how to one weird trick
quick one today.
i don't like totalizing stories that want to explain everything. this is my problem with folks like girard. there's something there to be sure. desire seems at least to me very obviously memetic sometimes. scapegoats as a relief valve is plausible. even his reinscription of jesus as a revelatory innocent scapegoat who lays bare the scapegoating mechanism is an interesting spin on jesus.
yet. acting as if these stories explain more than just a facet of humanity (desire) and a facet of one religion (christianity) and a facet of one act (jesus' death) is crazy.
i get the desire for a simple story. i get the drive for one weird trick. but every model is wrong--and girard and other totalising stories that purport to wrap up the complexity and just plain weirdness of history and presumably (should we deo/llm volente be permitted to have one) the future as well... well these models are very wrong and damaging to boot.
girard in particular provides a psychologised contramarxism take that just so happens to snap right into a rightist framework. his account of history (though i suspect he would strongly disagree with this but alas we cannot ask him) provides a rightist intellectualised language to brand any action against capital as disordered. this gives the rightist ghoul cover to believe quoth remski "revolution against inequality is a sickness resolved forever by jesus".
this isn't particularly fair to girard; i doubt he would be a fan of a lot of his followers though i can't be sure. dude's dead dead. but i don't think you need to be fair to dead guys who said stuff. you can absolutely judge them by the quality of their adherents. you should! this is why nietzsche gets no passes in my book despite being more or less right about a bunch of stuff. his fans are... big yikes on the whole.
fight club doesn't get a pass either. for the sameish reason. but that's a post of its own.