RENÉ GIRARD, THE NIHILISM OF POST-TRUTH, AND THE ESCALATION OF VIOLENT UNDIFFERENTIATION

Today’s cluster of geopolitical threats are helpfully addressed by the mimetic theory of René Girard. He accounts for human order and stability in light of cathartic violence preserved in socio-religious form, enabling the peaceful management of desire and the restraint of violent disorder. The challenge to this mechanism represented by Judeo-Christian revelation offers a nonviolent alternative vision but also brings the threat of instability, which has returned in modern times - an insight that Girard identifies in Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Carl von Clausewitz. In phenomena such as fake news and political populism, the culture wars in which Western self-aggrandisement is matched by its cultural self-laceration, the climate crisis, and the potential escalation to extremes of modern military conflict, the pathologies of mimetic desire threaten humanity with apocalyptic consequences.