Discernment and Desire

If nothing else, the last year has taught me to be more discerning. I have learned that little is as it seems and nothing that comes out of the mouths of the ruling elite or their propaganda machine is to be taken at face value. That does not mean that it is worthless to pay attention to what gets reported in the news. On the contrary, it’s most important to keep eyes and ears on what is happening all over the world, because the truth will be there somewhere. The crucial point is understanding that it will seldom be handed to us. Instead, it will be obfuscated, deemphasized, buried, bent, or outright turned inside out. Once in a while, it is given verbatim, but that’s when it sounds so outrageous nobody will believe it.

I see social media posts, mostly on Twitter, from people pointing out the nonsensical policies of our “elected” leaders. These average Johns and Janes, along with more well-known ones, rail about hypocrisy, about policies that produce consequences exactly opposite to proclaimed intentions, about the blindness of those with way too much control over the lives of the rest of us. I used to the do the same. Now I just shake my head and think, “Nope, those Janes and Johns still don’t get it.”

One of the most important books I have ever read is I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard. He was the 20^th-century anthropologist/philosopher who gave a name to mimetic desire: the passion lodged in the breasts of humans that drives us to want what others have, to imitate them in order to think we might get it, and then to band together with those driven by the same lust so we can bring down the one who is supposed to have what we want.

Girard wrote or contributed to more than a dozen books, but so far, I’ve managed to read two. Thankfully, when I discovered him last year in a roundabout manner, I was led to purchase and read I See Satan Fall …. The book focuses on Jesus Christ and how He undermined evil by shining a light on the greatest deception of the devil. How does Satan cast out Satan? By convincing us that we can rid the world of evil through an evil act.

Christ does not achieve this victory through violence. He obtains it through a renunciation of violence so complete that violence can rage to its heart’s content without realizing that by so doing, it reveals what it must conceal, without suspecting that its fury will turn back against it this time because it will be recorded and represented with exactness in the Passion narratives.

If we do not detect the role of mimetic contagion in the genesis of social orders, the idea that the principalities and powers are disarmed and exposed by the Cross will appear absurd, a pure and simple inversion of the truth. 

—René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Now, and in the last four years, mimetic desire and the single victim mechanism, which entails the sacrifice of one victim to heal society’s ills, are playing out on the world stage like never before since the crucifixion of Christ. Does that sound extreme? It should, because we are living in extreme times.