From The Scapegoat by Geoff Shullenberger, a review of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin.
Despite his stated interest in figuring out “what . . . Thiel actually believe[s],” Chafkin has little to say about Thiel’s Christian faith, or the intellectual framework he brings to it, based on the ideas of René Girard. Thiel has cited Girard’s sprawling 1978 magnum opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, as his favorite book. Girard draws on the Jewish and Christian Scriptures to argue that human societies are founded on mob violence against arbitrary victims. Archaic religion, for Girard, draws its power from scapegoating, ritualized as human sacrifice. Peace is brought to the community through the simultaneous vilification and deification of victims. They are blamed for the community’s conflicts, and then, through the pacifying power of this assumption of blame, become gods.What has this theory contributed to Thiel’s Christian worldview and his business career? Chafkin does not explore this question. He briefly examines Thiel’s better-known intellectual debt to Girard, which involves interest in the primacy of imitation in human behavior. Girard argues that human desire is fundamentally mimetic: People want things not because of their intrinsic value, but because others also want or have them. This insight informs one of Thiel’s most infamous views: that, contrary to what many of his free-market libertarian friends might claim, competition is an obstacle to professional and technological growth, rather than a driver of it. It causes us to focus more on our rivals than on the substantive objectives we aim to achieve.Girard’s insight allowed Thiel to glimpse the future of social media, which expands the field of mimetic desire by giving us a vast selection of models to imitate. Some take this as a benign or neutral development, but it has a dark edge. Imitation begets conflict by causing us to want what others have. Girard first explored this phenomenon in the romantic conflicts of novels, but it is even more evident in the attention economy. When others post about their happy, successful lives or receive more likes, favorites, and retweets than we have, the result is the toxic brew of rage, envy, and resentment we can observe online every day.Girard’s analysis of archaic societies suggests that sacrificial rites, taboos, and purity codes evolved to keep the ever-present, socially corrosive dangers of mimetic conflict in check. But Christianity exposes the lie at the heart of sacrificial violence—the guilt of the scapegoat—and thereby undermines its social efficacy as a means of expelling conflict from the community. It is in this sense, for Girard, that Christ brings “not peace, but a sword.” The apocalyptic result is that we are left without the mechanism that has constrained the tendency to conflict generated by mimetic desire. Without scapegoating, what keeps humanity from destroying itself?
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