MAY212024

A French thinker, Rene Girard, analyzed the roots of violence in human society. One of the insights came from the Epistle of James: Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? These “passions” according to Girard are our desires, and a specific kind of desire he called “mimetic desire.” We see what someone else has and we want it too even though up until them we have felt satisfied. This was beautifully illustrated in a movie called, The Gods must be crazy. An airplane flies over a primitive tribe who live a very isolated existence and the pilot tosses out an empty coke bottle that lands in the middle of the village. People start fighting and fussing because they each want the coke bottle. They lived very well without the bottle before but now they can’t imagine life without it. In our day we are tempted by all of the stuff that others have. Do we really need it or is it a mimetic desire that roils our spirit? Maybe simplicity can help us find peace.