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Girard Digest 11: Mimetic Violence
Mar. 18th, 2019 08:26 pmTo bring us up to date, these are the main ideas so far:
If you've been reading along, you may be one step ahead of me already. If humans are imitative, and we imitate another's desires, then: we also imitate another's violence. This, you may not be surprised to learn, is called mimetic violence.
Say I am in conflict with my sister. There is only so much tension our relationship can bear, and I would rather not sacrifice our relationship for whatever it is we're fighting over. I have all this pent-up animosity, then, which can't be directed at the person causing it, but isn't just going to go away on its own. I meet you at the coffee machine, and you tell me about your terrible commute in to work, how the first bus was late which made you miss your connection, and there was a funny smell, and the driver was rude. You're right! The transit system is terrible. We bond over shared transit horror stories. I find my frustration with the transit system growing more desperate by the day. Soon I am rude to the drivers. The drivers, in turn, imitate me and are rude back. When I am caught carving an anatomical detail into the back of a seat, they refuse to pick me up. My hatred of the transit system burns hotter.
There are three things happening here: First, I pick up your hatred of the transit system as an acceptable substitute for my animosity towards my sister – hating an enormous abstract over which I have no power is much safer than escalating interpersonal conflict. Second, we become competitive in how much we can hate on the transit system – I may never have given it a second thought before, but once I adopt your hatred, I must demonstrate my sincerity by one-upping it, which you do in return, and before long our mimetic violence has us acting out our violence towards public transport. Third, the drivers and I enter a separate cycle of mimetic violence, this time an adversarial one rather than the friendly one I have with you. Across the board, violence increases.
I may never know what your desire was, which caused you to enter a rivalry with the transit system. It is enough that you offered me a new rivalry into which I could channel the problematic animosity from my existing rivalry. Possibly you adopted your transit rivalry from someone you met, too, rather than developing it independently. There might be a whole chain of transit-haters who have picked up this hatred second-, third-, seventeenth-hand, all because someone, somewhere, found out her husband was flirting with a bus driver.
The easy transmission of both desire and animosity between people leads to a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who's had a cold: contagion.
Girard Digest 12: Contagion
For the record, I am a big fan of both public transit and my sister, who works in a different field of animation and is therefore never going to be my rival. At least not professionally. ;)
- Humans are inherently imitative (mimetic) creatures
- We want other people to validate our desires/values by imitating them, but also view other people as competitors, creating a double bind: imitate me, but don't imitate me too well.
- When we imitate others' desires, we come into conflict with them as we both strive for the same thing (mimetic rivalry)
- Eventually, the conflict with one's rival becomes more of a preoccupation than the desire you have in common
- We can either express our animosity to our rival through violence (which includes a wide range of social hostility as well as the physical kind), or, if violence towards our rival is unacceptable, then we transfer that violence onto another opponent.
If you've been reading along, you may be one step ahead of me already. If humans are imitative, and we imitate another's desires, then: we also imitate another's violence. This, you may not be surprised to learn, is called mimetic violence.
Say I am in conflict with my sister. There is only so much tension our relationship can bear, and I would rather not sacrifice our relationship for whatever it is we're fighting over. I have all this pent-up animosity, then, which can't be directed at the person causing it, but isn't just going to go away on its own. I meet you at the coffee machine, and you tell me about your terrible commute in to work, how the first bus was late which made you miss your connection, and there was a funny smell, and the driver was rude. You're right! The transit system is terrible. We bond over shared transit horror stories. I find my frustration with the transit system growing more desperate by the day. Soon I am rude to the drivers. The drivers, in turn, imitate me and are rude back. When I am caught carving an anatomical detail into the back of a seat, they refuse to pick me up. My hatred of the transit system burns hotter.
There are three things happening here: First, I pick up your hatred of the transit system as an acceptable substitute for my animosity towards my sister – hating an enormous abstract over which I have no power is much safer than escalating interpersonal conflict. Second, we become competitive in how much we can hate on the transit system – I may never have given it a second thought before, but once I adopt your hatred, I must demonstrate my sincerity by one-upping it, which you do in return, and before long our mimetic violence has us acting out our violence towards public transport. Third, the drivers and I enter a separate cycle of mimetic violence, this time an adversarial one rather than the friendly one I have with you. Across the board, violence increases.
I may never know what your desire was, which caused you to enter a rivalry with the transit system. It is enough that you offered me a new rivalry into which I could channel the problematic animosity from my existing rivalry. Possibly you adopted your transit rivalry from someone you met, too, rather than developing it independently. There might be a whole chain of transit-haters who have picked up this hatred second-, third-, seventeenth-hand, all because someone, somewhere, found out her husband was flirting with a bus driver.
The easy transmission of both desire and animosity between people leads to a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who's had a cold: contagion.
Girard Digest 12: Contagion
For the record, I am a big fan of both public transit and my sister, who works in a different field of animation and is therefore never going to be my rival. At least not professionally. ;)
