René Girard revealed one of the most haunting truths about human nature: our desires are not born within us—they are borrowed. We imitate what others value, often without realizing it, and this cycle of mimetic desire binds culture together even as it can tear it apart. Nowhere is this paradox clearer than in the phenomenon of oikophobia—the fear, rejection, or contempt for one’s own home, culture, or civilization.
The term oikophobia comes from the Greek oîkos (home) and phóbos (fear). Once used by poet Robert Southey in 1808 to describe wanderlust—the yearning to flee familiar comforts—it was revived centuries later by Roger Scruton, who saw in it a distinctly modern malady. For Scruton, oikophobia describes the educated elite’s disdain for national identity, tradition, and inherited culture. It is, in his words, the “repudiation of inheritance and home.” Benedict Beckeld expanded the idea, arguing that civilizations in decline often turn against themselves, mistaking self-destruction for progress.
From a Girardian perspective, oikophobia emerges when a culture’s mimetic models—its heroes, virtues, and shared ideals—lose legitimacy. When the sacred center collapses, people search for new objects of imitation, often outside their own tradition. The foreign becomes glamorous because it is unattainable; it offers a new purity against which the “home” appears corrupt. This dynamic breeds what Girard would call mimetic rivalry: a competition to reject one’s roots more zealously than others, to prove moral superiority through self-denunciation.
History offers ample illustrations. In late Rome, elites obsessed over Greek refinement while scorning traditional Roman discipline. During the Enlightenment, European thinkers idolized distant “noble savages,” condemning their own societies as irredeemably hypocritical. After World War II, many Western intellectuals equated patriotism with barbarism, idealizing transnational identities like the European Union as moral antidotes to history’s sins. Each of these moments reflects a Girardian displacement of guilt—the collective expulsion of “home” as scapegoat.
Girard warns, however, that such patterns cannot sustain communities. The destruction of shared symbols may promise liberation, but it often leaves a void that new forms of violence rush to fill. The more we imitate those who reject belonging, the more alienated we become. Real renewal, Girard would insist, demands reconciliation, not renunciation. To love one’s home critically is not to idolize it blindly, but to participate in its continual rebirth through gratitude and understanding.
Oikophobia, then, is not merely a political buzzword—it is a spiritual diagnosis of a society that has lost faith in itself. Its antidote lies in rediscovering authentic desire: not mimetic envy of others, but a sincere longing to preserve and perfect what is ours. Healing begins when we dare to turn toward home, not away from it.
