René Girard, Mimetic Theory, & Making the Process the Reward - Johnathan Bi

If I'm doing something as a means to an end, if I'm saying right, I'm doing this now because that it's going to lead to this outcome in the future.

That's going to make me happy.

Almost every project I'm going to on that basis has has failed.

Whereas if I do something and it's like I'm going to enjoy the process of doing it regardless if I fail or not, it tends to go well, you know, very simplistic, but that's what I've found in my own.

Exactly.

That's exactly how I framed my my switch of careers from tech into more of what I'm doing now, which is again, is just intellectual work, which is when I was building the business, even the one that worked, I had the sense that even if I succeeded, I would have failed.

Like even if this was, it would become $1 billion company.

It's looking like it's going to be $1 billion company within the next ten years.

But even if I did that, and I spent the rest of my 20s doing this, I would have failed in some deep sense because I don't really want to do that, like physical design wise.

I want to spend my 20s basically chasing ideas and and exploring.

But how I feel about this current thing that I'm doing, right, this, this, this Western canon, great books lecture series is even if I fail, I succeeded.

Even if after a year no one watches any of my stuff.

People, people stop, like, you know, engaging with any of the content.

The fact that I got to spend these two years just to, you know, talk with people and read that, that that is already the reward.

Okay, Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Now to get started.

Can you maybe just tell us, you know, why is memetic theory so important to understand?

You know, why?

Why does this matter?

Why have you spent a lot of time researching this topic?

Well, perhaps the first thing to say is that, memetic theory believes that human psychology is trying to hide a memetic theory from itself.

And I'll elaborate what that means.

The quartet end of memetic theory is a large part of our desire is not because of the object, but because of.

I want to be like the person associated with the object. Right.

So so a good example here is the iPhone.

Why are some people, sell their kidneys, to buy an iPhone?

Maybe it has to do with the functionality.

You know, Android doesn't have this.

And but at least in the early years when when the iPhone was a lot more prestigious, it was because celebrities owned it.

It was because it had great esthetic appeal.

It was because of the people who you associate had an iPhone versus the Android nerds who didn't have an iPhone. And

droid thinks that what powers this desire is a tremendous lack.

And the exact phrase that he use is that we lack being.

And so maybe this idea of if you want to translate to psychology would be something like insecurity, but but in a deep and existential way.

And so we try to acquire these objects to be like the people associated with them.

But psychology lies to itself because you don't.

When you're desirous of the iPhone, you don't think, oh, I only like this because I saw this great podcaster, Niall had this phone and I want to be like, now you don't think that you think directly?

No no this object is going to make me whole, right?

And maybe now it's silly to think about an iPhone, but think about a spouse.

Think about a career, think about a job.

Things more serious that people can relate to, and human psychology.

So for Gerard, the nature of desire is triangular, right?

When I desire the iPhone or the job at an investment banking place, let's say it appears like my desire is directly towards that, towards that, that thing.

But it is actually because the people associated with that thing. But,

Gerard thinks that desire includes this desire tries to hide this from you.

And so it makes the triangular relationship where it goes to another person appear as if it's an arrow, because that's what's going to get you to desire it, even more strongly.

And so that's, I suppose, that that's the first cut of it is because it has something to do.

The medical theory has something to offer us about the most important aspects of our lives, and importantly, in an aspect of our lives that we have hidden from ourselves.

Amazing amazing.

The example that came to mind for me whenever I was thinking about this was so whenever I was like 9 or 10, I was obsessed with football or you guys would call it soccer in the U.S. and,

a pair of a pair of football boots might cost, say, 40 pounds here. Right?

But around that time I was like 9 or 10.

Adidas came out with a new pair of boots that they, they created with David Beckham.

And these were the predator pulses or whatever.

And they, they were like 140 pounds.

And as a ten year old, like, I really wanted these boots.

And the reason that I wanted these boots is I think if I get these football boots, I'm going to get some of the magic of David Beckham.

I'll become like David Beckham by acquiring this object.

So this is an example of mimetic theory and metaphysical desire.

Exactly.

And so, the so I think I misspoke in the lecture series when I said the be like Mike campaign for Michael Jordan has had to do with his shoes.

I think it had to do with maybe a Gatorade commercial.

But anyways, like this is literally being used as an advertisement slogan right?

Be like Mike.

Like if you have this, you will be like Michael Jordan.

Now of course, that's kind of silly when you when you put it that way, of course you're not going to be Beckham if you just buy his shoes.

But that's the kind of trick that psychology Gerard thinks plays on us.

And what's really interesting here is I think all of advertisement advertisement can be distilled down into this insight on mimetic desire, which is, you know, the BMW ads, luxury car ads always show it with the beautiful woman they never talk about, oh, you know, the the horsepower and how gas efficient it is.

And because advertisers know, at the end of the day, that's not what we're looking for when we're at when going after things, even though we tell ourselves.

Right.

And it's very interesting that way because we can't say, oh, I got this car because I, I saw a beautiful woman with it.

And maybe if I get that car, I'll be like that guy.

So it's almost like the reasons you give are excuses.

And so it's almost like the advertiser needs to give you excuses to, to buy to buy this thing, right?

Because you have to say, oh, well, I bought the iPhone because of the, the rear camera and the 16 megapixels.

But the real reason has nothing to do with that.

The real reason has to do with the people that is associated with that.

And so maybe you can interpret that as the art of advertisement.

For sure.

It's almost like we're all carrying around like our own internal PR man.

And they are just like given the rational reasons why we are chasing these things for metaphors. Exactly. Yeah.

for metaphors. Exactly. Yeah.

And this is, I believe this is quite well documented in the psychology literature.

I think it's called confabulation.

There's some split brain patients, I believe, where I think how this goes, don't quote me on this.

And I'm not an empirical psychologist.

I think when the brain is split, the, the different hemispheres of the brain correspond to the different like, like my right eye is perceived by my left side.

And so I think what they did is they showed something only to the like the left side of the brain.

And I think the confabulation centers on the right side.

It could be vice versa. And

it was something like the the left side was what was told.

Get up now.

Because it was told get get up now because I xyzzy reason and then it asks the researchers asked the right side, like, why did you get up?

And it just completely makes up another reason.

So I think this is quite well documented in the psychology literature as well, that the human brain has this tendency to invent reasons even when they're when the actual reason is a lot deeper.

For sure. For sure.

And I I've heard you say that most people come to Girard and mimetic theory through suffering and failure.

So I'm just curious what have been the failures and suffering that have led that led you to to Girard?

Yeah.

I might say that for all the philosophy actually that you know, most, most healthy people don't, don't go about, go around wanting to spend their lives, asking these questions.

And you notice this, for example, in stoicism as well.

So right now I'm preparing a series of lectures on the Stoics.

And, you know, when things were going fine and well in the Roman Republic, stoicism was not that popular.

But in the Roman Empire, when people started losing control, people started getting into stoicism.

Cicero was it was it was one of the critics of stoicism.

When he lost the Civil War, he started espousing very stoic ideas.

Anyway, that's a whole, whole separate topic.

But as it relates to myself and mimetic theory specifically, I was just a I grew up between Beijing and Vancouver.

I was on a super tracked, academic path and competed in the Canadian Olympiad, got a full ride to Columbia to study computer science, and I dropped out my freshman a freshman spring to to to run a startup.

So I was a tech guy. And,

the startup just ended crashing and burning after 2 or 3 months.

Sorry. After a semester.

So that would be 6 to 9 months.

And when I really reflected what had gone wrong there, it wasn't like, you know, I gave it my best shot and it didn't work.

It was like, I didn't really want to do the thing in the first place.

And and so that but that's very odd, right?

Because why did I give up a full right opportunity to do something I didn't really want to do myself?

Like my day to day?

Like, clearly I had a strong impulse to doing this thing.

But my day to day, I was waking up and I was feeling, I was dreading looking forward to the work.

So why did that happen?

On one hand, I really don't want to do it on the other hand, I really do want to do it.

And Gerard just gave me the most compelling explanation of this, which was mimetic desire that there was all these people.

I called them the Zuckerberg Complex.

It's cool to to to be a dropout these days.

There's all these people who want to drop out.

They seem awesome.

And so you want to drop out to and that's, you know, there's not that much to it like that.

And so I wanted to be seen as a founder more than I wanted to actually found the company.

And so, you know, then you optimize for weird stuff, like you delay the product launch so you don't have to face with the fact that a lot of the stuff you built doesn't work, like you try to maximize press releases, even though press releases don't impact things.

And so that's one aspect of how I got into it.

And at the same time, it was like a double whammy, which is a technical term in philosophy.

It's, it's German.

And the other, thing that got me into it is is, I just had a romantic experience where, there was a girl who I was seeing.

Wasn't that into her?

One of my friends started dating her, and then, boom.

Like, it was like this, like, world ending thing. Like.

ending thing. Like.

Like, oh, my God. Like what?

What happened?

And and again, like, nothing about the girl has changed at all.

But by the injection of another with drug called model. Right.

In this case, my friend, suddenly the desire you feel for objects changed radically.

And so clearly there was something else going on. It was the

going on. It was the really.

This is why I say suffering was what led me there.

It was the great suffering of both.

That made me want to say, okay, I really got to understand this aspect of my life if I want to live a good life going forward, and this guy seems to know what he's talking about.

So that's how I got into it.

Wow.

Well, I, I've never thought of that before but like we call this the Zuckerberg complex there.

And for a while, maybe it's still there, but for a while, a lot of young people would see or hear was like Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or I think even Bill gates like these people dropping out.

And then that becomes like, almost like the football boots or the the Gatorade or whatever.

It's it's the object of desire.

And people think, if I do that, I will become like that, you know?

And I fell in the same trap when I was at university.

I dropped out in my last year to start my own company, and the exact same thing happened.

Like I thought, this is going to make me happy.

I did it, and I just totally like I wanted this status of being an entrepreneur more than I actually wanted the day to day process of running that business, and it led to misery.

And, you know, it's not.

And by the way, I think that was a key lesson that Gerard taught me because, so there there's actually two strands of desire.

This is my reading.

It's it's a quite niche reading of Gerard.

There's actually two strands of desire.

There's metaphysical desire.

And this is this desire for being right, desire for a kind of wholeness.

When you're feeling insecure and the way you satisfy this desire, like we've already described, is through this triangular route, I look at who I think has being.

And what this means is someone who's prestigious or successful or glorious or who has a lot of fame or, and then I simply latch on to the things that it seems to be.

Question was identity right?

In the case of Beckham, the boots and but clearly and so it is this aspect of desire clearly has nothing to do with the object itself.

It could be anything.

And by the way, this is why there's so many, so much variation toward things in human culture.

Like why do some people like piercing their noses and like doing all this crazy things?

It has to do with this idea of metaphysical desire, because metaphysical desire ultimately is not about the object at all.

That's why it's so malleable.

That's why human cultures can be so malleable.

But there is a different strain of desire.

And, this is where my sort of weird reading comes in, that your articles, physical desire and physical desire actually has to do with the experience of your object, because clearly, we clearly that's not all human nature is, right.

Not all human nature is just this desire for being.

We do do things because we just enjoy the physical experience of them.

And I think one way to understand sanity in Gerard is when most of your desire is physical and less of it is metaphysical.

It's a very simple way to cut it.

So for me, after college, I went down to, to be on the founding team of another company.

This one is doing very well.

It was almost certainly a lot better than the one that failed.

And there it was just I wanted to make money, okay?

Like, I just wanted to make money to sustain the other pursuits in my life.

And so that was physical in that sense, like I was just after the object.

But now I've been doing, I've left that company for a year.

I built that for for three and a half, four years.

I left that company for a year, and now I'm doing, a new, interview and lecture series on the great books.

And this is just pure enjoyment.

So.

So is there a metaphysical being here?

Yes, but most of it is physical desire.

Like I wake up giddy with excitement that I get to, you know, talk to people like yourself, interview people and read the books that I want to read.

And so hopefully that becomes a lens in which you can understand what sanity is, is when most of the pursuits in your life aren't about filling this hole of being inside of you.

And and it's about actually the experience of the action that that you enjoy.

Amazing. Amazing.

That's it's very I love the distinction you make between the two, you and for me, would it be fair to say that, you know, if you're optimizing for metaphysical desire, you're kind of optimizing for these external experiences or, sorry, external appearances, how you appear to other people, how you appear in the eyes of others.

Whereas with physical desire, you're optimizing for your internal subjective experience of life, the process of life itself, like your internal reality, is that.

Yeah, right. Ballpark.

That's the right ballpark.

That's the right first cut.

There's a few nuances.

The first thing to say about metaphysical desire is it's not just about how you appear to others.

It's not just about recognition.

So.

So I studied, I did another degree at Columbia, actually, in philosophy, and I studied with this group of, fantastic, philosophy, like modern philosophers who are called recognition theorists.

So people like Hegel, Rousseau, Smith Hume who who thought we talk a lot about precisely what you said about keeping up public appearances, but the way that art is different from that. Right.

from that. Right.

And these thinkers, again, very, very loosely, it's like I want Niall and his followers to think well of me after this podcast.

But.

Metaphysical desire goes a bit beyond that.

It's more like what external values you internalized such that even if no one is looking, you're chasing after them.

Does that make sense? So like.

Let me give you this example.

You can externalize the status hierarchies and the symbols of prestige so much in a society such that it becomes your own definition of success, that even if no one else knows, you still feel like you need those things to be successful.

So there are people who just care about making a shit ton of money, even if people knowing about how much money they make isn't core to that desire, does that make sense?

So it's still external in the sense that they're still looking around and seeing, okay, who is being?

What is the cause of his being?

It's money.

And money becomes this object that is able to grant being.

But the payoff function there isn't just about I want other people to think I have money.

It becomes so internalized that often, even if he's alone.

And by the way, this is not a positive thing.

Okay this this is a deeply frightening and negative thing.

Negative thing for Gerard.

Like even in your internal psyche, you think you need being to get money, right?

You need money to to have this fullness of being.

So to that's the nuance I want to tease out, which is that this external factor can be internalized as such a great degree, that it's not just about the moments when we care about what others think, think of us.

It really is about our own sort of impulses.

And on the other prong, physical desire.

You are right, as a first approximation, to think about it as our direct experience of things.

But that also is heavily, dependent on external and societal input.

So, for example, if I live in a culture that thinks, that believes this proposition that, animals or humans can reincarnate into animals, my experience of eating meat is going to be very, very different than your experience of eating meat.

And so even the physical experience is shaped by certain memetic phenomenon.

But you are right in making this this first cut. Yeah.

Wow. Wow. Okay.

And as I was thinking about this as well, Jonathan, something else that came to mind, like, in my own, in my own life, there's been the case where metaphysical desires have become physical for me.

So, for example, say, whenever I started a podcast, I might have initially launched up because for a metaphysical reason.

But as I do it more and more and I interview people, I just love doing this.

I love the process of doing it.

So that's become a physical desire, but vice versa.

Like running for me, for example, when I started running, I would just go out to a trail on a Sunday and run for a few hours.

And I just loved doing that.

That was a physical desire.

And then I got Strava, which is like a social network for runners, and then you're like looking at your time.

You're like trying to like, you know, get, running a certain peace and all the rest stop each other. Yep.

So it can go both ways, you know.

What are your thoughts on that?

No, I think that's very, very good observation.

And I think that the real question is, how do we turn more of the metaphysical stuff to the physical stuff, right.

Like, like surely you want to be living a life where you know, it's because of the experience that you live and wake up every day like there's just excited to live.

But you are right.

Like, there is a great way that that things can, can carry over, from one side to the other.

Maybe I'll speak a bit more about my my own theories about this that I'm developing out of Jarod and because clearly, one question is, how do we have more of your podcasting experiences and less of the running experiences?

And one thing has to do with, okay, the most obvious thing is, do you actually like, is this an activity that you can actually enjoy?

Right. Because

here's why I like the philosophy majors a lot more in college than the finance kids who end up going into investment banking.

Like, know what?

Almost no one loves doing Excel spreadsheets for 50 hours.

Oh, I for like 70 hours a week.

So so they're like physical desire in this early entrance level of investment banking is just non-existent.

Like like you have to be like a psychopath. Right.

To to to actually like doing that.

And so the only way you can be motivated is the metaphysical desire. Right.

There's like there's literally nothing else like so so that's just like the first obvious thing is like, do you like, is this an activity that you can actually sustain on its own?

And however, in the case that you gave in both running and in podcasting, both are.

And yet this transition still happens.

So, so I mean, there's so much thing to say here, but the other thing I'll say is.

I do think, what people often overlook when they think about how these things in life transition is the other parts of their life that seemingly have nothing to do with this.

So, for example, this is not what you said, but I'm gonna give you a hypothetical.

You your podcast is failing.

Your, you know, your girlfriend broke up with you, your friends moved away, and you feel like a certain lack.

And that's why you need to use Strava to to ground your identity in some sense, so you can think about the other parts of your life as forming, a protective barrier, potentially against metaphysical desire.

And when those things go away, you kind of just try to latch on to other things. Right?

And so one common and this is another way in which this desire for the concern of other people can be a good thing and not a bad thing, which is.

If I have a lot of people in my life, which fortunately I have now, developed over the years, who just like me for me, who, who are going to be around no matter what, you know, bar I do some crazy atrocity or something like that.

You don't you do feel that fullness in being, and you don't need to chase it that much with these metaphysical pursuits.

And so, you know, in, Rousseau actually talks a lot about this, and why he thinks marriage is important because, in marriage.

So Rousseau thinks that most of us or all of us have this impulse of being the best.

So we all want to be in the best in some way.

Obviously not everyone can be in the best in the way that Beckham is the best in society.

But Rousseau thinks that through romance, through romantic love, we can all satisfy this desire of being the best, at least for someone, right?

Because when I enter into a monogamous marriage with you, that's what I'm saying.

Like you're the best, or at least you're the best I can do, right? Like. And so

Rousseau thinks that the institution of marriage in a society is a way for people to satisfy that cognitive drive.

So to put it in our terms, they don't lack the sense of being in that domain.

And so, I joke with my founder friends that I only invest in two types of founders, the single and the unhappily married. Right?

Because so much of the impulse of building a company is wanting to be the best, to be the best.

It's metaphysical, it's big dick swinging, and that can be very useful for building a company.

But if you're living a very, very happy life, you have no chips on your shoulders.

If your sexual needs are satisfying, your financial needs are satisfied.

You're a cognitive needs are satisfied.

Then a lot of people cease to have that motivation. Right?

And so, by the way, I think we're already starting to tease out another tension within Gerard's ideas, which is clearly, I don't want to live a life pulled by metaphysical desire, but and maybe this is evolutionary of why it's panned out.

There's clearly a lot of utility in being pulled by metaphysical desire, right?

So like, we will not have investment banking as a profession if people stop having metaphysical desire because it's the junior work is just so damn boring that no one's going to want to do it unless it's for prestige, right?

And so so yeah, I, I'm rambling a bit, but I'm hopefully I'm drawing out some interesting tensions in the theory.

No, that's fast and I've never thought about that before.

And so the thing that really sort of stuck out to me from what you said, there was this idea, if you're if you say you're the podcast feels the girlfriend breaks up with you, all of these things diminish your sense of being and sort of diminish your sense of self, your identity.

And then at that moment, it seems that we're most vulnerable to being taken over by metaphysical desire, because that's the thing that we think is going to help us to become more.

And to me, that's such an interesting insight.

So it's like.

Yeah, I'll add one more thing.

The key thing that depends, the key thing that determines the strength of metaphysical desire is not just your being being taken away, but also how much being you want to have.

So there's actually it's the delta of that.

So let me give you an example.

If you are an arrogant person, you think I need to be the best no matter what.

I'm the king of the world and you're only, let's say, the president of the United States, then you're going to have a lack of being.

On the other hand, even if everyone in your life leaves you, you know, you're you're you're broken up by your girlfriend like business fails, but you have a minimal conception of what you need your being to be, to think about like a, like a Buddhist who's been meditating and practicing, you know, trying to understand emptiness and non-self.

Then maybe that is enough.

Does that make sense?

So there's actually two things that determine the strength of your metaphysical desire and how much you want to be pulled by that.

It's the delta between how much being you expect yourself to have and how much you actually have.

Which means there's two strategies to improving this part of your life.

One is actually building up the social, dimensions right?

Having a loving family, having loving friends who support you, having things you actually do that you like, but another is to reduce the idea of being you need.

But again, I just want to highlight this.

Like that will reduce a lot of the motivation people have for doing things like, I am certainly better off in life by being unreasonably pulled by metaphysical desire to study math, to study the classics, to, get into an Ivy League, to build a company that's going to give me financial freedom.

If metaphysical metaphysical desire wasn't there, I almost wouldn't be able to, do what I'm doing now.

And so maybe one way we can think about it again.

This is me, right?

This is not Jerrod at this point.

Maybe one way to think about it is of a booster rocket.

So metaphysical desire, like the no kid is just going to look live calculus for its own sake. Right?

So maybe you need some metaphysical desire about competition. Like.

about competition. Like.

Or are you smart, or do you want to be a you want to be a dumb man like you want to be dumb.

You want to be dumb and stupid, then do math and. Right.

And so obviously speaking from my own experience, but but, but yeah, that makes sense.

Totally totally.

And this is, this is going to be very simplistic way to sort of to frame it, but it's almost like it.

Well, in my own life, my own experience has been that if I am doing something as a means to an end, if I'm saying right, I'm doing this now because it's going to lead to this outcome in the future, that's going to make me happy.

Almost every project I've launched on that basis has has failed.

Whereas if I do something and it's like I'm going to enjoy the process of doing it regardless if I fail or not, it tends to go well, you know, very simplistic, but that's what I've found in my own.

Exactly.

That's exactly how I framed.

My, my switch of careers from tech into more of what I'm doing now, which is again, is just intellectual work, which is when I was building the business, even the one that worked, I had the sense that even if I succeeded, I would have failed.

Like even if this was, it would become $1 billion company.

It's looking like it's going to be $1 billion company within the next ten years.

But even if I did that, and I spent the rest of my 20s doing this, I would have failed in some deep sense because I don't really want to do that.

Like physical design wise.

I want to spend my 20s, basically chasing ideas and and exploring, but how I feel about this current thing that I'm doing, right, this, this, this Western canon, great books lecture series is even if I fail, I succeeded.

Even if after a year, no one watches any of my stuff.

People, people stop, like, you know, engaging with any of the content.

The fact that I got to spend these two years just to, you know, talk with people and read that, that that is already the reward.

Right.

And so again, that's, that's another way to cut this physical desire versus metaphysical desire, which is the physical desire.

The reward is the thing is, living metaphysical is are like is no.

You only get that boost in being when you acquire that thing.

And keep in mind, Gerard, Gerard thinks that metaphysical desire is always deceitful.

So it's always I mean, we have an experience of this.

You didn't feel like Beckham for more than three days.

I imagine as a kid after you got the shoes and there was some other thing, right?

And, you know, we think getting this job will make me so happy that my last a month, getting a partner might make me so happy that my last like two months and and so.

Yeah, George thinks that this is a never ending kind of rat race.

But again, that's why the human desire is never ending.

Like, in some sense, if we didn't have metaphysical desire, we would have stopped at the first hut and be like, yeah, you know, you know, I'm living a good life. Like, like,

why do I got to progress?

In fact, Rousseau in a second discourse says that to this desire, metaphysical desire, what he calls I'm a problem.

And equating these things very loosely here for the for the public audience is what built civilization like we want it to be, other than what we want it to be better than others.

We want it to win at the status, symbols and games within society.

And that's why we don't just build a hut and call it a day.

That's why we did agriculture well, why we did.

Some people compete in intellectual life.

Some people read podcasts, some people build spaceships.

And so this again, this is where the tension in the theory comes in. Right?

Draw is always extremely ambivalent.

So which is what I love.

So he's not just saying this thing is good, this thing is bad.

He's very ambivalent in his psychology.

A metaphysical desire, on one hand, is something that sort of leads you on one wild goose chase after the other, but it's also what probably made your life good in the first place.

It's what built civilization.

And then Girard's other part of the theory, maybe we can talk about that later on, is also ambivalent.

So he thinks that Christianity, for example, is going to bring us to apocalypse and, literally like a violent apocalypse.

And so, again, something very good bring about something very dangerous.

And so, yeah, his whole theory is extremely ambivalent.

There's no easy answers.

This could very easily be a three hour conversation with only an hour and or maybe half an hour.

Something that came to mind for me whenever I was preparing for this as well was like, have you run the thought experiment in your mind?

What would happen to human society if overnight metaphysical desire just became extinguished in all 7 billion people or whatever, they just became irrelevant?

What would society look like?

Would there be, you know.

I think Girard has a very simple answer here, which is just look at how monkeys are, because Gerard, despite him being being Christian, subscribes to evolution.

And what evolution consists in for Gerard is two things.

One is the increase of our mimetic capacity, and that directly inflames metaphysical desire, but it also creates the basis for language like the reason we can do language is because of our mimetic capacity.

Right?

That's why, like our our language capacities are better than apes.

And apes can do sign language, but dogs can't do sign language, right.

And so, but there's this other thing, which is the second part of Girard's theory that we should probably talk about it, which is what he calls the scapegoat mechanism, because when apes become more and more.

But anyways, to answer your question, what would society look like if humans were more mimetic apes?

Because the direction of human evolution for Gerard is primarily biologically at least the direction of increase in capacity of mimesis.

Now, here's the issue.

As you probably know, as you as you probably have seen, mimetic desire is a convergent force.

It makes our desires converge to things.

Right.

So, you I desire this girl.

You desire this girl to.

By the way, this is why Gerard thinks competition precedes scarcity and not scarcity precedes competition.

Right?

An economist would think, oh yeah things are scarce, like real estate in in Tribeca, and we compete over them.

And Gerard says, no, no, it's because we compete for them.

It's that mimetic frenzy that generates that, that that scarcity.

Okay.

There's an obvious problem with this converging thing of desire is that it leads us into conflict.

Right?

Because even if we desire different things in the beginning, mimetic desire is going to lead us to converge on a similar thing. And boom,

Gerard thinks as apes increase in their mimetic capacities, there were, these conflicts became more and more, extreme until it ended up destroying almost all the ape societies except for a subset of societies that were able to develop not a biological, but a cultural mechanism

that he calls the scapegoat mechanism.

So how the scapegoat mechanism works is when when an entire society is in frenzy.

Someone randomly is going to say, this person is to blame, and that is going to catch on when the until the entire group believes one person is to blame for the entirety of the society's issues.

Now you might think, oh, this is ridiculous.

Who would ever believe that Nazi Germany, right?

Today in contemporary politics, the right wing is saying, oh, there's I mean, in your country, like those Muslim immigrants are doing this and the left wing is saying, oh, the woke, the sort of racist white men are doing that right?

We have this tendency of just wanting to pin all the blame of a society to this one thing, like, I think two years ago, I saw this one thing where certain deaths in Canada were attributed to climate change. Right?

I mean, and the logic was, well, it's it's getting hotter.

Then there's forest fires, and forest fires could cause these deaths.

But that gives you an idea that that like, we're pulled to these simple solutions, we're pull.

And these simple solutions can have this way about capturing an entire society.

And what this allows the society to do is it allows because it's all against one to cathartic expel this blamed person or group.

And again, like this just happened with Nazi Germany.

And George thinks that this catharsis will bring about a degree of peace.

And so he thinks that, again, the scapegoat mechanism is what brings about, peace in society.

So, in other words, all society is founded on violence and deceit.

And again, hopefully, you can see the ambivalence in Girard's theory here.

This clearly is something wrong and deceitful, to blame a certain group for all the problems. But it's the only thing that prevented early humanoid societies. So.

So Girard thinks, from collapsing, from being completely destroyed.

And so I hope you can already start to get an intuition of why Jesus is the exact opposite.

Because Jesus exposed the scapegoat mechanism by by giving himself up.

Essentially, I'm speaking very loosely here as the ultimate scapegoat.

However, as we know it, the scapegoat mechanism weakens.

Then you don't have anything to resolve the conflict anymore.

And so that's why Jesus, I think, was Matthew 1335.

Jesus says, think not.

I'm come to bring peace.

I bring not peace, but a sword.

And different Christian traditions have interpreted this to be quite figurative.

Oh, you know, you're gonna have these arguments, you know, nonbelievers, believers are going to have these internal familial debates.

No.

Girard literally reads this as saying Christ is going to bring about tremendous violence in the world because he upsets the scapegoat mechanism.

So now that we're on the psychology, the scapegoat mechanism is Satan fit for Gerard?

It's Satan because it's deceitful, it's lying, it blames victims. But remember, there's a common tradition associating Satan with the princes and principalities of the world.

So the scapegoat mechanism is the foundation of all politics.

And, and so, yeah, I'll, I'll pause there.

I thought that was a lot.

The this, I think the panel's starting to draw for me here.

Just the significance of all of this.

And that, that idea that we were all our whole society was based on, on a lie, this lie of the scapegoat.

And this is how we sort of, the kept the peace almost.

And if the Christian story is, is at least partially true, Jesus came along and exposed that lie.

And for the first time ever, the story was told from the perspective of the victim.

And that's what that is what has fundamentally changed our society.

And one of the interesting things I've heard you talk about and.

But not necessarily for the better, not necessarily for the better. Yeah.

Right. Like it's ambivalent. Yeah.

Yeah.

And Tom Holland speaks about this as well.

But like before that happened there was no or it was not common practice for a society to, to have respect for victims or to look after victims. All the rest, like in ancient Roman societies, Greek societies and all the rest, it was worship of power, you know, totally this idea that we all take for granted that we should look out for the weak and vulnerable is something that is totally that that'll happen

around the advent of Christianity, you know, which is totally mind blown.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

And there's been a complete reevaluation of values.

I mean, in some sense, this is what Nietzsche was complaining about, right?

Comparing Greco-Roman values, which is like idolizing the power versus the Judeo Christian values, which seem to elevate the victim.

Yeah.

And have you any examples of, like, I think maybe a good way to explore this might be through trying to understand cancel culture in modern society.

That's a, that's a big thing nowadays.

Like how might Roman Girardi and Lanz help us to understand that?

So first of all, notice that, the language of cancel culture is to protect the victim, right?

It's because, you know, you're a racist white man, who's doing this unthinkable deed.

And so that language is already very different from Judeo Christian values.

Sorry.

From the Greco-Roman values, right?

In antiquity.

How does, Achilles introduce himself?

I'm the son of Peleus, right?

He starts by naming all his noble ancestors.

But Gerard thinks that there's something very odd here that goes on in Christian society, which is we still have this need for persecution, for peace, not just for peace, but we have a psychological drive, a yearning for catharsis.

And so what happens is, in Christian society and like in modern Western society, like any society touched by Christianity, it doesn't have to be, like a Christian theocracy.

What happens is people use the rhetoric of the victim to persecute others.

So.

So the Christianity's successors, so total that this idea that we must protect victims is so total that it becomes the only weapon you can use for persecution.

Does that make sense?

And so, so, so cancel culture for Gerard is it's not anti-Christian.

It's hyper Christian.

It's something that appropriates the Christian message for what he would consider the satanic aim of persecution.

And so remember, there's there's actually two bad guys in the Bible.

There's Satan, and Satan is this kind of Greco-Roman prince and principalities I'm just going to shamelessly persecute.

So Gerard compares Nazi Germany, with, with Satan.

But there's another figure, and that figure is the Antichrist.

And the Antichrist does not oppose, does not opposed Jesus in the same way that Satan does.

The Antichrist pretends to be Jesus, right?

If you if you read the new Testament, the Antichrist is someone who sits on the throne of Christ.

The opposite movement that Gerard points to in the 20th century is like Soviet communism.

That's the Antichrist, because the rhetoric is about protecting victims, right?

So Nazi Germany openly persecuting victims and proud of it.

They persecuted victims. Soviet communism, in Gerard's view, openly persecuted victims in the name of protecting victims. And so the modern far right and far left for Gerard all have this impulsive persecution.

But he thinks that the far left is a lot more dangerous.

The reason is because they disguise themselves as not really being persecutors, and that is a message that is a lot easier to digest if you look at someone on the far right.

The modern intuition is to say this person is just directly evil.

It discounts the theory.

If we look at these like cancel culture, it co-ops, Gerard thinks are designed to protect the victim and sort of, sits Satan.

Nice. Is it? Yeah.

Oh wow.

This is absolutely mind blowing.

Okay so I want to go move into some practical applications here.

And can you tell us you have a, a metaphor we speak about?

Is it John Boyd and fighter pilots and this whole idea of, you know, we create our social environment and then our social environment kind of creates us.

You tell us a little, little bit about this.

Yeah.

So I think, Boyd, who I think was a fighter pilot or instructor had this one line which is he says, superior fighter pilots use their superior judgment so they don't have to use their superior skill in the sense that what makes a fighter pilot so good, even if they're, you know, they can win any dogfight, is that they have really, really good judgment to position themselves

in a position against their foes that they don't even have to use their superior dogfighting skills.

And this is kind of the metaphor I had with what learning about mimetic theory did for me, which is clearly didn't make me any less mimetic.

And if I'm trapped in a mimetic frenzy already, I don't think I'm any more protected against it.

But what it does give me the ability is it gives me the ability to when when things are sober, when reason can have control.

It helps me see the potential roadblocks ahead that I can navigate away from.

Does that make sense?

So in Gerard's view, when you're in the mimetic frenzy, like reason, reason his own, he frames it like this reason when it's most needed is least available.

Like when at the height of the Waymo Republic, when when reason is most needed.

It's when people are least reasonable.

And so the only thing that you the only place that reason can actually do something is like ten years before Nazi persecution happens to navigate Germany away from this terrible thing that they were heading, that they were heading into.

And that's a metaphor I have in my own life.

Like, here's a great example.

One of the reasons I chose not to go into the academy, right?

To pursue philosophy.

I might do another PhD and actually leave the UK, but that's a whole other conversation.

Is the Academy is set up like a crazy memetic environment, a like it's like Goldman Sachs, but for like philosophy.

And so, again, once I'm already in there, there's probably not that much I can do that there's nothing that much knowing the memetic theory will help me with.

But being able to see what constitutes a potentially dangerous memetic environment and what is a more sober memetic environment and how to construct those things.

That's like you engaging the enemy fighter pilot when you're when before the dog fight, positioning yourself.

Well yeah.

So that that that's what I meant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think this is maybe for me it's the most important takeaway from from Gerrard's work.

I have no experience, actually.

This year where I went to an entrepreneur conference, and it's quite expensive to attend.

And I was there at the conference.

I was in the thick of it.

And they have this membership and it's really expensive to join.

But by joining you're sort of you're sort of surrounding yourself with these like mega wealthy entrepreneurs on a regular basis.

And you had these meetings and all the rest.

And like at the time when I was there, I was really caught up and I was like, right, I'm, I'm going to join. Right?

And after, like, I was I was flying back home and I had a few days thinking, but I was like, do you know what?

If I join, this is going to take away from take my time or put my focus solely on making money and take away all my time and energy from the things I actually want to spend my time doing?

And I was like, what the fuck am I doing?

This is totally like.

And it was only because I was aware of mimetic theory that I that I was aware, okay, this is not going to be good for me in the long run, you know. Exactly.

And that's a great example.

Before you like with memetic theory, you are able to know if I join this, this is what's going to happen to me, I'm going to have such a extreme desire for money that I won't be able to pull myself out of it.

Now, if you actually joined, knowing memetic theory probably wouldn't help with that at all, because it because these things will just it might help a little bit. Right.

But this is exactly the power it gives you because before you know, memetic theory, the common view is, well, my desires are my own.

So why don't I just join that thing and use all the resources there and not be affected by it?

And I can still decide what I want to do later on.

But no, you correctly realize that the decision between joining and not joining was not just about how to how you spend your time and money, it was about who you wanted to be and what you wanted your desires to be.

So that that's a great example.

Yeah yeah.

Something else I find, I find interesting, he said, Jonathan, is this idea that, you know, we can't escape this desire for recognition.

So instead of like just trying to say, like, I don't care.

Like, you know, Mark Ronson sort of looked like this a lot of not get not giving a fuck or whatever.

It's like instead of doing that, let's actually just be conscious about who we desire recognition from, nor we're down to the important people and that just gives us a lot more.

I don't know, there's a lot of freedom in the.

Yeah yeah.

And, it's funny, the people who don't care what other people think about them, allegedly, are always the ones telling other people that they don't care.

And so, so most often it's someone who does care what you think of them, and they want you to think of them as someone who doesn't care.

And so, yeah, this is like a pretty strong philosophical opinion that they hold is that we can't stop caring about just what anyone thinks about us.

But there are a healthier and more and less healthy ways of satisfying that recognition.

So the least healthy way would probably be you construct this image just online of people who you think you are, and you have no intimate relationships who actually know who you actually are.

And you know, one way around that is just to be surrounded by friends who you have such a secure cognitive environment already in your own private life that, you know, you don't care that much about things that happen online to you and stuff like that. So, yeah.

Do you consciously curate your incoming information flow, like, do you unsubscribe from things that you know are going to be potentially memetic for you?

Oh, I don't use social media at all.

So I only post stuff on social media.

The only exception I have is maybe I watch some YouTube stuff.

But but there I block out all the feed because I know these big tech companies are trying to poison me.

Essentially, they're trying to get me to use their platform as much as I can.

So yeah, I'm not on Instagram.

I'm not on Twitter.

I post stuff on there.

But I just block off all the feeds.

And the only thing I really use is I go to a few channels that I subscribe to, and I actively seek out, and yeah, most of my time is just spent reading and talking to people like yourself. And yeah.

Amazing amazing.

You know, do you think we have the capacity to.

To consciously choose models that are going to be good for us in the long run?

Because, you know, we're all going to have models?

Do we have capacity to like, let's say, pick a certain biography because we know this person has a good way of life, you know, and I want to write.

I think so, I think so, but but but it's I can't remember what 20th century philosopher had this analogy.

I think it was Quine.

Maybe but he this analogy of gaining knowledge as you're on this raft in the ocean and you can take off like this is a raft and you can take out one of the planks here and move it here.

And if you do that over and over again, you know, you can shift the entire raft and the whole conception.

But what people shouldn't have the idea is that they shouldn't have the idea.

You can just, you know, be whatever you want, desire or whatever you want.

I can stop this desire like you are.

Everyone is just immersed in a social environment.

But I think what mimetic theory gives you the ability to do is to nudge that environment and change that over time.

And so yes, yes, we do have capacity, but it comes about doing these small things like for example, not going on social media, for example, choosing who you hang out with.

So to every day decision that you've got to make, And with regards to Girard's own personal conclusions, they're quite they're quite unsettling.

You know what?

How did Girard spend the last few years of his life?

What was his his key takeaway from all of his study into mimetic theory?

There's definitely different, different ways to to read him.

I read him, as, taking the what is called the Benedictine option, which is to withdraw from the world.

So I think he got more and more pessimistic.

His last major book, battling to the end, is a is an apocalyptic book, and it's to describe why all the forces we talked about, mostly Christianity, is literally bringing about a violent end to the world.

And, you know, the younger Gerard was was still hopeful there were things that could be done.

But the more elder Gerard was in my reading, quite withdrawn and retreats.

And so there he just seemed to suggest like, yeah don't don't don't engage with the world because that's going to mess you up, mess you up really bad and retreat withdraw pray.

I mean, he was asking one of these conferences, what should we do?

And he just said, pray, there's different ways to read Gerard, but there's that that, that withdrawn tendencies definitely is definitely there.

So yeah.

If you could have them over for dinner this evening and you could ask him a few questions or anything you'd love to ask Gerard.

It's a good question.

I, I don't know, I don't know, I have to think about that a bit more, but I've almost.

You know what?

I probably want someone.

There are people.

Yeah, I probably want to have someone like the Buddha or Jesus more.

I've obviously, for obvious reasons, over for dinner, but but, but yeah, I, I don't know.

I'm sorry. I don't have an answer there.

No worries, no worries.

And I've heard you say as well that jihad and mimetic theory should come with a warning label. Why? Right.

Well, I think all philosophy should come with a warning label, because again we're not rational, purely rational creatures.

We can just choose to be a certain way when we decide it.

And there's a certain way that certain philosophies, turn you into.

So I started with a lot of, critical theorists at Columbia and, not so much the professors, but a lot of these students, especially the grad students in critical theory, which is quite miserable.

And I think a part of that had to do with the kind of philosophy that they were reading.

What are the side effects of Gerard?

Well one there's the sort of hopelessness and withdrawn thing that the world is going to end, and that's one of the conclusions that he comes to a violent end.

But I think if you don't read him well, you can come to the conclusion that, everything's mimetic, therefore nothing is used.

Everything is kind of useless and meaningless.

So that's another, worry that that one could have going to draw.

Yeah.

And and just being alienated, just being alienated from oneself in the social world. Yeah.

But that's, that's a misreading of Girard. I think.

But but the, the apocalypse thing is, I don't think is a misreading.

I think it's quite valid to read in that way.

Okay.

Well, we can we can end on that.

That very large cliffhanger.

Right.

Where can people, learn more about your work on lines on them?

Where can they find you?

And you been you lecture series?

I would, you know, tell us about that.

Yeah. So,

if you want, very thorough introduction to Girard's theory that's going to build off everything we said today.

I produced a ten hour lecture series, with my friend David Prell, and that's all on YouTube.

Just search my name. Jonathan de.

Joe and the I, and yeah, for the last year and hopefully for the foreseeable future, I've been working on a lecture series on the great books.

So I try to give, practical accessible entertaining but also rigorous introductions to the great books.

So we've done Nietzsche, two on Rousseau, one on Shakespeare, and we're going to do, we're going to do a few on stoicism that I've been working on now.

So with Jonathan, you're doing great work.

I want to wish you the best of luck going forward.

Thanks man.

Thanks for having me.