Rene Girard

A French historian and literary critic, described in Peter Thiel’s Religion as the person who influenced Peter Thiel more than any other writer — Thiel studied under Girard as a Stanford undergraduate in the late 1980s, and the relationship became a lifelong friendship; Thiel spoke at Girard’s memorial service. Girard is famous for Mimetic Theory, which the essay calls the bedrock of Thiel’s worldview. The theory rests on the assumption that all cultural behavior — beginning with a child’s acquisition of language — is imitative: Girard saw the world as “a theatre of envy,” where, like mimes, we imitate other people’s desires. Its corollary is a darker claim that human culture began with a murder, fueled by rage and rivalry, and that managing that mimetic violence is the secret reason for all religious and political institutions. Girard framed the essence of his own theory starkly: “There are fundamentally only two ways of looking at religion: as superfluous, added on—or as the origin of everything.”

Girard’s scapegoat mechanism (developed across the fuller Perell essay) holds that ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat is how archaic communities contained runaway mimetic violence, and that the Christian story inverts this pattern by being told from the victim’s (Jesus’s) perspective rather than the community’s — which Girard read as the essence of biblical revelation. Girard also recommended his own book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, as Thiel’s go-to text on “searching for secrets.”

Across the wiki, Girard is the deep root behind Memetics: if desire is imitative, then memes (Greek mimeme, “that which is imitated”) are simply how those imitated desires propagate at the speed of the internet — a thread Kyle’s The Meme Economy - Research picks up directly. Girard’s evidence base is notable for drawing on “the kinds of books and people that modern people tend to ignore”: the Bible, classic novelists like Marcel Proust, and playwrights like William Shakespeare, whose plays he reads as theatres of envy and imitated desire.

Context: René Girard (1923–2015) was a French-American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science, longtime professor at Stanford, and member of the Académie française. His major works include Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Violence and the Sacred, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, developing mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and a theory of the sacred.

Where this appears

• Peter Thiel’s Religion — named as the single biggest influence on Peter Thiel; mimetic theory, the scapegoat mechanism, and its evidence base (Bible, Proust, Shakespeare) laid out in full.
• Memetics — Girardian mimetic theory framed as the deep root of memetics (imitated desire propagating as memes).
• William Shakespeare — Shakespeare as one of the three pillars of Girard’s mimetic-theory evidence base.
• The Meme Economy - Research — cited among the people behind the meme-economy thesis (belief precedes truth; desire is imitative).