For Girard, everything is imitation. Or rather, every human action that rises above “merely” biological appetite and that is experienced as desire for a given object, in fact is not a desire for that object itself, but a desire to have the object that somebody else already has.
What about the other element of Girard’s theory, the scapegoat mechanism? Here Thiel’s preferred instance is particularly flat-footed: “As for scapegoating,” he says, “what happened to Bill Gates during the antitrust prosecution of Microsoft is a great example of the tendency to gang up and blame one person.” If you thought antitrust cases were about maintaining a rationally regulated system of moderate free-market capitalism that encourages competition and innovation, think again: go back to Girard, with his faithful student as guide, and find the primordial origins of the Microsoft lawsuit in the Vedic sacrifice of the cosmic horse.