Evolution and Conversion Quotes

“We are ready to deconstruct anything except the idea that we are self-directed and that the persecutors are always the others.”
― René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Ideologies are not violent per se, rather it is man who is violent. Ideologies provide the grand narrative which covers up our victimary tendency. They are the mythical happy endings to our histories of persecutions. If you look carefully, you will see that the conclusion of myths is always positive and optimistic. There is always a cultural restoration after the crisis and the scapegoat resolution. The scapegoat provides the systemic closure which allows the social group to function once again, to run its course once more and to remain blind to its systemic closure (the belief that the ones they are scapegoating are actually guilty). After the Christian revelation this is no longer possible. The system cannot be pulled back by any form of pharmacological resolution, and the virus of mimetic violence can spread freely. This is the reason why Jesus says: ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Matthew 10.34). The Cross has destroyed once and for all the cathartic power of the scapegoat mechanism. Consequently, the Gospel does not provide a happy ending to our history. It simply shows us two options (which is exactly what ideologies never provide, freedom of choice): either we imitate Christ, giving up all our mimetic violence, or we run the risk of self-destruction. The apocalyptic feeling is based on that risk.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“The idea of the end of history as the end of ideologies is simply misleading. Ideologies are not violent per se, rather it is man who is violent. Ideologies provide the grand narrative which covers up our victimary tendency. They are the mythical happy endings to our histories of persecutions. If you look carefully, you will see that the conclusion of myths is always positive and optimistic. There is always a cultural restoration after the crisis and the scapegoat resolution. The scapegoat provides the systemic closure which allows the social group to function once again, to run its course once more and to remain blind to its systemic closure (the belief that the ones they are scapegoating are actually guilty). After the Christian revelation this is no longer possible. The”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“mechanism. In their slow evolutionary ascent, proto-humans ‘found’ in this mechanism a ‘tool’ for controlling the mimetic escalations of interspecific violence, when imitation (stronger in humans than in animals) diffuses dynamics of reciprocal contention and revenge in a given social group.”
― René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Far from turning away from the West, they cannot avoid imitating it and adopting its values, even if they don’t avow it, and they are also consumed like us by the desire for individual and collective success. This sentiment is not true of the masses but of the ruling classes. At the level of personal fortune a man like Bin Laden has no need to envy anyone. And there have been many party or faction leaders in this situation. For instance, Mirabeau, at the beginning of the French Revolution, had one foot in one camp and one foot in the other, and what did he do but live out his resentment in even more bitter fashion.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“The error is always to reason within categories of ‘difference’ when the root of all conflicts is rather ‘competition’, mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be. No doubt terrorism is bound to a world ‘different’ from ours, but what gives rise to terrorism does not lie in that ‘difference’ that removes it further from us and makes it inconceivable to us. On the contrary, it lies in the desire for convergence and resemblance. Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry. What is experienced now is a form of mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale. When I read the first documents of Bin Laden and verified his allusions to the American bombing of Japan, I felt at first that I was in a dimension that transcends Islam, a dimension of the entire planet. Under the label of Islam we find a will to rally and mobilize an entire third world of those frustrated and of victims in their relations of mimetic rivalry with the West. But the towers destroyed had as many foreigners as Americans. But their effectiveness, the sophistication of the means they employed, the knowledge that they had of the United States and their training, were not the authors of the attack in a sense at least partly American? Here we are in the middle of mimetic contagion.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“First of all, I have to say that I am a theorist of mythology: I am not a moralist, or a religious thinker. I can answer questions on these themes, but they are not my main concern. However, there is a sort of outline of a theory of modernity at the end of I See Satan that is purely apocalyptic.2 For me, any understanding of the contemporary world is mediated by the reading of Matthew 24. The most important part is the sentence ‘where the corpse lies, the vultures shall gather’ (Matthew 24.28) because it seems to be a decomposition of the mimetic mechanism. The mechanism is visible, but it doesn’t work. In John’s Gospel there are apocalyptic elements as well: since Jesus triggers disagreement among the Jews, the rejection of him becomes more and more violent (John 8.31–59). The apocalyptic feelings of the early Christians were not pure fantasy. These texts should be discussed: they are just as relevant today as they were at the time of their writing, and I find it disconcerting that many churches have stopped preaching on them. This started around the time the nuclear bomb was invented and used, when they decided to do away with the fear which was spreading in the world. We have these fundamental texts about our collective, yet we refuse to discuss them. Jefferson, following Darwin, couldn’t conceive of the extinction of a national species. Marx, being an Aristotelian, believed in the eternity of the world. The experience of our own times, however – with their ruthless and unbounded use of violence – gives you the feeling that there is no time left, which was what the first Christians inevitably felt: ‘the time is short’, Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 7.29). The apocalyptic feeling is the consciousness that the scapegoat business has run its course, that therefore nothing more can happen. What else could happen after the Christian revelation? And at the same time, what might happen to our world if the precarious order of false transcendence imposed by the scapegoat mechanism ceases to function? Any great Christian experience is apocalyptic because what one realizes is that after the decomposition of the sacrificial order there is nothing standing between ourselves and our possible destruction. How this will materialize, I don’t really know.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“How do you see, then, the future – or, in apocalyptic terms, the ‘remaining time’ – under this view? It is going to be more of the same increasing complexity, but there will be dialectical turns so astonishing that they are going to take everybody by surprise. There must be things in store. That’s why for me it is important to go back to Scripture and to the early Christian texts, because they are so revealing about the nature of the present time. Paul says: ‘I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2.2). Scholars think this is an anti-intellectual statement, but it is not at all. It means that the Cross is the source of all knowledge of God – which theologians believe – and of man as well – which they do not necessarily understand. Paul understands this. And the idea of Satan overcome by the Cross is an essential one that unfortunately, in Western Christianity, has been suspected of being magical, irrational, and is dismissed as a result. The Cross destroys the power of Satan as ‘king of this world’, meaning the power to unleash violence through the scapegoat mechanism. Satan is still with us but only as a source of disorder. Indirectly, therefore, because of our inability to live without scapegoats, Christianity is a source of disruption in our world. Christianity constantly suggests that our scapegoats are nothing but innocent victims. Christianity shows that the guilty ones are the murderers of scapegoats, and those who approve of their murderers. Let me conclude by repeating what I have already said. This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity. We will always be mimetic, but we do not have to engage automatically in mimetic rivalries. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“The Heideggerian idea of the withdrawal of the gods is an effort to deny the primacy of the biblical God, which still lies behind the Nietzschean formula. Heidegger’s formula means that religion is withdrawing everywhere and not merely the Christian God. This is true, but why is it happening? Because the old pagan sacrificial order is disappearing thanks to Christianity! It is ironic: Christianity seems to be dying together with the religions it extinguishes, because, in sacrificial terms, it is perceived as one mythical religion among others. Christianity is not only one of the destroyed religions but it is the destroyer of all religions. The death of God is a Christian phenomenon. In its modern sense, atheism is a Christian invention. There is no atheism in the ancient world. The only exception I can think of is Epicureanism, but it is limited and its denial of the gods is not aggressive. Epicureanism does not deny God against anything or anyone: it doesn’t have that strong negative quality of modern atheism. The disappearance of religion is a Christian phenomenon par excellence. Of course, and let me clarify that I am referring to the disappearance of religion in so far as we see religion aligned with a sacrificial order. This process is going to continue and it is spreading all around the globe. I was talking with a specialist of Sanskrit, and he agreed with me that this process is probably also present in Indian history. It is much slower, but it is accelerating. The withdrawal of all gods is the first transreligious phenomenon. Like fundamentalism, it is a transreligious phenomenon which is taking place before our eyes, and we just do not seem to realize that it is the Bible which is responsible.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Vattimo is very different from Heidegger, and he clearly understands the importance and the centrality of Christian belief in defining the destiny of Western culture and civilization, and in fact at the end he dwells on the notion of agape as the result of the anti-metaphysical revolution of Christianity.40 However, it seems to me that there is a problem in his religious perspective because he does not place enough emphasis on the Cross. As I recently wrote, he sees only interpretations in human history and no facts.41 He aligns himself with the post-Nietzschean tradition in claiming the nonviability of any historical ‘truth’ and confining the novelty of Christianity to a purely discursive level. For him Christianity is mainly a textual experience, which we only believe in because somebody whom we trust and love told us to do so.42 Although this is a concept which is quite close to the idea of ‘positive internal mediation’, as proposed by Fornari, there is no grounding, no point of departure in this long chain of good imitation; or at least it is a loose one: the book, that, according to a strict hermeneutical approach, can be subject to any possible interpretation. Paul says that the only things he knows are Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2.2), and this seems to me to be an indirect answer to Vattimo: one can deconstruct any form of mythical or ideological ‘truth’, but not the Cross, the actual death of the Son of God. That is the centre around which our culture rotates and from which it has evolved. Why should the world have changed if that event did not convey a radical and fundamental anthropological truth to the human being? God provided the text, but also the hermeneutical key with which to read it: the Cross. The two cannot be separated.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“This is the reason why one has to see this process from the mimetic perpective and in Christian apocalyptic terms, in the sense that the more there is an opening in a world where ritual is dead, the more dangerous this world becomes. It has both positive aspects, in the sense that there is less sacrifice, and negative aspects, in that there is an unleashing of mimetic rivalry. As I said, we live in a world where we take care of victims in a way no other society or historical time ever did, but we are also in a world that kills more people than ever, so we have the feeling that both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are increasing all the time. If we have a theory of culture, it has to account for this extraordinary ambivalence of our society. I think that, at a certain moment, Vattimo comes close to this. In Belief, he uses Max Weber’s formula of the disenchantment of the world due to secularization, saying that this ‘disenchantment has also produced a radical disenchantment with the idea of disenchantment itself’.38 I agree with him: Max Weber went only halfway in the discovery of this paradoxical process. Ours is a world in which there is a paradox created by the co-presence of great improvement and a great deal of disintegration, and many other paradoxes that become more fascinating as they keep on intensifying.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Seinfeld is a show that gets closer to the mimetic mechanism than most, and indeed is also hugely successful. How do you explain that? In order to be successful an artist must come as close as he can to some important social truth without inciting painful self-criticism in the spectators. This”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“in order to unfold the mimetic theory in all its possible consequences, we would need an interdisciplinary team of researchers – no man could do it by himself.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“seems that modern society has devised other forms of dharma that help to keep violence at bay. Stefano Tomelleri, using Durkheim’s concept of social distance, sees the division of labour as a means of coping with mimetic rivalry through the creation of social distance.12 This is also reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a tool to control human behaviour, preventing any form of horizontal communication, meaning any mimetic activity, through an external source of control.13 In both cases the aim is the eradication of violence. How could you envisage a contemporary social order that, although acknowledging the constant presence of violence, tries to cope with it? The division of labour, unlike the caste system, leaves room for the individual, at least in principle. The market may force one to make some choices instead of others, but it is not proper to speak about capitalism, as the Marxists did, in terms of rigidity of social stratification. The division of labour has experienced important changes in the recent years, and I am not sure that I can give a definite explanation to account for this phenomenon. Certainly the organization of labour is particularly relevant for the stability of North American society. When people refer to the so-called ‘American dream’, they certainly exaggerate and overestimate its nature, but it is not entirely deceptive either. If one looks at the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley, it is true that many of them are really self-made men, and a good percentage are immigrants, mostly from India or China. So, I am not sure I would agree completely that division of labour keeps mimetic rivalry under control, but at the same time it is a very complex subject. There is unquestionably more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. However, we live in a world in which social mobility, although experiencing phases of inhibition and local rigidity, is constantly increasing. Structural injustice, although still present, has been gradually ironed out by Christian ethics, and the market itself asks for a wider circulation of ‘human capital’.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“According to you, ‘a functional society is one which is dominated by external mediation’10 Is contemporary Western society functional, given that it is dominated by internal mediation? A functional society is one whose institutions work without being constantly disrupted by violence. For instance, in traditional Indian society, this is defined through the concept of dharma, which basically means the strict separation of castes, and as a result a society in which everybody does what they are ordained to do.11 Therefore, a functional society according to external mediation is a hierarchical, traditional one. In the West, we have something special: we have outgrown the dharma definition of social order and we have a society that can be stable without strict internal hierarchical structure. Of course one must see this from the point of view of the mimetic theory and as the result of a historical process. A type of external mediation still ruled in the Western Middle Ages, and in terms of dharma, namely, the social and religious order, the hierarchical order, it could be defined as a functional society. The dissolution of this dharma probably took place in the period that extends from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. As a matter of fact, the Middle Ages cannot be said to be entirely ‘traditional’ either, since on the one hand, they were chaotic (in a pre-Christian way); and on the other, there was the disintegration of a certain type of order, which probably dominates up to a point in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then breaks down. Above all, there was the constant threat of scarcity of goods, a decisive factor in bringing about mimetic crises. Nowadays there is a stability which is no longer based on dharma, and which must inevitably be based on the Judaeo-Christian principle of the individual who dominates his/her own violent impulses.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“The system cannot be pulled back by any form of pharmacological resolution, and the virus of mimetic violence can spread freely. This is the reason why Jesus says: ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Matthew 10.34). The Cross has destroyed once and for all the cathartic power of the scapegoat mechanism. Consequently, the Gospel does not provide a happy ending to our history. It simply shows us two options (which is exactly what ideologies never provide, freedom of choice): either we imitate Christ, giving up all our mimetic violence, or we run the risk of self-destruction. The apocalyptic feeling is based on that risk.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“The apocalyptic feeling is the consciousness that the scapegoat business has run its course, that therefore nothing more can happen. What else could happen after the Christian revelation? And at the same time, what might happen to our world if the precarious order of false transcendence imposed by the scapegoat mechanism ceases to function? Any great Christian experience is apocalyptic because what one realizes is that after the decomposition of the sacrificial order there is nothing standing between ourselves and our possible destruction. How this will materialize, I don’t really know.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“It is the entire mimetic system which still runs human relations. This is the deeper meaning of all this: we will always be mimetic, but we don’t have to be so in a satanic fashion.44 That is, we don’t have to engage perpetually in mimetic rivalries. We don’t have to accuse our neighbour; instead, we can learn to love him.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Both Jesus and Satan prompt imitation. Imitation is the road to our freedom, because we are free to imitate Christ in his incomparable wisdom in a benevolent and obedient way, or, on the contrary, to imitate Satan, meaning to imitate God in a spirit of rivalry. Skandalon becomes the inability to walk away from mimetic rivalry, an inability that turns rivalry into an addiction, servitude, because we kneel in front of those who are important for us, without seeing what is at stake. The proliferation of scandals, meaning of mimetic rivalry, is what produces disorder and instability in society, but this instability is put to an end by the scapegoat resolution, which produces order. Satan casts out Satan, meaning that the scapegoat mechanism produces a false transcendence that stabilizes society, through a satanic principle, and the order cannot but be only temporary, and it is bound to revert, sooner or later, into the disorder of scandals.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Therefore, our free will is given by the choice we have of accusing others or having compassion for them. I don’t see why the idea of this imitation would imply the accusation of those who don’t practise it. All accusation is the attempt to get out of the game at the expense of a scapegoat. It is what Christ never does. The Gospel of John says: ‘You are the son of Satan because you don’t listen to my voice.’39 There are two arch-models: Satan and Christ. Freedom is an act of conversion to one or the other. Otherwise, it is a total illusion. That is why Paul says: ‘we are in chains but we are free’.40 We are free because we can truly convert ourselves at any time. In other words, we can refuse to join the mimetic unanimity. As we already explained, conversion means to become aware that we are persecutors. It means choosing Christ or a Christlike individual as a model for our desires. It also means seeing oneself as being in the process of imitating from the very beginning. Conversion is the discovery that we have always, without being aware of it, been imitating the wrong kind of models who lead us into the vicious circle of scandals and perpetual frustration.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“I think that his description of modern society is profound, with great insights, but it is too unilateral. He doesn’t see that I define the modern world essentially as deprived of sacrificial protection, that is, more and more exposed to violence. For”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“the history of sacrifice. It would show that archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favour of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ. Thus, to those who say that the Eucharist is rooted in archaic cannibalism, instead of saying ‘no’, we have to say ‘yes!’. The real history of man is religious history, which goes back to primitive cannibalism. Primitive cannibalism is religion, and the Eucharist recapitulates this history from alpha to omega. All this is essential and once it is understood, there is a necessary recognition that the history of man includes this murderous beginning: Cain and Abel. To put it bluntly, we cannot have a perfectly non-sacrificial space. In writing Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden I was trying to find that non-sacrificial space from which to understand and explain everything without personal involvement. Now I think that this attempt cannot be successful.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Schwager thinks like me that we need to see a spontaneous scapegoat phenomenon behind the crucifixion, as well as behind the myths. The whole difference rests on the recognition of this phenomenon, that cannot be found in myths, but is there in the Gospels. But the most extraordinary thing in the Gospels is that this recognition comes from Christ himself, rather than the evangelists, who do everything they can in order to follow Christ, and overall they accomplished it. I would like to write a total Christian interpretation of the history of religion that would really be the history of sacrifice. It would show that archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favour of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ. Thus, to those who say that the Eucharist is rooted in archaic cannibalism, instead of saying ‘no’, we have to say ‘yes!’. The”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Indeed, the two actions are juxtaposed in the same story. This is the crucial point. A similarity is also at stake here. If one must use the term ‘sacrifice’ for the good prostitute, it doesn’t mean that it cannot be used for the other woman as well. Things Hidden was still written from the perspective of anthropology and, therefore, Christianity seems like a kind of ‘supplement’, rather than converting everything to its perspective. Today I would write from the point of view of the Gospels, showing that the Gospels read the bad woman and the bad sacrifice as a metaphor of the old humanity, unable to escape violence without sacrificing others. Christ, through his own sacrifice, frees us from this necessity. We have then to use the word ‘sacrifice’ as self-sacrifice, in the sense of Christ. Then it becomes viable to say that the primitive, the archaic, is prophetic of Christ in its own imperfect way. No greater difference can be found: on the one hand, sacrifice as murder; on the other hand, sacrifice as the readiness to die in order not to participate in sacrifice as murder. These two forms are radically opposed to one another, and yet they are inseparable. There is no non-sacrificial space in between, from which everything could be described from a neutral viewpoint. The moral history of humanity is the shifting from the first to the second meaning, accomplished by Christ but not by humanity, who did everything to escape this dilemma, and above all not to see it.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Today I have changed my mind. There is no doubt that the distance between these two actions is the greatest possible, and it is the difference between the archaic sacrifice, which turns against a third victim the violence of those who are fighting, and the Christian sacrifice which is the renunciation of all egoistic claiming, even to life if needed, in order not to kill.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“However, in Jainism there is a system of extensive worshipping of all sorts of deities, which present residual sacrificial elements.23 In Christianity worshipping has been defined in terms of the imitation of Christ, with positive external mediation, which is fundamental to the idea of Christians’ involvement in worldly matters. As a matter of fact, there are historical sources that speak of connections between Jainism and Judaism, which remain underexplored and which are simply fascinating. The most striking evidence is given by Frazer, who reports the presence of versions of the judgement of Solomon, which is so central to Judaeo-Christian tradition, in Jainist texts.24 Although non-violent in nature, Jainism has eventually relapsed into a patriarchal caste system of Hindu Brahmanical heritage which is so widespread in India and which still represents a form of exclusion, of symbolic and actual outcasting.25 This is ‘structural violence’, i.e. radical injustice. Moreover, as was suggested at a recent COV&R meeting, the history of religions and societies in Asia testifies, from a descriptive standpoint, that Hindu and Buddhist cultures and states have not been without violence, as is commonly believed, pretty much in the same way as has happened with historical Christianity.26 What I gathered in that conference is that all these religions are fully aware, from a normative standpoint, of the injustice of violence and I fully acknowledge that the Easter traditions have contributed in making those societies less violent. They know that the human being should withdraw from anger, resentment, envy, violence, but they are not fully aware of the scapegoat mechanism. They know what sacrifice is, and they progressively tried to forbid it. The difference that I see between them and Christianity is that the latter was able to formulate in the Gospels and unmask in a full light the anthropological mechanism of mimetic scapegoating and sacrifice.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Ghandi saw a connection between Jainist philosophy and Christianity, but eventually he opted for the kind of political action that is more compatible with the latter. Christianity suggests a political dimension. It entails an intervention in worldly matters, not in the form of sheer proselytism, as it is commonly believed, but in the form of a personal, individual conversion, by proposing Christ as a model to imitate. It’s our Christian spirit which allows us to single out Jainism as a religion that carries our ethical presuppositions. What is appealing for the contemporary mind in Eastern religions is the absence of a transcendental God. The founding narrative of Buddhism, for instance, is strictly individual: it is a personal path which leads to revelation, and thus fits much better with contemporary individualism.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Ultimately, archaic religion and Christianity are structurally similar because man, even at the most archaic level, has always worshipped his own innocent victims, without being aware of it. This is, the unity of religion lies: it centres on the worshipping of the victim. The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence. The evidence is all there under our eyes and we don’t have to resort to theology to understand it, for it is purely anthropological. The discovery of his innocence is unwelcome because it coincides inevitably with the discovery of our guilt. The continuous teaching of Christ’s message through the diffusion of the Gospels is as important as this revelation. It is exactly what transforms the world, not in a sudden and abrupt way, but gradually, through a progressive assimilation of his message, which is often readdressed to be used against Christianity itself with”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

“Is the mimetic mechanism the original sin? Yes, of course. The original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level. Usually, people don’t see the mimetic mechanism, even when they can identify all sorts of rivalries which are at the base of the development of this very mechanism. The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence, which plays a very important role in the dynamic stability of archaic society and therefore one cannot condemn it from an anthropological and sociological standpoint, because it is necessary for the survival and development of humanity. It can be defined as the ‘social transcendence’ in Durkheim’s terms, or the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judaeo-Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic human community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities,6 meaning the secular powers of this world: they are doomed, and they are going to disappear very quickly, but he doesn’t condemn them in a self-righteous way, he does not demand that they are destroyed with violence, and one has simply to submit to their authority.7 The archaic sacred is ‘Satanic’ when there is nothing to channel it and to keep it at bay, and social institutions are there to do precisely this job, until the Kingdom of God will finally triumph.”
― Continuum, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture