From an early age, Palaver was a peaceful activist, registration as conscientious opposition at the age of 18, and then organizing nuclear weapons in college. It was in the class with the roots of human violence, where he came to study the work of Rene Girard – whose unusual theories generated noise in some parts of Europe.
Girard’s basic insight, Palaver would learn, is that all people are followers, starting with their needs. “When their natural needs are satisfied, people want intensively,” wrote Girard, “but they don’t know exactly what they want.” So people imitate the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors – “in this way ensuring their lives of eternal fights and competition with those whom they hate and admire at the same time.”
According to Girard, this “mimesis” – this is relentless copying – is being built, as in various relationships. In groups, everyone begins to look similar when they converge in several models, monkeys the same desires and compete furiously with the same objects. And the only reason why this “mimetic competition” ever breaks out of the omniscient war is that at some point he tends to transform into a war against everyone against everything one. Through something that Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism”, everyone adapts to the unfortunate goal that is responsible for the group’s diseases. Girard wrote that this mechanism is so necessary for cultural cohesion that the narratives of the scapegoat are the founders of every archaic culture.
But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, meant a turning point in human consciousness – because once and for all it revealed that the sacrificial goats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the narrative of the crucifixion, Jesus is murdered in a shameful act of collective violence. But unlike almost every other sacrificial myth, this From the perspective of a scapegoat, he tells himself and the audience cannot fail to understand injustice.
In this revelation, Girard wrote, the ancient rituals of the scapegoat immediately began to lose their effectiveness, not discredited and discredited. Humanity is no longer gaining the same relief from common acts of violence. The community is still a sacrificial goat all the time, but with less and less consistency to show. What awaits us at the end of history is unquestionable, contagious and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic competition.
The advantage of the narrative of the crucifixion is, however, that it offers moral redemption of humanity. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: regardless of the final game, you need to completely reject the sacrificial goat. The imitation remains inevitable, but we can choose our models. And the soundtrack forward, as he saw him, is the imitation of Jesus-Jedyne Model, which will never become a “fascinating rival”-in leading a Christian life without violence.
Girard’s theory almost immediately became Lodestar for the teenage Palaver, who recognized him as a bridge between his peaceful activism and theology. “You discover Girard,” says Palaver, “and suddenly you have the perfect tool to criticize all scapegoat.” And the teenage activist already had some main sacrificial goats in his sight.
In 1983-in the same year as the first class at Girard-Biskup Innsbruck tried to stop Palavera from gathering a group of teenage Catholics to join the largest protest in history against American missiles in Europe. By rejecting Palaver’s views as geopolitical naivety, the bishop told him to read the German collection of essays called Brotherhood illusion: the need to have enemies. The book, Palaver realized, was full of references to the idea – associated by Carl Schmitt – this policy is based on distinguishing friends from enemies. Reading the book, Palaver realized that “more or less against every sentence.”
So, as a doctoral student, the teenage Austrian decided to write Girardian Critique of Schmitt. He would apply the theory of Girardian against the right architect of the last great misfortune of Europe, who inspired frosty warriors who fueled the next ones. “Focusing on Schmitt,” he explained, “he meant for me to turn against the archives of my pacifist attitude.”
At the end of the 1980s, Palaver became one of the diminutive team of Girardian lovers at the Faculty of University of Innsbruck. Girard’s ideas also collected a couple in academic circles in other places in Europe. But Girard himself continued to develop his theories in relative forgetfulness at the Atlantic at Stanford University.
IV.
When Thiel arrived In Stanford, in the mid -eighties he was a teenage libertarian with the enthusiasm of anti -communism from the time of Reagan, hatred of compliance resulting from his stay in the Drakonian South African preparatory school and aspiration and aspiration, how he described it to win “One competition after the other. “He quickly played the role of a classic gadfly campus. Stanford reviewThe right-wing student publication-who contempted the fashionable policy of diversity and multiculturalism at a time when the demonstrations of mass students were guaranteed against the West Canon and Apartheid in South Africa.
No wonder that Thiel was attracted to Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the necessary, conservative minister of the Stanford campus, who once called himself “from South Africa armed with fascist education at a boarding school.” Hamerton-Kelly conducted classes in Western civilization and, according to Gazeta Szkolna, was booed at least once by the Anti-Artheid audience on the campus. According to several people who know them, Thiel came to see Hamerton-Kelly as a mentor. And because of him Thiel met Girard personally.
Hamerton-Kelly was one of Girard’s closest friends in Stanford and one of the most famed masters of mimetic theory in the United States. He also conducted the two -week research group Girardian in trailer At the campus and at the invitation, Thiel became a regular element in the early 1990s. According to his own party, his initial train for Girard’s mimetic thinking was simply contradictory. “It was very uneven with time,” said Thiel in 2009 interview“This had a kind of natural appeal to somewhat rebellious students.” In addition, Thiel’s first impression was that the mimetic theory was “crazy”.