Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Reviews Rene Girard's 'I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.' Lays out Girard's theory-of-everything: most desire is mimetic (the two-kids-one-toy example), which builds to a war-of-all-against-all resolved by the 'single-victim process' (=Satan) - a mob scapegoats/murders one victim, tension releases, civilization is founded, the victim optionally deified. Pagan myths are propaganda FOR the process; the Bible (Joseph, Cain/Abel, the Gospels) reveals it as evil. The payoff ('Origins of Woke'): Girard reads wokeness as the Christian victim-concern (Nietzsche's 'slave morality') outgrowing the Church and curdling back into the single-victim mechanism (cancel culture; wokeness as 'Antichrist' in the antipope sense). Scott's verdict: the mimetic-desire part may be right (ties to Sadly Porn); the all-myths-are-this-process claim is Freud-and-castration overreach (counterexamples: Hercules, Jonah, Bellerophon, Socrates); and Girard's woke-critique is awkward/incoherent (he can't say what changed post-1950).

Quality 75 · Excellent. Strong/Excellent boundary - a lucid, critically-sharp review that makes a hard Continental-philosophy theory legible, with well-chosen counterexamples and a genuinely illuminating framing (the Christianity -> slave-morality -> modern victim-focused-morality arc; the alien-nanobot-flower metaphor for Christianity). Held at the boundary because the book's central theory is judged 'mostly crazy' and the most valuable ideas (mimetic desire, the victim-morality arc) are Girard's/Nietzsche's, not original here.

Claude’s paradigm shift 52 · Moderate. Moderate - a fresh synthesis/critique (the slave-morality arc, the rigorous myth counterexamples) building on Girard and Nietzsche; not a new paradigm of Scott's own.

Real-world impact 1 · Negligible. A philosophy/religion/mythography book review; the woke-connection is interpretive commentary, not material real-world effect. RWI 1.