Published: Catharses

Dear readers,

I have not disappeared. I’ve been checking up on the website every day, and every day I was pained to find out that my returning readers, and especially those looking to read my essays on René Girard’s mimetic theory, visit this blog only to find that nothing new has been posted in so long! I’m very sorry about this.

You see, I was up to something. I spent the last several weeks - I lost count how many - painstakingly collecting, re-reading, editing, re-writing, substantiating, compiling, typesetting, etc. all the essays I wrote on Girard over the past two years. The result was a book a whole three hundred pages in length. The cover of that book is the image you see above this text.

The book title: Catharses: Essays in Applied Mimetic Theory.

Preface to Catharses

Looking back over my online blog, the first essay I wrote on René Girard’s mimetic theory, “Truth in Literature and Dramatic Arts,” was posted on August 13, 2020. As I am writing this in the spring of 2022, and since I must have begun reading Girard at least a few months before I began writing about his ideas, it follows that this book has been about two years in the making.

I don’t remember when and how I first heard of René Girard. I’ve thought about it, and the best I can guess is that it was through reading about Peter Theil. I used to keep up with Silicon Valley news back at the time when I was working as a business analyst. I think it was an interview with Thiel I read online, either before or after I read his book Zero to One.

It must have been some time in the winter or spring of 2020, during the first COVID lockdowns, that I downloaded my first Girard book. I was living in Shanghai, and the city had mostly shut down. I was teaching online high school classes, but truth be told, I had plenty of time on my hands. Also, I became frustrated trying to learn Chinese, and I thought I’d take a break from it and learn French a bit by reading a book in that language, in which I already had some ability. It would repair some of my lost confidence, I thought. It was thus, I think, that I downloaded both the French and English versions of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

Up until my mid-twenties, I had read a big part of the canon of Great Western Literature, and then I got bored of it all and lost interest. I had also always read non-fiction on history, science, philosophy, and theology. Over the years, I became a very qualified amateur in these subjects. So when I first opened that first book by Girard, it spoke to many of my interests. Right away I got that strange, magnetic feeling you get when you encounter the right book: I felt it was answering questions that had weighed on me for years, yet at the same time it seemed to be articulating answers that I already knew but could not articulate myself.

That first book, for example, made me remember and rethink my readings of Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and other big authors. Why, I asked myself, had I been so fascinated with those classics? What did nineteenth-century literature have to teach me about my life now in the twenty-first? Some of those books I was assigned in my high school English class, but then I went and read many more. Truth be told, a big part of the reason I read them was snobbishness – I wanted to be smart. But part of it went beyond that, part of it was genuine passion and genuine revelation. Girard’s interpretation of this literature revealed the nature of that revelation. It explained that it was the revelation of the romantic lie – the mistaken conviction that our desires are authentic and innocent. It also showed me how I was reading the books wrong. It showed how blind I was to miss the obsession with others in almost all of Dostoevsky’s main characters. And yet, I wasn’t any blinder that the consensus of literary criticism.

After literature, it was Girard’s anthropology that provided the next big revelation. This time, it was much more surprise, much less intuition confirmed. As a child of our age educated in the natural sciences, I always thought the big questions of origins, anthropology, and religion to be tied in with the big questions of the physical universe and humanity’s relation to it. In retrospect, I can’t believe how blind I was to the central role of relationships and the upheavals of desire and violence that they so constantly generate. Girard so thoroughly and systematically dispelled my earlier notions that it threw me into an existential slump for a time.

I went through a negative reaction. The second essay I wrote on Girard was titled “The Monomaniac.” In it, I railed against what I perceived to be Girard’s attempt to explain everything with one single little idea. I did not include that essay in this collection – not because I can’t still argue that he was a bit of a monomaniac, but because I would have to rewrite the essay from scratch after I studied so much more of his work. Besides, as Girard himself points out, if the biggest problem with his “little” theory is that it works too well… well, then it can’t be such a bad theory after all.

Be that as it may, soon enough I was fully converted. It was not a conversion to some esoteric knowledge that makes you feel smug as one of its privileged initiates. Awareness of mimesis has been there with humanity all along, implied in cultural practices and schools of wisdom throughout the ages. There is a certain type of street smarts that carries in it a sort of a mimetic intuition. Like a brilliant archeologist, Girard unearths it all and fits it into a scientific system, so that one gets the impression that he really has brought to light some “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” This is what true historical progress is all about: our understanding should become more explicit; our intuitions should become knowledge. So, like all good conversions, my Girardian conversion felt like a conversion to something that ought to be common sense.

The appeal of mimetic theory is much more than the intellectual pleasure of beholding a beautifully formulated idea with great explanatory power. Mimetic theory has healing power. The world needs mimetic theory. Scarcity of mimetic intuition, especially in thought leadership circles, seems to be a defining feature of the modern era, obsessed as it is with individualism and with objects (“subjectivism” and “objectivism”) and oblivious as it is to the Other. From the perspective of mimetic theory, many baffling modern crises look like slow-motion trainwrecks. God knows that in my own life, I could have avoided a great deal of grief had I had that perspective earlier.

This brings me to the unifying purpose of this book. Over the last two years, I have applied mimetic theory to various topics of interest that I thought would benefit from the treatment. I wrote about them if I thought that the popular understanding of them would be greatly improved if people were aware of their mimetic undercurrents. The twenty-three essays included in this book are the fruit of that effort.

I have divided the essays into five parts: philosophy, history, sociology, politics, and psychology. It was not my intention from the outset to cover these five disciplines. Rather, once I began editing this collection, I came up with them as a reasonable though a not very precise way to give my work some structure. As I wrote the essays, about one every month on average, I would pick a topic that may have been trending on social media or in my head. Topics like conspiracy theories, narcissism, political divisions, behavioural finance, and immigration are current issues. Others, like the origin of kings, the nature of genius, existentialism, or nerds sprung up from whatever I was reading at the time.

The essays vary in the balance between reviewing Girard and venturing out into the woods with my own theorizing. Each essay is meant to be readable as a standalone unit, so there is some repetition of concepts throughout the collection, mostly in the opening paragraphs (even a few endnotes repeat). For readers already familiar with Girard, the rehashing can still offer something new. My approach is applied, lighter on rigorous theorizing (which I very much appreciate in Girard) and heavier on examples and what it all means for the topic at hand and how it changes common perceptions.

As for my extrapolations, I was encouraged to find that they were mostly positively received. The more recent essays on persecution, narcissism, and conspiracy theories all produce traffic spikes in the days after I had them published on my blog.

Not all essays were a success with my blog readers when they were first posted online. In editing this collection, I spent the most time polishing the low performers, and some of them I almost rewrote altogether. These include, for example, “A History of Social Cohesion” and “The Art of War.” After I was done overhauling them, I felt they may become new leaders. But all the essays in this book have been taken to a higher level. The clarity of language, the rigour of analysis, the timeliness and maturity of examples, and the selection and formatting of sources have all been greatly improved. With that, there is of course the convenience of reading a professionally typeset book, in electronic format or print.

I would like to think that the unique value proposition of this collection lies in that every essay draws a line from Girard’s basic insights to their application to something the reader ponders about in their everyday life. Each essay offers an accessible, distilled line of reasoning, and many offer unique insights. I hope that each can spark new conversations on the hot topic it addresses, and beyond. If mimetic theory is true, and if we are to take it seriously, we must ultimately try to apply it.

Application here does not mean devising an algorithmic approach to ordering society. It means reaching a better common understanding of the nature of the problems that surround us. The reader may rest assured (or be disappointed to hear) that the essays contain no self-improvement genre of step-by-step instructions on how to improve his or her life or fix the world. I don’t believe in algorithmic solutions, at least when it comes to people, and I don’t think that mimetic theory is about that. In terms of what should be done, mimetic theory doesn’t have any revolutionary advice. It confirms the old wisdom, which it makes you realize is a lot about mastering our desires.

I hope that the reader will experience at least some of these essays the way I experienced writing them: as catharses – as insights that cleanse and purify because they outline the hidden pollutants in our perceptions within the topic discussed. The pollutants here always leak from the same spout: mimesis, that convoluted, unconscious, and incessant imitation and anti-imitation of others that mark everything we do in life.

The word “catharsis” (plural “catharses”) has perhaps become cliché. Its narrow meaning was coined by Aristotle: the expulsion of negative emotions by witnessing tragedy. But in its wider sense, it has come to mean all sorts of releases, healings, or closures. The Greek word that Aristotle used had a medical meaning in his time – it meant cleansing or expulsion of the toxic substance causing an illness. Its even older meaning was religious: the expulsion of evil, exorcism, or the expulsion of a person – the pharmakos – believed to have cast a spell on the city. This last meaning has to do with the big theme of persecution in mimetic theory.

Girard argues that the victimary mechanism – collective blaming of arbitrary victims on social ills – is foundational to all human culture. For most of human history, social catharsis meant persecution. But there is also a different kind of catharsis, the good kind. This was the kind preached by Jesus: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5).

In the good catharsis, we try to expel the pollution in ourselves rather than in others. The catharses contained within my essays try to expel the ignorance of the prodigious role our models and rivals play in shaping our perceptions. The beam that makes us blind to mimesis is a big one and hard to remove, but I can testify that the reward is worth the effort.

George Boreas,

6th of May, 2022.