What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all…

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that emerged post-WW2. /1 https://t.co/99b0eT9ras

For about 70 years post-WW2, the necessity of re-building destroyed nations fundamentally altered our politics. The world wars had stripped away our social hierarchies. Allowing us for the first time ever in history to deliberately design societies. /2

Rather than them be just the continuous exercise of the social dynamics of all human life. Imitative rivalry, leading to the competitive team sports of social hierarchy. Violence. Those team sports are *always* violent. Not because humans are naturally violent either. /3

But because humans are creatures of desire. And desires are both infinitely plastic, and fundamentally incompatible. That’s what drives the teams and their imitative rivalry. The specific desires they pursue. /4

Paradoxically, the most fundamental human act is imitation, *because* humans are all different. If we weren’t all different, with different desires, we would have lots in common, and naturally cooperate. But we each desire differently. /5

And so the violence of clashing desires is inevitable. We imitate others because imitation is the only way you can create a commonality where there isn’t one. You copy others, without becoming them. Copying retains the fundamental differences between people. /6

Also paradoxically, it’s only by recognising the fundamental violence at the root of human life that we can create peace. As we did post-WW2, where it was only because societies were in ruins that we got a temporary break from the imitative rivalry/violence. /7

We set up emergency institutions to re-build our societies. They then ran societies for several decades, leading to historically unique increases in health, wealth and peace. Then the happiness this produced blinded us to its origins. /8

We forgot the origins of this new happy life. We began to think that was the default, giving us licence to live without any care to the institutions that gave us these happy lives. Even worse, we made them the enemy. The ‘bureaucracy’. We replaced them with a ‘market’. /9

The market is an anthropological abomination. The idea that humans work best when left to their individual selves competing was a fast-track straight back to the violence. Ask South America. Many nations there now run more or less by drug gangs. /10 https://t.co/QDsZdvKGBJ

Without continuous attention and action towards collective life, all human societies will just re-form gangs. Teams. Teams that will then compete, leading to violence. A team can be a drug gang, a nation, a company, an anti-mask Covid group. It’s all the same mechanism. /11

So many are constantly bewildered at what’s happening in the world right now, mostly from rich countries who lived that post-war happiness. Poorer parts of the world don’t see anything except how they’ve always lived. /12

If we want those happy times back, unfortunately history shows time and again only catastrophe wrought by the team sports will tend to bring it about. Catastrophe large enough to disrupt the fundamental violence of the team sports. Another bizarre paradox. /13

Without catastrophic violence and destruction, there is only violence and destruction. Because desires will not be tamed. Girard saw only one thing that has ever escaped this paradox, at least in the West. Christianity. /14

By making the team sports of imitative rivalry visible through the story of Christ, Christianity built institutions that lasted centuries. Of course it wasn’t perfect. There are no utopias. But Girard saw this as a unique historical event. /15

The targeting of the violence at the root of our always clashing desires. And building institutions that made that competing violence the enemy. Just as we built institutions post-war. As Edmund Burke knew and repeatedly said, it’s institutions that create happiness. /16

Because they de-personalise, and focus on objectives that transcend any particular desire or lifetime. Of course institutions can be Kafka-esque too. Christianity coupled them to a specific target, the avoidance of imitative rivalry. /17

By crucifying Christ, who took upon his own body the scapegoating of imitative violence. By doing that it built Western society, over many centuries. Most of that has now been forgotten in religious team sports. /end