Borrowed Desire [Christianity]
5 min read
None of these ideas are new or original. Yet once you see them, you can cannot un-see.
Since we learn what to want by imitating others, that imitation breeds rivalry and scapegoating. The one way out is to choose Christ, the one model who can never become rival.
Mimesis
We’re told there are those who follow the crowd, and those who break from it. Girard shows us they’re two sides of the same coin. The conformist copies what the crowd wants, the rebel copies in reverse. Either way, the crowd still influences. Girard’s claim is so simple it’s insulting: we don’t know what to want. Hunger and thirst come built in. But specific things that we long for, we learn by watching other people want them. This is ‘mimetic desire’, and the refusal to admit it is ‘the romantic lie’.
If haircuts were personal, there would be no hairstyle trends. If food were purely taste, no sudden Korean BBQ craze. If university majors followed pure passion, enrolment wouldn’t closely track prestige and salary. Even the person we marry tends to embody values our culture or subgroups handed us. None of this means we aren’t choosing. We pick the haircut, sign the marriage certificate. However this is agency not autonomy. We have the power to act, but the desire that moved us to act, that was borrowed. The usual answer to this is rebelling, to ‘break free’, ‘follow your heart’, Girard says that’s futile….the rebel still needs the crowd, contrarians need something to be contrary to. The person refusing the popular haircut is still letting it decide they’re cut, just by subtraction. This is the mistake hiding under so much modern talk about “authenticity”. We confuse difference with autonomy and originality with freedom. Man is a social creature both ways.
Even in a “rational” market like mining, value is set by mimetic desire. A deposit’s ultimate acquisition price isn’t set by the rock but by the humans chasing it. Geologists can tell you what’s in the ground, tho not what someone will pay for it. That number appears only when buyers start watching each other. Once a major circles a project, others suddenly find it attractive, and a bidding war is mimetic rivalry: each party wants the asset more because the other does. The best dealmakers understand this. They respect the rock (quantitative), but they also read the crowd (qualitative), anticipating which way it will run and making sure they’re standing there first.
Scapegoat
If we all learn to want the same things, we end up competing for them. Rivalry spreads the way desire does (by imitation)….until a group is close to tearing itself apart. Then they find a scapegoat. Girard’s darkest discovery explains the scapegoat is not chosen rationally, instead the whole group falls under its spell, and unites against a single person. Once removed the herd feel a surge of relief, and peace (temporarily) returns. Everyone has watched this play-out, perhaps the coworker the whole office quietly bonds over blaming, while the real problems are systemic.
Ancient myths always sided with the mob to justify the killing of a scapegoat, the biblical texts were the first to flip the perspective to defend the innocent victim. By showing the victim is innocent & offering forgiveness v/ revenge, the story exposes human violence and breaks the endless cycle of retaliation. This is Girard's case for faith, and it's why he approaches a nonbeliever through anthropology rather than metaphysics. Girard's ultimate point being: Human beings could not have invented Christianity. Every piece of human psychology, evolutionary biology, and cultural history dictates that we hide our violence through myths and scapegoats. It is our survival mechanism. For a text (the Gospels) to emerge from an ancient, violent world and completely deconstruct the very foundation of human culture requires an intervention from outside the human system. The Christian God is proven true because the Cross is the only force capable of waking humanity up from its self-destructive psychological prison. And once the Gospels taught the world to see the scapegoat as innocent, that insight spread far beyond the church. Today, much of what secular people value most, from human rights to the presumption of innocence, is result of the text. Girard even argues in The Scapegoat that science needed it: people had to stop blaming witches for storms before they could start looking for the real causes.
Rivalry
Once a culture learns to side with victims, being a victim becomes a source of moral authority, and people start competing for it. Girard saw this coming. Victimhood used as a weapon isn't Christianity. It's just the old scapegoat mechanism.
The church isn't immune either. In religious circles, status isn't measured in sports cars; but in holiness, humility, purity, etc. You notice how early someone else wakes up to pray, and you feel a pull to wake up earlier. You notice which callings get praised in your community and which get looked down on, and somehow the praised ones start to feel like God's will. Jesus addressed this two thousand years ago. The Pharisee who thanks God he is "not like this tax collector" is simply running a humility contest. "Pray in secret" is a defence against praying for an audience.
Model
So if joining the crowd is imitation and rebelling against it is imitation too, is there any way out? Girard says yes, but we can only choose a better model. And there is only one model who can't become our rival: the one who wanted nothing from us, refused to grasp at anything, and let the crowd take everything from him without fighting back. Because "the crowd is untruth," faith performed in front of others becomes domesticated, just another petty contest. Kierkegaard’s solution is the single individual before God, an audience of one, where your deepest choices escape the crowd's watch entirely. We see this same trap in romance, where we often desire people because of status or social cues rather than unique magic, turning love into a crass scorecard of who cares less. Kierkegaard argued that love resting purely on preference is just hidden ‘self-love’. True love means burning the scorecard, and loving your partner as a person before God, choosing patience over retaliation every single day.
Some Christians might say to just ‘trust Jesus’ and stop overthinking faith as a philosophy problem, but for those of us who fight the battle in our minds, René Girard shows that deep thinking can ultimately lead us back to Christ. Wile the human mind is deeply complicated, Christ is simple, and philosophy helps clear away the mental clutter so we can see Him clearly.
JC