@Plough end/ What we call 'populist escalation' is captivity accelerating: a crisis of desire. A polity habituated to scapegoating cannot self-redeem by technique. The Paraclete universalizes that unveiling in history. A reconciliatory mimesis interrupts, rather than “wins,” escalation.
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end/ Girard, of course, thought humanity so deeply habituated into patterns of escalating violence, and the scapegoat mechanism to be so perfectly self-justifying, that he concluded some form of concrete, transcendent intervention necessary for world redemption and salvation. 1/ Essentially eschatological, his later work. On one hand, he identifies our crazed, self-justifying lurch into total cataclysm: on the other, echoing Holderlin, "Danger itself invites the rescuing power", transcendent intervention as humanity's only realistic hope of survival. The ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of all “the kingdoms of this world” is no longer distinguishable from the counter-violence it opposes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin completely out of control. 6/ “People all over the world are employing intellectual, moral, and rhetorical ingenuity in an effort to endow the violence they favor with culture-founding authority, and all over the world they are failing” - Gil Bailie 7/ As such, “The idea of ‘limitless’ violence, suddenly looms up before us,” notes Girard. “For the first time,” he says, humanity faces “a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence.” 8/ More convinced than ever that reading Girard is a good starting point for reflecting on the circumstances we find ourselves in. Apt. His concern, he said, not religion, but its anthropology and, as such, the staggering features of Jesus' murder ultimately revealing the only way out of a revolving hall of projections, our "automatic, unconscious, ingrained and mimetic" escalating war of all against all. Quote tweet: Eliot: “Prophesy to the wind to the wind only for only The wind will listen.” The mimetic escalation of 'war of all against all' exponentiated to the planetary level? A global mob of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish? Why now? Girard, apt. Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. Panic in the system. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst.” René Girard
Open original document@MassimoFaggioli @commonwealmag Sanity keeps the minutes; fascism writes the outcomes. The mimetic lock-in of this theo-authoritarian complex admits no defeat within its runaway cultic logic—hence its air of inevitability. It cannot be argued down: only interrupted by truth disclosed at scale. Apocalypsis.
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Tweet: @nick_routledge and @alon_mizrahi 4/ Sure, the U.S. defines a fulminant apex of this derangement vortex, but the fever is epistemic, virulent, networked, global and, clearly, fast-metastasizing. No nation or culture can—or will—extract itself from such an epochal, totalized psychosis, in isolation. Here we are, then, upon the threshold of a transcultural, transnational, religio-political complex of fascist universalism and its demonic perversion of an authentic, planetary yearning offering us the only way out of our 'war of all against all', rightly called salvation. Image one: Agreed and, frankly, a worldwide contagion: Jihadists, Zionists, Hindutvavadis, 969ers, Crusaders, they're all at it. And whilst we're not the only only ones suffering from this plague, nor are we the only ones God welcomes. This, hardly news to planetary prophetology, of course. Quote Tweet: Clearly, the supercharged universality of this phenomenon - pat, predictable, cookie-cutter dialectics of ethnonationalism, purity and exclusion, span a dizzying array of languages, cultures and borders, just now - powerfully affirms its common, transcultural, archetypal origins. Image two: 1/ Hence the fundamental nature, role and promise of the political liberator, savior or Great Emancipator, here to revision the bodies, minds and souls of men in a bastardized, religio-nationalist image of the messianic hopes of our times. The transcendent function, perverted. Quote Tweet: In other words, the bastard appeal of such ethno-nationalist analogs is universally paradigmatic. How then, to effectively address the immense planetary forces encouraging the emergence and powerful enchantment of such personalities and their platforms? Quote tweet: Hardly news, even as the illuminating recognition that no one culture, creed, philosophy, religion, nation or otherwise can save us, inevitably requires a planetary reckoning with an inclusive eschatology. We're saved, finally, by the beauty and brilliance of our togetherness. Quote tweet: Thanks for your series of responses, Alastair; a beautiful reminder. Stateside, we're confronted by own particular flavor of deep vexation, even though its fundamental causes and effects are, of course, as in the UK, planetary and shared. Perhaps, ultimately, a solution is, too?
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