By Olivier Klein – July 18, 2025
René Girard’s thought provides a penetrating lens through which to view the ideological excesses of wokism and the deep dangers they entail. Wokism—understood not as simple ethical vigilance but as an ideological system aimed at erasing all perceived differences—can be seen as an advanced episode in the mimetic dynamic. What this movement claims to fight—exclusionary violence—it reactivates, in reversed form. And in doing so, it maintains a sacrificial logic that has marked the history of humanity.
Mimetic theory is based on a fundamental discovery: human desire is never autonomous or free from others. It does not preexist the socialization process of the individual. We are not born with our desires or with fixed preference curves, as some individualist anthropologies or economic schools propose. We desire what others desire, precisely because they desire it. The other is envied and imitated because we believe they are complete, lacking nothing—unlike ourselves, who feel an inner void. This drives us to desire what the other desires: to define ourselves, to be, by mimicking their desires in the hope of filling our own emptiness.
This structurally mimetic nature of desire breeds rivalries, since we desire what others desire. This can unleash violence that is itself contagious. It can spread throughout the entire group and, in its extreme phase, lead to the group’s self-destruction.
This rivalry over possession intensifies when differences between group members fade, as the mimetic logic then spirals more easily and dangerously. Everyone develops a desire to possess what others covet—others doing the same. When two individuals resemble each other too closely, each becomes both a model and a rival to the other—especially dangerous because the other is nearly identical. This is Girard’s archetype (frequently found in myths) of the mimetic double, inherently charged with violent potential. Undifferentiation accelerates the mimetic process and its violent outcome.
Differences—sexual, symbolic, cultural—are thus not obstacles to peace. They do not hinder the prevention of violence. Quite the contrary: differences are conditions for preventing it. This is the heart of the paradox: the forced equalization of human conditions, far from abolishing conflict, exacerbates it.
How can the “mimetic crisis” that spreads among all members of a community avoid leading to the group’s self-destruction? A catastrophic outcome can be avoided if the crisis is resolved by designating a scapegoat. The scapegoat channels the violence of all-against-all into a unified violence of all-against-one. The scapegoat is chosen through a mimetic, quasi-random process and becomes the focus of a sudden consensus about their guilt—even though it has no real basis. The expiatory victim absorbs and takes away the contagious violence that had erupted within the group and become focused on them. In primitive societies, once the group is re-united, the victim is often sanctified as the figure who saved the community. Myth arises from this process, concealing the real mechanism while still allowing it to be deciphered for those who look closely enough.
Human groups, societies, establish strategies to avoid the repetition of the destructive logic of the mimetic crisis. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard shows that archaic societies managed to contain this violence by instituting differences, rituals, and taboos that constrain mimetic desire and limit its catastrophic escalation. This stands in opposition to the modern idea of “liberated” desire, assumed to emancipate individuals by freeing them from social constraints. It opposes the will to deconstruct taboos. But this so-called free, autonomous, unbounded desire is an illusion: it denies the mimetic structure of our desires, and therefore their destructive potential. On the contrary, it is civilization—with its mediations, rules, and norms—that can contain this endemic violence.
Differences—sexual, hierarchical, ritual, symbolic—are not archaic remnants. According to Girard, they are cultural tools for peace. In modern societies, this role is taken up by the law, the State (which has monopolized violence), and social norms. Differences remain, particularly economic or status-based. But rather than being sources of oppression, in today’s world these differences are fortunately mobile, evolving, not fixed—and thus become engines of economic dynamism and growth. At the same time, they subtly help restrain mimetic violence. Furthermore, rituals and moral taboos, though weakened in modern society, still play a useful complementary role in containing violence.
Herein lies the clear paradox of wokism. By aiming to erase all differences—perceived as discriminatory—wokism seeks to deconstruct the existing order in order to rebuild society on the basis of absolute egalitarianism. But this constructivism, rooted in the pursuit of undifferentiation, does not pacify—it intensifies mimeticism. It stirs up envy, jealousy, and ultimately hatred. Everyone competes to defend—or even embody—the purest victim, and to sanctify it. This is the contemporary logic of victimhood competition, analyzed by René Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: “The victim has become the absolute foundation of moral judgment.”
But if everyone is a victim in this artificially constructed world of undifferentiation, the barriers that once contained violence are destroyed. New scapegoats must then be found to absorb the violence this generates. The oppressor—vaguely defined but necessary to the ideological framework—becomes the new scapegoat. The man, the white person, the Westerner, or even the former and long-standing expiatory victim—now, through a historical reversal, recast as the quintessential oppressor—are singled out. The symbolic dominant is targeted for condemnation. The logic of sacrifice returns, but inverted.
From this perspective, wokism becomes a form of mimetic compassionism unaware of its own dynamics. It designates victims en masse, sanctifies them, and traps them in that status by assigning them to a fixed identity. It builds inverted hierarchies where guilt crushes responsibility, where identity replaces action, where absolute determinism denies the capacity to evolve or change status. Having dismantled the civilizational barriers to mimetic violence, the need for a scapegoat returns. But now the aim is not to sacrifice the victim to save the community; it is to sacrifice the supposed dominant—designated by new inquisitors—to redeem a presumed collective guilt. The barriers collapse, and the sacrificial logic endures. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard wrote that “the modern world is increasingly mimetic.” Wokism illustrates this. Beneath a posture of moral purity, it reproduces what it denounces: judgment, exclusion, violence, sacrifice. The victim is not abolished—only replaced. And the more this is done in the name of Good, the more dangerous the mechanism becomes. Evil—the principle of the scapegoat—thus takes on the appearance of virtue.
Should we then return to old hierarchies? No more than Girard, I believe we should. We must recognize the dynamics of mimetic desire, help disarm scandal, and break the cycle of vengeance. This requires rehabilitating symbolic mediations, legitimate structuring differences, and institutions that prevent the generalization of rivalry—without ever legitimizing injustice. This is what distinguishes equality of opportunity from egalitarianism.
Without differences, there are only rivals. And a society of rivals, without mediation and without cultural boundaries, is a society ready to ignite—and at risk of exploding. Integral egalitarianism, leading to generalized undifferentiation, becomes a breeding ground for distrust, amplified mimetic envy, and ultimately destructive violence.
Olivier Klein
Professor of economics at HEC
⸻
Note [1]: From a Girardian perspective, consider the rivalrous battle and striking mimetic behavior in the U.S. between proponents of wokism and religious ultra-conservatism. Both hurl anathemas at each other and claim victimhood at the hands of the other. Mimetic violence leads both sides to ban each other’s books and rewrite educational programs by erasing what contradicts their worldview—often with anti-scientific approaches. Both camps become polarized in a mimetic refusal of dialogue or exchange.
