This essay explores the centralization of wealth and power as one of the driving forces of political and social instability in America and asks the question, "Are we heading towards revolution?" Using French anthropologist, René Girard, as a guide to understand our instability, the essay explores the human tendencies of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating and their relevance in our current social disintegration. To counteract this growing fragmentation, the essay provides five opportunities for personal action to reintegrate our communities and ultimately our Nation.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Walking around the neighborhoods of Paris, you see these words on every public building. The motto of the French Revolution is emblazoned not just in the architecture but also in the hearts and minds of the French people. However, living here in France, I have noticed that one of these values shouts louder than all others in the streets of Paris: égalité. French memoirist Marc Antoine Baudot surmised that the French temperament was more inclined to the equality than to liberty. To a point, I have observed this broad generalization to be true. The French seem to be obsessed with equality in a way that Americans are not. For better or worse, Americans have a tendency to focus on the starting line of opportunity vs. the finish line of wealth accumulation.
“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth – that is the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community – and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
However, in the past decade, the rhetoric in the U.S. has stoked the fires of perceived and real economic and social injustice. Elite vs. middle class. Rural vs. urban. Black vs. white. Main Street vs. Wall Street. 1% vs. 99%. Men vs. Women. Looking at the economic data, there is much truth to the statements about growing economic inequality. Unstable wealth inequality, in particular, has risen significantly over the past 30 years. 16 thousand American families now have the same amount of wealth as 52 million American families.[1] Regardless of your politics, the data shows that the American middle class family has less wealth, lower relative incomes and faces higher costs than they did fifty years ago. Unfortunately, this downward trend of wealth creation is even worse for middle class families of color.[2]
There are many potential causes to these troubling inequalities: globalization, rapid technological changes in the workplace, legacy structural injustices and even misguided tax policy. Due to these forces, power and wealth have centralized significantly into the hands of a few elite players in a few American cities: financial markets and cultural power in New York, political and military power in Washington, D.C., cultural power in Los Angeles and technological power in Silicon Valley. This is not necessarily a nefarious conspiracy, but rather a historical tendency of human cultures to centralize around cities based on economic opportunity. However, an over-centralization of power and wealth could be a significant driver to the current instability in the United States. Will we have a revolution like the French that further pits our classes, religions, and races against each other in violence? What should we prepare for as it escalates? How do we prevent further violence and social disintegration? Regardless of one’s answers to these questions, there is a growing consensus that our country and our culture feels unstable and something must be done to prevent total disintegration of our Union.
Mimetic Rivalry and the Search for Scapegoats
“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
French anthropologist René Girard, an ex-patriot to America, thoroughly explored this phenomenon of cultural instability and human violence in his writings and showed a link between these phenomenons to inequality. According to Girard, human cultures innovate creating new cultural goods and then others desire these new goods largely because other humans find the goods desirable. He called this phenomenon of comparison, mimetic desire. We want to have what others have because they have it. Think of the fast fashion, Instagram, and ‘foodie’ trends, all examples of the power of mimetic desire in modern consumerism. Girard saw this desire as the driver of much of human activity and culture creation. One man sees what another has. If he cannot recreate or accumulate this object of desire, he attacks him for it. On the other side, the possessor of the cultural good, builds defenses and systems of domination to protect and to accumulate his riches. On a wider scale, as this dynamic builds and grows at a social level, this inequity and envy if unaddressed can lead to large-scale instability and chaos. “The chaos that precedes collective violence is nothing other than this, the disintegration of human communities as the result of the mimetic rivalries that all human communities are liable to be caught up in.”[3]
In addition to this insight, Girard also discovered in his anthropological research another constant theme across all human cultures: the mechanism of human sacrifice as a tool for reunification of the society during periods of great instability. From Aztecs, to Vikings, to the Ancient Mesopotamians, all ancient cultures used this approach to appease the gods when in reality they were appeasing mimetic rivalries of the community. To solve the problem of social unrest and instability and to protect their power, religious and political leaders discovered that if they found a scapegoat, sacrificed that person to the god(s), they could miraculously return unity to the community. But this sacral violence does not solve the underlying cause of social fragmentation: mimetic rivalry. The cycle continues ad infinitum. In the case of the Aztecs, the complex human sacrifices to their gods reached over 4,000 people at a time. Girard sees this phenomenon ritualized and repeated in every ancient culture but also throughout history and into modernity. Girard saw in the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, the mass killings of Communist Russia and even the public lynchings of his adopted Capitalist America all as examples of scapegoating to secure the unity of the collective and the power of elites. One does not have to look hard to find remnants of this activity in our current popular culture, from the dystopian violence of the Hunger Games, the final ritual of the flaming effigy at the Burning Man festival or the music video from Radio Head, Burn the Witch. Maybe these cultural expressions reveal that we are not wholly different from our ancient ancestors.
From Radiohead's music video, Burn the Witch, a haunting commentary on the human tendency to scapegoat.
With the rise of political instability and the power of authoritarian leaders around the world, we see something ancient and dark in our human nature raising its ugly head again. What are the examples of this scapegoating in our current political culture? The right and the left do not have a corner on scapegoating. On the far right, the easy scapegoats for all of our economic and social woes are the liberal media, the immigrants, the refugees, minorities of color, and different ethnic backgrounds destroying the European roots of America culture. On the far left, the scapegoat is the white, under-educated working class man, the corrupt police officer, or the gun toting evangelical. On all sides, we hear the sabre rattling and the growing lust for violence and confrontation. Each side is building armaments and a compelling rhetoric that covers the dark mimetic desires and desire for scapegoats in a veneer of noble purpose. What if all of these targets of scapegoating are actually useful distractions from our “disintegrating human communities as the result of our mimetic desires?”
A Quiet Revolution of Reintegration
The more people I talk to, regardless of political persuasion, they have the same heightened foreboding sense of existential crisis about the future of American democracy. Most of my friends are young parents in the full throws of their careers. I can sense in their voices an alarm and concern. What kind of place will their children grow up in? What can they do? Is it too late to change the tide?
"Dinner Party" by Jennifer Pochinski
As I listen to these friends, I hear in each of them a wake up to a call to engage more deeply in our troubled society. This gives me great hope. Across America, my intuition tells me there are others who are seeing an opportunity to stand in the gap.
If so, how does our generation counteract the dangers of mimetic desire, rising inequality, and scapegoating? Returning to one of my favorite authors, G.K. Chesterton, I remember when he was asked by a prominent newspaper to explain the most challenging problem in the world of his day. He responded with the brilliant two-word answer. “Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.” Any reflection on the destructive nature of mimetic rivalry has to start with me as a person. If I am going to be a part of the solution of “reintegrating” my own human community as a starting point, I have to start there. What do I desire of others that I do not have? Is my consumption sustainable? How do I create instability in my relationships by looking for a scapegoat? In what small ways do I encourage violence? This can happen in my family, my close friendships, in office politics, in my neighborhood and further out into my social networks. As a country, I believe we all need to start with contemplating our own role in the chaos of conflict and how our selfish desires destroy the fabric of our relationships.
As we work outwardly into our relationships, here are some practical ways that we can practice more integrity in our local communities and build more stability in our society:
Be Generous - One powerful way to counteract mimetic desire is voluntary sharing. Generosity kills our unhealthy attachment to our own material goods. As we give, we experience true "liberté" in our interior lives and we begin to see the ultimate purpose of all of our private property is to encourage healthy relationships. What can you give away to others in your city or neighborhood to decrease the power of your own mimetic desire? What can you give to your local church, synagogue, mosque or local charity to increase your personal freedom?
Give Hospitality to the Stranger and the Neighbor – One of the deepest desires of our heart is to belong to a family and to a group of friends. A simple thing we can all do is invite neighbors and even strangers over for a meal. If you feel inadequate to the task of cooking, there are excellent groups out there facilitating dinners for others willing to host. As David Brooks pointed out in his article “The Power of the Dinner Table,” this act of kindness has the power to break down walls, transform individuals, and build new relationships. Who are the people in your locality that need invitation into community? Who are the strangers that could experience belonging through a meal?
Make Something Beautiful – Prince Myskin, from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, was right when he said “beauty will save the world.” Our culture will recover its integrity when artists, musicians, writers, call us all to be our better selves, to live lives of meaning and help us understand the importance of quality over quantity. Without art and public beauty, we lose this sense of purpose in our daily lives. We need you to speak prophetically to our society that we are more than just consumers of temporary, throw away goods. Artisans and designers, whether you create landscapes, make furniture, or design websites, we need you to be masters of your craft and to call us to integrity with your excellence.
Invest in the Local Commonwealth – Regardless of our political philosophy, we can all agree that there are certain local treasures that are shared in common with our neighbors. In our cities and towns, each locality has local schools, parks, public art, and local landscapes that give a place a sense of identity and integration. Whether it is the local high school sports team or the fountain in the town square or the park in your city district, look for ways to invest in this commonwealth, especially in partnership with people that do not look or think like you. As we volunteer for the PTA, donate to the local museums, get involved in our local governments we discover that our neighbors are not that different than us. They care about their families; they have dreams just like us. By doing this, we build sociologists call ‘social capital,’ the trust and cohesion to have a healthy civic life. Social capital is also a key to unlocking economic opportunity for the disadvantaged; part of the solution for addressing inequality at a local level.
Create More Opportunities for Human Flourishing – If you are an entrepreneur, we need you to start and grow your businesses to create more opportunities for meaningful work. Look for ways to solve social problems with your business, build diversity into your teams and play a leadership role in the communities where you operate. All of this is good business. Entrepreneurs have the critical skill of managing an idea into reality, serving unmet needs, and creating jobs for people. Ultimately, you show all of us the abundance of human creativity to solve our problems and when you do this with fairness, you create a culture of shared equity in our economy.
““We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.””
Doing these small, daily acts of relational integrity does not mean we ignore the real inequalities in our society. Nor does this mean that there are not real inequalities in our society that need to be fixed. However, only addressing these issues at national level in hand-to-hand political conflict is not the best way to solve the problem of social disintegration. To explore inequality, we have to have a deeper understanding of what we really need to flourish as human beings in community before we try to fix these problems at a national level. We need a culture of encounter across our racial, religious, and political divides before we can understand how to fix the structural inequities. We need to be awake to our shared humanity. This can only happen in relationship.
From my conversations with our French friends, their society is still healing over two centuries later from the violence of the French Revolution. Endless revolutions are not a way to integrate the society. We have another choice: a form of peaceful, nonviolent revolution against the centralizing forces in our society. Powerful interests continue to create social instability by distracting us with advertisements that flame our mimetic desires and political scapegoats that stoke our fears. Are they trying to maintain control? Are they afraid that each of us would wake up and realize we each have power in our hands? If this is true, they will do everything they can to divert us from these simple opportunities with abstract political national dramas, reality TV, and mindless addictions to technology. Now, it seems they are combining all three in national politics. Using this strategy, our fears and desires are much easier to manipulate and keep us all asleep at the wheel.
Will we wake up to our own envious consumerism and tendency to search for scapegoats to blame? Or will we respond with generosity, hospitality, public beauty, local investment, and entrepreneurship? I hope that we choose the latter. Our communities are waiting for us to serve and lead the Great Reintegration.