By Ian Ortega
Life is a series of endless games. We all participate in one game or the other. It could be a success game. In the success game, we compete on successes and thus try to accumulate success trophies. It could be success in the form of career growth, a promotion to an executive, or success through hitting that annual target.
Then you can have the status game. You can see status games going as far as who people choose to marry. You marry into an aristocratic family, the daughter or son of a judge, and ultimately, there you are flexing it in the status game. It could be with the kind of car you choose to drive.
There’s the virtue or moral game. Here, people compete on showcasing their virtues publicly. It could be with how many kids you sponsor to a better life. It could be with how you keep all the rules while on the road.
There’s even the intellectual game, showcasing the ability to know more and better than others. You go to X, and most people are playing this game. And the thing about games is most people don’t know the games they are playing. And perhaps that’s why the games don’t end because most participants are not aware.
But at the base of all these games is something more fundamental, something that made Rene Girard one of the most remarkable figures of the past and present century. Rene Girard told us about Mimetic Desire. That at the heart of all our desires is the fact that we don’t know what to desire. And since we don’t know what to desire, we look around and see what everyone is desiring and then we mimic that. At the root of our human relationships is the fact that all our desires are copied. And because of this continuous process of copying desires, we end up conflicting, we end up desiring the same things. Our desires are learned, they are not innate. And all mimetic desire ends in conflict. Rene Girard extends this to then explain why society is always looking for the sacrifice or the scapegoat, in the sense that all this violence and conflict can only end with a scapegoat.
Yesterday I watched a documentary on Rene Girard, it came on Christmas Day, and I got to watch it on Boxing Day. It was phenomenal seeing the life of a man that I hold high in the sense that he stumbled on this idea, and he struggled with it till he’d spread it to the world. And he took on all the personal risk to publish this idea. You can enjoy the documentary below: