Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? A French historian, Rene Girard, looked at passages similar to the Epistle of James and concluded that, in general, war is simply a highly organized means of theft. You have something I want so I will take it. He described what he called “mimetic desire.” In general we are content with what we have but when we see someone has something that we don’t have, then we desire to have it as well. The movie The Gods must be crazy illustrates this. When a passing airplane drops a coke bottle onto a primitive village it causes rivalry and envy because someone has something I don’t. The cure: contentment with what he have.
