Believing Girard’s claims requires a very specific kind of squinting. His colleague Joshua Landy once pointedly asked just what sort of fact mimetic desire is supposed to be. If Girard’s claim were that literally all desires are mimetic, this would seem to be demonstrably wrong: What about desires that mix the necessary (meaning, features of the object) with the merely pleasing (meaning, features we might project onto them)? Wouldn’t there have to be a first desire that all other desires then mimic? Would this first desire not be nonmimetic? How do we decide the medium from whom we take our desire? Wouldn’t deciding this require autonomy?
If, on the other hand, Girard’s claim were that a lot of desire is mimetic, then we’d have to ask why we need a theory to assert a truism. The idea that there are mimetic desires is so obvious that having a theory about it is like having a theory that some cats are mean. Sure, it’s true, but is it worth a spot in the Académie Française?
What Landy does not say: this strange space, between a pretend universality and a far more modest claim that is so self-evident as to be a cliché, is where a lot of Silicon Valley’s global pronouncements make their home—the pronouncements about what “mankind” has always wanted, what “everyone” needs, and so forth. And in each case, it seems to be plain bad sportsmanship to poke at the claim’s supposed universality; it’s more fun to play along. The kind of faith Girard required of his readers, in other words, was the same kind of faith a lot of tech evangelists have become accustomed to asking of their audience. And why, after all, shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t it just be so much simpler, so much more elegant, if claims such as these were really universally true? If people had always desired X, or all Y was actually Z? Statements of this nature are selling themselves as “user experience” more than as truth claims.
These are the argumentative gambits used in books by Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, in TED Talks and pitch meetings. Statements that claim that we “tend to assume X,” when in fact a brief reflection would tell us that no, we don’t tend to assume anything as stupid as X. Statements that blow up some study’s perfectly plausible finding to a generalization that would give the study’s author a heart attack. Statements that repackage trite wisdom in verbiage meant to suggest that it is utterly counterintuitive.
Girard’s claims are far more interesting than those of Silicon Valley. But the appeal they hold for a certain kind of thinker may well depend on a very similar cognitive operation. After all, the flimsiness of these gambits is part of their appeal: we’re being invited to play along, and if we don’t, we risk coming across as scolds. Wouldn’t it just be so much more pleasing and elegant if this were true, if that claim were plausible, if that conclusion truly were counterintuitive?
Ultimately, then, Girard’s success may tell us something about how faith functions in Silicon Valley. Of course, it’s not fair to compare religious faith to the glib stock the very smart people in the Valley seem to put in very dumb ideas. But more than most industries, tech companies seem to run on tropes and rituals that remind you of a tent revival: the mantra-like phrases, the messianic gurus, the cult of genius that barely manages to cover up its religious dimensions.
It is quite possible that Girard never intended his philosophy to be understood as a philosophical anthropology—that is to say, a picture of what human beings are like. Instead, he may have intended it as theology: a picture of the world in codependence with God. It certainly makes more sense as the latter, and it’s surely not an accident that some of Girard’s most sensitive readers have been priests.
But where Silicon Valley is concerned, that may well be a feature rather than a bug. Is it possible that the story here is not that a bunch of techies misunderstand what philosophy is, but instead that they intuit something that was not, in fact, offered as philosophy? That Thiel recognizes in Girard’s claim precisely the kind of catechism of faith that Silicon Valley has built so much of its success on? That it allows tech CEOs to give substance to their sacerdotal allures?
In a 2009 interview with Daniel Lance from Thiel’s own institute, Thiel was asked what lessons he drew from Girard in running his businesses. His answer is revealing. He credits mimetic theory with helping him think “about how to avoid conflict within a business,” to reduce “counterproductive” internal disagreements. What makes that answer fascinating is that Thiel thinks mimetic theory, which, remember, claims that conflict between mirroring desires is pretty much inevitable, could actually tell us how to avoid that conflict. There’s no Jesus in this story to make visible the bad effects of mimetic desire. But there are smart young people banding together to seed startups. Tech will set us free.
Or perhaps it’s the other way around: as the journalist Geoff Shullenberger suggested, Thiel may have viewed sacrificial religion as a technology. Thiel is fond of defining technology as “doing more with less.” Is the scapegoat mechanism perhaps one such way of doing more with less? Or is the overcoming of this mechanism? It is hard not to be struck by the fact that the company Thiel made most of his money from, Facebook, is all about the algorithmic desire for incessant reciprocal rating and awarding of status. But perhaps more striking is that Thiel seems to think that the same mechanisms will operate on the other side of the algorithm—among the coders and designers, the CEOs and investors.
There is an entire worldview contained in that idea. A worldview in which companies falter not on
