The Nature of Violence

A Crash Course On René Girard That Might Change Your Life

“Why is there so much violence in our midst? No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers.”

- René Girard, One by Whom Scandal Comes

There is a secret hidden since the foundation of the world that describes the nature of violence. According to a wise man born in Avignon on Christmas Day, 1923, the root of humanity’s violent nature can be explained by one simple thing. And understanding this thing gives you the key to understanding the world around you, and to handling conflict in your own life.

“Violence seems to be escalating in a way that may be likened to the spread of a fire or an epidemic. The great mythic images rise up again before our eyes, as if violence had rediscovered a very ancient and rather mysterious form, a swirling vortex in which the most acute kinds of violence merge into one. Now there is the kind of violence that is now seen throughout the world, a terrorism without limits or boundaries that heralds an age of wars of extermination against civil populations. We seem to be hurtling toward a moment when all mankind will be confronted with the reality of its own violence.”

René Girard wrote those words near the end of his long life just shy of a decade ago. As a philosophical anthropologist, he dedicated his life’s work to understanding man, myth, religion, the sacred, and the fundamental forces driving violence. 

“People everywhere today are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance. These interlocking episodes resemble each other, quite obviously, because they all imitate each other. This is why I say the true secret of conflict and violence is mimetic desire.”

What is mimetic desire? And why is it, according to Girard, the true secret of conflict and violence? 

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire is so simple on the surface, but it has multiple layers of complexity to it. He says that once you start looking for mimeticism, you see it everywhere. 

Mimetic means to mimic, to imitate. And mimetic desire means that we mimic each other in our shared desire for the same object. This shared desire results in rivalry, and if it escalates, we have to fight each other.

But what if we don’t want to fight? What then? 

There is a way out of the conflict between us, well actually, three ways, and here enters the next part of Girard’s theory. 

The first way is for us to actually fight. 

The fight goes down between us. We have just begun a cycle of violence that can easily morph into intergenerational vengeance. An eye for an eye until the whole world is blind. 

This kind of thing is hard to put a stop to once it starts. Civilization cannot really thrive when ongoing all against all bloody wars are wiping everyone out. So, Girard argued, the second alternative was to find a way around it. Kind of like an adaptation to violence. 

This is the one I find the most fascinating, because if you’re looking, you will find it everywhere you go. 

Let’s say you and I are in this conflict, but we don’t really want to fight each other. 

“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”

Here enters the second way to resolve our conflict.

What Girard is talking about is what he called the scapegoating mechanism. We look for an innocent third party to project our guilt, our contempt, our conflict, our hatred, our fear and our resentment onto.  This happens in families, in communities, in personal relationships, and on a societal level. 

The scapegoat is meant to bear the burden of the mob who gangs up on it, either exiling it from the tribe, or slaughtering it in a sacrificial act of violence. Scapegoating, to the extreme, has led to the mass murders of minority groups, such as the Kulaks by the Soviet Communists, or the Jews by the Nazis. The horrors of the 20th century all involved mass movement scapegoating events, where the masses mobbed, persecuted, and killed the scapegoats, to cathartically cleanse themselves of their rivalries, which all began, Girard argues, with their mimetic desire.

For we imitate each other not only in our shared desires, but our shared animosity. 

The mass, made up of people with multiple inner-tensions and rivalries, are unified in their scapegoating, and once the scapegoat is dealt with, they find temporary peace, until tensions rise again.

Civilization itself was built upon the scapegoating mechanism as an imperfect way to resolve conflict, Girard argues. But humanity was elevated when the third way to deal with conflict was revealed.

So what’s the third way to handle our conflict, the last path we can take? It is, I would argue, the hardest path to take. But it is the best one we can choose in our personal relationships. 

The third way is to stop violence before it begins.

What? How? Sounds simple, but this one is the hardest to master.

Something happened around 2000 years ago that turned the scapegoating mechanism on its head. An innocent man was deemed guilty by the persecutory mob. Girard argued that He was put on the cross, and then resurrected, to reveal the truth about humanity. That is, for the first time, the scapegoat was ultimately found innocent. And more than simply being innocent, the people recognized his innocence and saw the errors of their ways. He was there to put right what had previously been in reverse: that the mob was ‘innocent’, and Jesus Christ was ‘guilty’. He revealed to humanity the nature of their violence, and the truth: that the innocent are innocent, and the guilty are guilty. 

The way to end our tribal violence is to understand that we are being pulled into the vortex. To shine light on what is hidden. To see the nature of our conflict, and choose another way out of it besides engaging in violent conflicts, and scapegoating the innocent.

“We are dealing with people who wish to infuriate us, to draw us into a cycle of escalating conflict. They do everything they can, in other words, to provoke a response that will justify them in retaliating in turn; to manufacture an excuse for legitimate self-defense. For if we treat them as they treat us, they will be able to disguise their own injustice by means of reprisals that are fully warranted by the violence we have committed. It is therefore necessary to deprive them of the negative collaboration that they demand of us. Violent persons must always be disobeyed, not only because they encourage us to do harm, but because it is only through disobedience that a lethally contagious form of collective behavior can be short-circuited. Only the conduct enjoined by Jesus can keep violence from getting out of hand, by putting a stop to it before it starts.”

By depriving violent people of the violent reprisal they try to instigate, we can stop violence before it starts.

Quick recap:

According to Girard, there are three parts to mimetic conflict: violence between the original rivals, scapegoating toward the third party, or making peace with our rivals before our conflict spirals out of control. The third way is the revelation that ends the archaic ways of the first: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It is what sheds light on the tribal second way: to choose peace over violence, to end scapegoating by refusing to take part in it.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, he argues, is anchored in the third way.

But what happens when you encounter archaic violence in the modern world?

What happens when you are confronted with an anti-Christian regime, which makes violence sacred instead of condemning it? 

Girard died in 2015, 9 days before the Bataclan massacre in Paris where Jihadists slaughtered 200 people in a coordinated three-way terror attack and injured hundreds more. Confronted with the rising threat of terrorism towards the end of his life, he never published a fully formed analysis about radical Islam, and the jihadist caliphate of destroying the Judeo-Christian way, even through coldblooded murder.

Scholars have pieced together his thoughts on the subject, and in an interview near the end of his life he said:

"As the world looks more threatening, religion is sure to return. And in a way, 9/11 is the beginning of this, for in this attack technology was used not for humanistic ends but for radical, metaphysico-religious ends, which are not Christian. That is why it is such an amazing thing for me, because I'm used to considering religious forces and humanistic forces together, not as if one were true and the other false; and then suddenly archaic religion is coming back in an incredibly forceful way with Islam. Islam has many aspects of the Biblical religions minus the revelation of violence as bad, as not divine but human; it makes violence totally divine. This is why the opposition is more significant than with communism, which is a humanism. It is a bogus humanism, the last and most incredibly foolish form, which results in terror. But it is still humanism. And suddenly we're back in religion, in archaic religion - but with modern weapons."

How do we respond to the rise of a violent archaic socio-religious-political ideology— a death cult that does not play by the same rules? How do we break the cycle of violence with an anti-Christian force that scapegoats, terrorizes, murders, maims, and desecrates the innocent victims, and does not recognize their own guilt? How do we meet those who celebrate violence instead of denouncing it? How do we confront those who maintain their vantage point of collective victimhood, who deny the Judeo-Christian revelation that the innocent are innocent and the guilty are guilty?

“Under the label of Islam we find a will to rally and mobilize an entire third world of those frustrated and of victims in their relations of mimetic rivalry with the West.” 

Girard was not alive to see the events of October 7th unfold, and the worldwide scapegoating and persecution of the Jews that has arisen in its wake. He is not here to give his thoughts on the dangerous Woke-Jihadist coalition, who in their mimetic hatred of everything that the West is about, threatens our very civilization. What is unfolding now is an archaic type of violence that refuses and reverses the Christian revelation. 

The answers to the looming civilization threat is not simple. To do nothing in the face of existential threats would be an act of self-extermination. René Girard proclaimed himself that he was not a pacifist. His ideas provide us with really powerful tools we can use in our own lives. On a societal level, we can ask ourselves if we are taking part in the scapegoating mechanism as it unfolds, taking out our petty rivalries on the innocent in order to release our tensions and unite with our foes.

“A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt.”

Girard says that the only choices we have are to join the persecution of the victim, or to stand alone. The only way to end scapegoating, according to Girard, is to stop participating in it, to shine a light on it and expose it. 

I will provide resources for you below to read and learn more about this, and to observe in your own lives how you can see these patterns playing out around you, and also within you. The point for me, is not to change our nature but to understand so we can learn to master it, to respond rather than react.

Understanding mimetic desire and scapegoating can help us to understand not only societal level events and our part in them, but the role of this secret in our relationships, families, friendships and work environments. We can see how friendships can turn to rivalries, if we are unaware of our mimetic desire. We can see when we are being scapegoated, or when we are scapegoating other people or groups. We can understand that all those tendencies are very human— human to the core— but we find the potential of our humanity when we tap into a higher part of what makes us human.

“All human beings now have the same vital interest in preserving peace. In a truly global world, the renunciation of violent reprisal is bound to become, in a more and more obvious way, the indispensable condition of our survival.”

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If you want to read René Girard’s work I have put some fantastic free resources below, as well as some links to buy his books and go down the Girardian rabbit hole. You can also subscribe to my Substack, where I have been writing about these kinds of things and will continue to write about them, and watch my latest video with

Norman Fenton

where we discuss mimetic desire and scapegoating. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to leave your comments below.

Girard’s The One by Whom Scandal Comes, is a book that everyone should be reading right now. The majority of quotes in this article are from this book, one of his last, written shortly before René died.

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Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is his magnum opus, highly recommended.

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Some good free stuff I have come across recently, which helped to shape this article:

René Girard’s Theories Summarized

René Girard’s Reflections on Modern Jihadism: An Introduction Andreas Wilmes

René Girard and the Question of Pacifism

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