All in my head: Girard vs. Thiel

student surpasses master? i think not. i present the Innovation paradox

Jun 25, 2025

You might’ve seen Girard’s claim from his essay in the Week#5 newsletter—“The only short-cut to innovation is imitation.”, and if you know anything about the Godfather of the startup world, you’ve heard Peter Thiels' mantra—“Competition is for losers.”

So imagine my dissonance when I realized: two of my biggest philosophical models—René Girard and Peter Thiel—might be at odds precisely in the one arena where they should be aligned: innovation.

How can innovation depend on imitation, yet demand you escape imitation entirely?

Let’s unpack this paradox.

1. Girard’s Ritual Mimesis Engine

Girard opens with a definition check:

"Innovation," from the Latin innovare, innovatio, should signify renewal, rejuvenation from inside, rather than novelty, which is its modern meaning in both English and French.”

He goes on to say:

“The mimetic model of innovation… depends on the kind of passionate imitation that derives from religious ritual and still partakes of its spirit.”

He shows that before modernity, “innovation” meant heresy. A spiritual danger. Something that could unravel the social fabric. As societies feared that mimetic contagion (copying gone wild) would collapse everything.
For Girard, nothing comes from nothing. You innovate through imitation (models). This is where Thiel is still in agreement.

2. Thiel’s Red-Ocean Escape

Now cue Mr. Peter Thiel:

For him, innovation is doing something fundamentally new—going from zero to one—rather than merely copying what already exists.

“Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.”

Thiel distinguishes between:

Horizontal progress: globalization, scaling what works, copying success (1 → n)
Vertical progress: technological leaps, breakthrough ideas, original creation (0 → 1)

To Thiel, the key markers of innovation are:

Contrarianism: doing what others (in the crowd) overlook or believe is wrong.
Monopoly: creating such a unique solution that you face no real competition.
Vision: seeing and building something others can’t imagine yet in alignment with vertical progress.

He famously says

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

Thiel’s doctrine is a line that has become startup gospel: carve companies into monopolies by doing what no one else is doing. If you’re competing head-to-head, you’re already disqualifying yourself. The zero-to-one leap is about escaping the red ocean of imitation entirely.
- This is where I felt the tension between the two thinkers. Girard wouldn’t deny the existence, or even the necessity of competition. But he’d question whether you can ever truly escape it. Because in Girard’s world, even the act of escape is mimetic.
  - In fact, we’ve seen it. The entire startup culture has trended toward contrarianism-as-a-brand. Everyone wants to be the next “original.”
    - Example: Take Thiel’s critique of higher ed in Zero to One. He framed dropping out as an act of independence, but as soon as the Thiel Fellowship gained traction, he became the new model. And here’s the Girardian twist: once Thiel became a model, the act of dropping out became mimetically charged. It stopped being about inner conviction. It became another gesture of conformity. Now we’ve got a generation of founders exiting school not because they’ve outgrown it, but because they think that’s what successful tech people do. They’re not rebelling; they’re re-enacting.

So Girard would push back here in two ways:

a) The Desire to Escape Competition Is Mimetic

Girard would call what Thiel champions counter-imitation:

“The losers try to demonstrate their independence by systematically taking the course opposite to that of the winners… Their pride turns self-destructive.”

So when Thiel says “do what no one else is doing,” Girard would ask: why do you want to do that? And from whom have you seen it? Boom mimesis exposed…

b) Innovation Is Still Rooted in Mimesis

Even when a founder creates something that looks radically new (0 → 1) , Girard insists they do so through a process of deep imitation:

“Many people innovate when they think that they imitate…The only short-cut to innovation is imitation.”

So Girard would be skeptical of Thiel’s claim that every moment in business happens only once. He would say: yes, the surface level of innovation might appear to be unique, but the underlying mechanism is always mimetic.

The new questions that arise are: does Girard believe mimesis can be transcended? What does Girard consider innovation in today’s world?

4. Girard’s Definition of Innovation

Girard believes that innovation is the renewal or transformation of existing forms, patterns, or rituals through deep and often unconscious imitation. It is not the creation of something wholly new, but rather the emergence of novelty through a process rooted in mimesis, whether personal, cultural, or sacred.

He emphasizes that:

“The only short-cut to innovation is imitation.”

In Girard’s view, true innovation:

Preserves continuity with tradition even as it appears to break from it.
Arises not from individual genius in isolation, but from the internalization of many models.
Often occurs unintentionally—innovators think they’re imitating but end up diverging in subtle, meaningful ways.
Can only be recognized in hindsight, as its roots are mimetic and only appear novel once refracted through new lenses or needs.

Importantly, he warns against the modern myth of “absolute innovation”—the idea that we can or should create ex nihilo (from nothing), like gods. That myth, he argues, leads to cultural instability, resentment, and intellectual self-deception.

5. They both matter sequentially for innovation!

Phase 1: Copy (Girard’s Domain)

Start with models. Girard insists all desire, creativity, and ambition begins with mimesis as we innately want what others want, we build by imitating those who built before us.

“The only short-cut to innovation is imitation.”

You learn by apprenticing. You imitate deeply. You study the greats not to flatter them, but to embed their instincts. This is not any form plagiarism, it’s how we’re wired as humans to learn.

Girard’s version of innovation isn’t about rupture or singular breakthroughs. It’s about re-patterning tradition from within ourselves. Real change, he says, comes from fidelity to form—not rebellion against it.

Phase 2: Create (Thiel’s Call To Action)

Once you’ve internalized the models of your status quo, that’s when Thiel enters and asks you to transcend them.

“If you’re copying these guys, you aren’t properly learning from them.”

The goal is for you look for convergence, where everyone is going, and break away from it. You escape the mimetic trap by finding what no one else sees. That’s Thiel’s Zero to One moment: the pivot from imitation to originality.

Putting Them Together:

Girard wants you to be aware and process what you want.
Thiel shows you where to swerve and create something new.

Real innovation lies in the tension between absorption and escape, so my request for you is to move through both thinkers.

Thanks for making it to the end. This was strange for me to reconcile with—Thiel was Girard’s student, like his intellectual heir in so many ways. And yet, when it comes to Girard’s essay on innovation, it almost felt like they were pulling in opposite directions. But maybe it was never a contradiction. Innovation isn’t a binary between copying and creating. Girard and Thiel illuminate two essential stages of the innovation cycle. So maybe I click-baited you by calling it a paradox—when it’s actually just a sequence.

Sidenote: An interesting surprise was understanding more fundamentals of conservative values, and how based they are in orthodox Christianity:

“People accuse each other of being bad imitators, unfaithful to the true essence of the models… A taste for innovation is supposed to denote a perverse and even a deranged mind. The unfavorable implications of the word were so well established that we still find them under the pen of a thinker as radical as Diderot: "Toute innovation est à craindre dans un gouvernement." ("In a government, every innovation is to be feared.")…Paradoxically, the Revolution did not reinforce the ancient fear of innovation, but instead greatly contributed to its demise. The guillotine terrified many people, of course, but it was "political" terror in the modern sense, and no longer something mysterious and uncanny. What disappeared at that time was the feeling that any deliberate tinkering with the social order was not only sacrilegious but intrinsically perilous, likely to trigger an apocalyptic disaster.”

A bit of a long quote, that says in short: