Girardian Isekai Part 0: Into the New World

This series is a somewhat edited republishing of my essay for 1517’s Girard Essay contest, with at least two additional parts added afterwards. This part is free, but the future parts will be paid. When reading this, the same rules as Punpun Straussianism apply. To recap: don’t go into this series expecting deep quantitative articles about the real world. It is certainly the domain of the second world, a new world even. And there is no such thing as reality in the the second world, only speculation.

Girard’s thought on mimesis and scapegoating have influenced and explained the past decade of technology. One of his most successful interpreters, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, sees us moving into an era shaped by escalating persecution. If the beginnings of mimetic theory foretold the last era of technology, then the conclusion of mimetic theory foreshadows the coming era.

According to Girard’s mimetic theory, human desires rarely come from within; instead, people copy their desires from others. This leads to a cycle of ever more people desiring the same objects, leading to a ‘mimetic crisis’. To resolve this crisis, the community chooses a scapegoat, or an innocent third party to blame for the escalating conflict. It is “The war of all against all that transforms communities into a war of all against one”.

This conclusion is told by Girard’s ‘anthropology of the cross’: the way the Christian story reveals the nature of mimesis, scapegoating and persecution in human society. In this telling, the Christian story fundamentally changed history by revealing the innocence of the victim. Humanity was forever changed by this knowledge, beginning to see through the scapegoating process represented by Satan. “In all the titles and functions attributed to Satan, we see reappearing all the synonyms of desire and its sickness, the evolution of which Jesus diagnoses.”

The Christian story was a bridge between two worlds. People ruled by the axis between strong and weak became able to imagine a world ruled by the axis between good and evil. Modernity faces the opposite predicament. In being saturated by concern for the victim, it lost its understanding of judgment, and consequently became vulnerable to persecution under the premise of defending victims. This is the problem of Girard’s antichrist: a corruption of Christian teaching, wearing concern for the victim like a skin-suit to justify a new wave of persecution.

Next week: Part 1: Agency and the Christian Afterlife

Heaven or Hell?