I have for you a treat, a dazzling overview of the work of the brilliant Catholic author and Stanford professor emeritus Rene Girard, who throughout his long academic career has triggered the ire of left-liberal professors. Writing at ISI’s web journal, First Principles, Thomas F. Bertonneau explains why Girard’s “truth-telling versus the crowd” has so riled the Left.

For starters, he insists on the objective reality of a fixed human nature and has taken North American humanists to task for gravitating toward what Bertonneau describes as “faddish mimetic contagions.”

Basic to Girard’s literary criticism is the centrality of mimesis or “imitation” in psychology and culture. Thus he

studies the authorial obsession with the genesis of misery in the tendency of the human subject to acquire his desires from what he takes to be the . . . object-of-desire . . . of another person . . .
[For example,] Girard notes how Stendhal’s or Dostoyevsky’s or Proust’s main characters think of themselves tacitly as victims of a . . . swindle that has deprived them of their proper being, which they locate in someone made enthralling through the apparent possession of all that the sufferer lacks. Modernity, with its spiritual bleakness and assimilation of everything to the politics of democracy, has exacerbated this perennial and universal phenomenon. “Men who cannot look freedom in the face are exposed to anguish . . . There is no longer God, king, or lord to link them to the universal.” The despiritualized and isolated ego in its misery inclines, writes Girard, to “choose substitute gods” so that it might “escape the feeling of particularity”; it does so typically, Girard argues, by “imitat[ing] another’s desires.” In this way . . . the endless cycle of vain jealousies and imitations . . . links up with the anthropological question about the origin of the gods—of divinization.

But, enough. Peruse yourself this engrossing account of “the gist” of Girard.