Thank you very much for overcoming your resistance and providing this simple and straightforward rebuttal of the notion that the words, writings and actions of Thiel/Vance accurately represent René Girard's theory or, worse, how he might have wanted to see it put into practice.
Thank you very very much for this comment. It must be upsetting for you to watch this misrepresentation playing out, so I’m glad you at least found my small gesture of protest.
Couldn’t agree more! I find this distortion of Girard’s thoughts pretty appalling. Makes me think of Nietzsche’s own misrepresentation by the Nazis. And yes, better read Girard himself than any of his (politically biased) commentators. I’d even add: read it in French if you can, his prose is incredibly elegant and compelling, comparable to Bergson’s, for instance.
Thank you very much for this. I fully agree re Girard’s French. I hadn’t considered the Bergson comparison before, but upon reflection there are some strong common elements: the effortless deployment of apt metaphors, the ability to be precise without being excessively technical, etc.
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this. It's only the latest work on Girard I've encountered that makes me look anew at my own scapegoating tendencies. Like Vance, I have been fond of labeling myself as "anti-woke." Unlike him, I also identify myself as "anti-Trump." Girard's thought, as interpolated by thoughtful writing such as yours, is helping me realize that there's something I'm just not getting in my passionate commitment to being "anti." I'm really, really bad at putting that faint, fragile realization into practice. But I hope some kind of seed is growing in there, somewhere. Thank you. Take good care.
Great essay and analysis! Wanted to share a link to a Thiel lecture where he discusses Girardian concepts of scapegoating, victims, etc. in greater depth. I don’t know if any of this made it into his book, but this is where I first read about his thinking on Girard.
You’re right that Thiel, Vance, etc. aren’t Girardian in the sense of understanding his work and avoiding the evils he describes—rather as examples of what Girard warned against.
Thank you very much for your kind words. I haven’t seen this lecture before, so I’ll check it out. Not much made it into the book, by the sound of things. Thank you for pointing it out to me!
Thanks for sharing this. I'm no Girard expert, but I've read some of his work and some about him. And to this extent, I've been bumfuzzled about how Thiel (as a prime example) can be an enthusiastic supporter of a candidate (Trump) who so overtly and regularly scapegoats others! Along with the lying, Trump is constantly scapegoating, and they're always usual suspects, the weakest in society. This strikes me as quite contrary to Girard's values, especially his interpretation of Christianity. But then you may simply be right that attempting to apply something as deep and subtle as Girard's thought to political opportunists is a fool's errand.
Peter Thiel seems to me to be one of the wilest, & most fascinating, operators inside/outside the public arena today. At this point in my investigations him, it is not at all clear what his actual belief system is, or how exactly that system informs & interoperates w/ his public speech & actions.
(*Thiel is, as they say, a very private person.... Indeed, if I were to liken him to a literary character, the most apt choice is probably Sauron, the archetectonic villian from Thiel's own beloved 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. Sauron, you will recall, is figured as an 'all-seeing Eye' that knows all that has happened, all that is happening, & even what will happen in the future to an exent (b/c he possess a talisman called the 'seeing stones,' or 'Palantir' in Tolkein's fictive language); rarely speaks, at least not in any kind of substantive way that motors forward the plot of the series; & yet - despite his apparent empyrean detachment from worldly affairs - Sauron has prearranged conditions such that vast multitudes of 'inferior beings' carry out his Nietzschean will & dark, panoptic 'vision' for Middle Earth.)
What does seem clear is that whatever Thiel's ethical system actually consists of its various components are arranged in a highly coherent, logico-deductive manner (while also probably being more postmodern-heteroglossic, each in itself & together, than Thiel would like to consciously/publicly admit. What I have also begun to sense is that Thiel's public persona, & the public pronoucements he does occasionally make, are - in a word - obscurantist.
Below are a few of the key texts that have had a hand in guiding my evolving considerations of Thiel, listed in the order in which they were encountered:
Please feel free to get in touch w/ your thoughts - most especially, if you happen to also notice the idealism-realpolitik dialectic animating the above collection as you move through it (which, I should emphasize, is not reducible to simple hypocrisy on the part of Thiel/Karp in my opinion).
The most embarrassing feature of our age is its obsession with politics 👏🏽
Much of Girard’s theory is primarily concerned with egotism, status-hunger, glory-seeking, and their mimetic causes and effects. - the former statement of yours speaks to this latter statement.
Thiel and Vance both fall into the trap of "fitting their conclusion into a hypothesis" (rather than the other way around) with Girard - that is, they had a world view, and tried to force Girard into that. Thank you for writing this piece to show how they do that. Your framing of your conclusion is especially well-stated and astute.
Thanks, very insightful. I have had only a little exposure to his writing (Things hidden since the foundation of the world), but his ideas resonate with the truth of experience and so I feel I have an intuitive understanding. Life in the time of COVID was an insight into deep history for me.
I agree with your thesis though I wanted to challenge some of your commentary. With regard to anti-woke, there is a coherent and rational argument that can be made that has a direct through line to political correctness. I am not at all familiar with Girard to know what his perspective would be, but I would like to think he would disagree with the Woke worldview and note it's dynamics accurately.
There seems to be some demon operating within the current culture of political polarisation that prevents a coherent centre (not an arithmetic middle as you also note) from forming, where true things, once made extreme by the right, lose respectability and provide a rebound for central liberals to reflexively form allegiance with the left again. It is a basic failure of discernment. Woke, the modern form, not it's origin meaning, is easily characterised and easily shown to be a problem--censorship, scapegoating, loss of academic freedom, cancel culture, groupthink, Hollywood social engineering- there are copious examples of it's egregious excesses. Just because the right produces an oversimplified version of it for their own purposes, and then in turn creates a weaponised and equivalent reactionary version, anti-woke, doesn't mean that there is not a core thread of truth about their claims. I don't agree with a lot of what Jordan Peterson says, but he was right about the risks of compelled pronoun use. People who have lost their jobs will confirm that risk.
I can understand people arguing about it's reach into various institutions and pointing to equivalence on the right but im puzzled by people professing confusion about what Woke is- where have people been living over the last 5- 10 years?
I agree with all of this, particularly about the destruction of a coherent centre. In academia, where I spend most of my time, the dynamic is just as you describe. Every idea or position gets branded “left” or “right”, so that you can’t state it without signalling some political allegiance. People then respond to your signalled “politics” rather than your idea. All thought dissolves into political power-wrangling, like some caricatured version of Foucault.
Discovering this just now, h/t Martin Girard. Spot-on.
The instrumentalization of Girard's ideas to abet/weaponize/profit from rivalrous mimesis and scapegoating is so dazzlingly wrongheaded (to put it kindly) one hesitates to argue or even engage with it, as the person(s) doing so are either so feckless or cynical or both that the possibility of getting them to see where they are not just wrong but an actual case study in what mimetic theory discloses seems a hopeless prospect.
This was a good read. None of this surprises me or is anything new. People take philosophical and religious writing out of context all the time. Sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. The most obvious example of this is taking verses from the Bible out of context. Often it is done innocently but other times for nefarious purposes.
Since you seem to be a specialist in Girard where would you recommend a nonspecialist to start in reading him?
Thank you! Regarding where to start with Girard, the most accessible presentation of his core ideas is probably *I See Satan Fall Light Lightning*. But to get a sense of him and his take on contemporary politics, the interviews with Michel Tregeur are invaluable.
Girard is very accessible to non-specialists. He didn’t write in a convoluted academic style. I see Satan Fall Like lightning is where I’d start, particularly if you are of a religious bend. It was revelatory to me.
In the same vein, you might consider "L'Univers de René Girard" by Nadine Dormoy, 1988 conversations between Girard and the author (recently published in English as "The World of René Girard: Interviews").
Thank you for this post. I've been an admirer of Girard's work for almost thirty years, ever since I was introduced to that work personally by Gil Bailie, one of Girard's best interpreters and popularizers. I've been appalled by the ongoing co-optation of Girard's legacy by figures on the political right, especially Thiel and in particular Vance, who seems to be a compulsive scapegoater. I will also say that Girard's mimetic theory, including his explication of the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism, is inseparable from his conclusion that the biblical tradition - and especially the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ - constitutes a divine unwinding of the efficacy of the "sin of the world."
Really helpful, thanks for this. Would you say that thinking in a Girardian sort of way requires non-dualism? It’s not about being in the right category, but realizing that the categories are the problem.
Once someone unveils Mimetic Theory—by truly understanding it—it becomes impossible to unsee. Either you recognize others using it, or you use it yourself. No one remains outside the game.
A thought-provoking and interesting read. My familiarity with Girard is largely confined to his literary theory, but some of the strange ways people apply different philosophy is probably worthy of its own study. It's a kind of ethos high jacking only made possible by the strange ubiquity of modern media and rapid (albeit partial) access to information.
I suggest you listen to this recording of one Girard’s Friday seminars. Around 48 minutes you can hear that questioner is Peter Thiel. My understanding is he brought into The Girard world by his pastor Robert Kelly.
Thank you very much for overcoming your resistance and providing this simple and straightforward rebuttal of the notion that the words, writings and actions of Thiel/Vance accurately represent René Girard's theory or, worse, how he might have wanted to see it put into practice.
Thank you very very much for this comment. It must be upsetting for you to watch this misrepresentation playing out, so I’m glad you at least found my small gesture of protest.
I just found this brillianty clear and important essay thanks to your comment. I will share it widely!
Couldn’t agree more! I find this distortion of Girard’s thoughts pretty appalling. Makes me think of Nietzsche’s own misrepresentation by the Nazis. And yes, better read Girard himself than any of his (politically biased) commentators. I’d even add: read it in French if you can, his prose is incredibly elegant and compelling, comparable to Bergson’s, for instance.
Thank you very much for this. I fully agree re Girard’s French. I hadn’t considered the Bergson comparison before, but upon reflection there are some strong common elements: the effortless deployment of apt metaphors, the ability to be precise without being excessively technical, etc.
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this. It's only the latest work on Girard I've encountered that makes me look anew at my own scapegoating tendencies. Like Vance, I have been fond of labeling myself as "anti-woke." Unlike him, I also identify myself as "anti-Trump." Girard's thought, as interpolated by thoughtful writing such as yours, is helping me realize that there's something I'm just not getting in my passionate commitment to being "anti." I'm really, really bad at putting that faint, fragile realization into practice. But I hope some kind of seed is growing in there, somewhere. Thank you. Take good care.
Thank you for these honest words. I too struggle with this immensely in practice, despite having studied it in theory for a long time.
Great essay and analysis! Wanted to share a link to a Thiel lecture where he discusses Girardian concepts of scapegoating, victims, etc. in greater depth. I don’t know if any of this made it into his book, but this is where I first read about his thinking on Girard.
Thiel 2012 Stanford lecture notes:
https://www.tumblr.com/blakemasters/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes
You’re right that Thiel, Vance, etc. aren’t Girardian in the sense of understanding his work and avoiding the evils he describes—rather as examples of what Girard warned against.
Thank you very much for your kind words. I haven’t seen this lecture before, so I’ll check it out. Not much made it into the book, by the sound of things. Thank you for pointing it out to me!
Thanks for sharing this. I'm no Girard expert, but I've read some of his work and some about him. And to this extent, I've been bumfuzzled about how Thiel (as a prime example) can be an enthusiastic supporter of a candidate (Trump) who so overtly and regularly scapegoats others! Along with the lying, Trump is constantly scapegoating, and they're always usual suspects, the weakest in society. This strikes me as quite contrary to Girard's values, especially his interpretation of Christianity. But then you may simply be right that attempting to apply something as deep and subtle as Girard's thought to political opportunists is a fool's errand.
Peter Thiel seems to me to be one of the wilest, & most fascinating, operators inside/outside the public arena today. At this point in my investigations him, it is not at all clear what his actual belief system is, or how exactly that system informs & interoperates w/ his public speech & actions.
(*Thiel is, as they say, a very private person.... Indeed, if I were to liken him to a literary character, the most apt choice is probably Sauron, the archetectonic villian from Thiel's own beloved 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. Sauron, you will recall, is figured as an 'all-seeing Eye' that knows all that has happened, all that is happening, & even what will happen in the future to an exent (b/c he possess a talisman called the 'seeing stones,' or 'Palantir' in Tolkein's fictive language); rarely speaks, at least not in any kind of substantive way that motors forward the plot of the series; & yet - despite his apparent empyrean detachment from worldly affairs - Sauron has prearranged conditions such that vast multitudes of 'inferior beings' carry out his Nietzschean will & dark, panoptic 'vision' for Middle Earth.)
What does seem clear is that whatever Thiel's ethical system actually consists of its various components are arranged in a highly coherent, logico-deductive manner (while also probably being more postmodern-heteroglossic, each in itself & together, than Thiel would like to consciously/publicly admit. What I have also begun to sense is that Thiel's public persona, & the public pronoucements he does occasionally make, are - in a word - obscurantist.
Below are a few of the key texts that have had a hand in guiding my evolving considerations of Thiel, listed in the order in which they were encountered:
• Packer, G. (2013). The unwinding - An inner history of the new America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (See: "Silicon Valley"; pp. 192-98.) (https://dokumen.pub/the-unwinding-an-inner-history-of-the-new-america-unabridged-9781427235947-1427235945-978-0-374-10241-8-9781466836952.html)
• Thiel, P. (2007). The Straussian moment. In R. Hamerton-Kelly (Ed.), Politics & Apocalypse: Studies in Violence, Mimesis, & Culture. Michigan State UP. (https://mindseyemag.com/magazine/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2007-thiel.pdf)
• Hurwitz, S. (2025, February 6). The gleeful profiteers of Trump’s police state. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/palantir-alex-karp-trump-private-prisons-profiteers/
• Karp, A. (2025, February 3). Letter to shareholders [Open letter]. https://www.palantir.com/q4-2024-letter/en/
Please feel free to get in touch w/ your thoughts - most especially, if you happen to also notice the idealism-realpolitik dialectic animating the above collection as you move through it (which, I should emphasize, is not reducible to simple hypocrisy on the part of Thiel/Karp in my opinion).
The most embarrassing feature of our age is its obsession with politics 👏🏽
Much of Girard’s theory is primarily concerned with egotism, status-hunger, glory-seeking, and their mimetic causes and effects. - the former statement of yours speaks to this latter statement.
Thiel and Vance both fall into the trap of "fitting their conclusion into a hypothesis" (rather than the other way around) with Girard - that is, they had a world view, and tried to force Girard into that. Thank you for writing this piece to show how they do that. Your framing of your conclusion is especially well-stated and astute.
Thank you! It is reassuring and gratifying to find people who feel the same way about this.
PSA: Anyone who liked this piece ought to enjoy this superb reading of the rhetoric of Thiel's (in)famous "Straussian Moment" essay: https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/1176-from-philosophy-to-power
Thanks, very insightful. I have had only a little exposure to his writing (Things hidden since the foundation of the world), but his ideas resonate with the truth of experience and so I feel I have an intuitive understanding. Life in the time of COVID was an insight into deep history for me.
I agree with your thesis though I wanted to challenge some of your commentary. With regard to anti-woke, there is a coherent and rational argument that can be made that has a direct through line to political correctness. I am not at all familiar with Girard to know what his perspective would be, but I would like to think he would disagree with the Woke worldview and note it's dynamics accurately.
There seems to be some demon operating within the current culture of political polarisation that prevents a coherent centre (not an arithmetic middle as you also note) from forming, where true things, once made extreme by the right, lose respectability and provide a rebound for central liberals to reflexively form allegiance with the left again. It is a basic failure of discernment. Woke, the modern form, not it's origin meaning, is easily characterised and easily shown to be a problem--censorship, scapegoating, loss of academic freedom, cancel culture, groupthink, Hollywood social engineering- there are copious examples of it's egregious excesses. Just because the right produces an oversimplified version of it for their own purposes, and then in turn creates a weaponised and equivalent reactionary version, anti-woke, doesn't mean that there is not a core thread of truth about their claims. I don't agree with a lot of what Jordan Peterson says, but he was right about the risks of compelled pronoun use. People who have lost their jobs will confirm that risk.
I can understand people arguing about it's reach into various institutions and pointing to equivalence on the right but im puzzled by people professing confusion about what Woke is- where have people been living over the last 5- 10 years?
I agree with all of this, particularly about the destruction of a coherent centre. In academia, where I spend most of my time, the dynamic is just as you describe. Every idea or position gets branded “left” or “right”, so that you can’t state it without signalling some political allegiance. People then respond to your signalled “politics” rather than your idea. All thought dissolves into political power-wrangling, like some caricatured version of Foucault.
Yes, it's curious how so many fall into it, on some issues I probably do myself. Like people forgot there might be an alternative.
Discovering this just now, h/t Martin Girard. Spot-on.
The instrumentalization of Girard's ideas to abet/weaponize/profit from rivalrous mimesis and scapegoating is so dazzlingly wrongheaded (to put it kindly) one hesitates to argue or even engage with it, as the person(s) doing so are either so feckless or cynical or both that the possibility of getting them to see where they are not just wrong but an actual case study in what mimetic theory discloses seems a hopeless prospect.
Kudos for this clearheaded set of observations.
Thank you! Much appreciated.
This is exactly right, I think. Thank you for writing this!
This was a good read. None of this surprises me or is anything new. People take philosophical and religious writing out of context all the time. Sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. The most obvious example of this is taking verses from the Bible out of context. Often it is done innocently but other times for nefarious purposes.
Since you seem to be a specialist in Girard where would you recommend a nonspecialist to start in reading him?
Thank you! Regarding where to start with Girard, the most accessible presentation of his core ideas is probably *I See Satan Fall Light Lightning*. But to get a sense of him and his take on contemporary politics, the interviews with Michel Tregeur are invaluable.
Girard is very accessible to non-specialists. He didn’t write in a convoluted academic style. I see Satan Fall Like lightning is where I’d start, particularly if you are of a religious bend. It was revelatory to me.
Thank you, Alexander. I will take a look at both! Is the interview on Youtube or is it published in print form?
I hope you like it! The interviews are published as a book, *When These Things Begin*
Thank you, I will start there.
In the same vein, you might consider "L'Univers de René Girard" by Nadine Dormoy, 1988 conversations between Girard and the author (recently published in English as "The World of René Girard: Interviews").
Thank you, I shall look into that work as well.
Thank you for this post. I've been an admirer of Girard's work for almost thirty years, ever since I was introduced to that work personally by Gil Bailie, one of Girard's best interpreters and popularizers. I've been appalled by the ongoing co-optation of Girard's legacy by figures on the political right, especially Thiel and in particular Vance, who seems to be a compulsive scapegoater. I will also say that Girard's mimetic theory, including his explication of the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism, is inseparable from his conclusion that the biblical tradition - and especially the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ - constitutes a divine unwinding of the efficacy of the "sin of the world."
Really helpful, thanks for this. Would you say that thinking in a Girardian sort of way requires non-dualism? It’s not about being in the right category, but realizing that the categories are the problem.
Yes, I do think so!
Once someone unveils Mimetic Theory—by truly understanding it—it becomes impossible to unsee. Either you recognize others using it, or you use it yourself. No one remains outside the game.
A thought-provoking and interesting read. My familiarity with Girard is largely confined to his literary theory, but some of the strange ways people apply different philosophy is probably worthy of its own study. It's a kind of ethos high jacking only made possible by the strange ubiquity of modern media and rapid (albeit partial) access to information.
I suggest you listen to this recording of one Girard’s Friday seminars. Around 48 minutes you can hear that questioner is Peter Thiel. My understanding is he brought into The Girard world by his pastor Robert Kelly.
I'm listening to Violence & the Sacred | A Friday Afternoon Seminar with René Girard - 2006 on Podbean, check it out!https://www.podbean.com/wlei/pb-6m5cv-12628bc
Ah, I’d heard it, but didn’t know that was Peter Thiel. It’s a very Thiely question.
This article, shared by Steve McKenna, confirms the connection to Robert Hamerton-Kelly: https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/1176-from-philosophy-to-power