The Cog & the Snowflake

René Girard & the Jesus Principle in Theory & Practice, Part 2

Reading from René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

(Audio version at end of piece)

DJT & Girardian Sorcery Theater

In order to understand primitive rules, prohibitions and rituals, one must postulate a mimetic crisis of such duration and severity that the sudden resolution, at the expense of a single victim, has the effect of a miraculous deliverance. The experience of a supremely evil and then beneficent being, whose appearance and disappearance are punctuated by collective murder, cannot fail to be literally gripping. The community that was once so terribly stricken suddenly finds itself free of antagonism, completely delivered. . . . Since the victim seems to be capable of first causing the most disastrous disorder and then of re-establishing order or inaugurating a new order, it seems legitimate to return to that victim whenever it is a question of deciding what one must and must not do, as in ritual and prohibitions, the resolution and the crisis. This knowledge will then take precedence over all else (Girard, THSTFOTW p. 26, 38).

I am writing this in the midst of the 2024 election, when—everyone now supposes—Donald Trump will either be re-crowned as POTUS or once again “robbed” of the populist vote by the so-called “democratic deep state.” In either event, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth; the only difference is whose teeth will be gnashing, and, to some degree, who will get gnashed at.

The anticipated scenario of a new “civil war” (it has to be in quotes when we are speaking of something being both social-engineered and media-manufactured) has itself been so drummed into people, over the past decade or more (including into me by my wife), that it is hard not to suspect this is also just another red herring (like the arrival of the mother ship?).

Either way, my recent interest in US politics has been primarily inspired by a seemingly visible overlap with Girardian mimetics and, by extension, with deeper theological and metaphysical questions.

At the end of the day, this is all metaphysics, something the real “deep state” players—human or not—moving events from behind the scenes certainly understand.

At a more demonstrably human level, the social engineers also understand (at least sufficiently well to apply) the Girardian mechanics of mimesis and ritual sacrifice; and apply them they certainly must be doing.

This is a far deeper level of political strategy than simply removing a problematic actor from the political stage, which—quite obviously—can be done without the least problem in at least two ways: by killing him, or simply by casting him in a different role and giving him a new script.¹

The point I wish to underscore before continuing with the metaphysical analysis—which some commentators seem to be mistaking for a sociopolitical one—is that, even such a relatively profound level of Girardian social manipulation is far from the deepest level of interference behind world events (including wholly falsified pseudo-events).

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If this is a spiritual war, then the forces and weapons employed are spiritual. At the level of world affairs, then—even though we are still obliged to work with the mundane evidence as if it were real—it is all “staged,” because both the means and the ends of world events are hidden and esoteric.

Put slightly differently: every end that we think we can perceive or deduce—such as DJT winning or losing the election—are (in this model) means to invisible ends.

The reason I insist the alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump was staged—without making any claims about blood bags or crisis actors—is that, whichever way you look at it, the event (or pseudo-event) plays into the Girardian sorcery theater of DJT as “king pharmakos.”

As such, it’s my view that it depended on Trump surviving the attack, in order to either “win” the next election, or to have it very obviously “stolen” from him. Ergo, at the metaphysical level, there was never any possibility that the assassination would succeed, and not because “God was on DJT’s side,” but because other hidden forces (the so-called “deep state”) were.

Girard’s Christianity

Religion is nothing other than this immense effort to keep the peace. The sacred is violence, but if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence (p. 30).

There has been an unusual amount of resistance to my focus on Girard at CoJ, and I am still working out what is behind it. In some cases, such as when Christians insist that “Jesus is not a principal!” (debatable) and/or that Girard is reducing religion to a purely materialistic framework (which also comes from non-Christians), the reasons are obvious enough. But there seem also to be subtler, more general objections to the mere attempt to make sense of things in an unfamiliar way.

As it happens, Girard had this problem throughout his career, so it shouldn’t surprise me if, by attempting to make Girard accessible and relevant to a new audience, I receive a (homeopathic?) dose of the same resistance.

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Since Girard converted to Catholicism early in his career, it is a mistake to suppose—as some commenters have—that Girard was “reducing” religion or arguing that it was no more than a fantasy projection, based in social and biological imperatives.

Girard, it is true, “unpacked” the Christ-story as a kind of meta-narrative that revealed the mechanics of all previous “savior” figures—that of a sacrificed human who provides a solution to the disorder in the community by being scapegoated, and then deified. Being raised up as a paragon of what saved the community, such figures are attributed with abilities to transcend what ordinary humans can do, and that extend beyond death.

Simply put, on being killed, the victim becomes a god (or at least a messenger of the gods), and thus the means for establishing a new set of sanctions, rules, and proscriptions—a religious sect— all of which can be seen to stem from this original sacrifice.²

Yet Girard never claimed that Christianity was no more than the latest example of religious and social coping strategies. He pointed out the correlations, by talking about ancient civilizations when worship was closer to an animalistic practice, more primitive, and without a solid basis in the transcendent order.

It was in such a context that Girard saw Christianity—though he never outright states this—as the first religion to genuinely introduce a transcendental element, for which all prior attempts were only laying the foundation.

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On the other hand, it does seem as though, for much of the time—since he is arguing that the whole notion of the sacred comes from sacrificial violence and that we cannot separate a belief in the sacred from the ritualistic sacrifice of an innocent—that Girard believed the sacred essentially did not exist. But if so, I would say he was redefining the meaning of the word as something related to violence, as a means to grope our way towards a true alternative.

The difference for Girard with Judaism, and finally Christianity, was that, while Judaism was founded on blood sacrifice, it was a movement away from it (via circumcision) and an attempt to expose the scapegoat mechanism, to abolish the idea of sacred violence, and to introduce a truly divine principle, that of God-as-love, extending to love of one’s enemies: total, all-consuming, non-conditional love.

The problem with Christianity, according to Girard, was that, from its inception—as even some passages in the Gospel indicate—it was misinterpreted, reframed as just another sacrificial religion. This made it compatible with the dominant culture and allowed it to survive to this day. The price was that, by conforming to the (Roman) hegemony of mimetic violence, it was infiltrated by, and assumed the structures of, “the Satan.”

Managing Rage

“One of the essential conditions for the organization of men in cooperative societies was the suppression of rage and of the uncontrolled drive for the first place in the hierarchy of dominance” [Sherwood L. Washburn]. At the moment when the propensity for rage is systematically cultivated and developed on the outside by an animal that arms itself with stones and tools, it becomes more and more necessary to master this rage on the inside, where the same animal is confronted with familial and social tasks that become constantly more delicate and absorbing (Jean-Michel Oughourlian, p. 81, 82).

In the famous opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ape reaches for the bone. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark used this image as a signifier of early man discovering tools as a means for greater violence. The image jump-cuts from the spinning bone to a floating spaceship, indicating the ultimate (or penultimate) outcome of this evolution.

The evolutionary shifts at the start and the end of Kubrick’s film are both results of the intervention of an extraterrestrial monolith; but leaving aside the ancient ET malarkey, the image of the ape reaching for the bone is strikingly resonant with Girard’s theories, specifically that, as human beings developed tools, it became increasingly essential for them to manage their rage.