An excerpt from —her foreword to the new book, Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis, published earlier this month by CUA Press. The edited volume contains 16 original essays on Girard’s work.

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Foreword: A Good Contagion

Before he became an acknowledged Silicon Valley guru, before he became the fourth wise man in a Nativity crèche, René Girard lived quietly and inconspicuously on a far-flung corner of campus, on the aptly named Frenchman’s Road. I was fortunate to know René before he was a legend, before he was featured in The New York Review of Books, before he was the subject of a documentary film called Things Hidden, before everybody who was anybody knew him, had read him, or had at least read about him and could quote him or pretend to quote him. My personal encounter with him would prove to be one of the more fortunate moments of my life.

How the Girard movement came together is an interesting story, too, the tale of how a small group drawn from the Stanford community prodded the beginnings of a worldwide movement that would eventually fan out from a circle of academics to the world at large.1 A good contagion, if ever there was one.

René Girard never craved the spotlight, although the spotlight found him more than half a century after his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, was published in 1961. And the light has only become stronger and brighter since his death in 2015. For me, my interest in his ideas was sparked by a one-on-one encounter before I knew much about him.

At that time, articles and interviews with René in the mainstream anglophone press were virtually nonexistent, and René was pretty much an inconnu in the land he had made a home. I combed through interviews and profiles from Le Monde and Le Figaro, but my French was rusty for the task. I cut my teeth on Achever Clausewitz—the title in English was still being wrestled out and the English proofsheets were under review when I first visited his home on French-man’s Road. The winning title: Battling to the End. Music and the mass brought us together.

Decades earlier, I had studied Dante with Stanford Professor John Freccero, a leading Dante scholar, and a close friend of the Girards. That connection led me to the Stanford music professor, William Mahrt; the medieval music in Dante was of interest to both men. A brilliant spiritual, musical, and literary nexus—they’re rarer than we think. The bonus: I eventually met René Girard for the first time, too. He was in a back pew every Sunday at St. Thomas Aquinas Church.

The “Carpenter Gothic” church, more than a century old, was familiar to me; I had appreciated Bill Mahrt’s long and tenacious work directing a Gregorian and polyphonic schola, a liturgical cycle of early music that has continued without break every Sunday and feast day for more than half a century. It was not a political statement in a culture war: it was an aesthetic and spiritual stance, with centuries of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Josquin des Prez, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Orlando di Lasso to back it up, and an uninterrupted chain of Gregorian chant going back to the fourth century.

I would soon learn that René and I were of the same party in liturgy and books. A world of harmony, order, beauty, and discipline. That was his life, but his work wrestled with the worst of what humanity had to offer: violence, scapegoating, and eventually the prospects of nuclear war.

These polyphonic composers were the basis for our first bond, along with the enduring chant of centuries. “When I first attended,” René wrote to me way back in 2002, “I assumed that the Catholic Church and the University actively supported this unique contribution to the spiritual and cultural life of the community. The truth is that ever since 1963, Professor Mahrt has been very much on his own in this enormously time-, talent- and energy-consuming enterprise.”2

That was my first brief, epistolary connection with René. I was writing about early music and chant and had contacted him for comment.3 It was the first note of an unexpected and unequal friendship. He made a debut in one of my books in 2006.4

At Stanford in 2007, we finally met face-to-face after circling around each other for years. I was invited to attend the meetings of a small Girardian group on the edge of the Stanford campus. I don’t recall how I came to be invited or how this particular eclectic group came together. Elective affinities, perhaps. Molecules pulling people together chemically: like to like.

The group had formed sometime in the 1990s. It convened every two weeks at the Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, a gray-and-white building on tree-lined Salvatierra, off Campus Drive behind the law school. Though there were at least twenty names (at one point, fifty) on the email list for the Genesis reading group (more often called “the Colloquium”)—less than dozen or so would be able to get away from workday commitments for the gatherings on the Stanford campus, settling into the well-worn couches and armchairs upholstered in faded browns and grays.

The discussions were an adventure. In March 2008, René shared his interpretation of the biblical Joseph story. It would have been the first time I heard his unusual take on the patriarch, culminating in René’s surprising claim that the account is history’s first recorded instance of true forgiveness. I haven’t been able to prove him wrong.

The group discussed Heraclitus, Pope Benedict’s controversial Regensburg lecture, and John Henry Newman’s idea of the university. Ken Quandt presented a mimetic theory of Plato. A Paris graduate student in political science visited to explore how to bring mimetic theory to his academic work.

Meanwhile, I was quickly put to work. At the April 2008 Imitatio conference, I conducted video interviews with Italian scholar Giuseppe Fornari, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and others, as well as René himself. Another discussion considered the Girardian aspects of The Wizard of Oz, based on the deceit of desire. There was a strangeness in being swept up by all of this: I was working crazily to finish journalism commitments at night, and carrying out my Stanford humanities work by day, with a deepening connection with René Girard on the side.

Years earlier, someone told the story of Stanford Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in Berlin with friends, who was confronted and asked why he had become a “Girardian.” The answer, according to the story: “Because it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis.” He had a point.

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a brilliant scholar and theologian, dominated the conversations, sometimes to the exclusion of everyone else; a big bold man with a pronounced South African accent, a wise and witty (and sometimes abrasive) one-man show. However, when René softly ventured a few comments, Bob deferred quickly: the courtesy of long friendship. Bob’s sidekick, a former Stanford football player named Wayne Larocque, often attended, as did the Voegelin scholar and Hoover Fellow Paul Caringella, theologian Gil Bailie, Plato scholar Ken Quandt, and Byron Bland, a consultant at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and fellow at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Institute. I would meet more members of the group in the weeks to come.

René also attended regularly—the star, a supporting player, and audience all at once. By then he was in his mid-80s and his energy was already ebbing, eight years before his death. But he was still an inescapable presence, still the reason that we were there. I observed his self-effacement, his modesty—he declined to dominate, even when he could have, even when we wanted him to be the boss. Finally, there was an intense young man of about forty with penetrating, pale blue eyes. He sat on the floor, legs akimbo, wearing running shoes before running shoes were a thing. That, someone whispered to me, is Peter Thiel. So it isn’t too much of a reach to say I studied René Girard with Peter Thiel, though I don’t recall ever exchanging so much as a greeting with the legendary entrepreneur in all my visits to the Gould Center.

Thiel’s interest in René’s thought was not about making money but rather understanding himself and his motives and assessing the times—that would be true of just about everyone who seriously engages with Girard’s ideas. As a young man in a New York law firm, Thiel remembers all the lawyers competing for the same goals. They measured themselves by their progress within their peer group, not any transcendent objective.

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Later, Thiel would focus on global warming and fossil fuels, apocalypse, immortality, and the future of democracy. His thinking followed the profoundly interdisciplinary directions and patterns modeled by René himself, though his preoccupations were of an entirely different hue. René’s theories weren’t fashionable and, in some cases, could be a career-killer. But not for Thiel.

Bologna-based anthropologist Mark Anspach, then an undergraduate at Harvard, wasn’t so fortunate. René Girard had warned him that mimetic theory was a risky career choice. One advisor told him that citing Girard in his senior thesis was “batty.” Anspach recalled the event ruefully: “It wasn’t a criticism of what I was doing; it was criticism of Girard. He said this guy’s ideas are dotty. That word stuck in my mind—you know, ‘dotty.’ It was dotty.” He complained to Harvard about the unfairness, arguing that once the faculty had approved the subject of his thesis, it was out of bounds to criticize him for writing about it. Rather they should critique his work on its merits. Such was Girard’s reception in academia. And for many years, the scholarly exile would continue. Girard’s theories are only beginning to find acceptance in academia, though his entire career was in American universities.

The point: I assumed back then I was entering a well-established circle of old-timers, long familiar with Girard’s work. That wasn’t the case—or at least, not entirely. I realized only much later that I was there at the beginning, not knowing it was a beginning. And everyone else was finding their way, too.

The Gould Center fostered a colloquium of Girardian novices at various stages of initiation. Everyone was learning and is still learning. The arc extends beyond our lifetimes, which puts a different scale on the notion of “beginning.” Almost all of us were new, or relatively new, to Girard’s thought—with the obvious exception of Robert Hamerton-Kelly, who met René in 1981. Though he was theoretically one among equals, his longstanding friendship with René and his clout at Stanford brought the colloquium into being. He was dean of the chapel at Stanford and also one of the cofounders of the Colloquium on Violence

Hamerton-Kelly usually offered an article or paper for the discussion at the Gould Center. Others did, too. I remember, in particular, English Professor Bernadette Waterman Ward of the University of Dallas presenting a paper on Adam Bede and mimetic angels in George Eliot’s novels.6 Women were still something of a novelty in the group then—so her appearance was cheering and so was the discussion around her paper. I recall an Imitatio workshop on neuroscience, a discussion of the Regensburg lecture, a visit from a PhD candidate in political science from Paris who was using mimetic theory in his research, and a large, splashy lunch at the tony Il Fornaio restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, with San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer as a guest of honor. That was Bob Hamerton-Kelly’s style and influence.

How was this conclave different from the other, more academic or corporate models of organization that were already coalescing around Girard? It was not a society, not an association, but rather a colloquium: that is, focused academic discussions with an in-depth consideration of René’s work. Professional societies also began to form, along with academic sessions where formal papers were given—but the growing Girardian movement hadn’t yet reached the worldwide audiences most in need of Girard’s message of reconciliation, forgiveness, and the utter abandonment of violence and retaliation. Girard was unequivocal and yet ambiguous: “The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough.”7 Time enough . . . for ourselves, for the world? Time enough to escape the apocalypse we’re preparing for ourselves? René left the possibilities open for good reason. Each one of us faces our own apocalypse, our own personal mortality. Perhaps we focus on big worldwide cataclysms to avoid coming to terms with it.

In those years, Imitatio was just beginning to sponsor research to pro-mulgate René’s concepts and legacy. Few of us anticipated that we would be recipients of its largesse. We were drawn to René’s work because it spoke to us, and to the world.

Elaborating and applying Girard’s concepts can’t be entirely a solo operation, a “head trip.” Hence organizations like the Colloquium on Violence & Religion. His concepts must be enacted in community, in concert with others. After all, it’s a social theory, not a self-help scheme, though all of us have found applications to our own lives. We are the experiments. We are the guinea pigs.

No one came to the Gould Center because it was the smart and up-to-date thing to do. Rather, like Peter Thiel and his running shoes—he wore them because it was the most convenient way to get to Salvatierra Street, not because he was trying to impress us with his savoir faire and nonchalance in a room of older academics. If it was cool, maybe it was because he seemed cool and unknown. Not a fashion statement, but his way of being true to himself and the world. He was onto something—and we sensed it was valid.

Mimetic independence creates a mimetic reaction from the people around us—but it is a good contagion. René was a model for many of us: we wanted to be like that guy; we wanted to understand what he understood. He had something to say that’s compelling. We were motivated by what, years later, Luke Burgis would call a “thick desire.” The thickest possible.

And that was the point: we were not just talking about breaking away from mimetic desire. We were demonstrating how to do it.

Inevitably, friction sparked among the players—people are prone to conflict, after all—but also a surprising joy and relief. It was the beginning of a growing movement. Nobody was in it for getting rich or getting tenure. Some lost social standing and prestige for taking up with an unconventional Frenchman, others dropped out of grad school. In Paris, Benoît Chantre lost his job as a publisher. Others switched their careers, or their college majors, or moved across the country or world. “You had a sense of a bunch of losers, but it was a lot of fun,” Trevor Merrill recalled. He compared it to one of those science fiction stories where people with no apparent affinities hear an unusual summons to gather, forming a disparate group of oddly assorted people with an all-encompassing mission.

In short, the reasons for being there were not mimetic. We were not driven by what the cool kids were doing. To the contrary, you had to abandon the cool kids to get in the space where you could understand what René was driving

No one was making a buck off this. There were no books pouring out of publishing houses, no seminars, no conferences. No one was interpreting Girard’s work because we were still learning his work. No one was getting tenure or doctorates or prizes because of mimetic theory. Podcasts and talking-head Zoom videos did not exist. Girard wasn’t yet in a New York Times crossword puzzle or mentioned on White Lotus—that was in a future he didn’t live to see. What he offered instead was the truth of humanity’s condition, the reason for our inhumanity, and a way out of madness.

The measure of success happens within the heart of each person. The theory has succeeded when we halt before an envious or snide remark, when we decline to join in a vindictive and personal attack on a rival, or when we resist the temptation to pour invective on a figure only seen on social media.

Here’s the kicker: I can’t remember a single word anyone said at any of those hours and hours of meetings decades ago.

What was happening in the room was more important than what was being said inside it. Words disappear with time, but the lessons linger. Consider: one of the wisest men in the world sat to the side, silent and humble. One of the richest men in the world sat on the floor.

And Robert Hamerton-Kelly—I remember his soliloquies as he talked wisely, wittily, not even stopping to inhale. Talking so long that people were no longer listening but merely waiting. And just when you were sure he couldn’t be more pompous if he tried . . ., he paused. His face crumpled in embarrassment as he began merrily laughing at himself, in front of the whole group. He was onto Bob Hamerton-Kelly. The unexpected self-recognition and disconcerting humility were worth the price of admission. That’s what I remember. Not the words, but the laugh. It taught me more than a bucketload of words.

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The idea of the ‘hive mind,’ the latest iteration of what used to be called groupthink, has become newly salient over the past decade. It has generated countless memes, along with new epithets for people who don’t seem to think for themselves: the rise of people being called ‘NPCs,’ for instance, non-player characters in video games who control none of the action and show up on the screen in programmed patterns.

The cocktail of media and technology has made the world far more mimetic. We are now so saturated in mimesis that the saturation itself has become the joke — like the 1984 Pepsi commercial that ushered in the age of mimetic irony.

So much of this discourse, though, remains at the level of ideas and taste, and not at the level where it is most insidious: our moral convictions, our conscience.

I sat down with Maddy Kearns, a journalist for the , last week for a couple of drinks and a chat about my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. (You can read the full interview here, if you’re interested). We covered a lot of ground over the course of two hours, but the one word that came up the most in our conversation—and to which I keep coming back again and again—is the word conscience.

While Pope Leo XIV doesn’t explicitly use the word in his tweet from this past week, he does capture far more eloquently and with more spiritual depth and authority than I could the cultural diagnosis that has been keeping me awake at night and driven the work I’ve been doing on the book for the past two years.

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How do we encounter truth that transcends the crowd? Or does our ‘truth’ always happen to be the truth of the crowd that we are most closely aligned with at any given time? I think all of us hope not—but we look at the world, and we see a ‘false conscience’, or what is commonly a hive conscience, prompting people to draw moral conclusions that always just happen to line up perfectly with the decisions they’ve already made. And that seems especially thin when it comes to political decisions and loyalties, like the Vice President’s suggestion that the Pope “be careful” when talking about matters of theology after it became apparent that there was friction between the administration and the Pope’s recent statements regarding war, care for immigrants, and general matters of morality. The Pope’s office involves teaching—but not merely in the way that our middle school teachers taught us math. His office involves forming the conscience, our sense of what is right and wrong.

The hive conscience doesn’t start with 'is this true?’ or ‘what must I do?’. It starts with something base: ‘which team will my words and actions put me on?’ How will my stance on this issue align me with certain groups or interests? And that primary reference to groups, interests, power, and community is precisely where things can begin to go off the rails.

As far as I know, the Pope is not seeking to enter or win any future elections. His relationship to the truth has not been distorted by power. His words are calling many people back to a primordial sense that many have lost, partly due to the media and technology cocktail that has scrambled both intuitions and even our very senses.

Conscience is emphatically not the voice of subjective conviction—the mere feeling that one is in the right. That reductive modern view is precisely what allows people to commit grave evils with perfectly "clear consciences," mistaking the comfort of their own certainty for a genuine moral summons. The older and deeper sense of conscience is rooted in what the tradition calls anamnesis: a primordial memory of the good, inscribed into our nature, which resonates when it encounters truth. Conscience in this sense is not something we construct out of our preferences and feelings; it is something we uncover, and it stands in judgment over us precisely because it points to a truth that exceeds us. The everyday act of moral judgment—what the tradition calls conscientia—is only as trustworthy as the formation of the anamnesis beneath it.1

The connection between memory and conscience has been one of the great revelations of the past two years for me. In the interludes between the chapters of The One and the Ninety-Nine, I tell part of the story of my relationship with my dad, who was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's disease as I was beginning the book. Through his illness, and through my care for him, I found myself called back to a deeper conscience, something almost primordial within me. This surprised me. My father did not appear in the original proposal I sent to St. Martin's Press, but he emerged in the writing of the first chapter and never left. His memory, which is bound up with mine, carried moral consequences I did not yet understand when I began writing.

The conscience is how we safeguard ourselves from the tyranny of our own age, or the corruption of the communities we inhabit. John Henry Newman grasped this when he raised his famous toast "to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards"—not as a declaration of private judgment against authority, but as a confession that conscience is binding precisely because it is the voice of a truth higher than the self, a truth to which even the Pope must answer. Such a conscience is never formed in isolation. It is awakened, tutored, and corrected within a living tradition—scripture, liturgy, the witness of the saints, the slow pedagogy of a community that hands down what it has received. But even communities can become corrupted, at which point their fate rests on the extraordinary witness of those who are still able to sense and respond to a truth which transcends the populism of its members.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: people telling others that they have a ‘moral responsibility’ to do something, as if one person’s moral imagination could substitute for another’s conscience.

Last week I tweeted that I had received an invitation from the AI company Anthropic to participate in a couple of days of working sessions at their San Francisco headquarters with other Christian leaders to help talk about their model Claude’s new constitution.

There were various red flags in my initial communication. Anthropic had raised over $30 billion the previous month, but the invitation reached me in the register of a non-profit or church appealing to volunteers' "time, treasure, and talent" for a kind of spiritual mission. The tone was too odd for me. I decided to sit it out, since something didn’t sit right with me about it. (Not to mention it would’ve required a huge sacrifice for my family, with me being away from my newborn and her sister for several days while I was technically on paternity leave—something the company thought was a sacrifice I should gladly make in order to help them.)

When I shared my decision publicly, many understood—but I was still shocked at the number of people, mostly fellow Christians, who implied or even said explicitly that I had a moral responsibility to show up when invited to things like that. Says who? I have a moral responsibility for many things, but I am confident that Anthropic’s invitation is not one of them. This was a prime example of the “hive conscience” at work: a notion of the conscience that is not personal, but collective: “because we are X, we must do Y.” In this case, X is Christian and Y is “be at the table”.

The conscience is the faculty by which we learn to say “I” with moral conviction. It is a step deeper than the comfort of “we believe” statements—it is how we fully own responsibility for what we think and believe, even if others do too: without the coercion and conformity that they want or expect from us. Sometimes, the people doing the coercing are the ones closest to you: your own family, friends, party, colleagues. Usually, they won’t be so explicit about it. The coercion will come in the form of a thousand nudges in the back with the thumb or forefinger, and those who aren’t paying attention may not even notice.

You will notice that the Apostles and Nicene creeds do not begin “We believe”, but “I believe”. And I’d like to suggest that getting to a genuine “I” is the work of a lifetime, but it’s the work that each of us must do—because that same tension plays out in nearly every aspect of our lives, in which we are asked to sacrifice our real conscience to the hive one.

And when you do exercise it, it may not be respected. And that’s okay—do it anyway.

The only tables you are really welcome at are the ones where you can get up and leave freely, and where the invitation doesn't come as an offer we can't refuse.

We can’t learn to respect the freedom of others until we first learn to respect our own: a freedom oriented toward truth over tribe, and one which finds its fulfillment in genuine communion with others who have learned the cost of freedom.

I am not going to suggest that loneliness is a necessary consequence of integrity and truth in today's world, but I will say this—if you feel lonely, do not assume that something is wrong with you; in fact, your desire for a form of real communion that you have not yet been able to achieve may be the very fire that you are called to keep kindled.

If you enjoyed this essay, would you pre-order your copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine today?

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In recent years, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the use of the word energy to describe how people feel. This person had good energy about them. The event had amazing energy. People join a movement because it seems to have energy. All of those are relatively straight-forward. I love live music, and that’s largely because I love the energy in the crowd—an energy that doesn’t come through my home speakers. But one area where I have heard the word over and over, to the extent that it has caught my attention, is that ideas have energy.

Oddly, though, the ideas that seem to have the most energy are the ones that seem most dangerous. Not Christian Orthodoxy, but heterodoxy—or at least if not obviously heterodox, ideas pushing the boundaries, operating slightly outside of the Overton Window (witness the energy surrounding Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, for instance). Notice the energy around Nick Fuentes and what used to be fringe political movements. Energy is now in edginess. Or the energy in tech: it is gravitating toward things that seem powerful and dangerous, like autonomous weapons systems and defense tech, and not necessarily to the more unsexy things like, say, a cure for Alzheimer’s. War is much more energizing to the young.

I don’t deny the notion that it has always been like this to some extent. History is filled with those who have pushed boundaries and sought the most energizing pathways forward. Nietzsche gave us all a philosophy and language to describe the impulse, and the world has never been quite the same. Once we stepped back and did the meta-analysis of attraction, then attraction itself became corrupted. We may begin to think that if we want something that seems pedestrian—I don’t know, like a family with children and a messy household—that we are somehow not wanting powerfully enough.

All of this has to do with the most fundamental topic of what is life—which is, as many of you know, the very theme of the annual Cluny Conference that I am hosting in Napa this July (tickets still available!). And one of the most fascinating distinctions of “what life is” is between bios and zoë, a distinction which itself is the subject of debate. One of the leading thinkers who has made this distinction central to his philosophy is the Italian Giorgio Agamben, for whom zoë represents “base” life—the simple fact of being alive. It is life that has not yet taken form. It is bare, vulnerable, stripped of everything that would give it real vitality, like political form and particular structures like participation in communities. These things turn it into bios and give life vitality—or we may even say a kind of energy. It becomes meaningful.

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Agamben’s masterstroke is his argument that modern politics increasingly collapses the distinction between zoë and bios while pretending to maintain it. Sovereign power decides who is a bios (a life that matters) and who is reduced to zoë (bare existence, a life that doesn’t matter). The person reduced to this form of zoë becomes a homo sacer, in Agamben’s language: a person who can be killed, because they lie outside of the system, but a person who is still recognized as having a base form of biological life.

For Agamben, the concentration camp represented modernity’s distinction between bios and zoë: pure death without—at least in the minds of those committing the murders—the character of sacrifice.

Using Agamben's framework, we can begin to see why debates like abortion are so intractable. The disagreement is not only moral but ontological. It turns on whether the life in the womb is understood as bios—a life with form and meaning—or as mere zoē, biological existence without that form, or as something that has not yet crossed the threshold into either category and thus is not a life at all. Most people have never articulated their position in these terms, but their intuitions already presuppose one of these views. The conflict, then, is not just about rights or policy, but about what counts as a life at all.

I hope the difference is becoming clear, because now I’m going to turn it on its head. We’re going to get back to energy—but first, the inversion.

A Different Kind of zoë

Agamben equates bios with life that has form—a life that is part of a city or state, for example. It acquires a new kind of vitality—we might even say energy—from this participation.

What turned this basic distinction on its head were the Christian gospels, especially the Gospel of John, in which Jesus uses the word zoë to refer to a specific kind of new life:

“I came that they may have life (zoē), and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life (zoē).” (John 14:6)

“I am the resurrection and the life (zoē); whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25)

“Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life (zoē aiōnios*). He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24)

“I am the bread of life (zoē); whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” (John 6:35)

Here zoë refers to a higher form of life that transcends city or state and is not dependent on them. It is a more abundant form of life in Christ that is within anyone’s reach, regardless of the circumstances or political forms of life that they find themselves in.

Agamben exposes the fragility of political dignity. The Gospel asserts the indestructibility of personal dignity.

The Gospels almost completely flip the earlier hierarchy: zoē becomes the highest form of life, because it means participation in the divine life. It is capable of eternity. Bios is not.

In Christianity, “form of life” began to take on new shapes that did not inherently have political character: for instance, the form of chastity (even celibacy), poverty, and obedience, as in the monastic traditions—something which, interestingly, the post-secular Agamben turned to in fascination in his later work. The very concept of “abundance” could now be conceived of in different terms than the merely material.

This doesn’t mean that there is no relationship between bios and zoē in the spiritual life; it does mean that bios is now oriented to zoē, though, and these new forms and structures should only be sought to the extent that they make this zoē more accessible, and attractive.

Jean Danielou began to describe this relationship in his classic Prayer as a Political Problem, originally published in 1965. In it, he describes the structure of politics like a lever that can either open or close people off to transcendent realities to varying degrees. He wasn’t just talking about the number of times an NFL football player says “First of all, all thanks to God” before he makes his post-game comments, or any of these performative or mimetic things which are hard to draw any serious correlation from. I think he was, at root, writing about the ways in which our environments direct our energy and ambition.

It’s incredibly hard to change the shape of desire for a single person, and it’s even harder for an entire company or community or nation. But one thing I’ve learned, having been helping people and organizations do this for the past 5 years, is that there is a singularly strong connection between energy—the things that make people feel truly alive—and desire. To ignore that connection would be to Platonize desire in some sense, to abstract it from its bodily form. Desire is something intimately bound up with the body. Not just sexual desire, but all desire.

That is why I believe that in the next decade, with the ascendency of disincarnate AI, the body will become paradoxically more important to those who truly understand. Enfleshed and ensouled desire will have primacy over the artificial desires of machines, if we could call those desires at all. (I don’t.)

Which brings me back to the fundamental question of what is energizing people right now. One thread that is undeniable is the desire to transcend all systems, or to overturn them, to become solo entrepreneurs and build billion dollar companies, to exist outside of any boundaries—in essence, to live the life of Agamben’s homo sacer, a life of zoē. But this new thirst for zoē is also Christ haunted, tinged with the Christianity it can’t escape, because it promises a form of salvation. My OpenClaw AI, set up here in my attic office, will save me from the coming economic disruption. It’s titillating to think of all the things we’ll do together, me and my Claw.

But this is clearly a kind of luxury desire—the kind of desire I have because I can afford to have it, and because my pursuing that desire doesn’t immediately affect anyone else negatively. It might take some time away from my family in the short-term, but most people won’t notice or have any idea of how I am directing my time and energy until, in some cases, years later. A great tragedy of our society is that any of us could be chasing thin, ephemeral desires for years without anyone stopping us or making us question ourselves.

We go searching the world over, in René Girard’s words, searching for the thing we want, believing that it must lie beneath the only rock on earth that is too heavy for us to lift. But the truth is not a rock, nor something that can live under a rock, nor something that is reducible to a “fact” or “object” that we will ever find.

We are living in a moment in which people are chasing energy as if it were life itself.

But energy is cheap. It can be manufactured, amplified, engineered. Entire industries now exist to produce it—political movements, media ecosystems, even technologies that promise to make us feel more alive while quietly detaching us from the conditions that make life possible.

This is why the most “energizing” ideas today so often feel dangerous. They are. Not always because of what they propose, but because of what they train us to seek: intensity without depth, stimulation without form, freedom without relation. A kind of life that looks, in the end, very much like Agamben’s zoē—exposed, unprotected, and endlessly manipulable.

The Gospel offers a different vision. It does not deny energy, but it refuses to confuse it with life. The life it speaks of—zoē—is not the life that burns hottest, but the life that cannot be extinguished. It does not depend on the system, or the crowd, or the next idea that feels electric.

And that is why it is so easy to overlook. Because in a world addicted to energy, real life often appears, at first glance, almost quiet.

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Almost two and a half years after the NOVITĀTE conference in D.C. (which celebrated René Girard’s 100th birthday), the book that I promised would emerge from that gathering is finally about to be published. There is much more on the book below—including a detailed table of contents of the 17 original essays that make it up, as well as a bonus preview of the Introduction.

I’m also excited to announce that we are going to be bringing back the spirit of NOVITĀTE with a special session dedicated to Girard and A.I. at the upcoming Zoe conference in Napa this summer, where you can expect to see a lot of the same faces from the 2023 conference—and a lot of new ones.

But before I get to the book: For the next 7 days, the second cohort of the Foundations of Agency workshop is open this spring at a cost of $495.

This is not simply a course that takes you on a survey of the philosophical, psychological, and theological foundations of the concept of agency—it will put you in a small cohort of 4-5 other professionals and act as a forcing function for doing something important that you know you need to do, or will figure out during the course of the 40-day workshop. And it will help you exercise the agency to do it.

I hope to see many of you there. The next seven days are your last chance to apply and enroll.

Be Not Conformed—Advance Reader Edition of the Introduction

Be Not Conformed is out April 10 from Catholic University of America Press and available for pre-order now from CUA Press and most places books are sold.

I’m excited to share with you below my Introduction to the edited volume of essays, along with the Table of Contents so you can see the array of thinkers and writers who make up this volume. I have permission from CUA Press to publish my Introduction here. For the rest, you will need to buy the book.

Here is why you should: While there are many fascinating essays that make it up, and some innovations—including Girard being brought into serious contact with Marshall McLuhan, von Hildebrand, and Liugi Giussani for the very first time, not to mention some apocalyptic (and antichristic! provocations)—it is fundamentally a book that is meant to transform you.

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Introduction, by Luke Burgis

The origin of this book is a conference I hosted at The Catholic University of America on November 3, 2023. That gathering, called NOVITĀTE: René Girard at 100, was one of several major events worldwide that celebrated the one hundredth year since the birth of René Girard on Christmas Day 1923. The conference title was inspired by the Vulgate wording of Romans 12:2—“reformamini in novitate sensus vestri” (“be transformed by the renewal of your mind”)—signaling its call to intellectual and spiritual renewal in Girard’s centenary year.1

I began planning about a year early. And then, relatively late in the process—nearly halfway in—I was forced to move the event from its original mid-October date due to joyous but unforeseen circumstances: my wife and I learned that we were expecting our first baby the very same week as the conference. Wanting to avoid the anxiety of hosting an event the same week as the birth, I moved it to the only other date that the banquet venue had available for the entire fall season: November 3.2 Still too close for comfort, but at least not a direct overlap.

After making the change, a friend reminded me that René Girard had died on November 4, 2015; the forced move had resulted in a conference that coincided with the anniversary of Girard’s death. We organized a Requiem Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown Washington the morning after the main event. A surprising number of conference participants, Christian and non-Christian alike, attended.

After the high intellectual pitch of the previous day’s talks and panels, and a boisterous party that evening, the mass brought our conference to its conclusion with sacred solemnity. I walked home afterward reflecting on the idea that, for all the grandeur of Girard’s theory, it may have found its highest expression in that liturgy: people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, heads bowed, asking for forgiveness.

Two of the keynote speakers were entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Girard’s famous former student, and Father Elias Carr, a Canon Regular of Saint Augustine from the abbey of Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria. The day featured a panel on race and mimesis with Coleman Hughes, Hollis Robbins, Lester Spence, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, and another on mimesis and media with Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie, author Walter Kirn, and Renée DiResta, moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. More than sixteen separate panels and presentations took place in concurrent sessions—everything from a Girardian critique of ideology (Geoff Schullenberger) to the Eschatological Problem of Technology (Jon Askonas) to conversations bringing Girard’s ideas into generative contact with Marshall McLuhan, Luigi Giussani, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.

One of the fruits of the conference is the book that you are holding in your hands. We selected and developed many of the essays presented at the conference, and solicited several additional essays related to its theme, to form a cohesive whole. The collection is meant to serve a dual purpose: to reflect on what Girard achieved in the past one hundred years, and to speculate about the potential contribution of his work to the next hundred.

The subtitle of this volume is René Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. Few thinkers of the past century were as multidisciplinary as René Girard. He was a silo-busting figure whose singular, dense insight of mimetic desire blossomed into a rich field of study that spanned the philosophical, anthropological, theological, economic, literary, and more. Girard wrote a book on Shakespeare; a book about Job; another about the apocalypse. He wrote essays about business and innovation, and some of his mentees were renowned entrepreneurs and investors.

Girard was a world-renowned academic, elected to the Académie Française in 2005. He was also deeply Catholic. And, being based at Stanford, his ideas influenced Silicon Valley indirectly perhaps more than any other thinker of his time, through his proteges. When the history of the twenty-first-century Silicon Valley is written, he will have a place in it. Girard is at the nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley (which stand for reason, religion, and innovation) because he probed anthropological truths in a way that connects them. That is rare in today’s fractured and fragmented world.

Inspired by Girard’s example and by the integrating force of his ideas, the conference in November 2023 led not only to the publication of this book, but also to the formation of the Cluny Institute in 2024, a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to connecting the “three cities” to build a future that is as meaningful as it is prosperous.3 Girard is one of its intellectual fathers and will continue to shape its evolution.

You will find a diverse array of essays in this volume of different style, substance, and form—some from Girard scholars, and others from writers who are relatively new to his work. That diversity was intentional, and key to the conference’s spirit; however, it may feel jarring if you’re expecting consistency. At the conclusion of NOVITĀTE, someone described it as a mix between a Parisian salon, a party, and a traditional academic conference, without regard to rank or title. I think that’s something Girard himself would have appreciated. There were professors encountering priests and technology entrepreneurs in conversation with novelists. The intention was to bring the greatest energy possible to Girard’s work and let the chips fall where they may. “Be Not Conformed” wasn’t just the theme of the conference, it was the form of the conference—something non-conforming—and the form of this book, too.

On one hand, we all strive to differentiate ourselves; we instinctively want to set ourselves apart, to not conform, especially when we feel our sense of identity under assault. And yet, on the other hand, we can’t entirely escape mimesis. We must ultimately conform our lives to something.

The way out of this conundrum, you will see in this book, starts with understanding that there are different kinds of conformity. The Czech theologian, Josef Zvěřina, a survivor of totalitarianism, saw that it is conformity to the world that leads to negative mimesis—to rivalry, and eventually to violence. In his commentary on the scripture passage from Romans 12:2 (“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”), he notes that the Greek word Paul uses for “form” has the root schema. “In a nutshell,” Zvěřina writes, “all schemas, all exterior models are empty. We have to want more.”

When Paul exhorts the Romans to be “transformed,” Zvěřina notes, he uses the word metamorphosis. “He opposes schêma or morphé—permanent form, to metamorphé—change in the creature. A person is not to change according to any model that in any case is always out of fashion, but it is a total newness with all its wealth.”

External models are easy to cling to, but true metamorphosis is a dynamic change from within the creature—and there are not always clear signposts.

And so, this book is not an argument, it’s an invitation: to step outside the ready-made forms of thought, to risk that kind of transformation.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Luke Burgis

Foreword: A Good Contagion

Cynthia L. Haven, National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar

Part One: Athens

1. Mimesis and Thumos: A Synthesis of Girardian and Platonic-Scholastic Psychology

Mark Shiffman, Saint Patrick’s Seminary and founding director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics

2. To What Do We Conform? René Girard, Black Studies, and Ayn Rand

Hollis Robbins, Professor of English at the University of Utah ()

3. Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist

A. Natasha Joukovsky, novelist

4. Girard and the Fictional Self

Marie Kawthar Daouda, author, Lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford

5. Aeneas as Founding Murderer: A Girardian Investigation of the Aeneid’s Close

Annika Nordquist McGregor, OpenAI

Part Two: Jerusalem

6. Escaping the Mimetic Whirlpool: Deceit, Desire, and the Catholic Imagination

Michael P. Murphy, Director, Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage and Senior Lecturer at Loyola University Chicago

7. The Analogical Antidote

Trevor Cribben Merrill, California Institute of Technology and author ()

8. Rulers of the World or Triumph of the Cross? René Girard and Dietrich von Hildebrand on: Anthropology, Liturgy, and Resisting Contagion

Michael Matheson Miller, Acton Institute Chief of Strategic Initiatives and Senior Research Fellow

9. Beyond Deceit: Girard and Giussani on the Meaning of Desire

Thomas Deutsch, Theology Teacher at Connelly School of the Holy Child

10. Media and Mimesis: From Imitation to Immolation

Andrew McLuhan, poet, educator, researcher, and founder of The McLuhan Institute ()

11. “We Lepers”: The Mimetic Saint According to Gavan Daws’s Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai

Fr. Elias Carr, Canon Regular of Saint Augustine of Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria

Part Three: Silicon Valley

12. “Things Hidden”: Mimesis, Technology, and the Apocalypse

Tobias Huber, writer
Byrne Hobart, writer, entrepreneur, investor, and consultant

13. Waiting for Girard: Rivalry, Apocalypse, and Return

Owen Yingling, student at the University of Chicago

14. Against the City of Noise

Justin Lee, First Things Associate Editor

15. The Illusions of Novelty: Belle Delphine and the Eternal Return of Online Fame

Katherine Dee, writer and podcaster ()

16. The Medium is the Mimesis: McLuhan, Girard, and the Technologies of Imitation

Brett Robinson, Associate Director for Outreach and Associate Professor of Practice at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame

17. From the Passion to the Hydrogen Bomb: René Girard and the Eschatological Problem of Technology

Jon Askonas, Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America

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It’s not hard to find your tribe. The real challenge today is not losing yourself within one.

For the past three years, I’ve been researching and writing the most important and personal thing that I have ever published: THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, out from St. Martin’s Press on June 16, 2026.

For those who know me or have followed my work, please consider stopping now to click this link and pre-order. For the rest: let me tell you why I believe this book is worth the investment—and why I think it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Some Backstory

In 2021, when my mother unexpectedly died, I became the primary caregiver for my father, who was battling advanced Alzheimer’s disease—only a few months after my book Wanting was published, and just weeks after I was newly married. That experience forced both me and my father to confront serious existential questions: our relationship to one another, to our families, to our friends, to group affiliations of every kind, and in turn our very identities. And I was forced to face questions about relationships which I had never seriously confronted before:

Why have I never felt at home in crowds? What important rites of passage did I miss in my life? (And did I have the courage to complete the one I was clearly in the middle of?) Which movements or affiliations had I been co-opted into without full awareness, knowledge, or consent? What does “resistance” really mean, and how and when do we know what to resist and what to accept? How could I be sure that my thoughts and desires were even my own? What effect is technology having on the way I relate to other people—and on the structure of my soul?

Ultimately, I realized that my journey—and the questions I was asking—is universal.

Those questions have become even more urgent in an age of thin desires and crumbling institutions, artificial intelligence, and powerful forces of social contagion amplified by technology. What does it mean to forge a solid self, a differentiated identity, and still have deep relationships with others when the world seems to be conspiring to make us retreat into bastions of safety under the guise of loyalty, or “finding your tribe,” or “finding yourself”—all detached from the freedom and responsibility that are the very foundation of love?

I’m convinced that beneath the economic and policy debates, beneath the political battles, beneath the fertility crisis, beneath the smartphone arguments, and beneath the endless online discourse, something fundamental has broken in the relationship between individuals and groups. It has become extraordinarily difficult to belong to groups without either becoming alienated or joining something that demands cult-like loyalty and eventually costs you your integrity—and yourself.

I’ve seen countless friends, families, and relationships fall apart because of a lost ability to relate to others when anxiety is high, when insecurity is present, and when mimesis and social contagion take over—often in the form of coercion and conformity.

The solution is not fundamentally technological, economic, or political. It is profoundly human.

Ways of Relating

Until we come to grips with the ways our society incentivizes and often produces pseudo-selves—people who lack a solid sense of self, who negotiate their identities in real time based on whatever is most expedient—and with the likelihood that we ourselves operate this way more often than we would like to admit, we will continue to experience greater volatility, polarization, and hollowed-out conversations and relationships.

There is a perennial path for entering into group dynamics in a way that leads to growth rather than hijacking. It is possible to use social technology—and an increasing share of tech is social tech—in ways that lead to depth, not shallowness. There is a way to recover strong rites of passage in our own lives, and for our families and children, that can lead to purpose and meaning rather than trapping us on the infernal hamster wheel of keeping up with whatever other people say is important at any given moment.

Many of us come back to the well daily, carrying our buckets, looking for other people who might help fill them with whatever form of water we think we need. What we seek is the kind of water that creates a well springing up within us. When we find it, we leave behind the cycle of addiction, the cycle of endless validation, and the search for being known and liked. We embrace a new path which, at times, will require us to feel unknown, unvalidated, and even unloved. We do the unrepeatable thing that only we are called to do on this earth. We speak what is real. We stop operating from fear.

Not All Who Wander…

It was with much of this in mind that I reread the parable of the lost sheep—perhaps for the 1,000th time—sometime in late 2021. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s simple: a single sheep leaves the flock of the ninety-nine and becomes “lost,” wandering until the Good Shepherd finds it and brings it back into the fold.

I have always been unsatisfied with the interpretation of this sheep as simply the lone sinner brought back into communion. After all, we all identify with the lost sheep when we read the story. So if that is all of us, how can we all be lost, all astray, while there remains the image of a perfect ninety-nine that has not?

Today, we face competing narratives about “the one.” I think many of those narratives are summed up in the Gospel of Thomas where—true to the gnostic mind—the lost sheep is actually the most intelligent sheep (“he has a 150 IQ!”—you can already picture it on Twitter), tracked down by Jesus and praised for being unlike the other dumb, herd-like sheep. Perhaps it is the neurodivergent tech founder who will save us all.

But this reading is thin, too. We are meant to be in communion with others, so what good is differentiation for differentiation’s sake?

This is the question at the heart of The One and the Ninety-Nine, which is an exploration into the heart of our culture—and into the heart of each one of us. I share details from my own journey that are intimate enough that, at times, I wondered what I was doing as I sat writing this book in my office after rocking my newborn daughter to sleep.

I did it because I had to.

We are in a moment of profound existential crisis, and it is going to take courage to find our way out—and to each other.

—Luke

P.S. If you’re interested in buying 100 or more copies, please use this form to submit a short application (1 min or less) our new crowdsources platform. In short: if you buy 100 copies for a group event, or can help 100 other individuals buy copies, you will receive a 25% discount off retail, signed books, and a virtual appearance by me to your group. The link to the crowdsourcing platform will be available next week for those who think they can move 100 books by June 1st.

Pre-order THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE now. Thank you.

Last chance for discounted Cluny Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) tickets—15% off good through the end of year with coupon code ‘antimimetic’. Full-time position now open: Manager, Social Media and Community.

Moths evolved to navigate by celestial light. Artificial light hijacks that instinct—and they spiral. Technology introduced changes into the environment that they can’t adapt to fast enough.

While none of us like being compared to moths, it’s hard not to see our current predicament as somewhat similar. We’re not adapting fast enough—morally, spiritually, intellectually, physically—to the bright, artificial light that is Artificial Intelligence.

The Internet ushered in the Information Age, in which people quickly became exposed to an abundan…

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“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” — Daniel 12:4

Dear Readers,

In July 2026, I’ll be hosting ZOË—a gathering in Napa, California—one I’m thrilled to finally announce.

Our moment can feel like it’s oriented toward death—suicides and overdoses, debt and cynicism, depression and anxiety, ugly aesthetics, endless discourse. Across politics, geographies, and ideologies, there’s a growing sense that life together is getting thinner.

ZOË, the theme of the gathering, is against death. In the New Testament Greek, zoē (ζωή) refers to abundant life—not mere survival (bios, or biological life), but a human being fully alive.

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ZOË will be a three-day gathering convening leaders from Athens (arts and philosophy), Jerusalem (faith and religion), and Silicon Valley (technology and venture) to ask the most basic—and urgent—questions:

• What is life?

• What does abundant life look and feel like now?

• Wh…

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The most dangerous forms of manipulation don’t look like manipulation at all. They wear the language of virtue—humility, sacrifice, obedience. But instead of shaping the soul, they slowly unravel it. This is spiritual manipulation. And it strikes deeper than any other because it doesn’t just hijack your thoughts or feelings—it hijacks your sense of what is right.

What Spiritual Manipulation Is

Spiritual manipulation is the dangerous use of spiritual categories—things like guilt, shame, humility, obedience, or the redemptive value of suffering—to subvert the action of the Spirit. It clouds the conscience. It distorts desire. And ultimately, it deadens the soul in the service of a false good.

It’s different from ordinary psychological manipulation. Playing hard to get, for instance—masking your own desire to increase someone else’s—is a fairly harmless form of psychological maneuvering. It takes place on the worldly plane. You …

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Two brief announcements before this week’s essay, in which I venture into Daoism:

1. Workshop: There are still 2 weeks left to apply for “The Foundations of Agency”, a 40-day workshop I developed with the novelist Jordan Castro. It starts in late September. You can learn more and apply here.

2. Work with me: I’m looking for a Marketing partner for a part-time role starting immediately. This person will work extremely closely with me to help launch my new book—but the possibilities extend far beyond that. I expect this position to grow into a full-time role within 12 months. You can learn more here.

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Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (of A16Z) published an essay in April 2020 titled “It’s Time to Build” while we were in the throes of the pandemic lockdown. I remember reading it while I was holed up in an AirBNB in Norton Shores, MI, binge-watching The Sopranos every night with my wife. (Yes, it was our first time ever—I’m glad I kept that one in my back pocket when I needed it the most.)

That essay begins:

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

It was both a failure of imagination, but also our “widespread inability to build,” Andreessen writes. I don’t disagree.

However, the deeper problem is that many of the people building VC-funded things are doing so within a siloed and highly specialized echo chamber that is existentially fragile and fails to provide meaning to people’s lives.

Silicon Valley is massively limited in its imagination because many of the people there have chosen, as a starting assumption, to build things for a Yuval Hararian Man, for men without chests, for siloed souls like themselves.

But while they build more tech to amuse themselves to death, some of us are wondering: do we need a new paradigm for building? Don’t we need to revisit the assumptions on which, and for which, we’re building in the first place? I think we do.

Nobody is building anything like the great medieval cathedrals anymore, and perhaps nobody ever will. (Will a colony on Mars have one? Doubtful.) And that’s okay. But we’re not even having the conversations that would lead us away from the small-souled building—we’re not forming the relationships nor having the shared experiences that would bind us together for a higher purpose, that would activate the capital network to fund spiritually ambitious things, that would help us to want more, and to want better.

Tens of billions of dollars have been invested in NFT’s in the past few years, which was the first sign that capital was priced incorrectly and that there was a failure of imagination. But the failure of imagination, the small-souled initiatives that were garnering millions of dollars in investment overnight, were not just due to the closing of the American mind, nor its coddling, but the shrinking of the soul.

Innovation without the spirit is dead. You will always be building on top of dry bones.

Where Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley Meet

It’s no longer acceptable to talk about the religious sense in polite society—but I believe it should be, and that we desperately need it to be so. Otherwise, we are forced to bracket ourselves and live disintegrated lives. We all want to be able to show up, as we are, and not try to fit our opinions, our hopes and dreams, our spirits into Procustean beds.

Everything we build, from our Substack publications to our technologies, is either awakening the religious sense in us or dulling it. There is no between. And yet most of the Content Class just shrugs their shoulders and seems embarrassed to even have the kind of conversations we need to have to even know where we stand. When the Stanford “Huberman Labs” founder and podcaster Andrew Huberman admitted on a podcast that he believed in God, he looked like he wanted to crawl under the podcast table. He hedged his statement in apologetic tones even before the words left his mouth.

We can do better than that. This kind of stifling environment serves nobody. We should all be able to lay our metaphysical commitments on the table—if we even know what they are—and talk openly about them. Otherwise, we’re building things for a human nature that is an Unknowable X, with people whose own selves are Unknowable X’s, which turns the people who consume these things into Unknowable X’s to themselves, too.

There are already signs that there is a vibe shift going on. Politics can’t save us; neither can technology. And it’s becoming more and more apparent just how exhausting and how banal life in the metaverse (remember that?) actually is.

We crave encounters; we crave fire. Or rather: we crave those experiences that will set us on fire. But the time has come in which we need to re-create fire.

The three city problem has led to a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood. But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.

And yet we have to build—we have to build things that truly matter, not things which merely amuse us or make for a good VC exit.

The time of building for acquisition and the time of building apps for engagement are over. The time is coming to build things that elevate the human experience, not trivialize it so much that it becomes en vogue to say that you don’t know whether they are living in a simulation or not anytime something unexpected or weird happens.

The materialist view is going to die. It is already in the process of dying. The clicks and the engagement are like a chicken with its head cut off running around for a few minutes before it finally collapses.

An Integral Human Ecology

Human ecology is “the systematic study of human beings in their relationships with one another, with various human communities, and with the natural world shared among all the living organisms on the planet.”1 It addresses the fundamental problem of our being disconnected from reality—and our inability to adhere to reality for more than a few seconds at a time, or perhaps for a few days at a time (when our first child is born, perhaps)—before we are flung back into disconnection, and before we must fight the disassociative and disassembling darkness.

We all need help fighting it. We all need help staying connected to reality. I know that I do. But what interests me even more than the study of human ecology is building around it.

Lest we become still further delayed, still further paralyzed, by market research and panels of talking heads, it’s time to build.

In 910 A.D., the Duke of Aquitaine—one of the most powerful men in Europe—took a monk from a nearby abbey through the countryside of Burgundy, France, and asked him to decide the spot on which he should found a new abbey.

In those days, many noblemen would retire to monasteries and donate their wealth to them in a last ditch attempt to care for, and try to save, their immortal souls. That was this Duke’s plan, too.

To the Duke’s great dismay, the monk selected the very spot of the Duke’s hunting grounds as the place where he should build his new institution. He told him to kick out his dogs and replace them with monks. The Duke had sworn an oath to build on the spot this monk chose, though, and he intended to honor it.

What happened next was a legal agreement unlike anything the world had ever seen: the Duke signed over the land and donated his assets to aid in the construction of this new institution, but he did so by completely renouncing his rights over it, and wrote the charter to ensure its complete independence and primacy of the spiritual.

Unlike every other monastery in Europe, in which feudal lords had dominion over these institutions and could exercise power over them, this new institution would remain completely independent politically, free from feudal lords, and it would sit at the nexus of all of the rivalrous factions and lands and at the nexus of what we might today call “Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley”.

Of course, there was no Silicon Valley then. But there were also no such thing as universities as we now know them. This new institution, which would come to be called Cluny, would become the center of learning, the center of architectural science and construction (the abbey which would eventually be built would be the most majestic structure in the entire world at the time), the center of liturgical renewal, and the center of innovation, both artistic and technological. (Many agricultural innovations were born there, as well as publishing: the scriptorium in Cluny led to the development of thousands of beautifully illuminated books.) The infirmary took in the sick. The abbey ministered to the poor. More than anything else, though, Cluny revived the spirit and fired the imagination; it led to magnanimity. People were once again given permission to dream, and to seek what is highest.

The spirit of Cluny became the center of renewal in all of Europe for over 200 years. The building itself stood all the way until the French Revolution, when it was torn down and looted. By that point, unfortunately, Cluny had become corrupt. Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. In no case was this truer than Cluny. But the spirit of Cluny, that original impetus of cultural renewal, lives on.

The founding of Cluny was the most important thing to be built in Europe in the three-hundred year period between 900-1200. The Cluniac Reforms influenced over 1,200+ abbeys and priories and deeply affected political life, the formation of education and the university system, civic life, care for the poor and the sick (what we now know as the modern hospital), and much more. It’s hard for us in 2024 to wrap out heads around just how important this single institution was.

I have often wondered: is the building of a new Cluny even possible? And what would it look like?

Today, it probably would not look like a monastery. But it would be an institution that took the religious sense seriously, that remained politically independent (yet not indifferent to the most fundamental human needs and desires, nor policy), and which was a nexus for unexpected encounters of talented and spirited people who want to work together to build things that elevate and ennoble the human spirit. It would not be founded on a materialist ideology. It would be a place for people for people who wanted to start fires.

Intellectual Appetite

Yesterday, during a solo dinner at my favorite restaurant in Saugatuck, I read this piece by Benjamin Wallace in NY Mag’s Intelligencer profiling Mark Manson, author of the “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” book, which has sold more than 12 million copies. The essay, titled “How Mark Manson Learned The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck”, tells the story of Manson’s burn-out.

“Throughout his career, he had wanted to write about what he wanted to write about. When he’d lost interest in something — first Practical Pickup, then PostMasculine — he’d moved on,” Wallace writes. The most striking section comes one paragraph later (emphasis mine):

And I suddenly started being okay with losing it. And as soon I was okay with losing it, I felt great. I’d say the last six months, I’ve probably worked the least of my adult life.” Instead, he played a lot of Elden Ring and became a crypto degen. “The difference between myself now and, say, seven, eight years ago is I don’t feel like I’m seeking anymore,” Manson told me.

Manson’s "being okay with losing it” is the kind of death that Girard (and every spiritual writer who has come before him) has described as a type of conversion experience—if not a spiritual one, then perhaps a literary or intellectual one.

Though in Manson’s case, it seems like the conversion may have simply been to nihilism. (The next sentence: “Especially the last year or two, it feels like that craving for a philosophical foundation to base my worldview on is kind of gone,” Manson says.)

How did craving a philosophical foundation—a basic metaphysical stance in the world—become a bad thing?

Pour me another glass of that blaufrankisch, please. Thanks.

My encounter with the man behind the (very Stoic) “Art of Not Giving a F*ck”, got me thinking about how little we understand craving, or desire in general. Let me be clear: This is a newsletter for people who want to give more fucks. More fucks about the right things. The things worthy of lots of fucks. Thick desires.

(Ever wondered what thin desires look like when they come face-to-face with a thick desire? Watch this.)

Hearing the way Manson speaks about his past year, it seems that he’s getting some much needed rest. I could use some too. The question becomes: What kind of rest? Nihilistic rest? Or joyful rest?

The haunting message of the piece is that Manson believes that losing the desire to seek is a good thing. (At least Nietzsche believed in the power of the will!)

When I stop seeking, I’m dead. The difference—the hinge between fulfillment and misery—is between good seeking and bad seeking.

I want to seek truth. I believe the truth exists, and that the truth is worth pursuing—that it is worth seeking. And I want to surround myself with other people who seek it passionately.

They increase the desire to seek it in me, and I in them. This is the kind of community I want to be a part of. It seems to me to be one of the most important positive mimetic desires: truth-seekers positively infect others to seek truth. You hang around nihilists, and you eventually become one.

Having “a philosophical foundation to base my worldview on”, then, is good. No doubt: it’s also good for any false philosophical foundations to be destroyed, to the extent that we have one. I, too, have had my entire philosophical edifice ripped out from under me—more than once, actually. But the desire to seek only grew stronger. When the seeking stops, that’s when we know we’re in trouble.

What foundation do we have to stand on—a place from which to even begin exploring these questions? As any regular reader will know by now, I am standing somewhere. We have to stand (somewhere) in order to understand anything. And I think the perennial philosophical tradition is a pretty damn good place to stand.

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That tradition has, for thousands of years, reflected on the phenomenon of desire.

‘Appetite’ is the scholastic name for what modern psychology often calls ‘motivation,’ with its distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ motivation—a distinction that I don’t find very helpful.

Why not? To start with: intrinsic motivation (engaging in an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for a separate reward) and extrinsic motivation are abstract categories that give the impression that we do things because we are motivated solely by one or the other. In reality, it’s normal to be motivated by both. I am inherently motivated to write this newsletter—but if I wasn’t also motivated by something else then I’d just keep a private journal of my thoughts. I am motivated by the desire to interact.

What the scholastics called the ‘appetite’ has a much broader meaning than the modern ‘motivation’ language, and it provides a helpful framework for understanding what Girard means when he speaks about human desire.

In the broadest sense, appetite is “any tendency of a thing to an object.”1 We could even say that planets have an appetite for certain stars due the force of gravity which moves them in their orbit.

Some type of ‘inclination’ follows every material form, according to Aquinas. In the case of a planet and its motion, this is a natural appetite.

There are, however, also elicited appetites. These are appetites that humans—a creature that participates in “knowledge”—may call forth in the intellect through an act of cognition.

Therefore, as forms exist in those things that have knowledge in a higher manner and above the manner of natural forms; so must there be an inclination surpassing the natural inclination, which is called the natural appetite. And this superior inclination belongs to the appetitive power of the soul, through which the animal is able to desire what it apprehends, and not only that to which it is inclined by its natural form. And so it is necessary to assign an appetitive power to the soul.

ST I, 80, 1.

This ‘appetite power’ of the soul seems very close to what Girard is speaking about when he writes about the nature of human desire. We can desire anything that we can think, or any abstract concept that may be conjured up for us in our interactions with other people.

Humans gain knowledge about objects in various ways—and when they perceive an object to be good (whether it is truly good or not, or whether a model of desire merely makes it shine with the brilliance of a great good when in fact it’s empty), the will becomes inclined toward it.

The problem is that the intellect is not perfect; it’s imperfect, and it can easily be led astray—whether by hyper-pedantic podcast exchanges from confident-sounding speakers, or by journalists that claim to report just “the facts,” or whatever else.

Many of us pursue goods which we perceive as good but which later turn out to disappoint us. It happens to everyone. This forces us to make a decision.

We can throw in the towel and stop trusting ourselves (or other people) altogether. Sometimes, this leads to extreme passivity—or we become more susceptible to following the first strong model that comes along, thinking that perhaps this is finally the one who knows what to want.

Or, a more positive approach: it can result in a continual refining of our desires as we learn more and more about ourselves and the world through a process of honest seeking.

Hopefully this leads to a greater recognition that we do indeed have agency—something traditionally called “the will.”

What follows is an excerpt from a piece that I wrote on the topic for Aeon Magazine which connects Aquinas’s concept of the appetites to the “will” and describes the difference between striving and resting:

Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

Your intellectual appetites might include knowing the answer to a mathematics problem; the satisfaction of receiving a text from someone you have a crush on; or getting a coveted job offer. These things won’t necessarily cause physical pleasure. They might spill over into physical enjoyment, but they are not dependent on it. Rather, the pleasure is primarily intellectual.

The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that these intellectual appetites are part of what has traditionally been called the ‘will’. When a person wills something, they strive toward it. If they come to possess the object of their desire, their will finds rest in it – and they are able to experience joy, so long as they are able to rest in the object of their desire.

But, for most people, such joy is fleeting. There is always something else to strive for – and this keeps most of us in a constant, sometimes painful, state of never-satisfied striving. And that striving for something that we do not yet possess is called desire. Desire doesn’t bring us joy because it is, by definition, always for something we feel we lack. Understanding the mechanism by which desires take shape, though, can help us avoid living our lives in an endless merry-go-round of desire.

Joy comes from the will resting in the object of its desire. Resting in it.

This weekend seems like a good opportunity to rest. A time for joy.

What, or who, will you rest in?

Sometimes going with the flow is nice. Nobody wants to be the disagreeable anti-mimetic guy in a group that makes it impossible to gain consensus among a group of friends about where to grab a beer or a bite to eat. And I consider it a positive thing to be infected by the calm, even lazy, disposition of a non-workaholic friend if that helps you chill on Sunday and make good on the day of rest.

(If my wife Claire were not infinitely better than me about blocking off evenings and weekends for recreation and relaxation, I’d burn right through my weekends like the cigarette that Ferruccio Lamborghini used to set on the engine of one of his Miuras in his famous “Cigarette Tests”—he used this trick to show how powerful and perfectly balanced his engines were to visitors at his farm.)

But there are other times when it’s necessary to exercise self-possession, freedom, and intentionality to choose a course of action that isn’t quite so mimetic—that is not primarily the product of social imitation but rather the product of our innermost sanctum, our conscience, our understanding of our vocation, our deliberate and fully ‘owned’ choice of what we believe to be true, good, and beautiful. It is through these kind of intentional acts that we become who we are.

Being “anti-mimetic” does not mean being a ‘contrarian’ or refusing to imitate one’s peers. That’s what every hipster thinks he’s doing, too. “Everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch,” wrote the social theorist René Girard, the father of mimetic theory. This kind of naive rejection of the culture is not what we’re talking about here.

Being anti-mimetic means have the personal freedom to counteract negative forms of mimetic desire—like the kind that leads to polarized politics, unhealthy obsessions, envy, hustle-porn, and never-satisfied striving for things that won’t ultimately matter to impress people who don’t love us.

Being anti-mimetic is the power to live in freedom. An anti-mimetic action or person is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream.

You know the kind of fish that floats downstream? A dead one.

I want to be the kind of person that can swim upstream when needed. That’s not an ability that any of us should take for granted.

Before we get to the 25 ideas, one interesting note: the word “anti-mimesis” has been used to refer to an artistic philosophy, with Oscar Wilde as its most famous advocate.

In his 1891 book The Decay of Lying (‘decay’ is translated ‘decadencia’ in the Spanish edition…), he articulates an anti-mimetic vision of the artist. “Art doesn’t imitate life,” as the saying goes—life imitates art, according to Wilde. The artist is a creator par excellence. The artist brings new realities into being and changes how we see and experience the world.

Wilde believes that lying, “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” is the proper aim of art. It’s "an art, a science, and a social pleasure"—and its decay is responsible for the decay of literature. Today everyone is obsessed with representing reality as accurately as possible—with facts and accuracy. But "if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts,” he writes, “Art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land."

The artist endows things with beauty and is the reason why attention is paid to some things in the first place. Wilde writes about the fog in London as an example. It has always existed. But its wonder and the attention paid to it happened because "poets and painters have taught the loveliness of such effects...They did not exist till Art had invented them."

The older I get, the more I realize that most of life is a matter of what we pay attention to—of what we attend to, with focus.

There are many different ways to attend to reality; most of us spend our lives stuck attending to it in only one or two modes. Part of the purpose of Wilde’s work, and I hope my own, is to propose some new ones.

Let’s start with 25 Anti-Mimetic ideas that can help us craft a life that is a little more free from the mimetic herd; a bit more open to the spontaneity and wonder of new things (including new desires); and a free life that saves us—in the words of G.K. Chesterton—from ‘the degrading slavery of becoming a child of our age.’

The Top 25 Practical Ideas for Becoming More Anti-Mimetic in Everyday Life

Alright: here they are, in no real particular order (well, except for the last few—which I think are the most important).

These are all things I’ve tried to cultivate in my own life…to greater and lesser degrees of success. I’ve kept the descriptions intentionally brief because each one of these could become an essay unto itself in the coming year. I hope this begins a conversation.

25. Anti-Mimetic Scheduling

Why go to the gym at 5:30pm on a weekend? Okay, maybe you just got off of work and it’s the only time you can. Or why make a dinner reservation at 7pm on a Friday night? There might be an excellent reason: it’s fun to be in a buzzing place sometimes—and it’s a great way to end the workweek. There are perfectly good reasons to schedule things around the same time that other people do; after all, there’s a reason why these are ‘peak’ times in the first place. At the same time, there are many idiotic reasons. I am amazed at how many entrepreneurs are stuck in the 9-5 / Mon-Fri mentality inherited from the standard work week. It’s ingrained. Each of us has the power, though, to make our experiences a bit less stressful and more enjoyable if we take advantage of the off-peak times when we have the freedom to do things on our own time. Some of my favorites include: going to the bar of a restaurant between 2-5pm when I’m the only person in the place and knocking out some work over an appetizer; going to museums (I live in DC, so there are a ton of great ones) during weekday mornings; and golfing at twilight where the rates are cheaper and there are 80% less people on the course (I also happen to think it’s the most beautiful time of the day to golf, anyway. I’ve had many quiet and inspiring moment losing my ball in the setting sun.) What are your some yours? Please use the comments section to share, if you’d like.

24. Building a Deep Bookshelf

I read many books not because I think I’ll ‘like’ them but because I think that I won’t. And that is exactly the point. I call these anti-mimetic book choices part of my ‘deep’ bookshelf because they go beyond the facade of easy choices presented to us on ‘lists’ or by the algorithm. My challenge: allocate 10% of your annual reading to books where you know you’re not going to ‘agree’ with the fundamental premise. This goes for periodicals, too.

23. Don’t Participate in the Shark-Tankification of Worth

I have always had disdain for the show Shark Tank and all of its many derivatives. The value assigned to founders and companies is more of a product of theater and mimesis than serious investigation and investment—and the spirit that drives people to want to compete in these dog-and-pony shows in the first place has to do with mimetic validation. This is not the way great companies are built. Needing this kind of recognition will eventually break you. In my experience, ‘business plan competitions’ and ‘incubators’ function like beauty contests, and they attract entrepreneurs who self-select based on emotional needs. The sooner you kill this beast within yourself, the sooner you can get to the real work of creating something that the market itself will validate—or not.

22. Learn to Navigate without GPS

What’s wrong with the fastest route from A to B? It kills the brain and it kills the wandering—the spirit. Not all who wander are lost. And sometimes, I like to drive with absolutely no destination at all. Why We Drive by Matthew B. Crawford helps explain some of the reasons why. This is anti-mimetic in the sense that it makes a mockery of our world’s obsession with efficiency. Here’s Anthony Bourdain on the topic: the joy is in finding “this little out-of-way place, that discovery is often the result of a happy mishap or an accident. You know, car breaks down, you get lost, you end up at some grotty little place that ends up being magical.” It would never happen if we stayed locked into the mimetic grooves of maps and travel books.

21. Watch stellar old films that never benefited from mimetically-inflated popularity

My friend Thomas J. Bevan is on a mission to dig up older, forgotten films that nobody else has thought to review recently—too distracted by the shiny red ball of the next Netflix show as they are. I have enjoyed his reviews immensely because he is intentionally going in search of the anti-mimetic gems and making them accessible and appreciated (and so desirable) for his readers. Here is one of my favorites. See, doesn’t that make you want to revisit 1947? Tom is doing for films what many people understand about ‘old books’—there are hundreds of years of stellar, world-changing books, but most people will go their entire lives having read a very small spattering of them while consuming vast amounts of fortune-cookie pseudo-wisdom that sells in the marketplace today. Older films are waiting for us to mine them for pleasure, enjoyment, and new ways of looking at the world. I think it’s NNT who says to never read a book unless it’s over 25 years old. Try applying that to movies for a few months.

20. Read Foreign Newspapers

Foreign newspapers—while they may be mimetic as hell inside their own countries—are outside of the fishbowl that you’re swimming in. In that way, you could even call them ‘transcendent’ publications. They’re not in our crab bucket. This means that their ‘takes’ on the stuff going on in our own country are far more interesting than listening to the latest pundit that is peddled to us on the evening news or in our social media feed. I lived in Italy for a few years and came to love reading about what the Italians had to say about what was going on in the U.S.; it got to a point that I found the U.S. news increasingly one-sided and ridiculous. Today I try to read a smattering of foreign language newspapers (at least the ones that I can understand—and if I don’t, I use google translate). It’s easy to forget that amount of stuff that we are exposed to in the English language is only a fraction of the total available knowledge available in the world.

19. Stop Writing to Please

Writing to please is a recipe for lowest common denominator ideas and quality. If you’re not pissing anyone off from time to time, or getting some quick unsubscribers from your newsletters, then you’re not actively trying to find your audience. As rough around the edges as Taleb can be, I admire his commitment to pissing people off. It could be argued that he ‘can’ do that because he’s already established and wealthy; he doesn’t rely on subscribers/readers for money at this point. Yes, that may be true. He might be more anti-fragile than you and I. But nobody should wait until they’re anti-fragile to act with integrity and speak the truth. That is a fool’s game. It starts today. The cluster-effect is real. The longer you wait to break it, the harder it will be. I don’t sit down and write the next edition of this newsletter after studying which past editions have gotten the most opens and engagement; if I tailored everything after “what has worked in the past” then I’m living in the past, not moving forward into the future. I recently had this discussion with a publisher who was encouraging me to write another book on Girard. There is low-hanging fruit there, sure; but sometimes the higher-hanging fruit is what we need to be nourished.

18. Filter Feedback

This one comes straight out of Wanting, so to those of you who have read the book I won’t belabor the point. But it’s simple: some feedback is good, some feedback is bad. And too much feedback is detrimental—especially to a Creative. At a certain point, you have to choose. If you try to take into account every person’s opinion, you’ll end up with something ‘nice’—not great. The same is true of ‘market research’ and ‘data’—people don’t know what they want. Henry Ford said, ‘If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would’ve told me it was a faster horse.’ Here’s Steve Jobs making a similar point:

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Filter feedback the way you filter calories: take only what you need. Take the rest with a grain of salt.

17. Invest in Deep Silence

Silence is the great mimetic quieter. It’s just that simple. I have a fundamental belief that if everyone in the corporate world had 5-6 days of silence per year, we woudn’t be destroying billions of dollar in value chasing bad ideas—the thin desires would fade away and the thick ones would emerge. People would have a great sense of purpose. The Great Resignation would turn into the Great Embracing of Purpose. It is currently not. I realize that this idea of silence retreats might seem like a pipedream for many individuals (especially those with children) and for corporations—it would require a significant investment. We can start, though, with our families and businesses. "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. He was right. And the only way we’ll begin to develop that ability is to start trying. This is positive mimesis at its best. I’ll be announcing a major initiative to bring structured silent retreats to more people soon—stay tuned. If you’re an individual or an organization who would be interested in participating in the first one, just drop the team a line here.

16. Set-up an Anti-Mimetic Environment

If you’ve been paying close attention to social media, you could easily believe that Austin or Miami are the only places in the U.S. where you can be a great innovator in these Soaring 20’s. (Or maybe it’s the Metaverse.) I am pumping the brakes hard on embracing these Mimetically Popular Locations. It’s extremely hard to escape the negative forces of mimesis while you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other people who are caught up in it. There has never been a time when there is more wide-open anti-mimetic landscape to explore in the world—and with the ability to work-from-home, that is only accelerating. I have nothing against clustering with people who share your values and lifestyle. It’s true that throughout history people in certain ‘centers’ have benefited tremendously from network effects. But it’s also true that many have had to intentionally separate themselves from the dominant herd and live an existence sufficiently unplugged from the prevalent systems of desire in order to change the world, at least change themselves. I think immediately of the Desert Fathers of the 3rd and 4th centuries around Egypt. What is today’s ‘desert’? When I moved my company from California to Nevada in 2008, I realized that I was literally going into the desert to learn something about myself. And that’s exactly what happened. I went into the desert spiritually, emotionally, and physically; I was transformed by it. The challenge now is re-creating that desert experience in modern life. But we have a duty to try—and each of us can do it our own way.

15. Look for the Coincidence of Opposites 

The fifteenth century polymath Nicholas of Cusa coined the term “The Coincidence of Opposites” (the coincidentia oppositorum in Latin). This means that opposites genuinely coincide while remaining distinct. It’s striking that in any case of extreme holiness, the coincidence of opposites is always present. In the person of Christ, for example, there are examples of extreme humility and meakness combined with boldness and zeal in the same person—and it all perfectly coheres. For most of us, we’re one way or the other. But in higher levels of spiritual development, there is no hypocrisy or contradiction between things that we don’t ordinarily think are compatible. These ‘seeming’ opposites coincide in perfect harmony—and it is evidence of a deeper truth. Dwelling in the coincidence of opposites without always defaulting to “convergent” thought is the key. Convergent thought always needs to converge on one solution, one answer, one mode of looking. My friend August Turak, an early executive at MTV, once told me the story of his friend quizzing him by giving him a series of numbers and asking what was the next number in the sequence. 14, 18, 23, 28, 34. He was racking his brain—he prided himself on being able to solve this kind of puzzle. 18-14, 23-18…no. He couldn’t figure it out. Finally, his friend smiled and said “42.” August looked up to see the number 42 emblazoned on the 42nd street subway station from the NYC subway car they were riding in. His mind had ‘converged’ on this being a math problem. But all he needed to do is attend to reality and he would’ve seen the answer.

14. Incarnate Attention

Mimetic desire can live in the abstract. But ‘active love’, as Fr. Zosima describes it in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, breaks through and forces us to attend to reality. Over the past couple of months, I was given the lot of having to watch my mother die as I held her hand in the hospital. I’m an only child, and her only and primary caregiver. In a situation like that, all abstract ideas about desire fade away. I had a feeble hand reaching out to grasp mine, and there was only one thing to do—reach out and take it into mine, and hold it. These are the moments when life becomes incredibly simple. There is a principle here: the more we are attending to the incarnate reality of the world we are living in, the less we are driven all over the place by abstract mimetic desires that are only leading us astray. Escaping the throes of some of our most unhealthy mimetic desires happens when we’re rooted and grounded in the Real. Maybe this is why people like moving to farms lately (yes, I know that’s partly mimetic, too). But when you’re forced to clean up cow shit every morning, you have a lot less time to pay attention to the latest social media influencer. Reality calls. Shit is literally happening.

13. Social Media with a Purpose

How many people can honestly and explicitly articulate their purpose, or mission, on social media? Is it to gain followers? Sell books? Build a Substack list? What? You have to be able to answer the question. If you have a vague answer, dial it in immediately. Otherwise, your purpose there is being dominated by mimesis for you. Your purpose, quite simply, will be what everyone else’s purpose is. Or the purpose of the person or basket of people you pay the most attention to. To take an anti-mimetic approach to social media, either 1) get off it completely; or 2) be guided by a very clear purpose. Even then, you will have to constantly gird yourself against the mimetic winds—but you will at least have a destination to sail in.

12. Start Going Analog

A hard copy of a book is metaphysically different from a digital one. For all of the many benefits of digital and audio books, their primary means of being acquired and read in the first place almost always driven by algorithms—you don’t walk down a hallway in the back of a duty used book store and spot a spine; you scroll through Audible or Amazon or see a book recommendation online and click on a link. Mimesis is baked into the entire experience. The mimetic acceleration that technology produces is one of distraction; the anti-mimetic gift of investing in more analog is attention. When I’m reading a physical book that I am engrossed in, it’s hard to distract me. I feel the same way about music (vinyls vs. Spotify), writing (pen and paper still produces a different effect), fitness (running on a treadmill through a digital forest as opposed to a real one), and many, many other things. Simple heuristic: ask yourself what price you would pay at the moment you are using a digital product to be doing the real thing. Take running on a treadmill through a digital forest on a 10” screen. If the answer is $10, then do the math: I bet that’s more than what you pay for a daily gym membership. That means that there is more value for you to unlock if you find a way to make that desire a reality. Do it. You can apply a similar heuristic to all kinds of things. But I’m looking at you, Peleton.

11. Clean-up Consumption

Most of our consumption is driven by mimetic systems of desire that care little, or not at all, about our well-being. In order to take an anti-mimetic approach, I try not to consume anything that is totally frictionless—because it was made frictionless for a reason. ‘Frictionless’ is like a substitute for grace: it’s something free and unmerited. And when it comes to our attention, we’re almost always open to receiving that free ‘gift’. There’s nothing wrong with consuming; it’s consumerism that is dangerous. Consumerism is a spirit that enslaves us to our own desires and leaves no room for others; it undermines human freedom by short-circuiting our ability to respond to non-economic values (and there are many: like taking time off work to spend ‘non-productive’ time with an aging parent). The goal I aspire to when it comes to clean consumption is simple: if a list of all of the things that I consume (and for how long) were made available to my wife and family and the students I teach, I’d like to be proud of it—and I’d like them to see how a well-nourished soul is fed. This is similar to the ‘front page of the NY Times’ principles, but applied to consumption. When we consume anonymously and in the dark, we are 100x more likely to consume unhealthy things.

10. Autodidactism

Being an autididact is anti-mimetic in itself because the force driving the learning path is one’s interest and desire generated by the material itself, not a pre-determined path constructed by people who want to produce a certain kind of ‘product’ (in the American education system, for example, that used to be good industrial workers; now it’s shifting to STEM.) I’ve never understood why the debate our education has focused so heavily on the type of school (private, public, parochial, charter, etc.). Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the quality of education? As it turns out, the quality can be good or bad in any of the different types of schools. We’re missing the personalization of education that makes people want to learn because their learning path it tailored to their experience, their interest, their demeanor, their greatest desire. It’s kind of like play: tell someone to workout, you have to beg them to start; get someone playing a game that they become engrossed in and you have to beg them to stop. That’s what a life of autodidactism is like: an infinite game. Follow the footnotes, follow the desire.

9. Price Capital Well

A respected hedge fund describes part of their investment philosophy like this: “Enterprises work best when they have access to capital priced to reflect the value they can create. Index funds, by the way, do not price capital; they only mimic the actions of those who do.” You see the mimetic principle embedded right in the statement. Here’s what I would like to propose, though: We all price capital in some way. Sure, a VC prices capital when they’re the first money in to a start-up and they have to decide how expensive that capital is in terms of the equity/interest they take in return, but we all do it: when we accept a credit card or a mortgage, we are helping the market price capital. If you’re in crypto, you have the opportunity to do it everyday, especially if you sell things. Too many people are price-takers, not price-givers—or they simply don’t think of themselves as involved in a pricing game at all, so they go with the flow and accelerate the mimetic flywheel until it breaks. While others are playing mimetic games in the capital markets, turning them into casinos, the anti-mimetic approach is to look at ways to invest your capital well in the things creating long-term value—not a flash value. 10 years from now, you’ll be glad you did. We have a problem with inflation right now because capital has not been priced well (and yes, the Fed is printing money like a mad men—which is pricing capital poorly); we can each play our small part in changing the tide, at least in our own lives. Don’t overextend yourself. Don’t get caught up in the mimetic bubbles that will eventually pop. This requires an anti-mimetic bone in the body. Even one will do.

8. Speak the Truth

Speak the truth in accord with your conscience no matter what the cost. Otherwise, the truth becomes subordinate to mimesis. In a post-truth world, the tyranny of relativism is a constant threat to us all. Speaking the truth only when it is convenient is degrading—it means, for instance, that the truth can always be subsumed and distorted by a mimetic mob due to the danger associated with dissent. What the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann referred to as the “spiral of science”—something that should be familiar to us all—is an accelerant of mimesis. But only one person passionately committed to the truth and willing to speak it is often enough to break that spiral and inspire some positive mimesis of their own. Putting the truth above expediency has got to be a foundational principle for anyone trying to live an anti-mimetic life.

7. Become Skilled at De-escalation

It’s easy to escalate things—as argument, stakes, or the level of vitriol in a competition. It’s much harder to de-escalate, but it’s an anti-mimetic skill that very few people (outside of hostage negotiators, therapists, and some teachers, and many parents) possess. But there are few more important skills to develop in life. Study the story of the Woman Caught in Adultery to see a masterclass in de-escalation, the transformation of a negative mimetic cycle into a positive one. Good parenting and leadership in general is dependent on this skill, and it’s never to learn it.

6. Cultivate an Interdisciplinary Mind

René Girard was one of the last great interdisciplinary in the world, in my opinion. He was a polymath, and autodidact, and saw connections between everything. He never would’ve ‘seen’ mimetic desire had he been confined to only one discipline—indeed, he made his discovery when he was asked to teach a class outside of his subject-matter expertise. As education moves more and more into siloed specialization, the kind of divergent thinking fostered through interdisciplinary thinking is being lost to the convergence of minds into specific domains (‘science’). When I speak about the connection between Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, I’m referring to the connections between Reason (Athens), religion (Jerusalem), and technology (Silicon Valley). I don’t believe we can understand the world we’re living in without spending some time at the intersection of these three places. As my regular readers will by now, I think that a massive deficiency in religious literacy is causing confusion. We have an inability to make sense of new developments like Bitcoin because our fundamental nature as religious beings—homo religiosus—is being denied. If we recognized and embraced it, who knows what Renaissance of reason and innovation we might see? This will require some more anti-mimetic people who reject the notion that we can live happily in any one of those three cities alone without ever leaving it. Come outside. There may be a sandworm here or there, but it’s better to live free.

5. The Marriage of Anti-Mimetic and Anti-Fragility

Anti-mimetic does not mean anti-fragile, but there are correlations. Mimesis is generally fragile (think of stock market bubbles), while anti-mimesis is generally not as fragile—for example, a person with wide learning across many disciplines and a variety of friends across the political spectrum is going to be far less likely to fall into a cult than someone who is totally clustered with horse blinders on. When we only want to see one thing, that’s what we see. That’s all we can see. I recommend Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Anti-Fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. If you read it with the lenses of mimetic theory on, you’ll see more connections than I could possibly address in this already-long edition of the Anti-Mimetic newsletter. The point is this: becoming more anti-mimetic necessarily makes one more anti-fragile.

4. Seek Positive Mimesis

It’s anti-mimetic to want to be mimetic in the right ways. Most people recoil at the idea of imitation, but a healthy anti-mimetic person seeks out positive models of desire with intention. (And that’s what makes this paradoxically an anti-mimetic thing). For instance, some people desire to be a part of intentional communities where desires are modeled in healthy and non-rivalrous ways. The Rule of Saint Benedict—the set of rules for community-living drafted by Saint Benedict, which has guided monastic communities for nearly 1,500 years—is the best anti-mimetic handbook ever written. It specifically identifies positive models of desire to emulate and describes a process for mitigating unhealthy behaviors. The men that have become Benedictines over the years know that they have positive models of desire, and a positive system of desire, to adopt. But one need not be a monk to draft up a playbook that maximizes positive mimesis. You could even get started today: map out something in your life that would benefit from a positive flywheel of desire—in other words, how one desire affects subsequent desires and leads you toward a goal. Take fitness: you probably know that you need to avoid certain environments and behaviors and lean into others in order to want to do the things that you know you need to do to be healthy—like exercise in the morning. But that’s hard to do when you feel terrible from the night before, or when you haven’t blocked out the time before your workday starts. The point is to reframe goals in the context of desire so that you are setting yourself up to want to do the things that you need to do. The more explicit you make these flywheels of desire, the easier it is to live them out.

3. Return Anger with Kindness

I’ve always been moved at the scene in Les Misérables when Jean Valjean steals silver from the Archbishop. The archbishop halts his arrest and gives him two additional silver candlesticks from his collection—he ransoms his soul and tells him to use that additional silver to become an honest man. The usual response to anger is anger; we react, instinctually (mimetically), to someone wronging us. As humans, we have the ability to override this instinct and return kindness for anger. Mimetic aggression is the easiest of all mimesis; a free and loving anti-mimetic response has the power to change hearts and minds. You might believe that this kind of behavior requires a special grace—something supernatural. If so, pray that you might withstand the test.

2. Forgive Someone. Repeat.

See number 3—forgiveness is the highest form of this anti-mimetic response to injustice. I believe mercy and forgiveness are the supreme anti-mimetic act in life. Here are René Girard’s closing words in his book, The Scapegoat: “The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough.” He understood that the only way that we wouldn’t be ‘battling to the end’ in a never-ending mimetic escalation is through an anti-mimetic movement away from violence and retribution and toward reconciliation and peace. Each of us has someone we need to do this for at this very moment. It’s never too late to start. Girard reminds us that “mimesis is not only a locked room, it also offers us a key, and a way out” (in the words of Cynthia L. Haven). That key has always been and always will be the positive mimesis of a loving act.

1. Live Out Your Personal Vocation

Discovering and living out a sense of calling—a personal vocation, or something you are uniquely meant to do—is the ultimate way to cut through the mimetic noise of the world and begin to shape both a moral and a vocational compass. When you have a mission, it begins to act like an interpretative key to everything and allows you to know what to pay attention to. Consider the primatologist Jane Goodall. She had such a strong sense of mission to understand chimpanzees for a long period of her life that she knew what she had to do—and she wasn’t bothered by much else. It’s hard to imagine her opening up the front-page of a newspaper and getting distracted by a new job opportunity. She had cultivated a thick desire. Everything, in a real way, coalesced around serving her mission; her decision-making became viciously prioritized and easy: if something helped her get closer to fulfilling her mission, it was likely a yes; otherwise, it was a no. The mimetic social dynamics fade away and the mission becomes the focal point, the destination, the telos. This mission becomes the one desire that all of the others must be ordered around. There is a great simplification of desire. And that’s a job that each of us must undertake. I realize that many don’t yet know their mission—and that’s okay. Each of us can take some steps this week to shed some of the obviously thin desires that are keeping us from discovering it.

“What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This question was originally asked by Tertullian, a Roman citizen in Carthage, Africa, who lived from 155 — 240 AD. He started out as a student of Stoicism, the most popular philosophy of his day, and he is now known by some as the father of Western theology. 

His question (“What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) was not referring to geographic places. It was referring to the relationship between philosophy (symbolized by Athens) and spirituality (symbolized by Jerusalem), or the relationship between reason and faith; the relationship between those things that we can know with our minds alone, and those that require different modes of knowing—truths which are not accessible to us through reason alone. 

Tertullian was trying to work out the tension between these two spheres of life because there was great disagreement about what their proper relationship should be in the early days of Christianity. Should they be treated as entirely separate domains? Or should each one inform the other? 

“Faith alone” and “Reason alone” were like mimetic rivals, and few realized that there might be a healthy, un-rivalrous relationship between the two.

Peter Thiel once told me that he felt Girard’s ideas are situated in the liminal space between reason and revelation. I agree. So for those who may have come here for Girard, this particular edition actually has everything to do with mimetic theory.

There is still great disagreement about the question today. My own view is that faith and reason are like two wings on which a person rises to the contemplation of truth. If either wing is broken, you can only get so far. They’re complementary goods.

(By the way, substitute the word “revelation” for faith and it’s the same idea: revelation meaning the things that must be revealed to us, which we couldn’t know through our own powers. A human example of how revelation and reason work hand-in-hand: when my dad revealed to me how babies were made, it was a “Son, this is the way it is” moment—and I’ve spent the rest of my life understanding the truth that he revealed to me in a more rational way, not just accepting it on his authority alone. But without the revelation, I would’ve been way behind.)

Perhaps this was one of my earliest examples of the old theological maxim, popularized by Augustine, which defines the sublime science as Fides quaerens intellectum: “Faith seeking understanding.”

I like to introduce a third location to Tertullian’s question by asking: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem—and what do they have to do with Silicon Valley?”

Silicon Valley does not refer to the physical place but to everything that it represents: namely, technological innovation, capitalism, and storytelling. (There has never been a successful start-up that didn’t know how to tell a good story.) 

Understanding Silicon Valley is important when it comes to reading the signs of the times. I think it’s important to bring this age-old discussion about Athens and Jerusalem into dialogue with this third location: the metaphorical place driving so much of human life (and yes, I include the blockchain under this umbrella of Silicon Valley, decentralization aside—Silicon Valley is simply the meme I give this general meaning-making narrative, or cartoon. Again, I don’t mean Silicon Valley literally).

We live at a time of great technological innovation and simultaneous abandonment of fundamental philosophical and theological principles that could help us make sense of some of the things happening in our world: the embrace of body/soul dualism (modern-day Gnosticism), a widening gap between religious and non-religious people’s understanding of the world, and a general belief in “progress,” unclearly defined.

I don’t believe we can truly make sense of many of the most important questions today without a synthesis of these three spheres—Athens, Jerusalem, Silicon Valley. Yet in a world of increasingly specialized knowledge, where experts vie for monopoly power in their own domains, it is increasingly hard to see the bigger picture. 

With technological analysis alone, we don’t have the ability to see what is going on within a broader context. This approach lacks an appreciation for the depth and complexity of the human person—in short, it suffers from the lack of an adequate anthropology: an exploration of what it means to be human. Providing some of that foundation is what I try to do in my writing. 

I was educated in Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. Yes, I have spent literal time in all three places—but that’s not primarily what I mean. By some circuitous path (on which I found myself lost in a very dark woods at one point), I worked in corporate finance, spent a decade founding and running companies, and then formally studied philosophy and theology. I spent most nights reading classical literature until I fell asleep and woke myself up with a book drop.

There is also a certain spirit that I hope to cultivate here.

I lived in Rome for three years where I learned the fine art of what the French call flâneuring—strolling or wandering around cities with no agenda.

In Italy, flâneuring has a counterpart. There is the tradition of the evening passegiata where one takes a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood before or after dinner (my favorite one being on the Bay of Naples). 

But there’s another thing that I learned to do in Italy that is similar to flâneuring, but a peculiarly Italian thing to do with a peculiar Italian word given to it: meriggiare. 

Meriggiare is a word coined by the poet Eugenio Montale in his poem of books Ossi di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), published in 1925. It comes from the Italian word pomeriggio, which simply means “afternoon.” Montale transformed it into a verb. In verb form, it means something like “to lazily pass the afternoon.” 

I learned to do this by taking 2-hour lunches with friends new and old—complete with intermissions to smoke Garibaldi cigars in some back alley outside the restaurant—discussing life’s most important questions and enjoying one another’s company.

Meriggiare is the kind of style that I want to cultivate in my writing. Like two friends sitting shoulder to shoulder at a good pub, taking our time working something out together—and having fun doing it. 

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This is the second part of a series on life lessons from René Girard. Part I (Lessons 1 - 6) is here.

Now, let’s pick up where we left off:

7. Look for the Mimesis in Current Events

René Girard was an avid consumer of the news. That might seem strange for someone keenly aware of mimetic phenomena. Wouldn’t the smart move be to tune out? To get one’s news from the server at the local diner? From someone who has already filtered through the noise?

Maybe. But temperance is a higher virtue than abstinence, and prudence is still more excellent.

In a world where consuming some amount of “news” is practically inescapable, I want to develop the ability to see behind the facade presented; to see the real forces at work; to read the signs of the times.

There is reading, and then there is reading.

Cynthia Haven, René Girard’s biographer (Evolution of Desire) observed this during her numerous living room conversations with him:

“His great serenity of spirit was marked by a passivity that puzzled me. I wondered, at the time, whether it was age, or the recognition of the futility of all oppositions, doubles, fighting, and rivalries.”

It could be that with age comes recognition—though we don’t need to have aged to recognize it.

Girard modeled an anti-mimetic, meditative approach to the news. When we learn of the Twitter Ban, for instance, the anti-mimetic response is not to debate what kinds of policies or language or personalities may or may not have led to the event—the reactionary taking-of-sides. Rather, the first step is sinking down into it and asking questions like:

What does this mean? What’s happening in the world? What are the mimetic forces at work here?

The specifics are always downstream from there.

8. Read Literature Through the Lens of Desire

While I was living in Rome, I met Matthew Luhn from Pixar Animation Studios, the lead “storyteller” for the films Toys, Up, and Inside Out.

When I asked him what the key to a good story is, he told me something I’ll never forget: focus on what each character really wants. And “Start with the things you are already watching and reading.”

I followed his advice. Whether I was reading Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or watching Breaking Bad, I noticed that all good stories take the desires of characters seriously. Good storytellers know that each character deeply wants something, and that his wants are affected by what the people around the character want.

This exercise of reading with “X-Ray Vision,” it turns out, is how René Girard began to notice the role of mimetic desire in real life. He saw that the most compelling stories in history are so compelling precisely because they’re true. They’re true to human nature. The greatest of them all get mimetic desire right.

Classic and enduring stories like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov are powerful because they are dripping with mimetic desire.

Don Quixote is sitting around reading books when the desire to be a knight captivates him. Until he started reading about heroic knights, the thought of being one had never even crossed his mind!

The lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream compete with one another not because they accidentally fell in love with the same woman; they desire the same woman because they imitate one another. Shakespeare comically underscores each lover’s romantic illusion that his is a “true love” while the audience is in on the game: they imitate one another’s desires and end up in an escalating mimetic rivalry.

In the Brothers Karamozov, Dostoevsky takes the reader through the entire process outlined in this book. Dostoevsky embodies in his characters his own evolution of desire. While two of the Karamozov brothers, Dmitri and Ivan, are consumed by mimetic desire just like their father, the youngest son, Alexei (Alyosha) is an “outsider” who lives (and eventually leads) others through desiring something that transcends the mimetic crisis that the rest of the characters are in.

These stories are powerful because we sense, whether consciously or unconsciously, that the characters are subject to the same forces that we are.

9. Discover New Layers of Meaning in the Bible

The Judeo-Christian scriptures are filled with mimesis. In Girard’s view, they reveal the mimetic nature of desire and the conflict and violence that often springs forth from it without our being aware of the origins.

Reading scripture through the anthropological lens of mimetic desire is an experience unlike any I’ve ever had. It opens up new perspectives.

Girard discusses numerous “mimetic readings” of scripture in his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Cain and Abel is the story of sibling rivalry par excellence. Ask yourself: What were they competing for? What were Jacob and Esau competing for? What is the significance of the meaning of Jacob’s name?

Very early on in the book of Genesis, when the creation story is recounted, we see mimetic desire operative in the serpent who suggested a desire to Eve for the fruit of the forbidden tree; from there the desire spreads to Adam, to their children, and on through the generations of descendants, leading to envy and rivalry becoming a core part of the human condition.

To read a literary account of how this plays out in human life, I recommend John Steinbeck’s masterpiece East of Eden. It falls squarely in the top 10 most important works I’ve ever read in my life.

10. Romantic Lies, Romantic Love

Why do people play hard to get? Girard had one of his first insights into the nature of mimetic desire while he was a young student in France. He was in love with a young woman. They were dating—until she asked Girard to marry her. Taken aback at the forwardness and timing of the request, he quickly backed off. They went their separate ways.

But as soon as she accepted his decision and started dating other men, Girard was drawn back to her immediately with an inexplicable longing. The more she denied herself to him, the more he wanted her. “She influenced my desire by denying it,” he recalled.

The woman’s new suitors were new models of desire for Girard, modeling his ex-girlfriend desirability to him. Without them, his desire waned. With models, his desire was inflamed.

“I suddenly realized that she was both object and mediator to me,” he remembered. “Some kind of model!”

In other words, people can model desirability for themselves. And this provides one clue into the tried-and-true method of playing hard-to-get: it works because it affects our perception of someone’s desirability through the way that is modeled.

Human desire needs models to help guide the way—and those models double as obstacles, reinforcing our desire for something the more that they block the way. We are all, in some sense, obstacle addicts. If there is no obstacle to our desire then we often think that we have made the wrong choice.

And when it comes to Romantic or sexual relationships, that can lead to some very strange behavior—manifesting itself in one of its most extreme forms in the phenomenon of BDSM, in which the dominant and submissive roles reinforce and amplify the subject-model dynamic of desire to the point where it is fetishized. But I’ll have to save that discussion for another edition with some kind of NC17 disclaimer on it.

The life lesson here is simple: understand that you are likely attracted to people and things merely because you perceive them to be difficult or slightly out of reach. Such is the nature of mimetic desire and its quest for the perfect model.

You can read more about Romantic Lies, Romantic Love here.

11. The Meaning of Scandal

Models of desire are always scandals—literally, stumbling blocks—to those who don’t understand how the subject-model relationship works.

Models are obstacles that stand in the way of getting whatever it is we think we want. We convince ourselves that the other person has something that would make us happy—whether that’s wealth or a love interest or a job. This is the cause of endless misery for humans. We normally don’t even realize that we’re doing this, though.

We stay locked in cycles of competitive desires, a zero-sum game in which we believe in the primacy of our desires and view other people as encroaching on them—when in fact it’s probably other people who helped generate and form those desires in the first place!

Mimetic models need not be rivals—but the malignant forms of mimetic desire always make them so.

Girard wrote:

“Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.”

12. Hope: The Power of Positive Mimesis

We’re not condemned to negative or destructive cycles of mimetic desire—we’re not condemned to a kind of Eternal Return.

While it’s not possible to transcend mimetic desire (it’s simply part of what it means to be human), it is possible to transcend the mimetic impulses that lead to destructive conflict.

We’re free to choose to take anti-mimetic steps in our lives, to live in more anti-mimetic ways—to not become children of our age.

Things like empathy, forgiveness, heroic self-sacrifice and love are every bit as mimetic as rivalry—and even more so, because these are the things that call to mind the better angels of our nature, that remind us of our great dignity, our tremendous capacity for love—if only we’re exposed to the right models and allow them to thoroughly infect us.

In the 2020-2021 year of the pandemic, one of the great tragedies is that the word “contagion” has taken on an extremely negative connotation. It’s easy to forget that there are some things worth getting infected by, and some things worth making contagious.

Hopefully we haven’t spent so much time erecting barriers for the bad that we accidentally erected them for the good.

We’ll have to shatter our defense mechanisms where necessary.

René Girard (1923-2015), the great Stanford professor known by some as the mentor to Peter Thiel, called “the Darwin of the social sciences” and the “Father of the Like button”, was a genius of a different order. He made visible what is normally invisible: the delicate dance of desire that human beings play from the moment they’re born, and which explains some of humanity’s more “irrational” behavior.

As we’ll see, it’s not irrational; it’s mimetic. Because pundits on CNBC don’t understand the mimetic impulse in human beings, they scratch their heads when there’s an inexplicable parabolic rise in a stock or when GameStop investors and hedge funds battle it out in the market with no regard for the underlying fundamentals of a company. The media seems perplexed when Republicans and Democrats are locked in stalemate politics and ignore obvious priorities or wins because the desire to punish their opponents is greater.

Girard’s ideas also explain why we’ll never “fix” the so-called Cancel Culture with some kind of artificial ceasefire because it would ignore the fundamental and perennial desire of human communities to purge themselves of perceived threats to their stable order. (Even when the order being preserved is violent, and it always is.)

The first words out of Girard’s mouth in one of the courses that he taught early in his early at SUNY Buffalo were:

“Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.”

A far cry from the typical sleepy-eyed “Welcome to the class. Now, let’s go over the syllabus.”

Girard was interested in the most fundamental questions that plague humanity, and he applied his brilliant mind to them with great intensity while leaving out most concessions to his readers.

I am reminded of how Satoshi Nakamoto responded to a question about his nascent crypto project: “If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”

Girard was a hedgehog with one big—one massive—idea: mimetic desire. Its discovery changed his life forever in the fall of 1958.

Have you ever had an important insight come to you in the nature of a gift? Not as the result of a conclusion, as if you’d reached the end of a long math problem, but as the experience of a revelation? That seems to be the way that Girard experienced his initial insight into mimetic desire as he was working on the last chapter of his book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

It happened to him as he was on a trundling train from Baltimore to Bryn Mawr to teach a class.

“I was thinking about the analogies between religious experience and the experience of a novelist who discovers that he’s been consistently lying, lying for the benefit of his Ego, which in fact is made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated over a long period, sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.”

(From Cynthia Haven’s excellent biography of Girard, Evolution of Desire.)

“Everything came to me once,” he recalled. “I felt that there was a sort of mass that I’ve penetrated into little by little. Everything was there at the beginning, all together. That’s why I don’t have any doubts. There’s no ‘Girardian system.’ I’m teasing out a single, extremely dense insight.”

So let’s tease it out a little. Here are some of the implications of that insight, starting with the core one.

1. Mimetic Desire Governs the World

“Mimetic desire is an absolute monarch,” Girard wrote.

It is the “thing hidden since the foundation of the world”, to borrow the words of Girard’s magnum opus (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). Girard, in turn, took them from the gospel of Matthew.

“I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 13:35)

Bold. Comparing yourself to Jesus?

That’s not what Girard was doing, though. He saw his work as a working out of the core anthropological truths about human relations that were already present in the gospel text—nothing more.

In other words, Girard didn’t view himself as having had some “new” idea. He saw himself as having seen something in the historical unfolding of the Judeo-Christian scriptures (not just the texts themselves, but also the events that the words gave meaning to) that others failed to fully grasp.

And that thing was mimetic desire.

It was present at the dawn of humanity. The mythological language in the Book of Genesis tells us of something important about desire in the story of Eve and the Serpent. It’s often overlooked.

Eve desired to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree only after the desire to do was suggested to her—in other words, modeled to her—by the serpent.

It was the first instance of what we might call deviated desire. Eve’s desires were hijacked, taken off track, by the desire for the fruit. She never would have desired it had the desire not been modeled to her by the Serpent.

Suddenly, a new desire was kindled inside of her for something that she believed would give her a special power—the knowledge of good and evil—but which instead blinded her to the truth of her own desires and caused them to become disordered. As the scriptures tell the story, these disordered desires immediately began to be passed down to her children and their children and to the rest of humanity.

It was as if the compass of her desire was placed near a magnetic object that threw off its internal mechanisms and caused it to read a false north. (For those who don’t know how to use a compass: it must be flat and away from any objects that can pull its highly sensitive needle from reading the earth’s natural magnetic fields.)

Life is a process of declutting our desires; of bringing order to our disordered wants.

If the world is disordered and chaotic, it’s because our desires were first. The world, and our future, is simply a reflection of what we want. And if what we want most is to destroy one another, that’s what we’ll do.

Mimetic desire is a constant presence across politics, business, relationships, work, play, even the books we choose to read. It’s at the heart of human relations.

We don’t understand ourselves until we understand our desires.

2. The Power of Fresh Eyes

Girard’s discovery of mimetic desire came while he was reading classical literature.

Girard’s PhD was in history. But he was an auto-didact with broad interests and enormous range—something rarely seen today, when hyper-specialization is the norm.

Girard read and absorbed philosophy, sociology, theology, literary criticism, evolutionary biology, and more. When I met with Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, one of the world’s leading brain science and childhood development specialists, he recounted a meeting with Girard in Palo Alto in which the great professor was enthralled by the neuroscience of mirror neurons. He was always looking to make new connections.

Girard was able to see things with fresh eyes in fields that were completely unfamiliar to him—not believing the lie that only the experts or those with great familiarity know best.

There is great precedent for innovation coming from people who stand at a greater distance from the thing being looked at. Henry Ford “saw” what would become the assembly line in a slaughterhouse as cows were broken up into their component parts and processed. Daniel Kahneman shaped the field of economics as a psychologist because he saw behavioral phenomena in economic processes that economists were too in the weeds to notice.

In Girard’s case, it happened in literature. Early in his academic career in the U.S., he was asked to teach literature courses about books that he hadn’t yet read. He was reluctant to turn down work, so he took the job on. He found himself staying just one step ahead of his students in working his way through classic novels: Standhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and more.

With his lack of formal training and the need to read quickly, he started to look for patterns in the text. In doing so, he uncovered something that all of the literary critics had missed: characters in the novels never desire anything spontaneously; their desires are shaped in and through their relationships with other characters who act as models of desire for them.

This discovery was like the Newtonian revolution in physics in which the forces governing the movement of objects can only be understood in a relational context—not independently.

He never would’ve been able to see this had he been infected with the intellectual fashions of the time. They would have clouded his vision and prevented him from being able to see the truth that he called, at the time, “triangular desire”, but which eventually came to be known as mimetic, or imitative, desire.

[Above: triangular desire. I dislike these images because they remind me of trigonometry class so I we-worked them for the book. But it is helpful for illustration the fundamental idea. What’s missing from this image is the sequence with which the movement happens. It’s this: 1) Model desires object 2) Subject imitates model; 3) Subject imitates the desire and believes their “imitated desire” (at bottom) is entirely their own]

The lesson? Don’t assume that just because you don’t have technical expertise in something—whether it is coding websites or looking at history or looking at societal phenomena surrounding the Covid-10 pandemic—that you can’t see things for what they are and uncover truths that others may not be able to see due to whatever psychological, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual blocks are preventing them from doing so.

3. We’re Killers Who Absolve Ourselves from Our Crimes

The dark secret that Girard discovered in human history is that violence is at the foundation of human culture. Institutions, taboos, prohibitions—indeed all culture—has developed in response to violence (what Girard calls “Founding Murders”) and to mitigate that violence.

Humans continually turn to the scapegoat mechanism to resolve societal threats.

When people in a community are engaged in contagious conflict that is on the verge of becoming a war of All-Against-All, Girard found that they suddenly unite against a single victim that they believe is the cause of their disorder. They believe that if they purge this person (or group) from their midst, they will purify themselves from whatever it was that plagued them.

The holocaust looms largest and most horrific in the twentieth century. In a way, it is the most extreme example of what happens on a much smaller scale—even on the level of a friend group or family or company—on a daily basis. The transference of blame for purposes of purification seems to be a perennial feature of human behavior.

The scapegoat mechanism was, in some sense, a “social innovation” that saved communities from their own violence by directing it in a very targeted way toward one person. Kill one cell; preserve the whole body.

The high priest of Israel at the time of Jesus knew how this process works. “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish,” he said. He knew that without a properly sacrificed scapegoat, the whole nation would collapse.

We are totally blind to our own violence and our own role in this scapegoating process because we are caught up mimetically in the violent contagion that spreads from person to person. Many things are mimetic; aggression is one of the most.

This is one of the “things hidden since the foundation of the world” that Girard explains in his magnum opus: humanity constantly covers up its violence through myths that reframe the violence in a way that justifies it.

Plato wrote that if there were ever a perfectly just man in the world that he would surely be murdered. If you believe the Christian scriptures, this is precisely what happened. (This is why Girard thought that they have a fundamentally revelatory function; not just revealing God to humanity, but revealing the nature of humanity to ourselves in a way that would’ve been impossible to see without the scapegoat mechanism being exposed in the scriptures; that exposure reaching its culmination in the crucifixion in which everyone could see that an innocent victim had been sacrificed out of self-preservation.)

If you don’t, then you might still be able to look at the gross injustice in the world and see that there’s a violent and self-justifying impulse at the heart of human behavior in certain circumstances. Nobody who commits violence seems to truly believe that their violence is unjust. It’s also “good” violence; the Other’s violence is always “bad.” All violence is bad. That much should be clear. But Americans spent the vast majority of 2020 justifying various forms of violence, whether from police or from rioters.

The mistake is to think that only others—and not ourselves—are capable of participating in this mechanism. We may not inflict violence in exactly the same way that others have, but we are capable of inflicting it in our own ingenious and egregious ways. And it’s precisely our refusal to accept the truth of this that ensures that the cycles of violence in human societies will continue.

The Judeo-Christian tradition calls this propensity of humans to commit violence against the moral good—violence against other people—sin. And the extent to which we commit sins is often in direct proportion to the extent to which we believe we are free from the possibility of committing them.

The accelerating desire for metaphysical purity in a world in which there is none can only result in violence or acceptance. The more zealous we are to rid the world and other people of their faults and failings, the less zealous we are to rid ourselves of them.

The lesson of Girard’s insight into violence—at least the one that I carry with me—is that it’s impossible to rid the world of bad people or bad ideas or opinions that I don’t like. It’s also impossible to become too aware of my own weakness and tendency toward self-justification. Perhaps if each of us renouncing our worst mimetic behavior, we might spread a different kind of positive contagion based on recognizing the inherent dignity of every human person.

Flannery O’Connor took a dimmer view. “The violent bear it away,” she wrote. They always have.

4. Humans Are Deeply Religious Creatures

If you sense that there might be a religious dimension to the Bitcoin mania, then you haven’t yet lost your sense of smell.

The market economy is a sacred institution. All institutions are.

We’re fundamentally religious creatures in Girard’s view. Sacred rites and rituals have been a part of humanity for millennia, and it would be ignorant to assume that our supposed rationalism has freed us from thousands of years of religious formation that so thoroughly imbues our culture.

There’s strong evidence that systems of exchange were developed in the context of religious rites. All of the earliest coins have been found around sacrificial temples. Thousands have been found around the temple of Juno Moneta (notice some relation to the word money)—a temple in which coins were known to be minted.

Why was money so integral to the sacrificial rite? Because people needed animals to fulfill the sacrificial rite; money was essential to make the exchange.

The real powers and principalities in the world are not the traditional heads of state, but the mimetic processes that develop independently from them. Power structures can shift overnight. Girard notes, with his usual penetrating insight, a situation that occurred in 17th century France that makes it hard not to call to mind the current crypto movement that is ushering in a new economy:

When Louis XIV ran out of money, he was forced to invite a Jewish financier to Versailles. The King had to court him because he needed money! He could not simply take it without violating certain rules, which could not be disregarded with impunity. Therefore, in spite of his tremendous power, Louis XIV was already the prisoner of an economic system that was evolving independently from absolute monarchy.

Remember, mimetic desire is the absolute monarch. But what are people looking for as they find new models to imitate? What is the driving force behind our never-satisfied striving?

All desire is a desire for being, according to Girard. In other words, everything we want is really our way of trying to be a certain way—to be a certain person. It’s our awareness of our many limitations (recognized or unrecognized) that leads us to search for models to imitate or emulate, for new goals to pursue, for new places to travel, new people to meet. Desire is about our search for transcendence.

Desire, according to René Girard, is always for something we think we lack—or else it wouldn’t be desire at all. His main discovery is that desire is not object-oriented, as we commonly assume; it is the search for being itself.

There is literally no object or achievement or person in the world that would ever satiate our desire. This is why desire always has a fundamentally religious character. It’s when we don’t recognize our own religiosity that we start to seek fulfillment in stranger and stanger places.

5. The False Allure of Competition and Rivalry

Competition is different from rivalry.

The idea of competition is abstract, illusory, precept enshrined once and for all in neoclassical economics as one of our greatest goods.

But listen to what Peter Thiel has to say about competition in his eminently Girardian book, Zero to One:

More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.

The cult of competition so engrained in the American mind that it leads us to believe that something is only valuable if people are fighting for it. We learn in school that competition is what spurs creativity, keeps prices down, and leads to an “efficient” market. We’re indoctrinated with these ideas as part of our economics 101 classes.

Yet competition is a strange thing to desire if you stop and think about it. Why would we choose to have competitors if given the choice to not have competitors?

We carry over some of our unquestioned assumptions about competition to all other domains of life. Competitive colleges must be better than colleges that are easier to get into; men and women with more suitors must be more desirable; restaurants with longer lines must have better food. These things are the result of mimetic desire creating false scarcity.

A moment’s reflection reveals the folly of these assumptions. We all know that competition for something drives up prices, but not necessarily the quality of the product. Take university education, for example. Despite the mimetic run-up in enrollment and tuition, there is little evidence that students are getting a better education today than they were 30 years ago (some would argue it’s far worse); yet, tuition has increases have outpaced inflation more than 2:1.

Girard realized that most competition is unnecessary because it’s the product of mimetic desire—people converge on one object and then reinforce one another’s desire for that object in a way that quickly becomes detached from the object itself. The model is what is valuable; not the thing itself.

Girard’s insight into mimetic desire had the second-order effect of explaining rivalry. Because people come to want the things that other people want—because desire is imitative—people naturally fall into rivalrous competition with other people. If given enough time, human relationships tend toward conflict as we view other people as scandals as threats to our pursuit of fulfillment—a pursuit that is itself conditioned by what those other people want.

And that will perhaps allow us to see the wisdom and necessity of the 10th commandment, which (strangely) prohibits rivalrous desire:

You shall not covet the house of your neighbor. You shall not covet the wife of your neighbor, nor his male of female slave, nor his ox or his ass, nor anything that belong to him. (Exod. 20:17)

From the earliest writings of the biblical tradition, the tendency of humans to covet their neighbors good is recognized and prohibited. There would be no need to prohibit it if it weren’t a foundational part of the human condition.

It is a tremendous step in the maturation of an individual to realize their own rivalrous tendencies. It’s the first step toward freeing ourselves from their more destructive consequences.

But few do this. Girard notes why:

If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger the harmony and even the survival of all human communities. Rivalistic desires are all the more overwhelming since they reinforce one another. The principle of reciprocal escalation and one-upmanship governs this type of conflict. This phenomenon is so common, so well known to us, and so contrary to our concept of ourselves, thus so humiliating, that we prefer to remove it from consciousness and act as if it did not exist.

We have to recognize it and address it.

Empathy is one of the primary keys to breaking out of our cycles of destructive rivalry. Why? Because the very nature of empathy is entering into another’s experience without necessarily identifying with it completely or even agreeing with them. It involves entering into the mind and experience of another while maintaining our self-possession.

Developing this skill allows us to enter into relationships with people and groups that don’t put us at so much risk of getting caught up in the disemmbling fog of crowds and mobs, or mimetically adopting other peoples’ opinions and desires as our own while keeping up the conceit and affectation of self-sufficiency.

6. The Identity Flippening(s)

My friend Jack Butcher of Visualize Value published this excellent piece. He wrote:

What is difficult to plot on a chart is the proportion in which our identities are shifting from offline-first to online-first.

Physical status symbols are of no utility if you aren't going outside.

If the internet is where you get your culture and build your relationships, it's also where you signal your status.

I don’t think anyone really understands what this new world of online identity-formation is doing to the process of people coming to know who they are.

Girard took a view of identity that is highly relational. We are, in a sense, constituted by our relationships: with our parents, with our siblings, with our friends. These relationships form part of how we understand the Self.

Perhaps nobody explains who we think we are more than the models we aspire to be. We are not yet who we ultimately think we should be. (Except perhaps an absolute narcissist, who is so insecure that he has to walk around convincing himself that he fits an idealized image of himself—that idealized image of himself is the model of desire that he aspires to; the tragedy is that it doesn’t exist.)

We are not yet who we believe we should be, so we unconsciously form our identities in relation to various models of desire.

The challenge is that today we have more models than ever before to choose from, and the models are more ethereal than ever. They may even be pseudo-anonymous personas who we are simply projecting ideas onto. Do we even know anything about the thousands of people we “follow” on social media other than what little we can read into their cryptic tweets and poasts?

It is shocking how little we know them. Yet we’ve thrown 10 to 14-year-old children into this world where they are surrounded by tens of thousands, even millions, of models of desire, at the most critical stage in their process of understanding who they are.

All Girard’s work on mimetic desire, rivalry, and scapegoating ultimately comes down to the question of identity. Who are we? That question is more tied up with the question of "What do we want?” than we realize.

We are, in some sense, what we desire. At the end of our lives, we will have spent most of our time and energy pursuing the things that we wanted the most—whether those things are drugs, alcohol, money, relationships, food, service, work, family, writing, or the pursuit of what we believe is our vocation.

The will does it wants. And that’s why it’s all-important to shape our desires—to assume some agency and intentionality in this process.

Our desires are ultimately the greatest predictor of what we’ll do.

Show me a man who renounced his greatest vice and has learned to love, and I’ll show you a man who wanted to. And that’s because someone else had provided a powerful enough model of desire.

We all need models of desire. The question is where will we find them. In each other?

That’s the great drama of human relationships. Each of is at every moment of the day helping one another want more or want less. There’s no in-between.

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I believe that a person’s intellectual journey is somewhat path-dependent. There’s a progression of books that I recommend for mimetic theory—but the first one always depends on the person.

I embrace the Thomistic axiom Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipients  recipitur (“Whatever is received, is received in the manner of the receiver”).

That’s why I don’t typically recommend I See Satan Fall to those with defense mechanisms in place against Christianity, or Deceit, Desire, & the Novel to those who don’t care about literature. But a Dostoevsky fan? By all means, go straight to Resurrection from the Underground.

I’ve recommended Cynthia L. Haven’s excellent biography hundreds of times as a starting book for people who, like me, care about the person behind the ideas.

So this list isn’t in any real kind of order—though it is in a “rough” sequential order as an imaginative exercise for me in which I teach a year-long seminar in mimetic theory. And I am seriously thinking about it. If you’d be interested in that, please do let me know in the comments.

Here’s my reading list. (None of these are affiliate links, by the way.)

1. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, René Girard (1961)

   Girard was calling it “triangular desire” at this point. The idea of mimetic desire hadn’t been fully developed yet. But that’s why this book is so fascinating. It’s like you’re there at the birth of something big, and you know it.

2. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, René Girard (1999)

   This is one of the most fascinating of all of Girard’s books, written when his theological perspective was becoming mature. He starts off by explaining the 10th commandment in a mind-blowing way. The last two chapters of this book, particularly Chapter 13 (“The Modern Concern for Victims”), is one of the most relevant of all of Girard’s writing for our present moment.

3. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, Wolfgang Palaver (2013)

   I like Palaver’s book because it lays out all of the key concepts in mimetic theory in a systematic way. It’s a nice way to Zoom out and get the lay of the land before diving deeper.

4. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, René Girard (1978)

   The magnum opus. A must-read for anyone who wants to go deep. Peter Thiel recommends this book to a lot of people as an intro to Girard. Well, Thiel has really smart friends. I know a lot of people who find this book totally obscure. It’s also a little strange because of the dialogical form that it takes (a conversation between three people). Yet it’s the book that I go back to and drink from the most. There’s gold in it if you’re willing to mine it. And you’re better off mining Things Hidden than Bitcoin.

5. Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, Cynthia L. Haven (2018)

   Haven’s book is a very solid biography. She calls Girard’s head “totemic, with its dark, deep-set eyes and shock of thick, wavy, salt-and-pepper hair.” I love this book because it rigorously explains the origins of Girard’s ideas—Haven does complete justice to his thought while giving the backstory of the man and the circumstances out of which these ideas were born. This book is reverent. And the reverence seems to be for the truth.

6. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, Gil Bailie (1995)

   I sat on a park bench with Gil Bailie in Sonoma (where he lives), while doing research and conducting interviews for Wanting. He told me that his friend René Girard could “remove an idol from another person’s eye as if it were an act of reverence.” Bailie wrote a book that is probably the single-greatest model for my own.

7. Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion, Scott R. Garrels, editor (2011)

   Mimetic theory could benefit from more scientific engagement, and this book delivers. It is at least a great start. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff’s essay shines.

8. Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, René Girard (2000)

   You won’t get Girard talking about Seinfeld anywhere else. After Things Hidden, this is the book that I return to the second-most. It’s one of the later and most mature works.

9. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, René Girard (1989)

   Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground has been called the first truly “modern” novel, and Girard interprets it like no other. The idea of the “underground” (of desire) is one of the most relevant and important images for us to grasp, in my opinion. I’ve seen underground mimetic desire destroy marriages and companies and friends with my own eyes. We have important lessons to learn so that it doesn’t happen to us.

10. Battling to the End: Conversation with Benoit Chantre, René Girard (2009)

    Chilling. That’s all I have to say. Read it. The word “apocalypse” simply means an “unveiling” of things to come. This is Girard’s most prophetic work.

As most of you know, I have a book on mimetic theory. Tyler Cowen had this to say about it.

But it’s not for me to put it anywhere on this list.

Enjoy the weekend.

Luke

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As part of my research for Wanting, I compiled a list of anything Peter Thiel, Girard’s most famous student, had said publicly about his Stanford professor’s ideas. Now I’m sharing a partial list with you.

The list is not exhaustive. Thiels’ book, Zero to One, is shot through with mimetic theory from start to finish. This list also doesn’t include the many things (like Thiel’s The Straussian Moment speech and resulting essay) for which public, copyright-free links do not exist.

The worst monopolies are monopolies on ideas. No one thinker should have a monopoly on the interpretation of Girard. In my view, it’s problematic that the weighted value that many ascribe to Thiel’s opinions is greater than the value ascribed to the thousands of scholars and thoughtful people around the world (who are assimilating mimetic theory into their lives) combined—if people are even aware of them.

This is a consequence of something I refer to in Wanting as the “Cult of Experts.” A billionaire is able to affect people at a metaphysical level, even from afar, in a way that an English professor at a small college in the Midwest cannot. It can lead to distortions in the way that we process and evaluate the importance of knowledge. The mediator of the knowledge matters.

Some of the most fascinating insights into mimetic theory come from places where people are not looking (there’s a reason why the great writers have put important truths into the mouths of court jesters, clowns, and town drunks…), which Thiel himself would agree with (see his quote below). I plan to share some of the ones I have found with you in due time.

But I thought this would be a good place to start.

“Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts—mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that’s generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.” —Peter Thiel

1. Business Insider - How an esoteric philosophy book shapes his worldview 

2. Perell.com Blog - Peter Thiel’s Religion 

3. The Week - Secret to Innovation 

4. The Society Pages - Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook 

5. Founders Fund - What happened to the future

6. Hoover Institution - The World According to Thiel

7. Knowledge at Wharton - Want to Build a One-of-a-Kind Company? Ask Peter Thiel

8. Masters of Scale - Masters of Scale Episode: Peter Thiel

9. Conversations with Bill Kristol - Peter Thiel Transcript (story of paypal) 

10. Conversations with Bill Kristol - Peter Thiel Transcript (innovation) 

11. National Review - The End of the Future

12. Cato Unbound - The Education of a Libertarian 

13. Yale School of Management - Peter Thiel at Yale: We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters

14. Hoover Institution - Peter Thiel On “The Straussian Moment”

15. Hoover Institution - WHAT, U.S. WORRY? Is the United States Losing Its Competitive Edge?

16. Medium - Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Innovation, and What Not to Call your Company 

17. Fox Business - Peter Thiel on Leaving Silicon Valley for Los Angeles

18. Youtube (Every PT Video) - Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel Debate

19. Zero to One - Book 

20. Lesswrong - Growth, Violence, Stories 

21. Tim Ferris Show - Episode 28 Peter Thiel

22. WBUR News - Peter Thiel Wants Us All To Go From Zero To One 

23. TIME - Republican National Committee Speech 

24. Manhattan Institute - 2019 Wriston Lecture: Peter Thiel 

25. Vox - Inside Peter Thiel’s Mind 

26. Independent Institute - Developing the Developed World 

27. New York Times - Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself  

28. Youtube (SXSW) - You Are Not a Lottery Ticket 

29. Youtube (Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence) - Peter Thiel on the Failures and “Self-Hatred" of Big-Tech

30. Youtube (The Rubin Report) - Trump, Gawker, and Leaving Silicon Valley 

31. Quartz at Work - Peter Thiel’s Favorite Interview Question (Think Independently)

32. City Journal - The Gospel According to Peter Thiel 

33. Yahoo Finance - Peter Thiel is Trying to Save the World: The Apocalyptic Theory Behind his Actions 

34. Inc.com - What You Can Learn From Peter Thiel's Brilliant Philosophy on Setting Personal Goals

35. FS Blog - Peter Thiel Recommends 7 Reads 

36. Asian Review - Google is Too Big to Innovate 

37. Unherd - Facebook, Jesus, and the Serpent of Social Media

38. Youtube (Big Think) - Keynesian Economics Will Be Dead

39. Youtube (Y Combinator) - Competition is for Losers

40. Youtube (The Aspen Institute) - Higher Education Bubble

41. Youtube (Imitatio Videos) - Optimistic Thought Experiment 

42. Youtube (Imitatio Video) - Peter Thiel On Rene Girard 

43. The Conversation - WhatsApp? Even private chatter now exploited by billionaires

44. The Portal - Peter Thiel: The Portal with Eric Weinstein

45. Youtube (Harvard University) - A Conversation with Peter Thiel and Niall Ferguson - Institute of Politics

46. Entrepreneurship in the Mirror of Biographical Analysis - Political Ideology And Economic Activity

47. COV & R - The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion 

48. WeDevs - How the Idea of a French Philosopher can save Your E-commerce Business

I will continue to update this list. If there is a good recent that is not on it, please leave it in the comments or drop it in our community Discord server.

Talk soon,
Luke

We ended the first installment of this series on mimetic desire by exploring the difference between internal mediation (Freshmanistan) and external mediation (Celebristan). 

In this installment, we’re going to take one more step in the mimetic process and explore reflexivity, the double bind, and the difference between meme theory 🤌and mimetic theory 👉👈.

This is stage 2 in what I expect to be a (roughly) 10-stage education in mimetic theory. For now, it’s free.

Things will get more complex and nuanced as we go, so please stick with me here. I promise that by the end you’ll have gone from Holy Shit (look at all this mimesis all around me) to Oh, Shit (look at all this mimesis inside me). And that’s a very good thing.

I would encourage everyone to use the comments section below liberally if any questions or comments arise. I will respond to all of them. And I would especially love to hear from anyone whose experience validates these insights.

The Freshman’s Dilemma

Let’s start with a very brief review of Freshmanistan and Celebristan. Grasping the difference between these two “worlds”—understanding how mimetic desire operates differently in each one—is the most important step in developing a robust knowledge of mimetic theory. Here we go.

What René Girard calls “external mediators” of desire live in Celebristan (my term). This world is unreachable, untouchable to us. We’re separated from it by some kind of barrier, whether death, time, space, or social status. The caste system in India is one example of a barrier.

People in Celebristan want differently than we do. There is no possibility of competing directly with them for the objects of their desire. They seem to be on a different plane, existentially or socially.

(Note: a person can appear to exist in Celebristan even when two people are very close physically. In the Netflix show The Sinner, which I’ve been watching these days, the character Cora, played by Jessica Biel, is in Celebristan to her sickly younger sister, Phoebe—even though they sleep in the same room together every night.) 

What Girard calls “internal mediators” of desire live in Freshmanistan (my term). It’s a world in which everyone has a high degree of sameness—like kids in a Freshman class. They are all jostling for position, each one trying desperately to differentiate themselves, yet each of them has far more in common with the others than they realize, or at least would ever admit. 

The most important feature of Freshmanistan is that everyone has the possibility of coming into contact with and competing with everyone else for the same things. If taken far enough, this can create a Hobbesian war of all-against-all. (But we’ll get to that in installment 3 or 4 of this series.)

For now, please just note that because everyone in Freshmanistan is basically in the same situation, their desires are highly reflexive (to borrow a term from financier George Soros).

It’s as if everyone in Freshmanistan is standing on the same small trampoline. One of them can’t jump without exerting some force on all of the rest. That’s the situation with their physics, though, but with their desires. 

Mimetic desire is a force very similar to gravity. What gravity is to physics mimetic desire is to psychology.

Here’s the difference between Celebristan and Freshmanistan in a concrete example: 

I could care less what kind of car the actor Tracy Morgan just bought because he lives in Celebristan from my perspective. But I do care deeply about what kind of car a fellow entrepreneur, Derek—who is in the same startup “incubator” as I am—just bought.

He’s working alongside me in the same coffee shops. Our company valuations are roughly the same (or so I hear). He is someone I’m always paying attention to. What new apps is he using for productivity? Who are his investors? What kind of customer growth and retention rate does he have? Is he hiring the top dev talent? I keep tabs on him.

(This is the danger of any startup incubator or accelerator. I generally like Y-Combinator. It produced a Garry Tan. This experience adds a ton of value for many, many entrepreneurs. But that doesn’t prevent me from also thinking that the hypermimetic explosion of “Shark Tank-style competitions” and incubators and accelerators are—for the vast majority of entrepreneurs—Girardian incubators of terror….to adapt a phrase from Dan Wang.)

My ears perk up when Derek starts saying that he spurned Tesla and pre-ordered himself a Rivian R1T truck instead. 

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with my gas-guzzling SUV wondering what this means about the future of my company and maybe even my whole life. 

You can bet that when the time comes for me to upgrade, I’ll be thinking about Derek’s decision to pre-order a Rivian.

See, I can’t help but be affected by what he wants. We both live in Freshmanistan together. And I have secretly taken him as a model—though I would never admit that to myself.

Memes Vs. Mimes

To understand what’s about to happen next, we have to understand the difference between memes and mimetic desire.

“Meme” is a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. The term is meant to be a riff on the word “gene.” A “meme” is a cultural equivalent of a biological gene. A meme ‘survives’ by replicating itself as many times as possible in the greatest number of hosts, caring little about who those hosts are so long as they replicate and propagate the meme to others. 

Like genes, memes can undergo small, random adaptations as they move through a culture—but those adaptations are never the result of an intentional process. (That’s precisely why Internet memes are not memes, in Dawkins’ purist view. An Internet meme is intentionally altered by different people to be funnier or to be more ‘viral’). 

There are many more things I could say about memes, but here are three key points to know in terms of their relationship to mimesis: 

A — Memes seek to imitate or replicate themselves perfectly 

B — Memes don’t care who their host is

C — In meme theory, imitation is viewed as positive because only what is imitated survives

Now let’s take a look at the mimetic theory of René Girard to understand how mimetic desires spread, contra memes. 

“Dawkins has no awareness of mimetic rivalry, mimetic crisis, scapegoating and other figures uncovered by mimetic theory.” —René Girard

Mimicry is Not a Meme

The exact opposite is true for each of these three points when it comes to mimetic desire. Let’s take a closer look:

A’ — Differentiation

Mimetic desire doesn’t spread through imitation; it spreads through mimesis, where the imitation is never about making an exact replica of another’s desire but about one-upping it, or differentiating oneself from it. 

Mimesis is differentiation through imitation. In the case of rivalry, it is imitation through escalation (a particular form of differentiation).

A mimetic rivalry happens when two people have taken each other as models of desire. 

In the case of my startup incubator, I imitated Derek by buying a Tesla Model S. This helps me differentiate myself from him with his stupid Rivian (it probably also signals something about my admiration for Elon Musk, if you want to go deep enough). 

But the fact that I got a luxury electric vehicle in the first place—before I felt financially ready to—probably has a lot less to do with my concern for the planet than the concern I like to signal to people. It has to do with my concern for Derek.

It’s worth noting that I could have never bought a Rivian—lest I imitate Derek too closely, which would be embarrassing. But my choice of a Tesla is still totally mimetic.

I would’ve loved a Rivian, in fact. But because Derek got one, I need to show that I’m different. My move to get a Tesla is a product of his initial move. My desire for a Tesla is a response to his desire for a Rivian.

(Gucci Mane wrote in his autobiography, which is excellent, that his decision to make a song called Black Tee was completely driven by a rival rapper making a song called White Tee.)

When Derek notices that I bought a nice Tesla—when I start rolling up to our shared incubator space every day in my new whip, while he’s still waiting for his Rivian truck to come from the factory (they aren’t out yet)—Derek begins taking me as a mimetic model. I got him.

René Girard calls this situation a double bind: we are bound to each other through mimesis, unable to escape the hold that the other’s desires and decisions have over us. What I want affects Derek; what he wants affects me. We’re in a reflexive tug-of-war. 

Derek goes back on the Rivian website and adds a few extra features to the model he ordered. 

Both of us want to be seen as the more environmentally-conscious, the more progressive thinker, the more successful entrepreneur, and a slew of other things. In the end, we want all of the same things.

The Double Bind

This dynamic of a mimetic double bind, by the way, even plays out in romantic relationships or the relationship between a husband and wife who have been married for 25 years. 

The French neuropsychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, a friend and close collaborator of René Girard, calls these teeter-totter or seesaw relationships. One person can’t be up unless the other person is down. 

They are people who claim to love each other—but they are also mimetic rivals to one another. Their rivalry is probably even more important than their love—or at least it colored the way they love each other. 

There is mimesis in every relationship. The only difference is between people who recognize it and people who don’t. Understanding how this dynamic works is critical if we want to begin extracting ourselves from these mimetic cycles and do the hard, anti-mimetic work of developing relationships in less mimetic ways. 

B’ — Obsessive focus with who the ‘host’ is

With mimetic desire, unlike with memes, the person imitating another person cares deeply about who that other person is.

In meme theory, hosts are mere carriers for some unit of cultural information known as a meme. When it comes to mimetic desire, it’s the people that matter and the information itself that doesn’t matter.

A model of desire could change what she wants 100 times; the person imitating her will also change what she wants 100 times. It’s the model that really matters, not the object of the model’s desire. It’s the model that is being imitated—not any particular ‘thing.’

What we want is every thing the model wants.

One more thing. Desire, as we saw in the last installment (Mimetic Desire 101), is ultimately a search for something metaphysical. Metaphysical desire is the desire for being—the being of the other that we feel we lack. This is completely different from a meme, for which the category of being doesn’t matter. 

Mimetic desire is a human phenomenon—something relational—for which nothing is more important than the other person “carrying” the desire. That other person’s desire is merely derivative—a secondary concern to us. Our greatest concern is who that person is and whether or not we believe they possess something that we do not.

The Brutal Truth

The uncomfortable truth about mimetic desire, then, is that we never take anyone as a model unless we secretly believe that they are superior to us in some way. Otherwise, we’d never take them as a model.

This is why it’s so hard to admit that we have mimetic models. To admit that we have a model is to admit that we want to be more like another person—that we’re not “authentic” in a hyper-individualistic age of “authenticity.” It would mean admitting our own envy. And that is the hardest thing to admit of all. 

Girard quipped once that the reason everyone talks so much about sex—indeed, talking about sex is celebrated—is because nobody would dare talk about their envy, which is still something embarrassing. 

As talking about sex became less and less of a taboo, envy went deeper into the closet. 

Girard is worth quoting again here:

“When we borrow the desires of those we admire we must play the deadly serious game of mimetic rivalry with them. Whenever we lose, our models successfully thwart our desires and, because we admire them, we feel rejected and humiliated. But since their victory over us confirms their superiority we admire them more than ever and our desire becomes more intense.”

C’—Imitation has a dark side

Dawkins never seems to make the connection that imitation is anything but positive. Imitation, in Dawkins’ myopic view, is just how things survive. 

In mimetic theory, the process of imitation (which Girard calls mimesis) is a process that more often than not leads not to survival but to destruction. People are even willing to destroy themselves if that means they can destroy their enemies. 

Mimetic theory admits that imitation has a dark side: it is the cause of conflict and violence. And few things are more mimetic than aggression.

Below is a depiction of the nodes of a social network called Weibo—China’s equivalent of Twitter—showing how quickly various emotions spread on the app during a 6-month research period in 2010. The four emotions are joy (green), sadness (blue), disgust (black), and anger (red).

State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University. Rui Ran, Ke Xu, and Jichang Zhao. “Higher Contagion and weaker social ties mean anger spreads faster than joy in social media.

The lex talionis—the law of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’—seems like it’s almost hard-wired into humans at an instinctual level, our default response. When someone hits us, we want to hit back. When someone is rude to us in line at the supermarket, we naturally want to snap back at them.

This is why the message contained in the gospels, especially in the beatitudes, is so radical: there is a call to transcend this base mimetic impulse in order to start a new mimetic cycle rooted in self-sacrificial love. If someone strikes your cheek, give them the other cheek to strike as well. If someone compels you to walk one mile, walk two with them. Mahatma Gandhi, with his non-violent resistance and protest, practiced a similar type of anti-mimetic response.

This is highly subversive behavior from a mimetic standpoint—it is anti-mimetic behavior—which is also (paradoxically) highly mimetic, because it kicks off a positive cycle of mimetic desire. 

The term anti-mimetic (not coincidentally, the name of this newsletter) could be thought of as a form of disruption, or reversal, of negative mimesis—destructive forces that are transformed into positive forces. 

In the next edition of this series, we’ll explore the scapegoat mechanism and how the process of scapegoating has been and can be disrupted by even one person.

So what now?

Dawkins is right. Imitation can be, and often is, a positive thing. Without our advanced powers of imitation, there would be no human culture. There would be no progress.

The imitation of love between two great lovers or between friends, or a transcendent leader who inspires others to want more than they thought was wantable—these are examples of powerful mimetic forces that attract others because they are mimetic in the best possible sense. They are a sign of contradiction in a world that has become all too comfortable with negative mimesis. Just turn on the news.

In a world so dominated by mimetic rivalry, it takes a radically different kind of mimesis to get anyone’s attention—a disruption. Disruptive empathy. Disruptive speech. Disruptive love.

But here is the conundrum:

Given enough time, mimetic desire becomes rivalrous in even its noblest pursuits—say, the Christian ideal of pursuing holiness. It’s enough to visit any seminary in the world to see how this happens. 

Believe me—I’ve spent time in one. 

One guy starts looking at the guy next to him who is praying on his knees instead of seated. And what’s more: he’s bare-flooring it, on the marble, eschewing the padded kneelers in the pews. Man, that guy looks like he’s praying so hard…

And so it begins.

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What is Mimetic Desire?

Nearly everyone (unconsciously) assumes there’s a straight line between them and the things they want.

> > I wake up one day and “suddenly” decide that I want to run a marathon—amazingly, all of my friends had a similar realization when they hit their mid-thirties, too. 

> > I get the brilliant idea that Substack is objectively the best publishing platform for my long-form essay writing, based on all the “data”—right around the time that everyone else and their mother seems to be arriving at the same conclusion. 

>> I decide to get a dog during Covid because, well, I’ve been wanting a dog for a long time and now seems like as good a time as ever. (Nevermind that I’m the only one in my friend group who hasn’t, yet, and these guys share pictures of their puppies on Instagram along with the rest of the world on nearly a daily basis.)

In each of these cases, I’ve convinced myself that my desire is independent and autonomous. I want to pursue something because it “just makes sense,” or it’s the right thing to do, or it’s what I “authentically” desire, my personal pathway to fulfillment.

(This all happens beneath my conscious awareness. Very few people question why they want the things they want at all.) 

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable and what’s not, unaided.

Julius Caesar was an excellent Romantic Liar. When he won the battle of Zela, he famously declared: “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). If we translate these words into the language of desire, we see what he is really claiming: “I came, I desired, I conquered.”

Caesar would like all of us to believe he needs only to lay eyes on something to know whether it’s worth wanting. But Caesar is lying. He’s like the rest of us. The desirability of the particular land on which the battle of Zela was fought had nothing to do with the land itself and everything to do with the value that his rival, the Persian king Pharnaces II, had put on it—simply by being there.1 

The value of objects is not objective—it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: we assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want.  

Models of desire—those people who we look to for guidance about what to want (usually without knowing it)—literally transfigure objects before our eyes. Say you walk into a consignment store with a friend and see racks filled with hundreds of shirts. Nothing jumps out at you. But the moment your friend becomes enamored with one specific shirt, it’s no longer a shirt on a rack. It’s now the shirt that your friend Molly chose—the Molly who, by the way, is an assistant costume designer on the sets of major films. The moment she starts ogling one shirt, she sets it apart. It’s a different shirt than it was five seconds earlier, before she started wanting it.

And it doesn’t have to be a shirt. It can be anything.

The path between us and the thing we want is never straight. It’s always curved. It goes through, or around, models.

Mediated Desire

Models are people, groups, or things that help us know what to want. 

“O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes!” says Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hell to know we have chosen anything by another’s eyes. But we do it all the time: we choose brands, schools, and dishes at a restaurant by them.

Humans have a built-in, instinctual radar for our most basic needs—just like animals do. If we’re trapped outside in the cold freezing, we instinctively seek shelter in the warmth. 

Basic survival, sustenance, sex, warmth: these are all instinctual needs for which we have biological mechanisms to help guide us. If I’m starving and I see a juicy steak and a piece of wood in front of me, I don’t need much help to determine which one I should eat. My body tells me what to choose. 

These things are not desires per se. It’s more appropriate to call them “needs.”

A desire, on the other hand, is an object that we pursue for which there is no purely instinctual basis. When it comes to desire, we don’t have a built-in mechanism (like instincts) to help guide us toward wanting one thing more than another. Which new model of car should we buy? What should we major in at college? What style of clothes should we wear? The more abstract the thing is, the more mimetic desire usually comes into play. Our central nervous system certainly isn’t going to give us any clear or intelligible answers. 

But models can. Models are people who show us what is worth wanting.

Rather than an internal (biological) homing device that helps us make choices, models are external signposts that steer us toward the pursuit of certain people, places, things, even lifestyles.

Models are like people who seem farther up ahead on the path we’re on; they can see around a corner that we can’t see around. We assume that they have some insight into which direction to go that we do not. In short, we assume they have something that we do not—that they possess some quality of being that we do not. And so we follow them.

Mimetic desire means that we make many of our choices according to the desires of others—our models.

The Mimetic Martini

If we choose something that nobody else seems to want, we begin to doubt that we made the right choice. If a high school student starts dating a classmate that none of her friends express even the slightest bit of interest in, she grows insecure. She begins to wonder whether she made the right choice. We seek validation in our desires. We look for social proof. 

Desire always needs something to latch onto; it can’t stay free-floating. In this sense, it operates like a bivalve that has to be attached to a substrate (a rock, or some other surface). As soon as it becomes detached from one thing, it immediately attaches itself to something else: another model. 

There is no end to desire because there are always more models. The overnight Bitcoin millionaire doesn’t start wanting less, or even simpler things; he starts taking an interest in rare fish aquariums, Nordic cooking, and traveling to obscure places he reads about in his Monocle magazines.

Desire, according to René Girard, is always for something we think we lack—or else it wouldn’t be desire at all. Desire is not object-oriented, as we commonly assume. Desire never finds fulfillment in any particular “thing.” There is literally no object or achievement or person that would ever satiate our desire. If anything, we dream up new and strange things to want the more that we have.   

Desire is unique to humans in this sense. Animals don’t have abilities of abstraction, which means they can’t want things beyond their immediate worlds. Humans, on the other hand, have learned to want the most obscure and trivial things. And our mimetic nature has made us a target of manipulation by those who understand how this mechanism works. 

This continuum is an oversimplification. In reality, the lines are blurry. Our most basic needs are also driven largely by mimesis.

Even water has transitioned from the world of needs to the world of desires. Imagine you came here from another planet that was still in the pre-bottled-water stage of evolution (a critical stage). I asked you whether you preferred Aquafina, Voss, or San Pellegrino. Which would you choose?

Sure, I could present you with the minerality breakdown and pH levels of each, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we think that’s how you will make your choice. I tell you I drink San Pellegrino. And if you’re an imitative creature like me, or if you just think I’m a more highly developed being than you—because you come from a pre-Pellegrino people—you’re going to choose San Pellegrino.

It’s revealing to think of mimetic desire along a continuum. Certain people and organizational cultures are more prone to mimesis than others. And one thing is clear, on a societal level: any society in which people are no longer struggling with scarcity but coping with abundance will undergo an explosion of mimetic desire. 

In this universe of desire that we find ourselves in, there is no stable hierarchy. Since desires are determined by models and not by instincts, we can begin to want something new at any given time if the right model comes along. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman referred to this kind of situation as “liquid modernity”—almost nothing is stable. Not least of all our desires.  

None of this is to say that our evaluation of people and things is merely subjective. It is (hopefully) formed in part by the objective qualities of the thing itself. A baby banging on pots and pans, a high school punk band, and Mozart have different levels of musicality. Beauty is objective, but we perceive it subjectively—that is, mimetically. We perceive it through the lens of models who distort reality. The more we want to be like a model, the more we lose sight of the objective qualities of the things they have. 

The things themselves don’t matter much when it comes to desire. We care about people (models), not things. They represent some quality of being that we think we lack.

This is what Girard calls metaphysical desire: desire of another’s desire—not of any particular object. One way to think about the word metaphysical is “after the physical.” Metaphysical desire is not concerned with physical things. It is concerned with being a certain way. It is concerned with identity.  

A chef who lusts for the elusive Michelin Guide stars does not want the silly red star that appears next to the name of his restaurant (like a blue verified mark on Twitter…)—he wants the prestige that comes with it. The credentials of universities, having bylines in certain publications, getting named to certain “lists”, or simply just being thought of as an “expert” by others are all forms of this mimetically-driven sense of identity. 

I’ll re-iterate in slightly different terms: a model is someone, real or fictional, who mediates desire to us. We already call people who mediate desire for certain clothes or styles by their true name: “models.” Their purpose is not to model the physical articles of clothing but the desire to wear the clothes. Their purpose is to make us want what they have.

What you actually want is their face, their body, their withering stare—which don’t come with the clothes. 

Two Types of Models

There are two major types of models with whom we have different kinds of relationships. Mimetic desire works differently in each of the two situations.

If the model stands at a great distance—not physically, but socially and existentially—then the model is an external mediator of desire. The model is external to the subject’s world. This means that no serious competition with the model is possible.

I like to call the world in which these types of models live Celebristan for short. 

There is a barrier between the models in Celebristan and the people who take them as models. That barrier can be death, or time, or space, or simply status.

While everybody likes a feel-good story of a movie star or singer taking a high schooler to the prom, we all know that the high schooler isn’t on a real date—he or she has no chance of competing with the movie star’s real suitors. They live in Celebristan. 

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that a person literally has to be a celebrity to exist in this world. I am referring to situations where a person is simply an external mediator of desire—their desires cannot be directly challenged by their imitator because they seem to occupy a different plane of existence. Even the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States can put neighbors in the awkward situation of one person living in Celebristan while the other does not. (And that’s a recipe for resentment—and more.)

In the greatest novel ever written—Cervantes’ Don Quixote—the protagonist Don Quixote has his desire inflamed to be a knight (more specifically: a “knight errant”) merely by reading about the adventures of the famous knight Amadís de Gaula. The chivalrous knight, Amadís, was completely external to Don Quixote’s world. He existed in Celebristan.

Don Quixote sets out on his crazy adventure with his trusty sidekick, Sancho Panza. But even though they are side-by-side through much of the book, Don Quixote is still an external mediator of desire for Sancho Panza. They are separated by social class and their sense of identity. At no point in the novel does Sancho believe he is a serious competitor to Don Quixote—he doesn’t even dream about wanting or achieving the same things that Don Quixote does—even though they occupy the same physical space and time.  

We all have people who are in Celebristan from our perspective. A Managing Director at an investment bank lives in Celebristan to an Analyst (an entry-level position); NBA players do to college players (college athletes can’t compete for the same championship and trophy); even a much older brother can seem to be in Celebristan to his younger brother. At least until they both make it through adolescence and the older brother doesn’t seem more like a man than a peer in the younger boy’s eyes. 

It’s worth asking ourselves, honestly: Who in my life do I look at as if they live in Celebristan?

Freshmanistan

The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.

Remember what it’s like to be a freshman in high school or college? Despite the “great differences” between the jocks and the nerds and the Thespians, they’re all far more alike than they are different: they sit next to one another in the same classes, they’re all roughly the same age, and they’re all vying to carve out an adult identity. None of them have that much power or money (I’m not counting mommy and daddy’s). They’re all, so to speak, in the same boat—as much as they try to deny it. 

Most importantly, there is no barrier separating them from one another. They are in a situation where competition over anything and everything is possible.

[Note: a model’s location in either Celebristan or Freshmanistan is always relative to the other person. The rapper Kanye West is in Celebristan to me—but he’s not to Jay-Z. The two of them exist in Freshmanistan together because they have a relationship in which real competition is possible.]

If you lived in 1954 and had 100 students in your class, that would be your Freshmenistan. In 2021, if you’re in a class with 100 students, your Freshmenistan is those 100 kids plus every other freshman you follow on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. That’s a lot of modeling, comparing, and desire-shifting.

In Freshmanistan, things can get messy very fast. And all social media is Freshmanistan—we are surrounded by models of desire at all times. 

In a way, we’re all Freshmen again. Freshmanistan is characterized by a dangerous level of sameness, which leads to a crisis of undifferentiation—even as everyone is imitating their secret models, whom they profess to love (but secretly hate), they are desperately trying to carve out their own identities on a tiny raft, in the middle of stormy waters that threaten to swallow them up in a sea of sameness.

Go ahead, differentiate yourself. You have 180 characters.

Until next time,
Luke

>> Continue with Part II of this series on Mimetic Desire.

1 The example of Julius Caesar as an excellent Romantic Liar is inspired by work of James Warren, who includes this anecdote in his excellent book, Compassion or Apocalypse: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of René Girard.