Jesus Christ and Steve Jobs in the Thought of René Girard
In the intellectual architecture of René Girard, history is not a linear march of progress, but a long, agonizing struggle between concealment and revelation. Human culture was founded on a secret—a bloody, unconscious mechanism of sacrificial murder that allowed primitive communities to manage internal rivalry and survive their own self-destructive violence.
To understand what Jesus Christ and Steve Jobs achieved through the lens of Girardian anthropology, one must first abandon the naive assumption that they set out to physically remake the institutional structures of society or the enterprise. They did not dismantle the physical levers of human persecution, nor did they eradicate clunky corporate software.
Instead, their achievement was far more radical, unsettling, and ultimately apocalyptic: they executed a double unmasking.
By introducing transcendent standards from outside our closed mimetic systems, Jesus Christ and Steve Jobs permanently destroyed the efficacy of human self-deception. They stripped humanity of its ultimate safety hatches—the moral excuse of the “guilty scapegoat” and the technical excuse of “unavoidable complexity”—leaving modern society and the enterprise in a state of unprecedented, unmediated exposure.
I. The Christological Achievement: The Unmasking of the Scapegoat
To comprehend what Girard attributes to Jesus of Nazareth, one must grasp the primitive engine of human civilization: the Scapegoat Mechanism (le mécanisme du bouc émissaire).
In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard demonstrates that archaic human culture was born from mimetic desire (désir mimétique). Because human beings copy the desires of their neighbors, human communities inevitably devolve into frantic, undifferentiated rivalry (la crise mimétique). Left unchecked, mimetic envy threatens total mutual destruction.
Primitive humanity survived this existential threat by inventing the sacred sacrifice. When social tension reached a fever pitch, the mob instinctively turned on an arbitrary victim—a pharmakos. Because the entire community unanimously believed the victim was the demonic cause of their plague, slaughtering or expelling the victim produced a genuine, unifying, psychological catharsis: the Pax Paganus. The victim was then deified, and sacred myths were carved to record the event—always written from the deceptive perspective of the persecutors.
[ Archaic Pagan World ] ──► Unanimous Belief in Victim's Guilt ──► GENUINE SACRED CATHARSIS
│
▼ (Unmasked on Calvary)
[ Post-Revelation World ] ──► Knowledge of Victim's Innocence ──► CYNICAL PARANOIA & CHURN
The Mechanism Neutralized
What, then, did Jesus achieve?
Jesus did not abolish the physical practice of persecution. Mobs still gather, states still execute, and corporate C-suites still fire scapegoats.
Instead, Christ permanently destroyed the mechanism’s efficacy by proving that the scapegoat is innocent.
By submitting to execution as a completely blameless victim and forgiving his executioners, Christ exposed the unanimity of the mob as a murderous delusion. The Passion narrative flipped the perspective of myth on its head: for the first time in human history, the story of a sacrifice was told from the perspective of the innocent victim rather than the triumphant persecutors.
By revealing this truth, Christ did not cure human envy, nor did he guarantee world peace. He achieved something terrifyingly double-edged: he took away the anesthesia. Post-Calvary, when a community or enterprise persecutes a victim, it can no longer achieve the blissful, unifying self-deception of the ancients. Deep down, the modern mob knows the victim is an arbitrary proxy. The sacrificial blade still falls, but it no longer yields sacred peace—it yields only chronic cynicism, moral exhaustion, and immediate, escalating paranoia.
II. The Technological Analogy: Jobs and the Unmasking of Enterprise Bloat
If Christ destroyed the moral safety hatch of human culture, Steve Jobs—evaluated through a Girardian lens—executed an identical structural operation on the technological plane.
For decades, Enterprise IT operated as an administrative sanctuary for corporate self-deception. When a multi-million-dollar Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform collapsed, paralyzed supply chains, and blew through corporate budgets, executive leadership executed a well-rehearsed liturgy: they blamed the “unfathomable complexity of enterprise software,” fired the third-party System Integrator, and written off the loss.
Ugly, bloated, mind-dependent software—which forced human workers to act as manual compilers for database tables—was not an accidental failure of engineering. It was the executive suite’s ultimate technical scapegoat. The interface friction provided permanent cover for managerial incompetence and political double binds.
[ Legacy Enterprise IT ] ──► Mind-Dependent Software Friction ──► EXECUTIVE COVER / SCAPEGOAT
│
▼ (Unmasked by Jobsian Consumer IT)
[ Modern Consumer IT ] ──► Transparent "Bicycle for Mind" ──► TOTAL EXPOSURE OF TALENT
The Transcendent Model
Jobs’ achievement was not that he fixed Enterprise IT from the top down. On the contrary, Apple explicitly abstained from B2B sales, RFPs, and corporate golf games. By standing entirely outside the enterprise arena, Jobs operated as an External Mediator (médiation externe).
Through the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad, Jobs established in Consumer IT that cognitive computing can be mind-independent—tools that absorb their own operational complexity, insulate human working memory, and vanish into the task (unbroken readiness-to-hand). He proved that a digital tool could act as a seamless “bicycle for the mind.”
By establishing what was technologically possible in daily life, Jobs executed a profound ontological disruption: he elevated the mimetic expectations of the global workforce and destroyed the technical excuse.
When workers brought personal iPhones and Macs into the office (Bring Your Own Device), the technical Romantic Lie collapsed. Employees realized that the clunkiness of enterprise software was not an inevitable law of computer science, but a deliberate administrative choice sustained by procurement committees to preserve control, generate consulting fees, and supply sacrificial cover.
Jobs did not eradicate bad software, but he made it impossible to hide behind it. If an enterprise deploys transparent tools and still fails, the C-Suite can no longer blame the computer. The machine executed the command instantly; the failure lies entirely in human judgment.
III. The Definite Sum Total Conclusion of René Girard
What, in the final accounting, is René Girard’s definitive verdict on these achievements? Are we better off, or has humanity been pushed closer to the brink?
Girard’s ultimate conclusion—expressed most hauntingly in his final work, Battling to the End (Achever Girard)—is profoundly sobering, anti-utopian, and apocalyptic.
To sum up Girard’s assessment of these achievements: By destroying the mechanisms that allowed humanity to deceive itself, Christ (and by structural extension, the unmasking of technical excuses) did not bring peaceful harmony—they stripped humanity of its protective illusions and accelerated our existential risk.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ GIRARD'S DEFINITIVE SUM TOTAL CONCLUSION │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 1. THE LOSS OF THE SAFETY HATCH: │ │ Humanity lost the ancient pagan valve (the scapegoat) that used to │ │ discharge collective violence and bring temporary peace. │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 2. THE ESCALATION OF MIMETIC RIVALRY: │ │ Without the sacrificial release valve, mimetic envy and competition │ │ no longer resolve—they accumulate indefinitely. │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 3. THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM: │ │ Humanity is backed into a corner where it must either adopt radical │ │ non-rivalrous truth or face unmediated, total self-destruction. │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Girard explicitly cited Christ’s jarring statement in the Gospel of Matthew: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34).
The “peace” that Christ destroyed was the Pax Paganus—the false peace built on the bodies of innocent victims. By unmasking the innocence of the scapegoat, Christ took away the morphine without guaranteeing that humanity would accept the cure (non-rivalrous love).
Similarly, by unmasking the artificial complexity of software, Jobs took away the technical excuse without guaranteeing that corporations would become rational or humane.
The Sum Total Verdict
Girard’s net takeaway on what was achieved can be distilled into three definitive conclusions:
- The Unaltered Weapon: The physical tools of persecution and administrative bloat remain completely intact. Human beings continue to fire scapegoats and buy bad software. But because the underlying lies have been exposed, these tools have been drained of their sacred efficacy. They no longer deliver peace, catharsis, or genuine absolution.
- The Accumulation of Mimetic Panic: Because the sacrificial release valve no longer works to bring lasting peace, modern rivalries and corporate anxieties do not dissipate—they accumulate. This explains why modern culture feels perpetually outrage-driven and why corporate CIO tenures have collapsed into hyper-accelerated 24-month sacrificial cycles.
- The Unforgiving Ultimatum: By dismantling the safety hatches of human self-deception, Christ and the unmaskers left humanity with zero middle ground. We are trapped in an apocalyptic sandbox where we can no longer rely on protective lies to save us from our own incompetence and violence.
In Girard’s final estimation, the unmasking of our protective illusions leaves humanity standing naked before an absolute ultimatum: we must either abandon mimetic rivalry and take direct accountability for our moral and operational failures, or face uncontained, total self-destruction.