If You are Competing, You Already Lost | Girard’s Mimetic Rivalry Explained

In this lecture, we will finish painting the picture of Girardian psychology by understanding mimetic rivalry and negative mimesis. This picture will expose humans as fallen and certain psycho-social pathologies as inevitable: fetishization, alienation, bipolarity, masochism, oppression, and inequity. Girard’s psychology, then, is also a theodicy — an inquiry into the origins of evil. For Girard, evil is not contingent on poorly designed societies but an inevitable consequence of corrupt human nature. We will never escape these pathologies no matter how much social “progress” is made. Girard’s theodicy tampers our expectations of the world and inoculates us against a whole host of, what we can loosely call, critical theories. This is a critique of critique. Some links to further guide your study: * Join my email list to be notified of future episodes: greatbooks.io * Full transcript: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnathanbi/p/transcript-of-girard-lecture-iii TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:26 Internal and External Mediation 00:10:50 Mimetic Rivalry 00:33:33 Doubles 00:35:24 False Differences 00:37:58 American Psycho 00:42:19 The Negative Phase of Mimesis 00:46:33 Conforming to Contrarianism 00:53:31 The Psycho-Social Pathologies of Man 00:55:51 Fetishization 00:56:39 Alienation 00:59:08 Bipolarity 01:01:01 Masochism 01:04:27 Oppression 01:07:56 Inequity 01:10:03 Hegel's Theodicy 01:13:22 Rousseau's Theodicy 01:15:40 Girard's Theodicy 01:20:14 A Critique of Critique