René Girard
French academicWikipedia
98
MENTIONS
57
EPISODES
54
PODCASTS
Search complete. 98 mentions across 57 episodes found for "René Girard".
Oct 28, 2026
Jonah GoldbergHOST
And there's nothing wrong with pressing your own economic interests.
Jonah GoldbergHOST
But there's this Rene Girard thing of victimism.
Jonah GoldbergHOST
You need to have essentially a poster child as an avatar.
Jonah GoldbergHOST
And so they want to make it the really poor, the homeless, all that kind of the Palestinians.
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
Against Girardian Mimesis By William Published on October 27, 2026 Wikipedia summarizes René Girard's memetic theory like this.
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
Quote Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
Scott TeemsGUEST
I was just out of college, and I was beginning this filmmaking journey when I encountered an essay he wrote called The Spiritual Frontiers of Film, which he published, Greg.
Scott TeemsGUEST
um which on first read it seemed terribly heady and theoretical to me but on subsequent reads revealed itself to be incredibly practical and applicable and i've used uh the ideas in that essay and the book which expanded on those ideas he published called in a new light i've used those ideas in virtually everything i've i've done since or i've tried to at least Through Ron's work, I was introduced to the work of René Girard, the French scholar and cultural anthropologist, and Gil Bailey and their theories and writings on mimetic desire and violence and scapegoating in particular, ideas which Ron Austin then put into the context of filmmaking and storytelling.
Scott TeemsGUEST
Those ideas have been hugely informative and influential on my life and my work and my worldview, my whole life really.
Scott TeemsGUEST
um ron and i became friends and became sort of pen pals over the last few years of his life we traded emails and it all culminated in this lovely event we did together in los angeles in 2019 at a church called reality la i got to interview ron and dig into all those ideas that have meant so much to me and to hear some new ones you know ron was very bold in his faith.
SteveHOST
One that is more particularly about very, very recent American political and cultural things is Kristen Kobe Dume's book.
SteveHOST
jesus and john wayne that sort of takes a look at like a whole movement within christianity that sort of is is tied up with uh partisan politics and a particular sort of take on christianity being the sort of like coercive macho sort of a thing and where that came from and how long that's been brewing um you know when you mention nt right and jesus and the powers it calls to mind um all of uh walter wink's work on the powers that they're uh also sort of about spiritual warfare and also the powers as sort of like uh uh international and national political in that sort of domination system kind of thing um richard roars another good voice as well even though he's often sort of like a little more contemplative and mystic but we'll sort of talk about that notion of um uh jesus brings an alternative to the domination system that sort of keeps showing up over and over and over again in history um and then for that matter um uh oh come on now i'm gonna i'm gonna blank on his name he's french um It's not Rene Girard.
SteveHOST
Oh, man.
SteveHOST
There's another writer.
Stephen CrosbyHOST
But John 4, he was talking about water and sandwiches, not us.
Stephen CrosbyHOST
We're going to talk about Rene Girard, and you need to blah, blah, blah.
Stephen CrosbyHOST
And so we don't allow people process.
Stephen CrosbyHOST
Number two.
BradGUEST
Interestingly, if we take seriously that language is a relation, that language is is the constitutive relationality which creates and resides as the human, Jesus as the Word.
BradGUEST
René Girard, having discovered this, specifically by not being deep down into the trenches of one discipline, and this is why people have to be cross-disciplinary or they're just They end up reinforcing errors and revealing nothing.
BradGUEST
He was alone.
BradGUEST
He lacked the relation.
MaggieHOST
have.
GingerHOST
Okay, so for everyone listening, this idea came from a French philosopher named René Girard.
GingerHOST
Maybe I'm saying that right.
GingerHOST
Maybe I'm not.
Alan BermanGUEST
We keep pointing fingers at people, but if you remove any of the people, the same system exists, right? It's the infrastructure that needs to be torn down.
Alan BermanGUEST
And a lot of these guys, including Thiel, were students of Rene Girard, who was a teacher at Stanford who taught something called memetic theory.
Alan BermanGUEST
And part of what that teaching is that the public needs villains they need people essentially to scapegoat they need people to point the finger out break out the guillotine for because that allows the infrastructure underneath the the people that are being used as mass to continue to run operationally functional while the mass that it's wearing keep getting replaced and replaced and replaced because we think that we're doing something it's essentially in a weird way it's kind of like voting and how we vote for the president and there are genuinely people that think that who the president is matters and that their vote counts right it's the same the billionaires are the same thing whether you're going at gates or feel or whoever it is it's all the same nonsense because the infrastructure underneath it's still built by the same people they were all at the same meetings they're all part of the same builder groups they're all tied to epstein right like all this shit is is again it's all tied together
Ty RobertsHOST
you just gave me this like um almost like epiphany actually just now You know what it really, like what you just said, you know what it really sounds like? It's all fucking WWE.
Matthew RemskiHOST
So, there's a grifter kind of category, but then, you know, there's a lot of characters that you cover, including Vance and Teal, who also sort of point to what seemed to be a more earnest moment of awakening.
Matthew RemskiHOST
into, oh, this was when I first heard Curtis Yarvin talk about, you know, unitary executive theory or Steve Bannon or whoever I was listening to, or Peter Thiel talking about Rene Girard.
Matthew RemskiHOST
They're talking about moments in which they really glom on to somebody who they believe has some kind of mastery over spiritual knowledge.
Matthew RemskiHOST
And they have specific reference points, which Russell Brand doesn't have, right? I don't know if Mark Wahlberg does.
speaker_0HOST
So, no good, no good.
speaker_0HOST
Now, this intensifies a conflict among the president's supporters and, as René Girard once famously suggested, a resolution of such tension requires anointing a scapegoat, our bouc émissaire in French.
speaker_0HOST
Societies restore peace by uniting against a vulnerable outsider and blaming him, them, her as a collective scapegoat.
speaker_0HOST
According to René Girard, The historically most consequential case of scapegoating was none other than Jesus Christ as the ultimate innocent victim.
speaker_0HOST
And that case, some 1,993 years ago if my math is correct, offers a definitive exposure of the scapegoat mechanism.
speaker_0HOST
The novelty of that case was that, unlike in ancient myths, which were written from the perspective of the persecuting crowd that genuinely believed that the victim was guilty, The Gospels tell the story from the perspective of the innocent victim.
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