Giulio d’Anna — The Swimmer, 1930 (detail)

On the curious survivance of “scapegoat theory” in Silicon Valley. By Adrian Daub.

Source: NZZ, Feuilleton, Saturday 30 April 2016 (http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/zeitgeschehen/suendenbock-und-silicon-valley-metaphysik-der-nerds-ld.16908)

Tech revolutionaries like Paypal-founder Peter Thiel claim they want to make the world a better place. What has all this preaching got to do with the anthropological theory of the Romance scholar René Girard?

The Romance philologist René Girard, who died in 2015, is well-known in Europe. From 1981 onwards, he was a professor at Stanford University, but some of his European readers might still be surprised by the fact that he has started to become more influent on the managing floor of some Silicon Valley companies than in universities.

One encounters many “Girardians” in Silicon Valley: they have their own conferences, their own book series, and their own foundation. They host the Governor of California at their meetings. The fan community around M. Girard embodies the process by which traditional Silicon Valley thinking is slowly turning into a socially transformative standard of life.

Why would the catholic-leaning philosophical anthropology of a Romance philologist be attractive to adepts of the technological persuasion? Girard’s main message is that every desire is the imitation of someone else’s desire. Human communities are therefore defined by a constant competition over identical goals — a competition that eventually turns into violence. To overcome this violence, this mimetic appetite must be focussed on a single point: the scapegoat. He is designated as the origin and culprit of that downward spiral into violence, and is eventually sacrificed. How can these archaic ideas be of any relevance to an internet startup?

The Californian aesthetic of the creative genius

The answer is, first and foremost, Peter Thiel himself. The billionaire co-founder of Paypal and former investor at Facebook loves funding unconventional charitable projects: a project against aging, the Thiel Fellowship, pays young people not to work; the Seasteading Institute designs small autonomous floating states in the middle of the ocean; whereas Imitatio, a think-tank, has tasked itself with the propagation of René Girard’s philosophy.

Imitatio’s goal is not simply research into Girard’s works, but also to propagate imitation theory “in social sciences as a whole”. The true ambition of the group stems from the same principle that underpins Thiel’s research into ocean colonies or the slowing of aging: the improvement of mankind. The idea behind it is: if the drive for imitation could be reined in or at least redirected into more constructive channels, then violence, war and instability could be brought to an end.

Tullio Crali — Lotta grecoromana (1936)

But where does this love story between intellectuals and entrepreneurs come from? Silicon Valley has always harboured its own particular aesthetic of the creative genius. The industry as a whole is doing very well, and since success cannot simply be a matter of luck, the only plausible explanation seems to be one’s own genius. Geniuses are normally men, and they like to form cliques: for example the “Objectivists”, who subscribe to the anarcho-capitalist theories formulated by Ayn Rand in the 50’s. Or, in this case, Girardians.

Thiel first heard of Girard during his studies at Stanford, and came to like his theories. One can imagine why: he recognised the theory’s counter-revolutionary potential. Thiel came to Stanford in 1985, got his Bachelor in 1989 and graduated in Law in 1992. Those were the years during which left-leaning multicultural groups coalesced into what would become the Stanford “Western-Civ” programme (where students read major founding texts, from Plato to Freud). Thiel was on the opposing side: he grounded the liberal Stanford Review, and, together with a fellow student, co-wrote a book called “the Diversity Myth”.

A voice in the desert

Thiel understood multiculturalism, diversity and political correctness as symptoms of a new conformism — the cultural revolutions of the 60’s had created a new form of orthodoxy that considered old European traditions a residue of the past. Girard’s perceived backwardness, which made him work his way through the history of thought from Gilgamesh to Proust, made him a dissident, an antidote to these left-wing ideas. For Thiel, mimetic theory, which explained the formation of communities by the exclusion of outsiders, painted a damning picture of this neo-conformism. In this respect, Thiel’s relationship to Girard’s ideas can be seen as the symptom of a particular turning point in Silicon Valley’s philosophical history. While Steve Jobs’ generation was shaped by left-wing counterculture, Thiel and his peers came to see it as a new form of conformism.

Girard was interesting because he was a marginal: he was a voice in the desert. Girardians still consider him today as a kind of prophet — albeit a Californian one: one that will one day come to be widely accepted everywhere. Just as every startup founder thinks that his niche business will one day be legitimised by commercial success, members of the Imitatio group seem to believe that natural selection naturally operates in the free market of ideas to filter out the wrong from the right. Girard wouldn’t have agreed, but to his spiritual children in Silicon Valley, it is beyond any doubt.

Girard was the guardian of a certain tradition, but precisely because of that, he was also a reformist, or in Silicon Valley parlance: a “disruptor”. He discovered a new and counter-intuitive way to cognitively organise the world: we are convinced that our desires are our own, in reality they originate from others. For Girard, Christianity had uncovered something fundamental in its depiction of Jesus Christ as a scapegoat, and now we finally understood why. It is this ambiguous figure of the scapegoat that exerts its magical attraction on the likes of Peter Thiel, bearing the burden of both guilt and holiness. In a seminar that he held a few years ago in Stanford, Thiel hypothesised that this theory could explain why Mark Zuckerberg had always been the subject of more envy and aggression than Larry Page and Sergey Brin: because the public could not agree on who should be the scapegoat among them. This shows that for Thiel, envy and agression are a matter of public perception that can be manipulated — the fact that they can be the manifestation of deeper social fractures is a secondary consideration. This kind of discourse has much less to do with Girard than with Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged”, in which envious masses start questioning the leadership of a group of genius founding fathers. Rand saw the envy of the masses as a moral lapsus and social equality as a delusion. For Thiel, the “Founder”, the idealised entrepreneur, has a dual identity, he is both praiseworthy God and sacrificial lamb.

It might be surprising to see one indulge in so much Pathos, but in Silicon Valley, the intellectual currents that implicitly confer an elite function to its techies are generally the most successful. For objectivists, they enable a state-free form of capitalism, for futurists, they are the only ones that can save mankind. That’s exactly how Girardians tend to read Girard: while the masses stay trapped in their mimetic desires, geniuses can liberate themselves from them and start influencing them.

The popularity of Girardianism in Silicon Valley is therefore mainly due to the seemingly watertight set of clichés that it manages to superimpose on a sometimes reluctant reality. Girard’s mimetic concept provides a simple explanation of interpersonal relations to those whose interactions with others were always overshadowed by the glare of a blue screen. It provides a metaphysic of nerdiness.

Step-by-step guide towards human progress

But it would be wrong to portray self-deception as the sole driver of Girard’s success in Silicon Valley. Their interpretation of his works allow his followers to put some perspective on the very peculiar history of the contemporary tech world. A world where socially transformative innovations walk hand in hand with strong technocratic ambitions.

The mimetic theory is one of shortage amidst abundance. We have managed to get instant access to almost everything, but in the end we still seem to be missing something fundamental. Thiel understands the deeply pessimistic concept of mimesis as a guide towards human progress: Girard himself, in his later years, differentiated bad (competition over the same resource, envy) and good mimesis (following the teaching of God). Thiel promotes a more technological version of this distinction: our job is to suppress the negative effects of mimesis and turn the positive ones into a force for good.

It must be pure coincidence, but it is still disturbing to note the extent to which social networks encourage the same desires, and at the same time, how much Uber, Amazon and Postmates have sought to eliminate shortage of goods and services. If all conflicts arise from the situation where several people want the same thing, they could simply be overcome by diversifying the products on offer.

Two people might fight over the same taxi, but never over the same Uber car. Each person is attributed their own car, Amazon automatically restocks all of its books; overall, supply shortages have become an almost metaphysical obsession of the Internet economy. New apps that automatically select the most appropriate object according to the user’s desires are anti-mimetic by essence. Has the ghost of René Girard taken such a prominent place in our digitalised world?

Probably not. But the underlying intuition probably has: not that mankind would function better without its mimetic desires. Rather, it is the vision of a human race freed of its own humanity. For if Girard’s solution to the woes of the world was originally Catholicism, theirs is an absolutist version of technocracy.