René Girard would launch a devastating anthropological attack on Alex Karp’s “lying eyes” formulation.

While Karp uses the phrase ironically to champion the idea that everyday citizens possess a clear, grounded, and unmediated grasp of local reality (which elites foolishly tell them to ignore), Girard would counter that the human eye is the most easily deceived organ in existence—not by corrupt leaders, but by the looking glass of other people.

Girard’s critique would dismantle Karp’s naive realism along three primary fault lines:

1. The Myth of the Autonomous Gaze (The Eyes are Mimetic, Not Objective)

Karp’s argument relies on the romantic assumption of the autonomous individual: a citizen walks down their street, observes an objective change in their neighborhood or economy with their own two eyes, processes it rationally, and notes the contradiction with the state’s narrative.

Girard would reject this entirely. His core philosophy of Mimetic Desire establishes that human beings do not experience the world or form desires independently; we look through the eyes of a mediator (others). Girard would argue that what a citizen “sees” happening in their neighborhood is never an objective appraisal of raw facts. Instead, their perception is deeply mediated by the collective anxieties, fears, and desires of their peer group.

If a neighborhood is experiencing economic friction, the citizen doesn’t just see the economic metrics; they look to see what their neighbors are angry about, copy that anger, and then interpret what they see through that shared lens of resentment. The eye is not an instrument of pure empirical deduction; it is an instrument of psychological imitation.

2. The “Lying Eyes” Are Actually Lying (The Blindness of Mimetic Rivalry)

Karp frames the elite as the liars and the citizens’ eyes as the truth-tellers. Girard would flip this script: the citizens’ eyes are literally lying to them, blinded by internal mimetic rivalry.

When social cohesion breaks down—due to economic stagnation or rapid demographic shifts—individuals within a society begin to compete more fiercely with one another for resources, status, and recognition. Girard calls this internal mediation, where neighbors become secret rivals to one another.

Because this internal friction is deeply uncomfortable and threatens to dissolve the community into chaotic infighting, the human mind subconsciously seeks an external target to blame. The “lying eyes” of the populace look outward and instantly misinterpret internal social rot as a simple, external threat (e.g., blaming migrants, an economic elite, or a specific political faction). The citizen thinks they are seeing an objective external problem, but Girard would argue they are actually projecting their own internal collective crisis onto a visible target.

3. The Protest Vote is Scapegoating, Not Rational Correction

Karp analyzes the political outcome pragmatically:

Leaders lie → Citizens notice the lie → Citizens cast a protest vote to punish the lie.

He treats the protest vote as a logical feedback loop to restore institutional balance.

Girard would see the protest vote as something far darker: a sanitized, modern iteration of the Scapegoat Mechanism.

When a society enters a mimetic crisis (a state of heightened polarization and anxiety), it requires a sacrifice to discharge that collective violence and restore temporary order. The “protest vote” is not a rational policy correction based on “what the eyes saw”; it is the crowd uniting to cast out the current “sacrificial victim”—the ruling political class.

The crowd convinces themselves that if they just expel the current leaders, reality will match their desires again. For Girard, the protest vote is a cyclical, irrational ritual of expulsion, not an act of clear-eyed democratic survival.

The Girardian Verdict on Karp

Girard would tell Karp:

“You are right that the elite’s narrative is failing, but you are dangerously wrong about why the populace is rebelling. You believe they are rebelling because they see the truth. In reality, they are rebelling because the institutional architecture that used to contain their mimetic rivalries has fractured. By telling them to trust their ‘eyes,’ you are not liberating them; you are validating the very crowd contagion and scapegoating dynamics that will ultimately tear the democracy apart.”

If the public’s gaze is fundamentally mimetic and prone to contagion rather than objective truth, then Karp’s strategy of being “more honest and frontal” cannot work by itself. How can a society restore trust in institutional reality when the populace is epistemologically trapped by the fears and rivalries they copy from one another?