Prophet of the Pandemic
Psychological Contagion and the Roots of Conflict
5 min readAug 18, 2021
The great French social theorist René Girard spent a large part of his career studying plagues and pandemics in ancient literature. He noticed something fascinating: in every instance, the psychological contagion that spread fear and anxiety and led to faction-forming is inseparable from the microbial and infectious contagion that caused a…