Speculating on the willing victim withdrawing from violence and the ideology of non-violent resistance

 

René Girard, French-American scholar of literature and religion, died in 2015.

René Girard built his reputation on a sweeping theory of human behaviour that traced the roots of desire violence, and religion to a single source: imitation. We don’t desire objects because of their intrinsic value, he argued- we want them because others want them. Desire is memetic: we imitate what others fund desirable, especially those we admire….But, what happens when the person we imitate is close enough to us to become a rival? When two people covet the same scarce good- status, love, land, attention- they turn on each other. Dr. Girard called this memetic rivalry. Its most famous expression is the love triangle, but it also plays out in office politics, athletic competition, Wall Street hysteria, and the endless quest to keep up with the Joneses. This insight leads to a darker one; human beings don’t fight because they’re different, but because they’re alike, locked in rivalry over the same thing. Ancient societies, Dr. Girard believed, were haunted by this tendency. To stave off chaos. They developed the scapegoat mechanism; projecting blame onto a single individual or group, then purging them through expulsion or sacrifice. It’s a primal pattern that persists in pogroms, witch trials, and, more recently, cancel culture and internet mobs.

Dr. Girard’s other great insight concerns religion. Far from being the cause of violence, religion, he argued as a means of containing it. Sacrificial rituals diffused mimetic tensions. These tensions held – until biblical religion began unravelling them from within. Scripture, Dr. Girard noted, repeatedly, sides with the victim: Joseph betrayed his brothers, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, and most of all, the crucified Christ. As Christianity spread, it undermined the scapegoat mechanism and implanted a new moral reflex: concern for victims.

But this moral breakthrough came with a paradox. Once victimhood conferred moral authority, people began to compete for it. Mimetic desire now played out as a race to be more oppressed, more offended, more righteous in defence of others. A new rivalry was born—this time over who suffers most. Dr. Girard, on the other hand, urged us to renounce rivalry and practise forgiveness. (How an obscure scholar is shaping the most powerful country on Earth, by George A. Dunn, Special to the Globe and Mail, July 3, 2025)

Peter Thiel, as a student at Stanford when Girard taught there has become a frenzied apostle of Girard’s and, adapting the mimetic theory to the internet, such as Facebook, where everyone ‘wants to imitate’ what everyone else has, has poured millions into internet investments. And that has fueled his political funding of the Vice-president, and other ‘like-minded’ (or equally dependent aspiring politicians). There is real danger in the application of Girard’s serious theory to the machinations of a digital and especially an artificial-intelligence-saturated internet.

No theory can be tilted so far as to be either all ‘utopian’ or all ‘dystopian’….and Jay Alison in his book, The Joy of Being Wrong, has cast a very different interpretation and application of the Girard memetic theory to theology.

If I am reading Alison (and Girard) reasonably appropriately, then, the violence of the society that without cause or justification crucifies Jesus on Calvary, and especially the blindness to its evil and nefariousness, especially when set in concert with the willing victim, can carry a model of imitation that moves beyond rivalry and violence and into compassion and forgiveness, and thereby into relationality. Rather than competing for the highest rung of victimhood, martyrdom, and a perverse iteration of the hero, especially the alpha male hero, the withdrawal from unjust, illegitimate violence, even if and when such a withdrawal might smack to the outside world as ‘weakness, spinelessness, excessive fear, and a perverse search for and ambition to heroism, is and can be a model of the willing victim of the Crucifixion.

The mystery of this apparent paradox continues. It is not necessarily a rational, even consciousness and conscientious and deliberate decision to withdraw. Sometimes it might be as simple as a child withdrawing from a voice or a look that, for that child, embodies what s/he ‘knows’ as dangerous, threatening, intimidating and unfair….even if all of those words are unfamiliar to that child. At the ‘other end’ of such a withdrawal from violence, as an imitation of the willing, relational victim of Calvary, we might consider Nelson Mandela, who rejected violence in favour of peaceful, yet forceful, resistance, (inspired and even modelled by Gandhi). Only after years of unsuccessful legal, public, physical and verbal argument, protests, and non-violent resistances of various forms did Mandela finally relent and accede to some his more impatient compatriots, submit to military (militia) training, and succumb to his aversion for violence.

From Britannica.com, we read:

Satyagraha, concept introduced in the early 20^th century by Mahatma Gandhi to designate a determined but nonviolent resistance to evil. Gandhi’s satyagraha became a major too in the Indian struggle against British imperialism and has since been adopted by protest groups in other countries. According to this philosophy, satyagrahis—practitioners of satyagraha—achieve correct insight into the real nature of an evil situation by observing a nonviolence of the mind, by seeking truth in a spirit of peace and love and by undergoing a rigorous process of self-scrutiny. In so doing, the satyagrahi encounters truth in the absolute. By refusing to submit to the wrong or to cooperate with it in any way, the satyagrahi asserts that truth. Throughout the confrontation with evil, the satyagrahi must adhere to nonviolence, for to employ violence would be to lose correct insight. Satyagrahis always warn their opponents of their intentions; satyagraha forbids any tactic suggesting the use of secrecy to one’s advantage. Satyagraha includes more than civil disobedience. Its full range of application extends from the details of correct daily living to the construction of alternative political and economic institutions. Satyagraha seeks to conquer through conversion: in the end there is neither defeat nor victory but rather a new harmony.

This is not an argument to identify Alison’s willing victim who withdraws from unjust violence (the Jesus figure of the Crucifixion) as identical to the Satyagrahi of Gandhi or vice versa. It is, however, a seemingly inescapable and compelling connecting of the dots that link (at least by analogy, comparison, implication and praxis) the two images. And while we in the West seem, at least on the surface and in both rhetoric and attitude of our better angels, to revere men such as Mandela and Gandhi, for their accomplishments, and while Satyagraha is considered, in the eWest, a ‘philosophy’ rather than a religion, not a discipleship to and emulation and imitation of a willing victim to unjust violence (on which the world seems unduly dependent, if not actually obsessed with, consumed by, and even perhaps addicted to) the discernment between a philosophy and a religious principle and image may be a search for a difference where little, if any, really exists.

What jumps out from these thoughts, linking Gerard, Alison, Mandela, Gandhi, and whomever else might be lurking in the shadows of these words and sentences, is a cosmos of  theological and historic and philosophic images, incarnations, disciplines and ideals to which, for which and in which humans might find meaning, purpose, direction and both relief and some contentment.

Of course, suffering, the sine qua non of all foundational premises of both theology and philosophy, is never absent from any attempt to live a full life as a human being. And, God is not reducible to a single image, nor a single principle, irrespective of which name and identity each God is imaged. Individual human choices, especially when confronting the most extreme moments, (Hillman’s in extremis) matter to both the person facing the choice, and, it says here unapologetically) that it also matters to the universe. It is not enough to repeat, as does that man throwing the clam back into the sea, when asked why, ‘Well, it matters to that one clam!” It is not only each clam tossed back into its habitat, but each human choosing his or her habitat, where life can flourish. And life flourishing is an image irreducible to the literal, the empirical, the scientific.

Life-flourishing is, to borrow and mix metaphors, analogous to the salmon swimming upstream to spawn, to flourish, to propagate. It is confronting the rushing white water in the face, joyously, vigorously, courageously and unrelentingly, as if impelled by an instinct to and for life that will not be either sedated or denied or avoided.

And, whether such an instinct of the willing victim submitting to unjust violence, or the satyagrahi embracing the discipline of his highest instincts and ideals, or some other ‘path’ to resisting the over-wheening, unjustified, illegitimate and tragic obsession with, addiction to, violence, in whatever of its many faces and forms, it seems that we have intellectual, political, as well as deeply spiritual models from which to glean inspiration, motivation, discipline and hope.

We know that there is a kernel of both truth and wisdom in much of the legacy of each of these mentors. How we curate, interpret, espouse and apply their gifts remains an individual enterprise, not in order to achieve some heroic status, but almost perhaps the inverse, given that the world is highly unlikely to shed its dependence on violence, especially illegitimate and unjust violence.