If we take Girard’s claims on the fallenness of human nature seriously, then a large portion of western political philosophy is confused about the levers of societal progress ...

If, as Girard shows, alienation, vanity, fetishization, suffering, and deceit are the natural consequences of social interaction produced by innate psychological mechanisms, then utopia cannot be established by only changing the political-economic superstructure ...

For example, if fetishization – imbuing metaphysical value into objects – is part of our constitution, then Marx, while warranted in identifying production relations as that which channels fetishization, was incorrect in concluding that they were also its chief cause ...

Indeed, as history has revealed, the negative drives Marx identified in capitalism were often just redirected, sometimes in more grotesque ways, to a different channel in the communist utopias of the 20th-century ...

In like manner, the tools of emancipation – chief among them private property and political equality – that liberal thinkers used to fight the oppression of tyranny have revealed themselves to be, in some other sense, oppressive ...

Similarly, pioneers of the internet had hoped it would bring about a free, connected, and truthful world. Social media platforms, in recent years, however, have proved to be just as much vessels of surveillance, division, and falsehoods ...

We should always be cautious of the extent to which changing external structures of the world can alleviate its evils.

The fundamental error is to confuse avenues that merely channel our collective evils as their root cause.

Doing so usually invites the same evils to come back through new channels.