See also [[=Luke Burgis]]. ## Jonathan Bi on Econtalk When we desire to _be_, Girard thinks what we really desire is a form of persistence. Right? We want our names to last. We desire a form of self-sufficiency or power, almost like a Nietzschean will to power, if you can interpret it that way. And we desire a social reality. We desire recognition and fame and we desire to be lauded by the social groups that we're in. Girard's point is that our fundamental desires--our moral paradigms, if you will--are fundamentally anchored by these models and the objects and values associated with them. Now what seems as an innocuous suggestion, I really think to be one of the greatest attacks mounted against the foundations of modern social theory, because it's fundamentally giving a completely different answer to the question where normative certainty is derived from. I think modernity really has two answers to the question: Where does normative certainty, how do we access normative truth? And I think one is offered by the Enlightenment, and the answer there is reason. Right? And, our core institution of free speech is grounded upon this by Mill [John Stuart Mill]: that through our investigations, each of us as individuals, filtering through our own reason, can come to our own understanding. Another is romanticism. Right? And that's the primacy of the individual's intuition, so to speak. A lot of our politics of self-expression is based on this. Why do we permit and expand what type of sexual and familiar relations are acceptable? Well, it's because people themselves know their true gender identity. However, Girard's answer is to say No to both of these strands of thinking--to reason or personal intuition. To reason, he says: Reason is so often a lawyer and spokesperson for normative values that we've actually ingested, _tribalistically_, through our social needs. To the romantics, he says: We do not always desire strongly authentic desires. We _do_ desire strongly to go to a prestigious school, to get the right job, to live in the right postal code. So, the _strength_ of your desire clearly can't indicate its authenticity and whether it's truly yours. Russ Roberts: Mainstream modern economics struggles to deal with these issues of social interaction. In modern economics, human beings are autonomous and alone. They have their own preferences. These preferences are given from the outside, meaning exogenously in the formal terms. And, I spend my life trying to make myself happy and to rack up utility. And that's the physical desire that you talk about with Girard. As I've gotten older, I realize: But that _metaphysical_desire--the desire to be perceived a certain way, which is the way I understand Girard--and what that does for my sense of identity in a circle of people who have their own perceptions of me and of what's important, that's also very, very hard to resist. And one thing I have to say, I _cheated_ on a little bit in my Adam Smith book, is I did not want to talk about this fundamental issue that you raised in your description and discussion of Girard, which is authenticity. Because, in theory, if Smith is right--and I don't know how much he writes about this explicitly. But, if Smith is right and what drives us is how we're perceived--that we want to be seen, that we want to matter--what is authenticity in that world? Jonathan Bi: One question I always had reading Smith is just: How impartial is this, really, spectator? Because Smith seems to suggest that this is a universal eternal spectator that judges upon these, just, laws of human nature that are unmoving. But, I think--and what Girard would say, and how you get from Smith to Girard is a slight tweak. Which is that: instead of these eternal, sort of spectator, almost a god inside your brain, so to speak, what you get are actually quite partial spectators. You get spectators through your cultural upbringing, in your environment, that grounds your fundamental, key moral values. So, there's a close proximity--really close proximity--between Smith, between Girard, and also I would argue the Germans--Hegel--and the rest of the French--Rousseau and Sartre, as well. ... I compared Girard to my Virgil in the sense that he was able to rescue me through Hell. He was able to show me how to purge more milder forms of perversion. But, just as Virgil couldn't take Dante all the way to heaven, neither could Girard. Girard kind of just retreats. What I'm about to share with you is mostly my own creative interpretations on top of Girard. I think there's in general two solutions, once you've identified there's a metaphysical and there's a physical desire. One wing, and I think this is what Girard leans to, is to say this metaphysical--this is the Buddhist as well as the Girardian way--is to say this metaphysical desire, this desire for being, it's _completely_ perverse. It's _always_perverse, whether from Girard's perspective, because it's essentially a desire to be God. This is why it's satanic. You're desiring persistence; you're desiring power; you're desiring reality. If you push those far enough, those are the metaphysical qualities of the Judeo-Christian God. So, Girard actually sees metaphysical desire _as_ the original sin, _as_ the satanic drive to rival God in his metaphysical splendor. And the Buddhists--right--we don't have to go into that, but long story short, these metaphysical qualities are not possible in the world. Emptiness is what permeates the world. So, this is a fundamentally wrong sort of desire. So, for the Christians and Buddhists, the way to good health is to completely get rid of metaphysical desire, to be only concerned by the object physical desire. There's another, however, strand of thinking, and probably most popular amongst the Germans, in Hegel, is to say there is actually a healthy way--the Germans, and Plato actually, which we'll talk about--there actually _is_ a healthy way to exist in society. And the way, long story short, to do so is for your metaphysical and your physical desires to align. That is to say: if you really like to do philosophy, don't hang out with a bunch of people who are industrialists. Hang out with a bunch of philosophers, so that the somewhat partial spectator, as we've discussed, will naturally _align_with your normative values, with your physical desires, and thus you'll receive recognition and a form of reality. ## Luke Burgis: Wanting The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand. Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation. ![[Luke Burgis - Wanting (2021, St. Martin’s Press) - libgen.li.png]] Girard was interested in how we come to want thinJs when there is no clear instinctual basis for it. 3 Out of the billions of potential obMects of desire in the world, from friends to careers to lifestyles, how do people come to desire some more than others? And why do the obMects and intensity of our desire seem to fluctuate constantly, lackinJ any real stability? In the universe of desire, there is no clear hierarchy. People don’t choose obMects of desire the way they choose to wear a coat in the winter. Instead of internal bioloJical siJnals, we have a different kind of external siJnal that motivates these choices: models. Models are people or thinJs that show us what is worth wantinJ. It is models—not our “obMective” analysis or central nervous system—that shape our desires. With these models, people enJaJe in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis (mi-mee-sis), from the Greek word mimesthai (meaninJ “to imitate”). --- Facebook is full of models who are inside our world, socially speakinJ. They are close enouJh for us to compare ourselves to them. --- It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive—in other words, desirablz.