René Girard IV: Totalitarianism and Differentiation
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
René Girard’s mimetic theory states that human desire is learned from another human - a model. Once our animal needs are satisfied, we seek a higher state of being. This need cannot be avoided. The higher state is believed in and yearned for by all. Looking for it, we will look to other individuals who seem to enjoy such a blessed state and we will imitate them. We'll imitate their likes and dislikes, and we'll imitate their desires.
Girard distinguishes two kinds of models: external and internal. External models are the ones we never hope to approach because they are too far above us. We may hope to capture some of the stardust they shed, but we don’t identify with them so much as to imagine ourselves one day taking their place.
On the other hand, an internal model that we look up to and imitate is someone close enough to us that one day we will become close enough to them and become their rivals. As our rivalry approaches the model from the bottom, so to speak, it reinforces the model’s own conviction of the value of their position and drives them to protect it jealously. The admirer-model dynamic becomes symmetric. It turns into rivalry.
Humans are distributed on a rather smooth continuum for any skill or trait, which means that anyone can be someone else’s internal model. This, combined with the unstoppable human tendency to imitate and to strive, means that rivalries will always tend to spread through society. In what Girard calls a mimetic crisis, the level of general rivalry reaches such a high level that a breakout of violence of all against all threatens to permanently destroy the social order. Traditionally, permanent societies solved this problem through seasonal rituals that channelled mimetic violence onto real or abstracted sacrificial victims. It was never possible to remove the mimetic process itself.
During the age of enlightenment and especially during the 19th century, intellectuals sought to solve social conflicts by proposing radically new systems of social governance. These systems generally featured newly minted enlightenment principles such as rationality, equality, self-interest, and independence. Common to all systems was the idea that individuals can live in accordance to the interest either of themselves or their collective, or a balance of the two. This idea clashes with René Girard’s view of human behaviour as a never-ending cycle of violence whose cause is - approximately speaking - envy.
Among 19th century plans for reordering society, communism is marked by the most radical insistence on equality and erasure of boundaries. Even a critic who has never heard of René Girard might claim that the idea is doomed, for several different reasons. To give a simple argument, one could foresee that the guarantee of equality removes incentives for work. From the vantage point of mimetic theory, however, the erasure of boundaries and differences raises unique and screaming alarms, as central to the theory is the claim that violence is primarily caused by loss of differentiation.
As rivals approach each other in the struggle for the object of desire, that object itself fades from sight while the rivals turn aggressively towards one another. As their conflict accelerates and heats up, the two rivals begin to resemble each other. Indeed, if one person becomes obsessed with their desire, they become defined by it, and if another person is obsessed with the same desire and also becomes defined by it, then the two people become indistinguishable.
While archaic societies dreaded this sameness, as suggested by widespread ancient superstitions against twins, the modern communist systems seem to have made out of it the key to their plans for utopia. Surely, it cannot work, right? Well, communist systems tend to collapse, often in a dreadful and embarrassing manner, so there is that. However, if we look closer at past communist systems, we will find that in fact, such systems have made powerful efforts to combat the threat of mimetic crisis and to meet the need for differentiation, despite the central claim of total equality.
There are three major ways in which all communist and other totalitarian states manage mimetic conflict: cult of the leader, hatred of the external enemy, and commemoration of military sacrifice.
It may appear paradoxical that a communist society, which insists so adamantly on equality of human beings, will take one or two of those beings, usually its founding fathers, and assign to them every imaginable vector of inequality: unmatchable intellectual genius, moral infallibility, physical strength and beauty, invincibility in war, clairvoyance of the future, boundless compassion for their nation. Reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of hypostatic union, the leader will nevertheless also be one of the people, a Comrade. Whatever the nature of the mystery, there is no question that the hollowed leader plays the role of the perfect external model. To look up to him is duty, to pretend to approach him is the ultimate sacrilege. Theories of comparative religion studies applied to such a leader would return the conclusion that he is nothing other than deity. In religion, the only legitimate external model is deity.
In communist societies, the unbearable sameness of everyone around you is dealt with by turning your eyes from the monotonous masses of people, clothes, food, architecture, and employment, and turning them towards the shiny icon of the great leader. When one watches protests in countries that either were totalitarian or are totalitarian now, one will likely notice faceless members of the crowd holding above their heads a framed image of their strongman. The act of displaying it seems to have the intention to encourage the followers and the scare evil spirits possessing the enemy.
Students in primary education of totalitarian countries are indoctrinated with the cult of the leader. At that level of human development, there will be no major behavioural differences in comparison with children elsewhere. Children everywhere need to believe in infallible idols to cope with the overwhelming vulnerability of childhood. Protection of omnipotent parents or the image of a superhero taking on the whole world makes children feel safe in a world where everyone is bigger and more powerful than them. It is at later stages of life when differences begin to show.
Growing out of childhood normally entails a realization that our desires have rivals. It entails encountering lust, envy, greed, wrath, and all the other sins that are part and parcel of mimetic struggle. The healthy approach is to acknowledge and deal with these negatives, though we cannot quite get rid of them. One unhealthy approach is to pretend they don’t exist. In the perfect communist society, they cannot exist.
A Totalitarian society is always a perfectionist society. The totalitarian government bases it right of total control on the promise of bringing about perfection. Even a non-totalitarian government will demand some, but not total, control and promise some improvement but not perfection. A non-totalitarian culture accepts that the mimetic nature of humans will always give rise to conflict, and it makes no attempts to eradicate it. It manages it through ritual, religion, and law, institutions that seem to spring from each other in that chronological order. Totalitarian society on the other hand believes that, through the application of external force and indoctrination, it can root out mimetic tendencies altogether. But mimesis is analogous to infection. Where there is a little of it, there will be more of it. Imitation is imitated. Thus, for there to be no destructive conflict, there can be no conflict at all.
In its perfectionism, the totalitarian state cannot quite recognize a spectrum of crimes. Its legal spirit is binary. There is only one crime: betrayal of the revolution. All other crimes are treated almost as misunderstandings, and all non-capital punishments are viewed as warnings.
The intricate network of human ambition and envy that is found in countries with limited state power is truncated to a vast two-layer pyramid in a totalitarian state. There is one leader or perhaps a small pantheon of them on the top, and there is everyone else at the bottom. The triangular structure of desire - subject, model, object - is tolerated only within the single framework where the subject is the citizen, the model is the leader, and the object is the revolution. This external mediation structure is safe because external models, in this case, the leaders dead and alive, cannot become rivals. All internal mediation, which causes rivalry, is prohibited. A consequence of this is that the leader, the universal external model, must be perceived as perfect, because any perceived weakness would, at least in theory, expose him to critique, a form of rivalry and strife.
In the totalitarian environment, the dark side of human rivalry is suppressed by turning the eyes of the people away from their neighbours and towards the image of their infallible leader. However, we all cannot help but look at what’s in front of us. The leader’s image is at school and work, in the public square, on television, on the walls of living rooms and offices, but it cannot be always before us. At some point, we are bound to look at our family members and at our neighbours. The moment we do that, the leader sinks into the background, and what plays out in the foreground is the organic human interaction that cannot but cause mimetic conflict. For this reason, the totalitarian state works to destroy anything that sticks out of the monotonous background, any differentiated structures, including differentiated families, clans, neighbourhoods, architecture.
A society with limited power manages conflict by establishing boundaries and prohibitions, by creating law codes and private property, to limit rival desire on objects. The totalitarian approach is to remove the objects: there can be no objects of private desire. The desire of all is instead to be directed towards one central object, the “revolution”, whose consumption is to become an immanent and eternal feast. The totalitarian state can never succeed in its mission because to remove strife, it is not enough even to remove objects. It would rather have to eliminate the others, because mimetic strife comes from them, and not from the objects, which can be created out of anything. That is to say, to eliminate strife, the totalitarian state would have to completely isolate all men from their neighbours.
To return to our indoctrinated students, once they enter adolescence and adulthood, they will begin to see signs among their peers of universal human tendencies for rivalry and resentment. However, both the observers and the ones acting out on such tendencies will ignore them in terror and shame instilled in them by the image of the perfect leader and his perfect children. In a non-totalitarian society, negative acts of teenagers and adults will be tolerated as a private thing, or accepted within limits of written law, or judged with moral restraint produced by the notion of hypocrisy, or a combination of these. In a totalitarian society, human fallibility and hypocrisy are not supposed to exist; therefore, there is no room for tolerance. The only option, when confronted with human fallibility, is to turn a blind eye.
While in popular Western imagination people from totalitarian countries are stereotyped as aggressive and cynical, the reality is that an average citizen from such a country will strike you as the pure and innocent type. Where they are from, sin is not merely judged by a god in heaven, it is exterminated by a god on earth. Thus, as far as they are concerned, they have no sins. Once you have spent some time with such an innocent totalitarian, you will of course find faults in their behaviour as you would with any other human. Getting them to admit to those faults, however, you will find to be impossible.
Traditional societies implicitly accepted the existence of mimetic conflict. They set in place differences and boundaries that would limit the scope of mimesis. They accepted winners and losers. Most importantly, they set in place religion and rituals, including the relatively late ritual of theatre, to channel violence and restore harmony. Totalitarian societies, on the other hand, have the singular problem of making human differentiation the final enemy. As a consequence, totalitarian societies are liable to seismic bursts of mimetic violence.
One sufficient reason for archaic societies to accept mimetic conflict is that the governing structures of such societies were nowhere near having enough power to control and eliminate such violence. Mimetic crises often ended up unleashing an endless chain of blood feuds or inter-tribal warfare that ended with the complete destruction of culture. In modern times, the ambition of totalitarian governments to control mimetic violence stems not only from their conviction that human ambition can be eradicated but also from their belief that they have the technological means to monitor and eliminate all strife.
Judgments and crimes do happen in totalitarian societies, and people of course do go to jail. But because everyone must pretend that society is perfect, there is a taboo in recognizing petty faults and offences. These are ignored. Petty mimetic violence of which they are the product builds up under the rug where it is swept, and when it finally emerges it does so in a spectacular fashion. A totalitarian country is not bound to have many people imprisoned for petty theft, perjury, or breach of contract. Is there anyone in North Korea imprisoned for such crimes? A totalitarian state’s favourite indictment is what humans generally consider the ultimate indictment: treason.
The problem with this setup arises very quickly. No organization can be completely flat. The country will need an army with captains, majors, and generals, and they will need factories with line managers and directors. Surely, the major is an internal mediator to the captain, and the director is an internal mediator to the line manager.
The way to deal with this problem is to ensure that progression through organizational ranks is not driven by ambition. The state will establish perfectly rigid systems of progression. Chances must be eliminated from the process. If you have only a 40% chance to be promoted, it means that someone else also has a chance. This creates an occasion for you and the others to become rivals. Your chances for getting a certain position in a totalitarian society must be either 100% or 0%.
One way to select the right candidate is to base the selection on merit. This will not work out perfectly. For one, merit is often impossible to measure objectively, and subjective evaluation of merit will give occasion to resentment from a rival. Secondly, in objective measures of merit such as written tests or professional accomplishments, there are always ways to obtain an unequal advantage. Two candidates can't live through identical circumstances on their way to being measured. The unequal circumstances will again give rise to resentment: “don’t we live in an equal society?” The one who created unequal conditions for himself betrayed the social contract.
In the end, to ensure stability by eliminating internal mediation, totalitarian states cannot rely on merit as a social differentiator, either. This too is disruptive. The only perfectly solid thing to fall back on is the ancient system of class immobility. The classes have different names now, but they are there. If a father is a general today, his oldest son will be general when the father retires. If there is a second son, they will figure out a rule for that too. That said, having too many children in a totalitarian state is discouraged because large families are too prone to conflict.
Besides what is in essence rigid classism, totalitarian systems will fill their differentiated ranks through vacancies created by those who have betrayed the revolution. The strife and rivalry natural to humans will simmer underneath the utopian cover, and every once in a while, a scandal will occur in which one of the rivals will have to admit guilt and be eliminated. Perhaps all of the rivals will be eliminated, just to make sure the virus of contagious rivalry is completely sterilized.
In such a system, it is very easy to see that competence will become unimportant. The system becomes a farcical competition of cronies that rewards blind loyalty and psychopathic cynicism. This contributes to gross inefficiencies and misallocations that spell the system’s collapse.
Sooner or later the delusion of blissful equality will begin to wane in a totalitarian society and the hearts and minds of the people will need to be distracted. This invariably comes in the form of structuring an external enemy. A powerful scapegoat, an external enemy is a powerful sink to channel resentment of the populace. It is an abstracted, mute victim. The phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to totalitarian societies, but it is empirically observable that among them it is much more intense.
Now, a classic analysis has it that the external enemy serves to take on all the blame for the failures of the system. Indeed, this is the definition of the scapegoat in the general sense and not the specific and deeper sense of mimetic theory. The analysis is correct in that people will indeed blame the external enemy for the problems at home, but it does not explain why they will do it so readily. It is a rationalizing analysis of an irrational phenomenon. An external enemy may restrict the country’s trade options, but it cannot rationally be faulted for dysfunctional institutions and petty hatreds at the office. We can better understand the effectiveness of the external enemy as a scapegoat once we understand the Girardian mechanism of mimetic rivalry transforming into resentment that ultimately generates violent urges that, like sexual urges, become less discriminate as they fester.
To the degree that the internal mechanism of controls such as the cult of the leader crumbles, the degree of hatemongering with the external enemy as the target increases. People become resentful of each other; the facade of perfect equality begins to crack. If left alone, this situation will cause an explosive conflict of all against all. The conflict might end in some organic equilibrium before it causes a total collapse, but even so, the state will lose its power. This must be prevented.
The pent-up resentment of the citizenry is channelled towards hatred of an external enemy. The lifetime achievement award for the latter role surely goes to the United States of America. Dictators throughout the last century whipped up vitriol for it every time their internal control structures started to creak. With North Korea, they may as well make a national holiday in which the external enemy is ritually murdered at a public high place. Maybe they already have one.
A modern observer may look at the process of scapegoating the enemy and consider the citizens of the country where that works to be naive or misinformed. Both characterizations of the citizens are true: naïveté stems from the innocence expected from the children of the immaculate leader, and misinformation is aggravated by limited communication. Citizens of a totalitarian state are a mock version of Adam and Eve living in the garden of the god-the-leader. They are expected to know nothing and suspect nothing. Yet, the modern observer often fails to understand the non-technical aspect of their predicament. The scapegoating mechanism works on an emotional level because the oppressed citizen is burdened with suppressed resentment that they must unleash upon someone. The collective blaming of an external enemy is not a result of a rational process that happens to be based on misinformation: it is a result of an emotional need that can easily ignore facts.
If the cult of the leader gives vent to pride, and hatred of the enemy to wrath, then commemoration of those fallen in the line of duty allows for outpours of gratitude and compassion. Totalitarian respect for the dead is not completely different than cults of the dead in any other culture, but it is much more important than elsewhere because of the restriction on other ways of showing gratitude or compassion. One cannot show gratitude to a god, as it is man who takes his destiny into his own hands. One cannot even show true gratitude to the state, or any individuals within the state, because that would imply inequality. Compassion is also hard to express anywhere. One is compassionate for those who suffer, but there can be no undeserved suffering in a utopia. Thus, heroic deaths of unsung heroes in the struggle against external enemies become one of the rare objects on which to safely indulge in such warm feelings.
As in any other culture, the cult of the dead works as a sacrificial cult. The fallen have suffered the ultimate loss in the act of the purifying and unifying act of violence against the external enemy. Their blood has been spilled at the altar of the state, and it thereby sanctifies the state and reinforces the unity that it brings. The state makes the utopian claim that it has eliminated the contaminating violence of internal strife, yet its cults of fallen heroes betray its pressing need to subdue precisely it through the purifying blood of sacrifice, as it has been done in all archaic and pagan cultures.
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The childlike innocence observable among adult disciples of totalitarianism radiates with consequences across all aspects of culture. In the analysis of many thinkers, culminating with that René Girard, tragedy as a literary and dramatic genre is the most archaic and the closest to the ritual of execution of the scapegoat as a way to achieve catharsis or cleansing of indiscriminate violence from within society. Since a totalitarian society pretends that there is no mimetic tension within its society, tragedy cannot have a role in it. Thus, a look at the theatre and literature of any totalitarian country should reveal that tragedy in the classical sense is non-existent there. One can only find black-and-white morality plays, in which some version of the people or its representatives are pure, while an external enemy is a pollutant. The term “tragedy” may be applied to such works in the superficial sense that something bad happens, something to be avenged. Moral ambiguity and blurring of the differences between characters that first appear as protagonists or antagonists is inconceivable in the totalitarian pathos, let alone the idea that self-righteous tit-for-tats create a cycle of violence that inevitably ends up destroying both sides of the conflict.
What then, is there to be seen in totalitarian dramatic arts? An efficient answer would be to say that totalitarian drama most resembles drama that is universally served to children. Totalitarian drama is childish drama. Childhood is dominated by external mediators. Due to their complete dependence on adults for survival, children cannot engage in rivalry with those near to them. They can only engage in rivalry with other children, but these are trivial and temporary. Having no significant internal mediators, children do not engage in strife, and thus do not need catharsis, meaning expulsion, of violence pent-up inside of them. Nevertheless, children, being animals, are intrinsically aware of violence. Fears stemming from such violence are assuaged through fairy tales of lone, which is to say small, heroes defeating large monsters.
The totalitarian adults are like children in that internal mediation and resultant rivalry and strife with their neighbours are supposed to be non-existent. A child anywhere might fight for a toy with another child, but that rivalry fizzles out as soon as it becomes clear that the possession of the toy is unrelated to the child’s life circumstances. Similarly, the totalitarian adult will have the urge to strive with his neighbour, but he is to remember that for all the things that matter, all the things of the revolution, are to be provided by the state, which serves as a perfect parent. If thoroughly propagandized, the totalitarian adult will believe that the state indeed is the perfect parent that will provide fulfil all needs - and desires. Nevertheless, he will never be able to entirely remove the aggressive adult urges of mimetic strife, which are hard-wired deeply in his human nature.
The adult aggression in a totalitarian society will need vents that are not necessary for children, for whom the threat of punishment is sufficient. Totalitarian drama must do its best to channel these urges somewhere safe and consistent with its perfectionist worldview. The most obvious channel is the external enemy, “the capitalist”, the enemy of the revolution. Now, even Hollywood, the dramatic organ of the land of the free, finds it expedient to produce heavy doses of us-against-them military films. The technique of channelling aggression towards an external enemy is as old as civilization. But in totalitarian societies, the epic genre celebrating military heroism will be tuned up to a pitch nauseating to observers from balanced cultures.
Films celebrating military heroism in totalitarian production are different from their “balanced-society” counterparts. The differences all could be described as childish, though with mimetic theory in mind we can tell that they are also conditioned by a strict prohibition of internal mediation. The antagonists in totalitarian drama cannot be seen as struggling with moral dilemmas; they must be completely good or completely bad. The balanced-society observer will be soothed by watching moral dilemmas because he will relate to them. The totalitarian observer will be disturbed because moral dilemmas are prohibited. Any time we engage in a moral dilemma we are processing a conflict between us and our neighbours, and we are contemplating our power to hurt them. But a totalitarian adult would never hurt their neighbour, nor wish them any kind of evil. Such an act would be sacrilegious rebellion against the parent-state; it would be a crime, and there is only one crime in totalitarian states: capital crime. In short, in a totalitarian society, conflicts are not supposed to exist. As a result, totalitarian drama is replete with one-sided caricatures of good and evil. All the citizens of the totalitarian state are good, but there also must be evil to struggle against, ergo, evil exists outside of the state.
Most of the discussion so far focused on the theoretical ideal of a totalitarian state, for expediency. Of course, no state can be completely totalitarian, and actual implementations always show cracks. In historical examples of totalitarian systems that became accessible to the West, such us most prominently the Soviet Union, we see that the totalitarian narrative in culture and dramatic arts sooner or later collapses into a mere surface charade. Below the childish and idiotic surface, flesh-and-blood citizens play out the charade with farcical automation, and if the threat against it is low enough, develop an underground culture where the true drama of human conflict plays out.
Many of the phenomena that at first glance seem negative are in fact means to establish cultural processes for negotiating conflict, accommodating ambition, and creating differentiation. Such phenomena include bribes, alternative currencies, underground markets, and smaller-group loyalty. In a democratic society all such phenomena are considered bad because such a society believes itself to already provide legitimate alternatives for each one, and playing within the legitimate rules is part of the social contract. However, in totalitarian societies, there are no alternatives, and the existence of underground versions is necessary to keep a basic level of collective sanity.
Read more in the book Catharses.