René Girard was one of the great geniuses of the 1900s. A historian, literary theorist, philosopher, anthropologist, social psychologist, and theologian, Girard wrote almost 30 books and influenced dozens of scholarly disciplines. Yet in a time of rising social discord, Girard’s ideas move beyond the ivory towers of academia and apply directly to the unfolding American crisis.

One of Girard’s major contributions was in the realm of psychology. Until Girard’s time, it was assumed that desire originates in the individual. People thought that it was a manifestation of the human personality. This was why many psychiatrists encouraged their patients to follow their desires as a way to “self-actualize.” (Even today, this view lives on in a popular saying: “Follow your bliss.”)

To Girard, this is the great “Romantic Lie.” Desire, he argued, does not spring from some special place inside us. Rather, it is learned through a process of imitation that he calls “mimesis.”

Girard discovered the origins of desire when he was teaching literature at John Hopkins University in the early 1960s. As he was preparing to give lectures on great authors like Cervantes and Shakespeare, the scholar stumbled across a curiosity: Many of the stories he read had a similar structure.

For example, in a short story in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a man has a best friend whom he trusts more than anyone on earth. The friend tells him that he should marry a local girl, so he does. But after some time, the man worries that his wife may not be completely faithful. He asks his friend to try and seduce her, just to make sure that she truly loves him.

The friend, of course, is shocked and appalled. But the man insists, and the friend starts courting his wife. Soon, the friend and the wife fall in love, and the original man commits suicide.

This rather odd story escaped attention for centuries. However, Girard noticed something: It was exactly the same as a story by Dostoevsky called “The Eternal Husband”—and a story told by Shakespeare, and another story told by James Joyce. These great artists, writing in different languages, at different times, and in different places, all related the same tale.

Girard’s unique contribution lies in the way he explains these coincidences: Great writers have special insight into human nature. What these writers show us is that even though our desires seem unique and special, they do not come from within. Instead, they are learned from others.

In each of these stories, men do not fall in love as a result of some powerful inner experience. Rather, they fall in love because someone they respect shows them whom to love. The man and his friend end up desiring the same woman because they are mimicking one another.

It’s important to note that when Girard speaks of “desire,” he’s not referring to instincts such as hunger. Rather, he refers to contagious drives such as love, hatred, and greed. As he argues, these always take a triangular form: We don’t simply desire things directly, but we desire things that have been shown to us as good by a model. So while we have the innate capacity for evil—just as we have the innate capacity for language—we develop our capacities by imitating others. Much as the Christian tries to do good by modeling Christ, the person who feels love or hatred does so because they are imitating a role model.

Girard builds on this insight to lay out the structure of desire more generally. As David Cayley notes in his fantastic five-hour interview with Girard:

The husband in the Cervantes story loves his wife only so far as this love is endorsed by his friend. [Similarly,] in advertisements, products are usually presented, not on their merits, but as the possessions of attractive or prestigious people. We are invited to desire not so much the beer or the car as some quality of being that seems to belong to the blessed souls who we see drinking the beer or driving the car. Desire, Girard says, is never just a straight line between a subject and an object, but always has some other as its model.

After Girard made his initial discovery, he turned his eyes toward one of the oldest accounts of desire in the West: Adam and Eve’s desire for the fruit of knowledge of good and evil in the Book of Genesis. Here, too, he saw mimesis at work: Adam learned to desire the fruit from Eve, but Eve learned to desire the fruit from the snake. The snake’s promise? Eat the fruit and you will be like gods.

Rather than reinforcing the “Romantic Lie,” Girard saw that classic literature and traditional religion warn people about the contagious nature of desire. They also uncover the violence that accompanies it. For when two people desire the same thing, they are inevitably drawn into competition.

How many times have two friends fallen in love with the same person? How many times have nations desired the same territory or siblings desired the same inheritance? Too many to count. Tragically, the more similar people are, the more chances they have to fall into conflict with one another.

Girard saw, then, that it’s not just desire that is contagious. Desire is linked to strife, which means that violence itself is a social contagion.

Because violence is built into human society, Girard saw that communities have a tendency to fall into discord. However, people rarely realize why they can’t get along with their neighbors. As tension rises, they look for someone who might be meddling behind the scenes, throwing everything into disarray.

Enter the scapegoat.

Girard argued that every culture on earth has practiced human sacrifice at some point in its history because every culture has a tendency to fall into a pattern of mimetic violence. By blaming one person (or a group of people) for the issues in their community, societies concentrate the tension on a single point. By committing a collective murder, they unify the community until the cycle starts again. Indeed, Girard calls this murder the foundation of all myth.

There is, however, one story that cuts against the grain. It concerns a rabbi accused of fomenting unrest among the people. With one voice, the mob cries out, “Crucify him!” Like all scapegoats, the rabbi dies a horrible death. But, unlike other scapegoats, we know that this rabbi is innocent.

His name, of course, is Jesus. To Girard, Jesus reveals a truth hidden since the foundation of the world: Scapegoats are innocent. It is not the scapegoat, but the untrammeled desires of the community, that we should blame for social strife.

Yet as the West loses the insight of Christianity, the search for scapegoats has intensified. Nietzsche, for instance, was worried when he proclaimed the death of God. On that topic, he wrote this:

God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Like other great writers, he understood that religion kept mimetic conflict at bay. With Christianity no longer a vital force in the West, he worried that there would be no sacred rituals available to ward off the contagion of communal violence. Thus, the modern era has been wracked by world wars, genocide, and apocalyptic crises.

Ultimately, Girard shows that we don’t get out of this mess by finding someone to blame for our ills. Rather, we ensure peace by resisting the temptations of our limitless desire. In this, he echoes the truth written long ago by the apostle James: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?”

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