12 Things I Learned from Rene Girard: “By desiring the same thing as our neighbor, we are drawn into inevitable conflict. Mimetic desire turns into mimetic rivalry—in everything from love to war. That’s the reason for the injunction against ‘coveting your neighbor’s wife.’ Girard claims this is emblematic of how mimetic impulses destroy a community. You try to seize what your neighbor desires most. But this happens on a much larger scale in sociopolitical and economic conflicts. The truthteller has a special responsibility to expose imitative passion—because it is the force behind so much violence, persecution, and scapegoating.”
America Has Become a Society of Gamblers: “There are only two paths to fixing the problem. Either the United States figures out how to stop the accelerated debasement of the currency, which would allow citizens to gain restored confidence in the protection of their hard-earned economic value, or citizens will have to resist the urge to gamble and instead seek out alternative assets that help them outperform the inflation they are experiencing.”
Burdens of Belief: The Foundational Myth of Holocaustianity: “From a Girardian-Christian perspective, the human social problem isn’t anti-Semitism or Zionism, fascism or cultural Marxism, neo-Nazism or wokism, organized Jewry or Anglo-American alliances. Every currency has two sides and the two sides complement one another by opposing one another. The problem is scapegoating and mimetic violence. Placing blame, in lieu of accepting responsibility. Scapegoating binds a people together by redirecting the energy of blame from all-against-all to all-against-one. This is the law of the tribe, or mob rule. As yesterday’s taboo becomes tomorrow’s totem, and vice versa, the vicious circle of blood vendettas keeps on spinning.”
God Gone Silent: “God dwells in unapproachable light, but that’s no help to me if I’m groping in the dark, far from the light. God is the Word; every Christian believes that. But I can hardly hear his voice if I’m already tipping halfway into the silence. If he is going to be my Lord, he has to be Lord of light and dark, of life and death. If he’s going to rescue me, he’s got to come to me in the silence. ”
The Laughter of Wolves: “Since they are at the top of the food chain, the wolves of Chernobyl necessarily absorb more radionuclides than anything else in the area. Under ordinary circumstances this would make them horribly vulnerable to cancer. Wildlife biologists researching the wolf packs, however, recently discovered something unnerving: the wolves have evolved robust resistance to cancer. Nobody understands the biochemistry yet, and it’s possible that nobody ever will. The fact remains that the wolves responded to a lethal danger by quietly evolving around it. In the process, they have achieved something that modern medicine has tried to do for more than a century, without any noticeable success.”
John David Ebert Interview (Substack Video)