Neurological studies have shown that this reflexive imitation is present even in newborns. Girard calls this blindness to the role of mediators in the origin of desire i. Mimetic desire seems obvious when self-consciously reflected upon, but such reflection is not at all common and is certainly not automatic.
Acquisitive desires, subject to mimetic mirroring, will inevitably attach themselves to a single object within the same field of play and generate hostility and violence. The important thing to notice is that my mediator will first appear to the desirer as a rival, an obstacle, an opponent.
Again, the mimetic phenomenon is preconscious, whereas the rival as rival stands all too noticeably in our way. An example is the behavior of a nation-state perceived to be threatened by another nation-state.
A familiar situation? Its defensive preparations look to its rival like aggressive provocations, which only increase the perceived threat. The rival then arms itself defensively, which is interpreted as aggression by the other side, and so on and so on.
Therefore, the actions that were undertaken to secure each nation from threat have actually increased the threat and have fed a dynamic that is dangerously self-reinforcing e. Europe, circa Here is a link to a story nicely illustrative of the phenomenon of scandal. Examples might include prestige, fame or success. We attribute to the glamorous, e. In eliminating my obstacle, I also eliminate the originator and sustainer of my desire and therefore the substance of the object in question.
Such scarcity extends even to material objects. Contrary to the assumptions of classical economics, which posits that competitive struggles emerge from the scarcity of goods, perhaps it is competitive struggle that creates the scarcity.
And predictably when the rival falls away, the cherished thing no longer has its luster. Mimetic forces left unchecked by external societal checks would result in contagious spasms of violence. Remember that the strong mimetic tendency in humanity is biological and preconscious rather than a product of human deliberation.
Therefore the origin of any general disorder caused by the propagation of mimetic rivalry would be generally mysterious, while its effects are obvious and dangerous. The societal checks that we take for granted police forces, manners, etc. The new contagion is catalyzed not by an acquisitive gesture, but by an accusatory one. Someone is blamed arbitrarily for the violence — the scapegoat.
Questions of who or why matter less than that the accusation is imitated. As an accusation is transmitted by mimetic contagion across the social field, there is a natural tendency for it to converge on a single victim. This can be demonstrated in computer models with a collection of mimetic agents biased to imitate the most duplicated meme. The social vectors all become aligned, commonly focused on a single victim, who is eliminated.
The social solidarity survives the death of the victim, and the experience of mass antagonism giving way so suddenly to an apparent peace has a powerful effect on everyone involved. The accusation has been pragmatically justified by its predicted effect — the pollution having been purged, the society is now restored to health.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The victim must have been peculiar in order to be singled out and must lack defenders in order for the mob verdict to be unanimous. Far from being the projected fantasies of savage minds, the peace achieved is very real indeed, as was the danger of unchecked mass violence that preceded it. Because the danger was so precarious and because the deliverance so sudden, the corpse left behind becomes an object of intense fascination to those simultaneously threatened and saved by it.
The post mortem divinization of the victim by the society is the natural culmination of the story. The unity that follows the collective murder obviously is of life or death importance to the community founded by it.
There are three signature components of sacred cultural order: ritual , prohibition and myth. RITUAL Since scapegoating murder cured the original disease, ritual repetition of this generative event will be used either to reactively cure further outbreaks of mimetic violence or prophylactically prevent them. This gives rise to sacrificial ritual. Girard is the first to adequately explain the widespread existence of sacrificial rites in human cultures.
Girard also believes that the institution of sacred kingship arises out of the deferral of these rites: the king is a sacrificial victim with a suspended sentence — kept alive and treated as divine as long as order prevails. For instance, the incest taboo prevents destructive rivalries over the closest available sexual partners from developing within families. In what is often called his third great insight, Girard discovered that this repetitive cycle of sacred violence was partially exposed through Greek tragedies and various sacred texts, but it was the Christian Gospels which ultimately offered a completely different perspective—that of the victim.
Because of this revelation—that the scapegoated one is actually a victim of the system—the system of sacred violence has slowly begun to break down and lose its long-held grip on human conflict resolution.
That this ancient system no longer works like it did has both positive and negative implications. The upside to the crumbling of sacred violence is that we humans are now more likely to recognize when we are scapegoating others or pushing our own pain onto others unjustly.
But deal with it we must. Sacred violence is losing its grip on us because of a prevailing cultural norm that has developed over time—an empathy for the victim. Consider the famous beating in Los Angeles of Rodney King.
Gil Bailie bril-liantly analyzed the King beating by four police officers at the center of a crowd, an incident that was captured on video and went as viral as a video could before smartphones. Also raising the stakes was the bystander rule at work whereby the greater number of bystanders reduces the likelihood that any of them will object to the violence. In the chaos of the moment, all the attention was on King as the guilty party. But if scapegoating were to have the same effects it used to have or even years ago, the officers would not have been so quick to question their actions.
Rodney King was not completely innocent that night, but the tendency with scapegoating is to hone in on stark, categorical labels of good and evil. That said, the Christian message has caused us to question our categorical pain-passing. We might wonder why there is still so much violence in the world if the Gos-pels set in motion an empathy for victims more than years ago. In psychology, the prevailing understanding favors increases in empathy where possible due to its relationship with a multitude of prosocial outcome variables.
But as societ-ies and their moral sensibilities have evolved, causing humans to question their own scapegoating, sacred violence has increasingly failed to provide the peace effects it once did. Our growing emphasis on honoring human rights, dignity, and the equal worth of every human being makes scapegoating troublesome at best. We see business organizations moving from strict hierarchical structures to flatter, team-oriented organizations.
We see the concept of the innocent victim taking prominence in the twentieth century. We hear the voices of Kosovars while the Serbian paramilitaries are burning their houses, and the myth of Serb victim-hood is shattered. And, later, we hear via the Internet what it is like to live in Belgrade while NATO bombs away, and the myth of Serb aggression is likewise demolished.
Whereas sacred violence served a profoundly important function in past societies, there is no wistful looking back for a restoration of ritual violence that once brought ingroup cohesion. If sacred violence is, in fact, what held societies together in the past, and if sacred violence is losing its effectiveness today—after all, we simply cannot unswervingly send our troops off to war like we used to—what is going to hold our societies together? After all, he says we are fundamentally mimetic creatures and will desire what others desire, inevitably leading to conflict.
He also, however, feels that we can go a long way by realizing our own hand in mimetic struggles. Bailie puts it this way:. Nowhere is this tendency more noticeable than with modern-day social media commentary and what turns into cyberbullying.
Such confusion was the case with the January encounter on the National Mall when a group of Trump-supporting high school students engaged with a Native American man drumming during an Indigenous Peoples March. Victimhood was quickly redirected to the lead high school student whose photo was captured across several news outlets.
That student eventually won defamation suits against at least two broadcasting companies. The importance of having a grand theory to understand disparate pieces of research in a field cannot be overstated. By doing so, the theory shows how and why we are dependent on others for our being, needing others to understand ourselves even and including our own desires.
The field of social psychology has been telling us the same, even if the distinct areas of research—imitation, mimicry, conformity, and so on—are rarely brought together to show the power of this human tendency.
As Girard further concludes, our intensely relational makeup also sets us up for interpersonal conflicts. Because rationality has a difficult time breaking through during conflict episodes, there appears to be substantial psychological research to support the human tendency to deflect our pain, fears, and blame onto others in an attempt to preserve our own righteousness. From a mimetic theory perspective, redirected aggression—or scapegoating—has been the primary way in which humans have long quelled violence.
Our pre-rational ancestors lacked the brain capacity or support of a civil society needed to end large-scale violence, but they happened upon another strategy that worked to keep mass violence from spiraling out of control.
Over thousands of years, our ancestors subconsciously recognized that redirecting violence onto an entity too fragile or few in number to fight back could contain frightening, uncontrollable violence. This successful strategy was repeated ad infinitum, with new forms of it being invented as con-sciousness increased. The killing of a scapegoat of premodern times may now resemble the exclusion of a friend, the blaming of a colleague, or the ousting of a candidate.
This type of sacrifice allows all those doing the ousting to experience feelings of cohesion and satisfaction for having cast out the evil one. This strategy used to work quite well and have more lasting results, but this scapegoating cure would ultimately be deemed a poison. Scapegoating is now widely condemned, and though this may seem like a self-evident truth, it was not always the case.
Though many texts and historical paradigms contributed to seeing scapegoating for what it is, Girard ultimately credits the Christian Gospels for zeroing in on empathy for the victim. Unlike many other texts up until its time, the Gospels offered a way of understanding human entanglement from the perspective of the victim rather than the victor.
As the innocence of the victim became a predominant cultural value, it compelled us to realize the seductive but often mistaken projections placed on others, the true complexity of human entanglements, and the need to better understand the plight of those cast off and excluded. Because scapegoating by our ancestors used to bring such calm and cohesion to the chaos of tribal warfare, it was presumed that only a god could have been at the center of this transcendent peacefulness.
But if this kind of sacrificial religion served to keep species-threatening violence in check for millennia, it was a questioning of this scapegoating approach which forced us to see how easily we fall into the trap of presuming our own righteousness in assigning guilt to others. The old system of sacred violence worked well for a long time, casting out the weak and allowing the victors to maintain cohesion amongst themselves and proclaim that justice won out.
But scapegoating no longer works that way, whether one credits Christianity as a religion, a morality, or an epistemology. Scapegoating only works well when we are blind to the fact that we are engaging in it! Seeing justice from the perspec-tive of the victim sets in motion the necessity to question our own participation in the scapegoating process. The unveiling of the scapegoating mechanism gave us a new way of being human and represents a conversion of both heart and mind.
The picture we get from both mimetic theory and social psychology is that of a flawed human, full of biases and cognitive errors, and frequently caught up in petty jealousies and envy that leads to conflict. Mimetic theory explains why these tendencies are so and reminds us that we are not alone in our flaws because our fellow human traveler is caught up in them too. Acknowledging our entanglement with mimetic desire does not provide us with any kind of automatic salvation or newfound freedom, but it does remind us how profoundly relational we are and that any kind of progress toward peace will likely come from the slow, demanding, and thorny process of trying to understand better ourselves and our fellow beings.
Understanding involves more than a philosophical shift. It requires more than simply realizing there are no pure victims and no pure perpetrators.
Even with the best of intentions, each of us finds ourselves invariably guilty of scapegoat-ing others and at other times being the recipient of the same. Hope College P. Box Holland, Michigan steen hope.
Designed by Public Platform. Hit enter to search or ESC to close. Close Search. Frost January 15, March 25th, No Comments. Imitation and the Relational Self The beauty of mimetic theory is its parsimony, beginning with the concept of mimetic desire, this pervasive tendency for humans to imitate others, not deliberately or consciously, but somewhat helplessly.
It should be noted that Girard is making a descriptive claim here rather than an ethical one: Modern people still fondly imagine that their discomfort and unease is a product of the strait-jacket that religious taboos, cultural prohibitions and, in our day, even the legal forms of protection guaranteed by the judiciary system place upon desire.
They note, These psychological impulses. Robert Sapolsky reminds us of what subordination stress looks like in human life: Consider how economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse. Conclusions The importance of having a grand theory to understand disparate pieces of research in a field cannot be overstated. Cite this article Kathryn M. Frost Austin Community College. But even then, in his short romance, he saw that there was more to desire than most people believe—especially the hidden role of a model.
The advertising and fashion industries have known this for decades. They almost always show us other people wanting the things they want us to buy. This site is run by a voluntary and cross-disciplinary coalition of scholars and practitioners.
Content Contributors, Administrators, and Editors are wanted. Contact us: info at mimetictheory. Instead, their radar becomes other people. People want what other people want. Desire is social. Because people want what other people want, there will inevitably be conflict as people compete for the same goods.
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