Someone writes,
Girard discovered the answer. Society has survived because it has developed a mechanism for concentrating violence on a limited number of victims. This he called the “scapegoating mechanism”. In fact the scapegoating mechanism exploits the very mimetic mechanisms that render it necessary for society’s survival. People who fall into violent, obsessive desire quickly lose their grip on reality. It is easy to convince them that the source of their frustration – their inability to satisfy their mimetic desires without running into violent conflict – is the fault of some group of scapegoats. It is important for the scapegoats to be a disenfranchised minority, so that the violence of society can be turned upon them without fear that they will be avenged. Here, again, Girard’s theory renders unsurprising that which economists and political scientists are at a loss to explain: for instance how the favoured ‘cure’ for economic depression is to visit structural violence upon low-paid immigrants, racial minorities, the homeless, the unemployed and the disabled.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
In summary, there is this:
the most historically common form of spontaneous order is that of a human community tacitly agreeing to vent all of its violent frustration upon a defenceless subgroup.
I have some doubts about Girard’s core hypothesis, which is that we all want the same few goods. It seems to me that there are all sorts of things that other people want which interest me not at all. By the same token, many of my most favorite pastimes seem to be shared by only a few others.
The theory that our tastes are modeled on the tastes of others may be right, but I am not sure that its implications are as dire as Girard would have it. When I go to a folk dance session, it is true that I will like a dance more when there are others who also like the same dance. But I don’t want to kill them so that I can “possess” the dance. Quite the contrary.
In fact, I think that this is generally true. Nobody wants to be the only person who owns an i-Phone. Even with status goods, we all want others to own them, in order to validate our tastes.
I am sure that in some sense we sometimes desire that others have less than they do. But I am not ready to sign on to the idea that this is a major driver of a lot of our behavior.