Preliminary remarks on Girard and Schelling
Girard thought that Christian revelation was pivotal in how human beings related to violence and the scapegoating mechanism. The difference between Christ’s crucifixion and other similar stories, such as that of Socrates’ sentencing to death, is, according to Girard, that the Bible sheds light on the innocence of the victim and presents the narrative from the vantage point of the people. Once the sacrificial mechanisms are exposed, scapegoating, in a way, loses its legitimacy. After that, it becomes hard to unite a group through blame, and even harder to solve the rising violence problem that scapegoating kept at bay prior to that.
A result of this is a gap between the Christian doctrine’s message of peace and love and the reality of increased rivalry that loses its natural outlet, resulting in a crisis of global scale. The artificial intelligence race is a good illustration of this pattern. We have actors that started with a common goal and vision, ushering in a new era of technological progress, but soon found themselves entangled in an escalating competition where each actor became the mirror of the other. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI, then became rivals, and now resemble each other too closely as they race and fight over the same desired object. The US and China exhibit the same pattern, but at a scale where different governance paradigms are at stake and the consequences are harder to contain or predict.
Girard explains these mechanisms in depth, especially how competition spreads and intensifies. However, there seems to be a point where an existing rivalry changes into something else, hinting that there might be something more at play. When competition becomes too intense, it seems like it stops being about the desire for the same object or outcome, or even about the other person. Rather, what emerges is the drive to become the only legitimate source of things, the only reference point, the fountain from which value and authority originate. This is closer to self-divinization than competition, and it is a more serious problem.
Mimetic theory does indeed touch on this issue, when the yearning for self-divinization breaks open all social patterns and the question of freedom comes to the fore. This is why Girard argued for the need of a ground that would curb this problem, and why he thought theology and Christianity would solve it.
But the problem persists, for many reasons. One of them is that even within the Girard community, some people do not think theology is quite necessary. Another issue, I think, is that while Girard lays out the anthropological account of desire, mimesis, violence, and scapegoating, he seems to assume that mimetic desire is a given and that violence is simply the result of this desire.
This is where, I think, Friedrich Schelling’s Freedom Essay might prove useful in addressing the above problem. Writing in 1809, Schelling argues that evil is not the absence of knowledge, as Plato suggests, but rather a real force in nature, part and parcel of reality and the universe. It is a dark and chaotic force that precedes any rational activity. Freedom, for him, is the capacity to choose not to resign to this brutal force. Evil in human beings manifests when the individual starts acting as though they are the whole rather than part of the whole, and this is a choice.
As such, the primordial desire is not necessarily one that wants to imitate others. Rather, it wants to overcome, absorb, and even obliterate others when they do not comply. When the individual no longer recognizes its limits or the space it shares with others, it fails to recognize any ground beyond itself, loses orientation, and engages in all kinds of evil.
What is actually at stake here is more dangerous than violence that results from competition, because in this case it precedes it. AI rivalry might be motivated, then, not necessarily by the desire to be like someone else or to take them as a model, but by a disrupted will that wants to become the only reference within the sector, desiring to be the model.
When motivated by the desire to obliterate others and become the whole, the consequences can be far-reaching. It might well be worth bringing Girard and Schelling into dialogue around the question that the problem in a post-scapegoat world is perhaps caused by a deeper desire than, and which precedes, mimesis. It is the problem of potential evil and the threat this pauses to systems like democracy, especially in the age of AI. This problem is due to no other than, according to Schelling, the will refusing its own orientation, seeking to pull everything into its orbit. What that means for democracy, plurality, and the possibility of any shared limits at all is what to be explored.