Consumer society and mimetic rivalry

René Girard Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

They (Dupuy and Dumouchel) say that the consumer society is the way to defuse mimetic rivalry, to reduce its conflictual potentiality. By making the same objects, the same commodities available to everybody, modern society has reduced the opportunity for conflict and rivalry. The problem is that if this is pushed to the extreme, as in contemporary consumer societies, then people ultimately lose all interest in these universally available and identical objects. It takes a long time for people to become disaffected, but this finally happens. The consumer society, because it renders objects available, at the same time also makes them eventually undesirable, working towards its own 'consumption'. Like all sacrificial solutions, the consumer society needs to reinvent itself periodically. It needs to dispose of more and more commodities in order to survive. Moreover, the market society is devouring the earth's resources, just as primitive society devoured its victims. However, all sacrificial remedies lose their efficacy because the more available they are, the less effective they become...

The consumer society turns mimetic desire and its possible crisis into a positive instrument of economic wealth, but it has a side-effect: when more of the same objects are offered, they become less and less mimetically desired. This creates an inflation of objects, the consequence of which is that one now has an array of objects which go directly from the shop to the bin, with hardly a stop in between. One buys objects with one hand, and throws them away with the other - in a world where half of the human population goes hungry...

The consumer society, at its extreme, turns us into mystics in the sense that it shows us that objects will never satisfy our desires. It can corrupt us in the sense that it can lead us to all sorts of useless activities, but it also brings us back to an awareness of our need for something entirely different. Something that the consumer society itself cannot provide. pp 79-81