give them, perhaps without meaning to, a vocabulary to think through their particular moment on a university campus. Girard warned of endless cycles of violence, where persecution could be “pursued in the name of anti-persecution.” Thiel wrote an entire book about the racial politics of Stanford, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (1995), in which he and his coauthor (and later fellow PayPal mafioso), David O. Sacks, lamented what they described as groupthink and a persecution of conservative students.
But Girard’s oeuvre presented the good old canon with a twist—all the established authors are there and still great, but they are great for an entirely new, previously unglimpsed reason. In The Diversity Myth, Thiel argued that multiculturalism, “instead of representing an advance on the Western religious and cultural tradition,” was “its perversion.” Girard reaffirmed the importance of that cultural tradition while at the same time disrupting it.
There is an odd tension in the concept of “disruption,” and you can sense it here: disruption acts as though it thoroughly disrespects whatever existed previously, but in truth it often seeks to simply rearrange whatever exists. It is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical but its effects never really upset the apple cart: Uber claims to have “revolutionized” the experience of hailing a cab, but really that experience has stayed largely the same. What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions, and anyone other than Uber’s making money on the whole enterprise.
Girard is a disrupter of tradition in exactly this mold: whatever thinkers or poets you thought were important before you read Girard, you will still think they are important after. If you thought dead white men were pretty much all you needed to read, you’ll still think so after reading Girard. But he will have taught you entirely new reasons why they’re important. Girard’s philosophy was, in other words, disruptive in precisely the way that Silicon Valley likes: “bombastic redescription of orthodoxy,” as the philosopher Daniel Dennett once put it.
While Girard’s thought managed to be appealingly far-ranging, it was at the same time monomaniacal: rather than abandon himself eclectically to this field or that, this idea or that, he was always in search of a kind of master code, one that unified, according to him, a vast corpus of literary works, religious practices, human mythology, societal phenomena, and historical events. Behind The Epic of Gilgamesh and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, behind advertising and Dostoyevsky, lay—if you knew how to look—the machinations of mimetic desire. Sure, you sort of had to squint to make it work, but mimetic theory provided a kind of elegant reduction of an otherwise baffling range of phenomena.
It is perhaps unsurprising that adolescents and nerds, two groups not known for their love of social cues, might find something to like in an anthropology that pureed the bewildering variety across human society and history into easily digestible Soylent. Once you have figured out that all desire is mimetic, you see examples everywhere. Thiel himself pointed out in an interview that mimetic theory allows you to say, “This is really what’s happening in this moment.” Thanks to mimetic theory, you always know better than
