René Girard

"Mimetic Theory rests on the assumption that all our cultural behaviors, beginning with the acquisition of language by children, are imitative. He sees the world as a theatre of envy, where, like mimes, we imitate other people's desires. His theory builds upon the kinds of books and people that modern people tend to ignore: The Bible, classic fiction writers such as Marcel Proust, and playwrights like Shakespeare. Mimetic conflict emerges when two people desire the same, scarce resource. Like lions in a cage, we mirror our enemies, fight because of our sameness, and ascend status hierarchies instead of providing value for society. Only by observing others do we learn how and what to desire. Our Mimetic nature is simultaneously our biggest strength and biggest weakness. When it goes right, imitation is a shortcut to learning. But when it spirals out of control, Mimetic imitation leads to envy, violence, and bitter rivalry."

"[Girard's ideas are] a portal onto the past, onto human origins, and our history. It's a portal onto the present and onto the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. It's a portal onto the future in terms of where we are going to let these Mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence... It has a sense of both danger and hope for the future as well. So it is this panoramic theory... [It's] super powerful and extraordinarily different from what one would normally hear. There was almost a cult-like element where you have these people who were followers of Girard and it was a sense that we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did."

"Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it's about word of mouth, so it's doubly Mimetic. Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it's about our natures." Its success hinges on meta-mimeticism.

"We work jobs we hate, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like."

Shakespeare wasn't the only writer to identify the vicious Mimetic impulse. Sigmund Freud called the tendency for conflict between two similar people "The Narcissism of Small Differences." We reserve tooth-grinding envy for people most like ourselves. Thomas Hobbes wrote that "if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End... endeavor to destroy, or subdue one another."

Academic rivalries are vicious because they focus on hierarchies over knowledge. They bicker over trivial details and compete for a limited set of status-based titles. In each department, there can only be one chairman. In each university, one president. Speaking about the faculty relationships at Harvard, Henry Kissinger once said: "The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small." By obsessing over their competitors, the faculty lost sight of the big picture and fought over small scraps of superficial status games. The more they strived to be different, the more their actions mirrored each other.

"There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people get all tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers… It's very limiting for our society as well as for those students."

"My college jobs department steered us towards high-status jobs instead of high-impact ones. Students, professors, and advisors cared more about perception than reality. It felt as if the goal of life wasn't to improve the world, but to win awards and build an impressive resume. They're raised in institutional environments where conformity is praised and originality is punished. Like Pavlov's rats, they've responded with authoritarian obedience. To no fault of their own, they're sleepwalking through life as if their best years are already behind them.

He explained how the school system taught him to follow rules, mimic his peers, and listen to teachers. That's how Jim was taught to succeed, so that's his strategy for climbing the corporate ladder. It's as if the age-based fraternity hierarchy never left his mind. Pledge first. Succeed later. All the while, he's spent years marching along the institutional track, obeying orders and doing exactly what others told him to do, without questioning why he should listen to them in the first place.

Spoiler alert: Jim is wasting his time.

He knows how to get things done, but never asks if it's worth doing in the first place. Instead of working on important problems, he's building 'options' for the future. Like so many other college graduates, he's been pushed into a mundane and uncreative profession. His dream-filled heart is crushed by the cold logic of investment banking. His words echo those of another friend, who said: 'I'm just trying to get through the next 25 years as fast as possible.'"

In response, as CEO of PayPal, Thiel set up the company structure to eliminate competition between employees. PayPal overhauled the organization chart every three months. By repositioning people, the company avoided most conflicts before they even started. Employees were evaluated on one single criterion, and no two employees had the same one. They were responsible for one job, one metric, and one part of the business.

"When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, 'You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.' Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of. Because their identity was defined by competing so intensely with other people, they could not imagine leaving... On the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out."

"The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not weigh stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you."

"Once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend... So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere."

"Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever." — 1 John 2:15–17

Everybody imitates. We cannot resist Mimetic contagion, and that will never change. But there are bad ways to copy and good ways to copy. Bad imitators follow the crowd and mirror false idols, while good imitators copy a transcendent goal or figure.

To Peter Thiel, short-term thinking is the essence of sin. Like The Bible, he advises us to make plans and sacrifice the present for the future. Greatness is like chess. To win, you must study the end game and work towards the one you want to see. Thiel's favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca who said: "To begin you must study the end. You don't want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing."

In a thought-provoking essay called Peter Thiel and the Cathedral, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues that cathedrals were the equivalent of the Apollo project in the High Middle Ages. Like America's Apollo program, each cathedral required a specific and ambitious plan. Medieval cathedrals were the first man-made structures to soar higher than the Egyptian Pyramids, which were monuments to death. But cathedrals are dedicated to the triumph over death. Moreover, cathedrals can only be built with scientific knowledge and communal support. They require scientists, mathematicians, engineers, craftsmen, and artists, and all of them need a long time horizon.

Long time horizons aren't just psychological. They're cultural. Modern society suffers from temporal exhaustion. Or as sociologist Elise Boulding once said: "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future."

"Younger Americans today are perhaps the first generation to be certain that they are and will be 'worse off' than their parents. The interconnected nature of the world makes nightmare scenarios—pandemics, global economic collapse, climate-change disaster, cyberattacks, terrorism—all seem like genuine possibilities, even probabilities... Today hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone. In our current phase of American history we have lost belief in God and salvation, or in any shared sense of national greatness and destiny."

Tim Keller spoke about the core tenets of Christianity: faith, meaning, satisfaction, identity, morality, justice, and hope. In one of his talks, he spoke about the human transition from hope to optimism, from praying for a better world to working hard to ensure a better future. Keller argued that humans are future-oriented beings. If we don't have a positive vision for our future, we become slaves to the desires of the present day and crumble under the suffering of daily life. That's why we need to believe that our lives are marching towards an end that's worth striving for. Otherwise, we will become adrift like a log in the ocean.

Seneca created the notion of progress: "mankind has advanced in the past and will advance in the future." Progress has ancient philosophical origins. But it did not crystallize until Augustine in City of God: the assumption that all that has happened and will happen is necessary, and the vision of a future condition of heaven on earth.

"Of all the contributions to the idea of progress by Christian thought, none is greater than this Augustinian suggestion of a final period on earth, utopian in character, and historically inevitable."

Guided by this belief in the possibility of progress, Christians follow a high-resolution painting of a perfect future. It's as if humanity is on a mission. They believe humans are here to reflect God's light onto the world. Instead of returning to the Garden of Eden, humanity will march forward, from the past to the future, and create "a new heaven and a new earth."

Thiel concludes that time is linear, not cyclical. The future won't look like the present. It will either be much worse or much better. Or more explicitly, "stagnation leads straight to apocalypse." If we don't advance, we'll suffer from limitless Mimetic violence; and if things go well, we might find our place in God's peaceful kingdom.

"Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. I am well within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one, solitary life."