René Girard

philosopher · 21 mentions across 3 readings

In this course

Girard was a French theorist of mimesis and violence whose ideas about imitative desire and scapegoating mechanisms profoundly shaped Peter Thiel's worldview and investment philosophy. The readings trace how Girard's concept of mimetic rivalry—the idea that people desire what others desire, creating cascading social pressures and potential violence—helps explain both social media dynamics and Thiel's venture capital decisions. Though Girard appears primarily through his influence on Thiel rather than direct engagement with his work, he's essential to understanding how tech-world thinking about status, contagion, and social breakdown maps onto theories of human conflict and desire.

Mentioned in 3 readings

Geoff Shullenberger

Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection

Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Full Essay) (https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/) Geoff Shullenberger on August 13, …Thiel’s connection to the late René Girard, his former teacher at Stanford, is well known but poorly understood. Most accounts of the Girard-Thiel connection have described the common ground between them as “conservatism,” but this oversimp…Thiel’s intellectual debt to Girard’s theories has a surprising relevance to some of his most prominent investments. For anyone who has followed Thiel’s career, the summer of 2004 – the summer when the “Politics and Apocalypse” symposium at…

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Nadia Asparouhova

from Antimemetics_ Why Some Ideas Resist Spread

Until recently, supermemes were relatively rare. War is human civilization’s oldest supermeme: as Girard might put it, a violent outgrowth of mimetic competition for limited resources. It forces everyone in the network to direct their atte…Social institutions – whether media, academia, or the political machine – are the bottlenecks through which all ideological demands must eventually pass. To truly change culture, one must master control of these institutions. But the Digita…

Eugene Wei

Status as a Service (StaaS)

When the definition of status is distributed, often one minority has disproportionate sway. If that group, the cool kids, pulls the ripcord, everyone tends to follow them to the exits. In fact, it’s usually the most high status or desirable…

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