Peter Thiel was greatly influenced by Girard at Stanford [1] and he worked to create the nonprofit that supports the proliferation and application of Girard's theories, Imitatio [2]. You can get an idea of some of Girard's thought and of related works that engage with it at the free collection of writings maintained by Paul Nuechterlein [3].
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a comprehensive, yet concise writeup on Girard's theories [1]. Interestingly, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has no article on him [2] - is it because he worked there?
In the first article you point to, Thiel says that:
> Economics will tell you that competition dilutes profits, and that’s one big reason to question it.
Hmm, actually, no and no. Economics don't tell you that competition dilutes profits, it tells you that competition drives down prices until profits are zero, which isn't the same thing.
And it also tells you that low prices are good, not bad; only companies care about "profits", but the public at large benefits not from profits but from low prices. Walmart is the best thing that ever happened to the US, economy-wise.
Didn't know that Peter Thiel was an admirer of René Girard, but since he's also a disciple of Ayn Rand, I guess it makes sense (in that he revels in big empty bullshit).
> Economics don't tell you that competition dilutes profits, it tells you that competition drives down prices until profits are zero, which isn't the same thing.
Dilution is a process that happens over a time interval. In that sense, Thiel obviously is referring to dilution in profits per time interval moving forward. So driving the prices from X to 0 per time interval is diluting profits in that sense.
And if one looks at a very large, long term view of things, overall profit will be competed away too. So in a perfect competition, assuming the person shuts business with no loss, all capital ever earned will be competed away. Because competition typically drives prices way below the point where profits are 0, it drives it down to the point where overall profit ever earned is 0. Companies frequently sell at loss for market share.
Peter doesn't argue that competition is bad in some general sense. He's merely speaking form an entrepreneur's perspective. For whom competition is very much about diluting profit.
Peter gets a lot of flak from people interpreting his writings in the context of the general economy/society rather than the context of startups.
> Walmart is the best thing that ever happened to the US, economy-wise.
Care to elaborate? From my school of thought, Walmart is the worst thing that has ever happened to the US economy. Sure they might have that scotch tape you want for 50 cents cheaper, but that came at the cost of less small businesses and lower wages overall.
Scores of businesses and shops that were once thriving and profitable in small town main streets are now empty because Walmart opened up on the other side of town.
Walmart also only lets their buddies near their shopping centers, and charge a high premium to any mom and pop stores or restaurants to in the shopping center, which is why if you drive across the South you always see the same 3-4 stores in a Walmart shopping center.
Yes, and before we had efficient textile factories, scores of small businesses and individuals worked as wool spinners - many of them women (the origin of the term "spinster"). These businesses went kaput when industrialization came along.
Same thing with farming. In the middle ages, and long after then, there were many small businesses engaged in farming. In fact, quite a lot of it was subsistence farming. Fortunately, textile manufacturing brought down the price of clothing from thousands of dollars per suit to far less, and industrial farming has made food (by comparison to the past) cheap and plentiful. In the course of it, this shut down many small businesses who could not compete with the scale and efficiency of larger ones, but it brings down prices for everyone - as bambax mentioned, the general public cares about prices, not how goods are provided.
In the modern age, we live better than kings did in the middle ages, with electricity, sanitation, health/vision/dental care, access to food and water, fuel, entertainment in our homes - all of the benefits of modern life come from the steadily lowering price of technology and scale and knowledge. Small businesses are not intrinsically good, and large ones are not intrinsically bad. Large businesses tend to have economies of scale and investment in technology that small do not, which brings down prices and raises the quality of living for everyone.
> These businesses went kaput when industrialization came along.
You are equating a renaissance in labor to Walmart? Industrialization brought new jobs to the table as well. If you used to be a professional seamstress, and you were replaced by a machine, you can now go learn how the machine works and go repair them for all the factories, or help them install them. More than likely you probably got paid more now because of the increased productivity.
When Walmart comes into your town, and desolates your small business, you can go work for that Walmart, in a reduced role, with a fraction of the pay.
Well, actually, Pyxl101 just did, but I'll add that the formulation "competition dilutes profits" is really misleading; it seems to say that profits disappear into thin air, they're destroyed.
But that's not the case. Profits are not annihilated, they're transferred from firms to the general public, who become richer in the process.
So the correct formulation should be "competition makes you richer".
That's why we have anti-trust laws, and that's why any country which would take the "monopolies are good" theory of Thiel seriously would be in big trouble... (That's also why, on a more controversial note and IMHO, patents and copyright are very very bad.)
Patents and copyright enable competition by creating property rights. Without property rights, whoever starts out the biggest can just seize everyone else's property and get even bigger. This is how the feudal system worked: the lord owned all the property and took from his peasants whatever he wanted. The only competition was between lords and it was basically just border disputes.
Copyright and patent laws were developed to broaden the economic base by empowering small authors and inventors to extract payment from big companies in return for their creative works or inventions. This allowed them to accumulate and direct new pools of capital, which is what sustains competition over the long term.
One of the most interesting writers I've read. His theories of acquisitive mimesis and scapegoating are towering ideas.
I have no idea how they could be made falsifiable but it would be interesting if they could. Even if they are not falsifiable, as a theory of literature - or just storytelling - they're still quite powerful.
Noob question, I suppose anthropology is a descriptive science, did it lead to theories about transcending human nature ? for instance avoiding (or at least attempting) social scapegoating.
I'm going to over-simplify, but according to Girard, the greatest social attempt to avoid scapegoating and civilize human nature has been christianity. The figure of the Christ, and his sacrifice, was a smart operation to replace real scapegoats by a symbolic one, allowing the community to unite against an innocent without having to kill anyone. This has been successful for centuries, but it's interesting to note that in his latest books, Girard sounds pretty disillusioned about this. "Achever Clausewitz" (strangely translated in english by "Battling to the end") is quite a frightening apocalyptic book that I would recommend to anyone interested in Girard's work.
It's not about people not being slained anymore. Obviously that's always going to happen in some degree.
It's about how they're slain and why.
An pre-Christian society did not need pretenses like "bringing democracy", "fighting for good", "civilizing" etc to attack their enemies. Merely their interests and wanting to plunder was enough -- and nobody would ask for a justification anyway.
Before Christianic ideas spread nobody (or very few) in the ancient world would bat an eye for slavery, slaining captives, eradicating whole villages and cities etc. Afterwards these things continue to happen, but with strong voices and agreement against them as immoral / inhuman etc.
For an ancient, Greek, Persian, Roman etc, war and killing was on the contrary not inhuman but all too human -- and they didn't even need to formulate theories like the Europeans and Americans that blacks are inferior, etc to justify that (like we justified colonialism and slavery). They just accepted slavery as part of life for the losers.
It's also interesting to note that possibly the worst offender regarding war crimes et al, the Nazi regime, was influenced by an open attempt to annul Christian morals (e.g. with "ubermensch" mentality). Nietzsche and other thinkers popular in Germany at the time were quite open about this.
> Before Christianic ideas spread nobody (or very few) in the ancient world would bat an eye for slavery, slaining captives, eradicating whole villages and cities etc. Afterwards these things continue to happen, but with strong voices and agreement against them as immoral / inhuman etc.
IIRC the Christian bible doesn't bat an eye at slavery either or voice any dissent, rather upholding it as a moral virtue.
I don't see a big difference between justifying enslavement and murder because the bible tells them it's okay, and justifying it because it's what everyone else does. They're the same thing at the core but one has a superficial narrative that lasted.
>IIRC the Christian bible doesn't bat an eye at slavery either or voice any dissent, rather upholding it as a moral virtue.
The Christian Bible is not that much christian -- it's basically the old jewish religious texts repackaged. As such it existed for centuries without any external adoption outside Israel (not that it's practitioners meant it for other peoples anyway).
What caught on in Roman times, and was revolutionary, was the New Testament. That was the "good (new) message" (the Gospel) that caught on, and that's where the fundamental change in mores is contained in.
Unfortunately there are a lot of "Christians" these days that are more for Old Testament than the New Testament part of the bible (as did the most conservative people in previous centuries too).
Consider Jesus treatment of outsiders, thieves, low-ranking people, beggars, prostitutes, criminals etc. (as portrayed in the gospels, I'm not saying it happened as such in real life), and how e.g. church-going "christians" think of and treat such people.
[Add.] Now, as to what you said about "batting an eye", actually there were several advocates for the abolition of slavery in christianity, and a long-going internal discussion about the issue. At worst, christian thinkers were for the humane and brotherly treatment of slaves (as opposed to downright abolition of slavery), which is still improved than the older views on the rights of masters. They also accepted slaves as saints (something that would sound preposterous to Romans before).
In fact a lot if not most of the early adopters, so to speak, of the new religion in Rome were slaves themselves -- not talking openly about abolition was to protect themselves and because it was an ancient and accepted institution that took ages to erode, one which not everybody (slaves included) thought unnatural at the time. Not unlike sweatshop labor today (which you see well educated libertarians and the like accepting still, as better than poverty).
Heck, slavery was still practiced by open minded, modern, post-industrial revolution and enlightenment countries, not just in the US until the Civil War, but in most of European countries that had colonies until the '50s (and even in the US, the same tradition carried on in the form of officially sanctioned Jim Crow and segregation laws).
The New Testament also has several verses admonishing freshly-converted Christian slaves to obey their masters (Eph. 6:5, 1 Peter 2:18). Christianity at that time was controversial enough that they didn't want to add abolitionism to the mix.
Even in Medieval/Renaissance Europe there was a healthy slave trade centered around filling galleys with oarsmen who were understandably not happy with such repetitive work under terrible working conditions. Genoese traders in Italy even collaborated with the Crimean khanate in enslaving Eastern European Orthodox Christians so they could fill out their galleys. Also, taking of Moorish slaves during the back-and-forth of Mediterranean maritime politics.
Much of this sounds like speculation. How exactly, do you know what religious beliefs the slaves in Rome had, and why they chose not to talk about particular aspects of their beliefs?
From historians and accounts of the era -- you do know that there are several volumes of scholarly studies on the matter, right? Check out especially Rodney Stark and Jennifer Glancy (but you can also read accounts from that very era too -- up to the early Byzantine era, including from founding figures of the church).
Very Christian and Catholic societies fought one another with absolutely no other motive than territorial gain. That's the whole history of Europe from 450 AD to WWI.
Also, the Nazis thought they were doing God's work; they had written on their belt "God is with us" (Gott mit uns), which they did not invent (the origin is ancient) but did not suppress either.
And of course, the original idea of the "chosen people" and the "holy land" is found in the scriptures, that the Nazis subverted for their own use.
>Very Christian and Catholic societies fought one another with absolutely no other motive than territorial gain.
Sure. Like they did for millenia before that too. Having adopted christianism doesn't mean people get perfect or all good or something.
It's more of a moral compass than actual everyday conformance. We might point the "hypocrisy" but then we ignore the importance of having a moral compass, even if don't follow it all the time, which is that it helps shape mentalities, laws and practices.
And that's something that doesn't happen in a day -- it takes centuries of slow progress, while the new values kick in, to the point that their nominal carrier isn't even needed anymore (e.g. we now have codified christian originated values in non-religious forms, including in the Declaration of Independence).
>Also, the Nazis thought they were doing God's work; they had written on their belt "God is with us" (Gott mit uns), which they did not invent (the origin is ancient) but did not suppress either.
They never had any special relationship with the church -- only attempted to keep it to not alienate the huge christian population, but first cleaning it of jewish influence (including lots of new testament). The "Gott mit uns" is just a relic, not a central tenet of their philosophy.
Which is not exactly tied to the christian god's either, it has more to do with the pagan gods of the past, the kind Wagner also celebrated. Early tendencies in 20th century Germany, that later turned pro-nazi, were in favor of such a pagan revival, including naked dances/rituals in the forests, occultism, and other such BS.
The fact that Jesus was jewish itself is enough of an issue for most top nazi's to avoid christianity altogether (although they also maintained that he wasn't, in an attempt to keep the devout masses with them).
Yea, you're right. I just wonder what society will look like without all the oral literature, mythology, folklore, fact-- for some, becomes really fashionable? I just don't think human beings are born moral, and I've met more than a few individuals who should spend a Sunday in church, and leave the filthy lookers club--just for a few Sundays. Just kidding with the lookers; not kidding about dudes who pride themself's on making it to the top of the shit pile, at any cost. And I've meet too many of those guys lately. I don't find them clever, cool, or hip.
I sometimes visualize a Roman Emperor, like Constantine, looking over society, and thinking, 'I need to control the debachery that's getting out of hand.' (Just found out that Emperor Constantine had nothing to do with the formation of the canon. I always though he did?)
Humans are not born moral because morality is a human intellectual construct and is taught. Nature, without humanity, is neither moral nor amoral, it is just nature.
I agree with Girards postulation that sameness begets violence because there is always non-uniformity, and those who seek to control and organise want uniformity (sometimes violently). I do wonder if there would be less violence not with the abolishment of all religion, but with the abolishment of all but one.
>umans are not born moral because morality is a human intellectual construct and is taught. Nature, without humanity, is neither moral nor amoral, it is just nature.
That's not exactly accurate. For one, animals are also capable of handling "intellectual constructs" (even if less complex) and teaching them to their offspring or herd.
While both humans and animals may practice empathy, cooperation, or other behaviors that help them as individuals or groups to survive or thrive, this falls short of 'morality'.
Morality is positions about what one should do: eg "one should not murder humans for sport". Hume's observation of the Is-Ought problem shows us that we cannot reason "humans practice X therefore humans should practice X" as we similarly cannot reason "humans believe X therefore X is objectively the case".
Saying that animals or humans practice empathy is merely observing something they do, the "Is". We can't say "humans sometimes practice empathy therefore humans should practice empathy" like we can't say "humans sometimes practice violence therefore humans should practice violence".
You could add a condition, such as "If humans do not want to be put in jail by society, then they should not murder (or at least get caught having murdered)". But this is known as Hypothetical Morality, and with dependence on the conditions it becomes merely advice about cause and effect and is to be ignored by those who don't find the conditions compelling.
Very interesting, I tried to theorized the Christ idea, but never thought of it as a safety valve. So far all I got was the 'took our sins' as quick path to an everloving alter ego that can empathize with anybody since he sinned too.
ps: Achever clausewitz sounds like a bad portemanteau. I guess on purpose.
"René would never have experienced such a career in France," said Benoît Chantre, president of Paris' Association Recherches Mimétiques, one of the organizations that have formed around Girard's work. "Such a free work could indeed only appear in America ".
Looks like times have changed in France, since Thomas Piketty had no problem working there and writing his "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" which went on to have millions of copies sold?
I'd like to point out that he also heavily influenced Jean Pierre Dupuy (also professor at Standford) who wrote a few brilliant books. Among them : "l'Avenir de l'économie". Don't know if it's translated in english but for my fellow french hackers I highly recommend it
For me he is the champion of "people mimic stuff and people". Since I agree that it is human nature to do so he's also part of my foundation of favoring FLOSS software and being opposed to software patents (or limits on the ability to mimic things in general).
Agree with you. Girard is anti-scientific. It is the typical kind of guy who finds a pseudo-key (mimetics) and applies it to everything and everyone. And if you ever dare to disagree you are also doing that because of mimetism. His theory is simplistic, not very novel, and cannot explain everything.
One very big "hole" in his thinking is that for him no civilization can be accomplished without the Christ and its revelation. So, well, all those incredibly advanced East Asian civilisations? Thrown overboard! Never existed!
Really solid thinkers like Paul Ricœur are a dozen levels higher and deeper than Girard.
And, as HN is not a necrology website, I think it is a very good occasion to criticize a guy's theory the day his death is announced, why not?
Thanks for your support, I seem to really need it!! ;-)
Completely agree with your observation that it's ludicrous to argue that Christianity is consubstantial with human civilization; what about ancient Greece, for starters...?!?
Some very original and deep thought about Christianity, as well as what it means to be "modern", can be found in another French author, Jacques Ellul, who like Girard is more well known in the US than in France (but didn't achieve rockstar status; he died in 1994).
>Completely agree with your observation that it's ludicrous to argue that Christianity is consubstantial with human civilization; what about ancient Greece, for starters...?!?
Ancient Greece declined, and Greeks adopted Christianity among the very first -- because it solved many of the moral and social problems that led to the decline of their civilization. They actually had abandoned their old gods for a few centuries already, dwelling in eastern gods, neo-platonism, mysticism etc.
But even more importantly, Girard, whether right or wrong, neither says that "Christianity is consubstantial with human civilization" nor ignores Ancient Greece.
> Ancient Greece declined, and Greeks adopted Christianity among the very first
Not before having invented Western civilization, philosophy, mathematics, literature, etc. Thank God we didn't have to wait for Christ for maths, because we'd still be waiting.
Yeah, we just had to wait on him for that lesser thing, all-encompassing trans-ethnic humane values.
(And before someone shouts "Christianism didn't invent those", citing this or that precedent: sure. Like Apple with the iPod, it just created the first version of them people in large numbers cared about).
> Yeah, we just had to wait on him for that lesser thing, all-encompassing trans-ethnic humane values.
> (And before someone shouts "Christianism didn't invent those", citing this or that precedent: sure. Like Apple with the iPod, it just created the first version of them people in large numbers cared about).
What about, eg, buddhism? As for trans-ethnic, I thought this was a later addition to Christianity - after all, Jews are still the "chosen people", right?
Buddhism is merely a method to accept Nihilism (Nihilism being "the belief that all values are baseless"). The Anathapindika records that the Buddha taught that there was no Creator God (issara-karaṇa-vāda), therefore there were no morals, that the universe was deterministic and there was no free will, but that even so humans should strive to act with loving-kindness ("just because"/Eastern nonrationalism).
Ultimately, the true goal of Buddhism is to achieve "Enlightenment", a state of mind where one fully internalises this Daoist idea that God does not exist and due to this Good and Evil are not different but are one and the same (as depicted in the symbol of the Yin Yang). According to Buddhism, Good and Evil have no real existence, being part of the illusory world of phenomena.
All of the practices done before this (meditation, compassion, tantra, etc) are--as in other branches of Hindu and Dharmic faiths--understood to be merely optional "yogas" or activities to fill the time and enjoy oneself in a Nihilistic world.
Buddhists sometimes claim these practices can lead to Enlightenment, but what they don't mention is any practice on Earth is as likely to lead to this state, because for the Buddhist, wanting Enlightenment is a huge mistake as Moksha/Nirvana/Nihilism is available at all times, without the practices, as our default status. As Jed McKenna notes: Why does Buddhism rarely produce Buddhas? It is because Buddhist practices ("yogas") are not able to transmit the realization that Self is Illusion and All is Nothingness.
Christianity on the other hand teaches that Good and Evil are distinct, objective, and Real, that Good is to be sought and practiced, and that man has been endowed with self-evident, unalienable value having been created in the Image of God, giving unconditional worth to all human persons. As the Personalist Project puts it "those who repudiate God cannot preserve [this affirmation] though they may for a time live by the light of a setting sun".
Had some similar ideas, but was mostly concerned with the elimination of the self, which is something different. But more importantly, it was a non-player outside of Asia for the most part of history. Even today, after a century of spreading of Buddhist ideas here, it's cultural impact in the popular culture of West is negligible.
>As for trans-ethnic, I thought this was a later addition to Christianity - after all, Jews are still the "chosen people", right?
Huh? No, jews are not the "chosen people" in Christianity. Christianity has no special affinity to the Jews as such. The tacked-on Old Testament stories relating to Israel etc. -- and previously part of the jewish "state religion" (from the Tower of Babel to Noah's flood etc), are taken to apply to "the whole of humanity" by Christians.
I think it's a shame that in the US especially, most christian doctrine is relegated to the Old Testament -- but then again, the US was founded by christian sectarians thrown out from Europe for such differences of opinion.
Here's how Paul the apostle, put the trans-ethnic thing: "There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.".
And of course Jesus himself is said to have told his disciples "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation".
No problem. Just don't underestimate the importance of the iPod (or christian ethics -- not just as an inhibitor, as they are now seen, but also as a progressive and important force for centuries).
Why anti scientific ? His theory is based on a lot of anthropological observations. He elaborates a very robust hypothesis with rigorous reasoning and comes up with a brilliant/thought-provoking and yet simple theory (so much more simple & elegant than freudian theory) on the structural role of religion, rituals and sacrifice in human societies.
Overall you don't need to agree on everything he says or consider it as scientific ! Scientific proof anyway in human matters are hardly testable, subject to contradiction and ideological bias. So criticizing him because of a lack of scientific rigor is just bashing in an open door.
However I don't know much about Paul Ricoeur, so I'd love to know what you consider great about his work.
I have no thoughts on Rene Girard, having never heard of him before.
Still, just as a matter of civility, perhaps calling him a charlatan and criticizing his work is something that we shouldn't do on a thread announcing his death. There are better places for this.
That's like saying we shouldn't talk about gun control on the day of a mass shooting: when then?
The thread "announcing" his death points to an article comparing him to Voltaire and Racine. Please.
What really upsets me about Girard is his arrogance and how well it worked. It takes some balls to title a book "things hidden since the creation of the world" (meaning, nobody before me was able to think clearly). And it takes some admirable luck to have people fall for it.
You noticed that "things hidden since the creation of the world" is a quote from the Gospel, right? (Matthew, chapter 13, verse 35.) And that Girard's point is to show that the Gospel tries its best to uncover the scapegoating phenomenon?
Sure, here's the full verse: "So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world."
If you use this quote to title your book, how are you not identifying with the "prophet"?
Matthew 13 ends with this: "Coming to his hometown, he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed. [...] Where then did this man get all these things? [they asked] And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home.”
It seems pretty obvious to me, by using this quote taken from this context, that Girard is referencing himself and seeing himself as Jesus, regretting that he's a prophet but in his own country...
> If you use this quote to title your book, how are you not identifying with the "prophet"?
I have not read the book, so maybe you have an impression based on the contents that justifies this, but standing on its own this statement is entirely ridiculous. How are you identifying with someone just by using a quote as the title of your book?
Somehow, I agree with you on the idea that Girard may consider himself a prophet. But, it must have been depressing for him since (as far as I understood him) he only reframed and repeated what he seemed to read everywhere in literature.
As a layman, I try to sum it up from my memories: according to Girard, desire does not stand by itself. It only rises to meet another's desired object. Somehow: you don't desire a shiny car because of the shine of the car by itself, but only because someone already has or desires a shiny car.
This phenomenon generates conflicts when the desired object can't be shared. This leads to crises in human groups where the only escape was traditionally to take someone (anyone, actually) as culprit for this crisis and kill them, honestly pretending that they are responsible the the group disease.
I don't recall how, but Girard says that this killing cures the group. Which proves to the killers that 1) the scapegoat was indeed responsible for the trouble and 2) it was in the situation of providing the miraculous cure and is therefore some sort of goddess.
This is what Girard explains but refutes to have found by himself. According to him, denouncing this unconscious process is the very purpose of the gospel. This is what has been hidden since the creation of the world.
I'm sorry if this was ambiguous. The analogy isn't about death or how one dies, it's about what's "proper" and what isn't.
People will always try to silence dissenting opinions by arguing it's not the proper time to voice them, that one should wait a while... until we have changed subjects and whatever you had to say can't even be heard anymore, that is.
We shouldn't care about "proper"; the death of an author is an excellent opportunity to discuss his work, for and against, just as the effect of a policy is an excellent time to discuss the policy itself.
>That's like saying we shouldn't talk about gun control on the day of a mass shooting: when then?
Accusing of "charlatanism" is not merely "talking" or critique. Not to mention the main argument is quoting a "sceptic" webpage, the most cliched and crude approach to break all things non-analytical with a large hammer of scientism and naivety.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-rene-girards-i...
[2] http://www.imitatio.org/
[3] http://www.girardianlectionary.net/