Sublime

The best way of preventing violence does not consist in forbidding objects, or even rivalistic desire, as the tenth commandment does, but in offering to people the model that will protect them from mimetic rivalries rather than involving them in these rivalries.

To better understand this concept, we must examine Girard’s usage of the term “scapegoat” more closely. The term first appears in the book of Leviticus (16) and describes a rite in which the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the community on the back of a goat, which was then cast into the wilderness to the demon Azazel.

That is why the so-called ‘war on terror’ can never eradicate this kind of violence from our world, because we are not talking only about human emissaries of evil but of a predisposition to evil in the psyche itself.

Girard’s mimetic theory is based in essence on the literary insight into man’s unalterable religious nature. Looked at systematically, his position can be understood as follows: Human beings have the choice between recognition of the one true God and arbitrary idolatry.

It is true that the characters in the Merchant make greater claims to sympathy and humanity than those in its influential predecessor, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1589), in which not only the title character, but Christian and Muslim protagonists as well, are cynical distillations of villainy. But these claims are just one symptom of a

Cambridge University fellow Daniel Williams asserted that in a time when people choose beliefs and then look for rationalizations to support them, a marketplace for rationalizations emerges, “a social structure in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs.”93

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. And in Jamesian solitude, Sociopaths find ideas contending in their minds. The creative destruction they script in the world of Losers and Clueless is mirrored by a creative destruction in their minds. This process creates power, but destroys meaning, especially th