A recent article by Nicolas Truong in Le Monde examines how figures such as Peter Thiel and sectors of the American techno-reactionary movement have appropriated René Girard’s thought. The article is not, strictly speaking, a theory of artificial intelligence or education. It is an exercise in intellectual history. But it contains an intuition whose implications extend far beyond the political domain.
At its core lies Girard’s well-known insight: human desire is not autonomous. We do not desire objects directly; we desire them through others. Desire is mediated, structured by imitation, and therefore inherently relational. Truong’s article shows how this anthropological insight can be detached from its original moral and religious context and repurposed as an instrument of power. If human beings imitate, then whoever shapes the environment of imitation acquires a subtle but decisive form of influence.
The article does not develop this point systematically. But it suggests something more general: ideas about human behaviour, once translated into systems, cease to be descriptive and become operative. They begin to organise reality.
From Mimetic Desire to Delegated Thinking
Girard’s theory is not simply a claim about desire; it is a claim about structure. Desire is mediated through a third element — a model whose desire we imitate — forming a triangular relation between subject, model and object. What appears as personal preference is, in fact, already shaped before it becomes conscious.
The algorithmic environment introduces a structurally analogous mediation, but at a different level. It does not primarily organise what we desire, but how we think. Increasingly, we do not approach a problem directly. We approach it through systems that suggest formulations, generate reasoning paths, and prestructure the space of possible answers.
The parallel is not rhetorical. This analogy, however, must be handled with precision. Mimetic desire, in Girard’s account, is constitutive of human subjectivity, whereas delegated thinking is a historically contingent tendency enabled by specific technological environments. The parallel does not collapse the two; it clarifies how a structural feature of human behaviour can be intensified under new conditions.
In both cases, orientation occurs before deliberation. In both cases, the mediation is largely invisible. And in both cases, the subject experiences the result as its own.
This is what I would call delegated thinking: the progressive transfer of cognitive initiative — the act of formulating, structuring and orienting inquiry — from the individual to the system, not through explicit decision, but through habituation.
We do not stop thinking. We stop initiating thought.
Arendt’s Warning Revisited
This shift is not merely cognitive. It has a moral dimension.
In her analysis of totalitarianism, and most explicitly in her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt described a form of failure that was neither intellectual incapacity nor ideological fanaticism. It was a failure of judgement. Eichmann did not lack intelligence. He lacked the ability to step back from the framework within which he operated and to evaluate it.
He functioned within a system that had already structured the space of possible decisions. His role was to execute, not to question. The language he used, the categories he employed, the problems he addressed — all were given.
The parallel with our present situation must be handled with care. But structurally, the risk is recognisable. When systems begin to pre-formulate questions, suggest directions, and define relevance, the individual may retain activity while gradually losing authorship. One continues to operate, but within a space that one has not defined.
Delegated thinking is not imposed. It is accepted because it is efficient.
The Educational Risk
The implications for education are therefore not superficial. They do not concern themselves only with the use of tools, but also with the formation of the mind.
If cognitive initiative is progressively externalised, several shifts follow. Intellectual effort is reduced not because students are unwilling, but because the system removes the need to struggle. Correctness becomes detached from understanding, as valid outputs can be produced without reconstructing the reasoning that justifies them. Authorship weakens because the origin of ideas becomes increasingly opaque.
But the most significant shift is more subtle. Criteria themselves — what counts as a good question, a relevant argument, a meaningful problem — begin to migrate from the individual to the system. Traditionally, these criteria are not given in advance. They are formed through the very process of inquiry: by struggling with ambiguity, by testing formulations, by learning to distinguish what is trivial from what is meaningful. When systems pre-select directions, highlight what appears relevant, and suggest lines of reasoning, this formative process is short-circuited. The student no longer develops an internal sense of orientation. Instead, orientation is received.
What is lost is not information. It is the capacity to recognise significance.
A Necessary Clarification
The value of the diagnosis suggested in Truong’s article lies in reminding us of something essential: human beings are not isolated rational agents. We are shaped by structures we do not fully perceive. Artificial intelligence does not introduce this condition. It amplifies it.
But amplification changes scale, and scale changes nature. When mediation becomes constant, immediate and invisible, its effects are no longer episodic. They become the environment itself.
A Final Distinction
The question is no longer whether students can think.
It is whether they remain capable of initiating thought, or whether they limit themselves to operating within structures that have already defined what is worth asking, what counts as relevant, and which paths are available.
And this precedes any discussion about correctness, performance, or even understanding.
Because before any answer can be judged, something more fundamental must occur: the question must be posed.
And the capacity to pose it — to define the problem rather than merely respond within it — is where judgement begins.