See also [[=René Girard]]. Inbox: - [x] [Review – Wanting by Luke Burgis — I Want What She’s Having](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/wanting-by-luke-burgis-review-i-want-what-shes-having-0ljlbpxdx) - [x] [Luke Burgis — What Drives Human Desire? (EP.50)](https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/luke-burgis-what-drives-human-desire-ep50/) - [ ] [Manias and Mimesis: Applying René Girard’s Mimetic Theory to Financial Bubbles](https://www.academia.edu/40130881/Manias_and_Mimesis_Applying_Ren%C3%A9_Girard_s_Mimetic_Theory_to_Financial_Bubbles) - [ ] [Narrative Economics – What People Say About the Economy Can Set Off a Recession](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/business/recession-fear-talk.html) - [x] [Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard](https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dangerous-introduction-to-rene-girard/comment-page-1/) - [x] [Making Dumb Groups Smarter (Harvard Business Review)](https://hbr.org/2014/12/making-dumb-groups-smarter) - [ ] [Podcast with Luke Burgis on Wanting and Social Change](https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/podcasts/the-power-of-desire-in-everyday-life-wanting-and-social-change) - [ ] [Podcast with George Akerlof on Economics’ Sins of Omission](https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/podcast/george-akerlof) ## II Salon https://youtu.be/5KGCl0gnznE ## Jim O'Shaughnessy essay Need: shelter, food, warmth, sex. Biological hard code, instincts. Desire: wholly different. Girard fundamental discovery: human desire is mimetic, imitative. Humans rely on examples of others to determine objects of desire that they themselves pursue. For abstract objects of desire, human beings need models. Girard: "Romantic lie" our desires are entirely our own, we generate them autonomously and independently. In fact desire is social, desires spread via contagion. Role models, celebrities, colleagues, peers influence us way way more than we realise. Jim: Desires and beliefs aren't as different as you think. Many beliefs are formed without much evidence. People conflate these beliefs with themselves. Kessler: the more profound a discovery, the more obvious is appears afterwards. Girard first saw mimetic desire in great novels. Why do we pick models? They strike us as having a quality that we lack. No man is a hero to his valet. Sex is not the biggest taboo subject. It is envy. Social media has made us all a bit more like university freshmen. Brightest people are often the easiest to con. They're very good at constructing good stories. When things don't move at the speed of trust, things are very hard. Edward Bernais was a total bastard psychopath extremely good at persuasion. Heuristic: Everything ends up as sales. Everything started as a marketing campaign. Pollan how to change your mind great book. #recs Pair Luke's book with Think Again by Adam Grant and WEIRD by Heinrich. All great books. #recs Excessive hustle is a real occupational hazard for entrepreneurs like me. Workholism big issue in US. Luke lived in Italy for three years, helped. ## The Times Book Review https://archive.is/VD0sD#selection-877.1-881.619 Movements of desire,” Burgis says in _Wanting_, “are what define our world. Economists measure them, politicians poll them, businesses feed them.” The key issue, he says, is “What do you want?” and “What have you helped others want?” The answer shapes our lives and our life satisfaction, but we are, he argues, fighting some strong tides. Powerful figures have always changed our desires. Now we don’t just have PR Svengalis and the influence of peers and celebrities such as, say, the Kardashians. We have the tech giants stoking our desires every time we glance at our phone. And the cycles of “thin desires” they are generating are creating division and stress. It isn’t “Celebristan”, the world of celebrities and influencers, we have to worry about, he says. It’s “Freshmanistan”, the world of models from inside our lives who can drive us to destructive cycles of envy, exhaustion and distress. We should learn, he says, to pursue our “thick desires”, like Sébastien Bras, the chef who asked to be removed from the Michelin guide because he wanted to see more of his family and do things his way. Part philosophical tract, part self-help guide, _Wanting_ is a thought-provoking book. It’s also a deeply moral one. Like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Burgis wants to create a better world. The ideas he presents, and his suggestions for action, seem to offer a more realistic hope than most. ## 2021-09-15 II Salon ### My questions 0. I see the scapegoating theory as a subcomponent of the broader mimetic theory. So we might accept the broad story about mimetic desire, but reject the subtheory of the scapegoat mechanism. Is that the right way to understand this? Or are the two stories more tightly bound up? LB: agonised over this for three years. Don't have to buy everything Girard is saying. It wants to be a theory of everything. Very universalising. Tries to do too much. 1. Mimetic desire 2. Conflict 3. Resolve with scapegoat 4. Cover up --- 1. What are the implications of mimetic desire for moral philosophy, and in particular, for meta-ethics? What does it imply for the philosophical methods we might use to understand and improve our values, to build our moral theories? (E.g. Sidgwick thinks we should ground our moral theory on a special class of self-evident intution, but it seems like Girard would expect divergence in intuitions at the deepest levels, unless you have some ultimate influencer Leviathon to enforce similarity.) Girard doesn't have much to say about ethics and morality. Max Schaler influenced Luke on ethics. Anti-mimetic dimension to ethics. Acquinas. Book: Logic of Desire. Teleology of desire. 2. I noticed Alisdair MacIntyre _After Virtue_ in the sources list but I couldn't find a reference in the body of the text. What happened there? Did you cut something? In any case... how does MacIntyre's stuff connect with Girard? 3. Girard, Thiel, Burgis—all call themselves Christians. Coincidence? If Girardians are more likely than relevant reference class to be Christian... what's going on there? 🤔 (Is it just that they're more likely to be _consciously_ Christian...?) Girard has lots of Christian symbols in his texts. Makes it click. 4. Have you read Agnes Callard on aspiration? What do you think of her story? 5. What are the main mechanisms by which we pick certain people as role models and reject others? --- 6. In a footnote to Chapter 4, you quote from Crime and Punishment at length—Raskolnikov's dream. In the dream, something happens such that people lose their ability to agree, and society quickly falls apart. I'd like to hear you talk a bit about mimetic desire and political theory. Girard talks about Hobbes a lot. Dream: mimetic crisis— loss of distinction. Unclear who to trust? The Leviathan as mimetic exemplar. Ultimate authority on what to want, as well as how to behave? #tweet Transcendent figure who stands above the war of all against all. ---- Anti-memetic response: Les Miserables, someone is stealing his tableware, he says you forgot the candlesticks. On giving in: "If someone is making excessive demands on you, he's already involved in mimetic rivalry, he expects you to participate in the escalation. So, to put a stop to it, the only means is to do the opposite of what escalation calls for: meet the excessive demand twice over” ~R. Girard ---- The Golden Ballad --- Christ is the way you break out of the system. Voluntary scapegoat. Voluntary martydom. Require innocent scapegoat who volunteers. Optional. When the scapegoat says "choose me", it breaks the loop. He actually starts with the figure of Jesus. Why Christ. We kind of know we're doing murder as performance art. Placating sense of justice. Helmut Schluk -- Envy. Societies where envy is taboo. Where envy is celebrated. Communism = envy is permitted.