From a young age, Palaver was a peace activist, registering as a conscientious objector at 18 and then organizing against nuclear weapons in college. It was in a class about the roots of human violence where he came to study the work of Rene Girard—whose unusual theories were generating buzz in parts of Europe.
Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Philosophy: A Glossary Want to know how the billionaire actually thinks? If you don’t know these terms, you kinda can’t. Mimetic rivalry: The violence that results from humans’ fundamental tendency to imitate each other—specifically to mimic each other’s desires. A key concept for Rene Girard, Thiel’s biggest intellectual influence. Scapegoat mechanism: The process by which humans find unity—and relief from mimetic rivalry—in ganging up on one target who gets blamed for all the community’s problems. According to Girard, scapegoating has provided less and less cohesion since the time of Christ. The Antichrist: The figure, described briefly in the Bible, who ushers in the end times. For Thiel and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, the Antichrist’s evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unify the world. Apocalypse: For some Girardians, the final explosion of violence that will result from unchecked mimetic rivalry in an age of world-killing weaponry. The katechon: A Greek term, appearing in just two sentences of the Bible, for “that which withholds” the Antichrist and the end times. After World War II, Schmitt’s vision of the katechon was for a fragmented world of nationalist states, with no global unity. Thiel seems to envision something similar.
Girard’s core insight, Palaver would learn, is that all humans are imitators, beginning with their wants. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people mimic the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”
According to Girard, this “mimesis”—this relentless copying—builds as it ricochets across relationships. In groups, everyone starts to look alike as they converge on a few models, ape the same desires, and furiously compete for the same objects. And the only reason this “mimetic rivalry” ever fails to break out into omnidirectional warfare is that, at some point, it tends to get channeled into a war of all against one. Via something Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” everyone aligns against an unfortunate target who is held responsible for the group’s ills. This mechanism is so essential to cultural cohesion, Girard wrote, that scapegoat narratives are the founding myths of every archaic culture.
But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—because it revealed, once and for all, that scapegoats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the crucifixion narrative, Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice.
With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same relief from collective acts of violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but with less and less unifying cohesion to show for it. What awaits us at the end of history, then, is the unchecked, contagious, and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic rivalry.
The upside of the crucifixion narrative, however, is that it offers humanity moral redemption. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: No matter the endgame, one must wholly reject scapegoating. Imitation remains inescapable, but we can choose our models. And the sound path forward, as he saw it, is to mimic Jesus—the one model who will never become a “fascinating rival”—in leading lives of Christian non-violence.
Girard’s theory almost immediately became a lodestar for the young Palaver, who recognized it as a bridge between his peace activism and theology. “You discover Girard,” Palaver says, “and you suddenly have a perfect tool to criticize all the scapegoaters.” And the young activist already had certain major scapegoaters in his sights.
In 1983—the same year as that first class on Girard—the bishop of Innsbruck tried to stop Palaver from rallying a group of young Catholics to join the largest-ever protest against American missiles in Europe. Dismissing Palaver’s views as geopolitical naivete, the bishop told him to read a German essay collection called Illusions of Brotherhood: The Necessity of Having Enemies. The book, Palaver realized, was full of references to an idea—coined by Carl Schmitt—that politics is grounded in distinguishing friends from enemies. Reading the book, Palaver realized he was “more or less against every sentence.”
So as a doctoral candidate, the young Austrian decided to write a Girardian critique of Schmitt. He would use Girardian theory against a legal architect of Europe’s last great calamity, who was now inspiring the Cold Warriors stoking its next. “Focusing upon Schmitt,” he explained, “meant for me turning against the archenemy of my pacifist attitude.”
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