René Girard
imitation is the fundamental mechanism of human behavior.
With freedom comes risk and uncertainty: humans don't know in advance what to choose, so they look to others for cues. People can desire anything, as long as other people seem to desire it, too: that is the meaning of Girard's concept of "mimetic desire."
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
Societies unify themselves by focusing their imitative desires on the destruction of a scapegoat. Girard hypothesized that the violent persecution of scapegoats is at the origin of the ubiquitous human institution of ritual sacrifice, the foundation of archaic religions.
More than any other animal, humans learn through imitation. Girard shows what happens when imitation extends to the realm of desire.
Human culture began with religion, and religion arose from our species' need to master its own violence.
The violence of all against all gives way to the violence of all against one. When the crowd vents its violence on a common scapegoat, unity is restored. Sacrificial rites the world over are rooted in this mechanism.
DESIRE is what makes us human, as opposed to biological needs, such as food, shelter, and reproduction, which we share with other members of the animal kingdom. Desire is essentially, inherently mimetic, other-centered, as it depends on models, such as parents and peers, to identify its objects, to represent them as desirable. Desires issue from culture, not from nature, from other humans, not from instincts or the individual self, who is an altogether relative, relational, interdependent being.
INTERDIVIDUALITY highlights our relational and accordingly incomplete being. As the only neologism in mimetic theory, it is intended to correct the widespread notion that we have of humans as single, autonomous self-sufficient and self-directing individuals, an illusion that our greatest literary works regularly dispel.
... a desire to be the model, to embody, and thereby, displace or destroy the model.
all myths narrate cultural origins as issuing from a supernatural intervention, the action of asacred being, a divinity which is to be worshipped and propitiated by ritual sacrifice.
SACRED names what archaic religion considers as both beneficent and terrible, being the name for what both protects the community from without and threatens it from within.
"In the science of man and culture today there is a unilateral swerve away from anything that could be called mimicry, imitation or mimesis. And yet there is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behavior that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation. If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish. Neurologists remind us frequently that the human brain is an enormous imitating machine.”
"We are competitive rather than aggressive. In addition to the appetites we share with animals, we have a more problematic yearning that lacks any instinctual object: desire. We literally do not know what to desire and, in order to find out, we watch the people we admire: we imitate their desire.54 Both models and imitators of the same desire inevitably desire the same object and become rivals. Their rival desires literally feed on one another: the imitator becomes the model of his model, and the model the imitator of his imitator. Unlike animal rivalries, these imitative or mimetic rivalries can become so intense and contagious that not only do they lead to murder but they spread, mimetically, to entire communities." (Girard 2004, 8)
Girard's mimetic double bind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
René Girard, in his literary theory of mimetic desire,[9] proposes what he calls a "model-obstacle", a role model who demonstrates an object of desire and yet, in possessing that object, becomes a rival who obstructs fulfillment of the desire.[10] According to Girard, the "internal mediation" of this mimetic dynamic "operates along the same lines as what Gregory Bateson called the ‘double bind’."[11] Girard found in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, a precursor to mimetic desire.[12] "The individual who 'adjusts' has managed to relegate the two contradictory injunctions of the double bind—to imitate and not to imitate—to two different domains of application. This is, he divides reality in such a way as to neutralize the double bind."[13] While critical of Freud's doctrine of the unconscious mind, Girard sees the ancient Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, and key elements of Freud's Oedipus complex, patricidal and incestuous desire, to serve as prototypes for his own analysis of the mimetic double bind.[13]
Far from being restricted to a limited number of pathological cases, as American theoreticians suggest, the double bind—a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives—is an extremely common phenomenon. In fact, it is so common that it might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.
Bateson is undoubtedly correct in believing that the effects of the double bind on the child are particularly devastating. All the grown-up voices around him, beginning with those of the father and mother (voices which, in our society at least, speak for the culture with the force of established authority) exclaim in a variety of accents, "Imitate us!" "Imitate me!" "I bear the secret of life, of true being!" The more attentive the child is to these seductive words, and the more earnestly he responds to the suggestions emanating from all sides, the more devastating will be the eventual conflicts. The child possesses no perspective that will allow him to see things as they are. He has no basis for reasoned judgements, no means of foreseeing the metamorphosis of his model into a rival. This model's opposition reverberates in his mind like a terrible condemnation; he can only regard it as an act of excommunication. The future orientation of his desires—that is, the choice of his future models—will be significantly affected by the dichotomies of his childhood. In fact, these models will determine the shape of his personality.
If desire is allowed its own bent, its mimetic nature will almost always lead it into a double bind. The unchanneled mimetic impulse hurls itself blindly against the obstacle of a conflicting desire. It invites its own rebuffs and these rebuffs will in turn strengthen the mimetic inclination. We have, then, a self-perpetuating process, constantly increasing in simplicity and fervor. Whenever the disciple borrows from his model what he believes to be the "true" object, he tries to possess that truth by desiring precisely what this model desires. Whenever he sees himself closest to the supreme goal, he comes into violent conflict with a rival. By a mental shortcut that is both eminently logical and self-defeating, he convinces himself that the violence itself is the most distinctive attribute of this supreme goal! Ever afterward, violence will invariably awaken desire...
— René Girard, Violence and the Sacred: "From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double", pp.156–157
