AI and the Desire to Destroy the Rival - Minerva at Dusk
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AI and the Desire to Destroy the Rival<br>A Girardian theory of why the world is obsessed with artificial intelligence.
Minerva at Dusk<br>Jun 07, 2026
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“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.” (René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes)
David with the Head of Goliath (Caravaggio, 1610)<br>The obsession nobody can explain
The public conversation about AI has settled into two camps. The optimists say it is the greatest productivity tool ever invented, a technology that will make us faster, smarter, and richer. The pessimists say it is a threat, that it will eliminate jobs, concentrate power, and perhaps endanger the species. Both sides assume the fundamental question is what AI will do to us.<br>Neither side explains why we are so obsessed with it.<br>Not interested. Not cautiously adopting. Obsessed. The speed of adoption, the emotional intensity of the discourse, the hundreds of billions in capital pouring in on terms that no sober analysis can justify, the eagerness with which people hand over functions that were until very recently considered irreducibly human. This is not the behavior of rational actors evaluating a productivity tool. Economists call it a bubble and leave it there. But a bubble is a description, not an explanation.<br>I want to propose a complementary explanation, one that does not replace the economic or technological accounts but sits underneath them. It comes from René Girard, a French-born American literary critic and philosopher of social science who spent fifty years studying the structure of human conflict and desire. His framework, applied to AI, suggests that the extraordinary appeal of this technology has less to do with what it can do for us than with what it does to our relationships with each other.<br>Specifically: it removes them.<br>I should be clear from the outset that this is not a doomsday argument, and it is not an anti-technology polemic. It is an attempt to understand something that the standard explanations leave unexplained. If the argument is uncomfortable, that is because it is about us, not about the machine.<br>Girard in five minutes
For readers unfamiliar with René Girard, here is the core of his thought.<br>Girard’s central claim is that human desire is not original. We do not decide what to want through some private, autonomous process of evaluation. We learn what to want by watching other people want it. Desire is imitative, or as Girard put it, mimetic. I want the job because my colleague wants it. I want the house because my neighbor has one like it. I want the life because someone I admire appears to be living it. Left entirely to ourselves, Girard argued, we would not know what to desire at all.<br>Girard distinguished between two forms of this imitation. The first he called external mediation: the model I imitate is far enough from me, in status, in era, in world, that we can never come into conflict. A medieval Christian imitates Christ. A teenager imitates a musician she will never meet. The distance makes rivalry impossible. I borrow my desires from the model without the model becoming my enemy.<br>The second form is what Girard called internal mediation, and it is where the trouble begins. In a democratic, egalitarian, hyperconnected society, the people I imitate are not distant figures. They are my peers. The colleague who got promoted. The neighbor who renovated. When I want what they want, and they want what I want, we become rivals. The person who taught me what to desire is now standing between me and the thing I desire.<br>Here is Girard’s crucial insight: the rivalry is not an unfortunate side effect of imitation. It is inseparable from it. The closer the model, the more the admiration curdles into resentment. We do not hate our rivals despite imitating them. We hate them because we imitate them. And neither party can acknowledge what is happening, because admitting that your desires are borrowed from the person you resent is psychologically intolerable. So the rivalry intensifies beneath the surface, each side convinced their desire is original and the other person is merely in the way.<br>Girard’s second major contribution is the scapegoat mechanism. When mimetic rivalry escalates to the point of crisis, communities have historically resolved the tension by directing their collective violence toward a single victim. The scapegoat is sacrificed, the community achieves temporary peace, and the cycle starts over. The mechanism works only if the community does not understand what it is doing. “To have a scapegoat,” Girard wrote, “is not to know you have one.”<br>His third insight concerns modernity. The Judeo-Christian tradition progressively exposed the innocence of the victim and made the scapegoat mechanism visible. Once visible, it loses its power. We can no longer sacrifice our way to peace. But the mimetic...