Girardian Isekai Part 4: There is no Innovation in Peace Land

Freedom From Desire

This manifests in the economic process through managerialism. James Burnham identifies a “Managerial Revolution” in which economic power becomes increasingly controlled by large, dispersed networks of managers lacking vision and accountability. Rather than committing to an affirmative goal, which those responsible can be held accountable for, the impulse is once again to seek deference. It is valorized to defer to an existing market, existing process, existing model, or existing power center. This process destroys human agency in two ways. The first is directly, through lack of accountability. In a managerial system, employees are rewarded according to compliance with process, not on eventual success. The second is the telos, or purpose, this process creates. The telos of the managerial system is deference to process. The idea of Christian love, of genuine concern for the victim is impossible. It requires an expression of agency, of desire, to act on the victim’s behalf. Instead, the managerial system holds only policy. If the victim is helped, it is the result of committee, of process, of human will so diluted that it is guaranteed ninety-nine percent of it is based on unthinking mimesis. 

As Girard put it:

All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything.

In promoting innovation and agency as a process of production from a blank slate, contemporary libertines make innovation impossible. The cultivation of agency must explicitly begin by seeing imitation as it is. Otherwise, the output is similar to Peace Land. 

In no area is this more evident than biotechnology. The demonization of scientific experimentation often has Christian undertones, but is anything but. Girard identifies the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice, in which one pursues a goal for the intrinsic benefit of others. Nothing could exemplify this more than voluntary scientific experimentation. Unfortunately, modern bioethics departments abide not by the principles of Christ, but by those of Girard’s antichrist. They’ve set up their own Peace Land, collecting the most feeble and unambitious experimenters doing make-work and ethics declarations. The result is the invisible graveyard: millions of avoidable deaths due to the deferential business and regulatory process. It is human sacrifice by any other name.

Girard identifies the aesthetics of powerlessness as an vengeance driven indulgence. "The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible." Rather than valorize the victim for his own sake, the biotech regulator adopts the image of powerlessness to satisfy his ego, all while exercise enormous amounts of state-backed power to persecute innovators.

The resolution of Asuka’s story leads us to a natural Girardian answer.