Rene Girard - Who IS This Guy?

Yet for all that the table continues to be that common everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity it is changed into something transcendent.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 82

Rene Girard at the time of this writing is nearly ninety years old. He is the greatest philosopher and Christian alive today that you probably never heard of. The Oracle of Ottawa discovered him on You Tube, quiet by accident while doing up the Richard D. Wolff piece on the best introductory lectures on Marxian thought. Once I heard the famous theory of mimetic desire spelled out, the Oracle of Ottawa was completely hooked. It basically states that all our desires are borrowed from other people. All conflict arises from mimetic desire, and this of course leads to the eventual sure as Sunday scapegoat mechanism.

Rene Girard - Immortal (richly deserved...)

As the "thinking about thinking project" has been progressing, the Oracle of Ottawa kept coming to the same realization over and over; I am missing something really elementary here but I can't put my finger on it. Well Dear Reader, after you become familiar with the basic ideas of Rene Girard, you will soon realize that you have finally discovered the missing and key piece to damn near every thing.  Religion, language, politics, economics and history in the big.

The Oracle of Ottawa quickly realized that this guy must be really dangerous, since it is damn near impossible to find his books or any anyone who has even heard of him. When you happen onto a an actor under these circumstances, you know that you are probably on to something powerful and very valuable. The clincher was when it provided the final and complete piece to my common stock algorithm, which I have deemed the Midas Algorithm For a Portfolio of Common Stocks. Weird how useful and universal a basic idea can be, isn't it?

Among the many advantages of the theory of mimetic desire is that it provides the center idea to understanding many weird books that you know are important but just can't seem to get into. The Oracle of Ottawa will list a few:

1. The Bible - any version...

2. John Milton - Paradise Lost

3. Karl Marx - Capital and most all of his other works.

4. Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

5. Arnold J. Toynbee - A Study of History...

6. James George Frazer - The Golden Bough

Once you have even an elementary grasp of mimetic desire you will be able to plow through the above mentioned works with ease and greatly enjoy them at the same time, much unlike the usual crop of ordinary undergraduates...

Now Rene Girard should have won the Nobel Prize by now, but alas he hasn't. He has won something even better than a Nobel, he is an Immortal in the Academy of France! From what the Oracle of Ottawa can find out about this gig it is way better than a Nobel any day. The French People are pretty smart to have something like this, that elevates the best and the brightest, always keeping the spiral in an upward direction, they should all be very proud of this. In Canada and the United States at the present time we are on a downward  Wall - Mart spiral of spend less, live better, which all in only teaches you one thing; You only get what you pay for...