When I was in my late 20’s, having by then graduated from undergrad business school, worked on Wall Street, and started several companies, I realized I was totally confused. I felt pulled in a thousand different directions without an integrated source of meaning to draw from. I wanted to be fully alive, but I was stretched thin. I felt like a battery that had lost its charge.

It’s so easy for life to become siloed. I enjoyed learning on my own, I loved building things, and I had a newfound fire to explore the ancient spiritual traditions. But every place I turned seemed walled off from the others: my undergrad education (NYU Stern) and subsequent learning communities appealed to the intellect alone (I call this “Athens”); my entrepreneur friends were only interested in talking about tech, or whatever was most useful for building their companies (I call this general utilitarian-minded world “Silicon Valley”), and my religious friends (I use “Jerusalem” for shorthand) had an inside baseball of their own, a language I didn’t understand often filled with what seemed to me like cliches and other unreal words.

Making meaning involves making connections. And part of why my friends and I lacked meaning was because nobody was helping us make connections between these disparate worlds, between different aspects of reality. At a certain point, I realized that I would have to do it myself. The central mysteries of my life lacked a nexus mysteriorum: a connecting point, a bond of mysteries.

It’s a shame to only be talking about questions of philosophy or spiritual things with your religious friends. You should not only be able to talk about progress with your tech friends. And serious intellectual conversations don’t have to be confined to universities.

I believe we must de-silo our world, throw open the windows and the doors, and retake ownership of our cultural heritage and the age-old questions of anthropology (first, questions like “What does it mean to be human?” and “How should I then live?”) that lie at the heart of the human mystery.

Philosophy and theology provide keys to understanding some of the most fundamental anthropological questions. (For most of the past 2,000 years, philosophy and theology were not sequestered or kept separate from conversations the way they are now; the German research model of a university, which I won’t get into in this particular post, has played a large role in contributing to the sense of fragmentation we have now.)

So in this list, I am drawing at least two books from each century, and capping the number of books that I draw from any of the past 20 centuries at five. Therefore, what you will find below is a list in which less than 10% of the books come from the past 100 years.

What you will find in this anti-mimetic format is that you are forced to respect the time and place of each century in ways that are initially difficult, but which—by the time you are done—open up a new appreciation for the way in which knowledge, innovation, and disciplines develop across time. The approach will feel unnatural. It runs counter to the way we are used to consuming knowledge. It requires true engagement.

Each of the books I’ve selected has something important to say to us in terms of the things we create and build, but they also speak to what it means to live a good life. How that pursuit of a good life plays out in different contexts is one of the keys to understanding why we create certain things at certain times, and sets the foundation for a deeper understanding of progress. (The current “progress studies” approach seems to draw almost exclusively on recent thinking; and I think this is a deeply flawed way to think about progress.)

My promise to you is that if you make your way through even some of these books, a rich tapestry of human potential and wisdom will begin to emerge. It won’t appear as content; it will appear as art. You will begin to see the form of something new, and it will lead you deeper into the mystery.

At the very bottom of this long list, those who are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start will find a shortcut guide in three section:

1. If you only read three books…

2. If you only read five books…

3. If you only read ten books…

Alright. Without further explanation, here it is:

Philosophy for Creators—by the Century

BC: Books From Classical Antiquity

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Below is the new foreword I wrote for the Chinese edition of my book WANTING: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, published by CITIC—I’m sharing it exclusively in English with you here. I thought I’d publish it in this space since it contains some pre-history to the events that open the book, and many readers originally found this newsletter because of it.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

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An excerpt from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2021), published with permission.

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The first session of our Book Club on René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World was held Tuesday, November 29, 2023. We went for approx. 100 minutes. Sparse notes from our Zoom call are below, as well as some of the audio of the conversation that happened after our breakout sessions concluded.

N.B.—The primary place for asynchronous group discussion, setting up new book club meetings (which anyone can do—we need to self-organize by time zone!), and posing new questions/comments for the Book Club is in the Anti-Mimetic community on Mighty Networks, which can be found here. Simply navigate to “Groups” and then “Girard Book Club” in the left navigation menu.

A brief synopsis of our discussion is below. A summary of Session 1 can also be found here in Google Docs, which is meant to be a collaborative document—if you are part of the book club and would like to add/edit/organize the document, please do so in any way that you see fit. No single person is meant to “own” it.

…

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Below is the original, unedited opening to my book, Wanting, from an early draft of the manuscript. I’ve never shared it before with anyone.

The text is completely different from the opening of the published book. The prologue, in particular, is more literary and allegorical.

I thought I’d open a window into both my early thinking and the extent to which the editing process shapes a final work.

Here it is.

Wanting — Uncut

Epigraph

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”       

Milan Kundera
Author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and friend to René Girard

Prologue

Rhea Silvia got pregnant—this, after she’d been forced to be a Vestal Virgin for thirty years by her murderous uncle. Some say it was by rape. Some say by tryst. If you asked Rhea, she’d tell you that the god Mars had visited her in a secret garden. 

When Rhea gave birth to twin boys, her uncle—fearful that the boys might one day become rivals to his throne—ripped them from her arms, threw her into a cell, and ordered a servant to abandon them on the banks of the Tiber River. 

There on the banks of the muddy river, where the babies laid crying and grasping for their mother’s arms, lived a she-wolf who had recently lost her cubs. She found the babies and suckled them in a cave, protecting them from the cruel world outside. 

The twins were eventually discovered by a shepherd and his wife, and the twins grew up to be strong, natural leaders—but completely unaware of their real identities. 

Finally, after they became involved in local community politics, they learned from others who they really were. The two boys, Romulus and Remus, gathered an army of followers around them, took vengeance on their uncle, and restored the rightful king. 

Then they decided to build a city. 

As they stood atop one of the seven hills of Rome, Romulus expressed his wish to build the new city right there on the very place they were standing—on the Palatine Hill. Remus wasn’t pleased. He was adamant that the city should be built on the higher and more fortified Aventine Hill. 

For the first time in their lives, these brothers—alike in every way, including desire—had to differentiate themselves in some way. They couldn’t both want the same thing. There was room for only one of them to be the rightful founder of this new city.  

To solve their problem, they turned to the ancient art of auguring, or divining messages from the gods by watching birds in flight. Remus saw six vultures in patterned flight. Romulus saw twelve. Remus claimed victory because he saw his birds first. Romulus claimed victory because he saw more. 

Auguring only served to escalate the crisis. It quickly spread to the entire community. The two sides—the followers of Romulus and the followers of Remus—began to resemble one another almost as much as the twins. 

Whatever differences the people on each side had before the dispute had dissolved. They were bound together with one another by a tribal hatred of the other, convinced of their own rightful claim. The only difference between the two tribes, like the twins, was the choice of hill.

With no objective criteria to guide them, and with the gods remaining silent, they increased the loudness of their voices until their voices no longer mattered.

A massive fight broke out. 

When the crowds dispersed, Remus was dead. There was temporary peace. 

Rome is built on top of his bones. 

Introduction

In August of 2004, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman introduced PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg, an awkward college student who made an inarticulate pitch to Hoffman and Thiel about investing in his new company, theFacebook.

At certain points during the pitch, Zuckerberg stopped talking and stared at the table. He fumbled his way through answers to basic questions. His social skills were wanting, yet he wanted to start a social network for college students.

The site looked unimpressive. There were eight basic features like friend requests and profiles with single pictures. No wall. No pokes. No messaging. And just in case there was any doubt about who the founder was, at the bottom of the homepage was an ostentatious reminder that it was “a Mark Zuckerberg production.”

It’s easy to look at the Facebook of 2004 with today’s eyes and believe Peter Thiel had an easy decision to make.

Would you have invested, though? Take a look.

Despite the clunky user design, Zuckerberg could boast of one metric that caught everyone’s attention immediately. Within six weeks of launching on a new college campus, 80% of students were using the service. “And by using the service, I mean they checked it more than four times a day," Hoffman recalled.

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See my first post on Peter Theil’s Zero to One, which covers the Preface of the book, here.

“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie.” —John Steinbeck

Chapter 1: The Challenge of the Future

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This is Peter Thiel’s famous interview question, which he shares in the first chapter of his book Zero to One.

How would you answer it? I encourage you to share your answer in our new group thread, which you can find here. I’d love to hear.

Visit the Anti-Mimetic Thread

What’s an “important” truth, though?

Are we reasoning from the universal to the particular (“We are in a Disembodied Content Bubble typified by everyone needing to start a new podcast; therefore…) or the particular to the universal (I am convinced that Jason, despite everyone else thinking that he’s a great guy, is a narcissistic ass…; or “Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, is not really about startups”…)?

Also, there are different kinds of truths—and some truths are more important than others. This is why Thiel is asking about important truths.

But what does that mean? Metaphysical truths? First principles? Anthropological truths? Truths about an industry or underlying market fundamentals? Truths about how the world works? (For this last one, perhaps some of us could have answered: “Most people believe desire is individual, but it is interdividual, and is usually or maybe even always generated through mimesis.” But if someone gave me this answer today, I would say: “Too many people now know that…”)

How many secrets do you believe are left in the world that are given to you to know? (I admit there is a fair charge of gnosticism leveled against Girard because of questions like this from his most famous student, and/or because the name of his most famous book was nothing other than Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World—but I’d argue that this critique misunderstands Girard. But that is an essay for another day.)

The question of truth is never clearly defined in Zero to One. It is simply taken for granted.

Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, on the whole, conceive of truth in different ways. (This is part of what I call the Three City Problem.) In Athens, rationalism (leading to scientism) is most prominent. In Jerusalem, people believe that there are some truths not accessible to reason alone; they must be revealed, and faith is the only entry point to these revealed truths which do not contradict reason but lie beyond it. And Silicon Valley is largely powered by a Peircean pragmatism or Randian Objectivism: what’s true is what works.

These three cities and their way of approaching truth are in tension. So it would help to define, before we start, what kind of truth we’re talking about.

I believe that the most important truths for humanity to discover right now are anthropological truths. This is by no means the only domain of truth that is important—but it happens to be our current arena of battle.

Back to the text of our book.

Thiel admits that his interview question about rare truths is an extremely hard question to answer: “It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon,” he writes.

In school, truth is socially mediated—it is “peer reviewed”. But as we all know, there are many things that are socially-mediated and peer-reviewed which are absolutely wrong.

The idea of socially-mediated knowledge is the general gist of the book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch, which I recently learned about. The book is about, in Rauch’s own words, a process undertaken by liberal democracy in the eighteenth century which resulted in a “social system for turning disagreement into truth.”

Thiel would obviously reject the notion that a “social system” magically weaves truth out of disagreement, and in fact is more likely to result in a large network of convenient lies.

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As for the interview question, Thiel gives some examples of bad answers:

• “Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”

• “America is exceptional.”

• “There is no God.”

Many people already believe the first two statements. The third simply takes a side in a familiar debate. A good answer, he says, takes the following form: Most people in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.

It’s not immediately clear to me why the truth has to be the opposite of x. Why can’t the truth simply be something slightly different than what everyone else believes is true? Sometimes, a small difference in the truth means the different between the life and death—imagine, for instance, everyone believing that the most effective formula for a medicine were X, but the truth were X-1. The truth need not be the opposite; but it can still be just as rare.

So I reject Thiel’s notion that the “opposite” distinction is the most important part of this question. The answer could lie anywhere. It’s the truth we’re after; not contrarianism.

Thiel later gives his own answer to the question he asks in interviews:

“Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”

His statement already seems out of date. The book was written in 2014. Today, “most people” do not still believe that the future of the world will be defined by globalization. I’m not even sure that was true eight years ago. If it were, I don’t think a candidate running on a nationalist platform would have won in 2016. There were already plenty of people skeptical about the promises of globalization.

René Girard wrote:

“So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected.”

Now, let’s look at the future.

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Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, is one of the most brilliant and subversive books on startups—and on business in general—ever written.

It is ostensibly about startups, but it’s really a Straussian masterpiece that disguises difficult truths in a text that appears, on the surface, to be talking merely about business. It puts forward a worldview shaped heavily by René Girard.

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Preface

Zero to One opens with a strong warning against imitation. Importantly, it ties imitation to learning:

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page of Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Imitation is how we learn many things—how to speak languages, how to play sports, how to do well in school (yes, there is a way to do well in school that has little to do with intelligence; many students learn it from a young age by imitating those who do well in school, often to the detriment of their own personality.)

The most important kind of learning, though, is learning how to create something new. And that is a very different skill.

Imagine an apprentice who is in the workshop of a famous artist learning the craft of making bronze statues. The form of the statue to be created is always given by the Master. At a certain point, the apprentice asks the Master: “So tell me, how do you come up with the ideas for the statues in the first place?”

The Master smiles and pats the student on the back. He knows his ability to teach this creative art is impossible for him to fully transmit.

Thiel acknowledges this idea later in the Preface:

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.

I joke with my own business school students that after a hitman visited me at my home in Las Vegas to collect a debt, I wanted to go back to my $65,000/year undergrad business school and ask them for my money back because they never taught me what to do in the 2008 debt spiral when you get mixed up with the wrong people on the Strip.

There is no roadmap. We create a new one every day, as the next bend and the next field comes into view.

The Master artist, like the Master entrepreneur, knows this secret: The creative process that leads to real innovation is far more mysterious and far less teachable—you might even say spiritual.

There is indeed a kind of mystical element that Thiel seems to ascribe to the act of going from zero to one. In traditional Jewish and Christian theology, going from zero to one is called creation ex nihilo—or the creation of something “out of nothing,” a quality the scriptures give to God alone.

I think there is a better way to think of creation which doesn’t require the conceit of thinking that we create things ex nihilo, yet which still acknowledges our tremendous capacity to participate in the continuing act of creation as humans.

Each person is a relational, mimetic creature—the difference is in the nature and quality of our imitation and the person or thing being imitated. There are at least three different kinds of imitation:

Static imitation is simply copying someone else. Tone-matching in emails is an example of this. It doesn’t create or destroy anything: it might establish rapport or maybe even empathy, but it keeps a baseline.

Destructive imitation is the kind of tit-for-tat competitive imitation that results in a zero-sum game, or in the destruction of one of the participants. The imitation of aggression in war is one particularly dangerous example of this. The language of war is often used in business schools, and it has led to the destruction of many companies (and lives).

Generative imitation creates something new by taking imitation and combining it (raising it to the power of) with critical thinking, courage, boldness, and a willingness to do something for which there is no model. It is imitation combined with an anti-mimetic act.

Imitation is the runway; the anti-mimetic act is the moment of take-off.

A great jazz musician must first learn music through imitation. Without that foundation, he doesn’t have the freedom to play anything new.

The same was true of Zuckerberg before he founded Facebook: he established baseline skills in coding that gave him the freedom to build something to seize an opportunity.

And here’s another interesting thought experiment: Parents are generative because they have the ability to create new life. A man and a woman are able to do this naturally in the sexual act because there is some Otherness in their partner—a kind of complementarity, the union of which transcends the capabilities of either partner alone.

There is a lesson to be learned from sex when it comes to a theory of creativity: entrepreneurship and transcendence go hand in hand because without a notion of alterity—without the willing exploration of that which is mysteriously Other—we are caught in a feedback loop which produces (at best) incremental improvements to existing structures.

It is the willingness to go beyond where we are currently at—even risking a radical new way of life (as a parent, perhaps)—that allows new life, and a new creation, to happen.

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The second paragraph of Zero to One goes on to explain what the title of the book means, and it also doubles-down on the mystical notion of creation we explored above. [italics mine]

Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

The idea of 0 to 1 is pushed too far here, in my view.

To see why, let’s go back to the creation of a new human person—the parenting example. Yes, when parents make a baby they are “doing what we already know how to do” and taking the world from 1 to n, according to the book’s analogy.

But they are not just “adding more of something familiar.” Each person is fresh, strange, unique and unrepeatable. And children are the agents of new creations (as free, acting persons who might invent something that changes the world someday) which bring about that which is both familiar and unfamiliar—familiar because they share the genes of both parents, but unfamiliar in that they are a separate, unique person, who will exist in a different place and time and in a different body.

Does it seem strange to be bringing sex into the picture so soon in a book that is about ‘startups’? Maybe. But it’s the single-greatest way that humans create, and it sheds light on the question at hand. In life-giving sex, there is both zero to one and the zero to n happening at the same time, on two different levels. It is both-and.

The point is that creation is not so easily categorized, and the binary that is set-up in the first pages of this book is not the way that creation often happens. The concept of ‘zero to one’ is, however, a helpful reduction in understanding the difference between mimetic and anti-mimetic actions. But it does create fundamental philosophical, anthropological, and theological problems which we’ll explore later, especially once we get to Chapters 6 (“You Are Not a Lottery Ticket”) and 14 (“The Founder’s Paradox”).

Back to the Preface:

Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

I hate ‘best practices’ because I wake up everyday believing I can find a better practice—for most things, at least.

But it’s not always the case that ‘the best paths are new and untried.’ Take, for example, the pathway of religious traditions. Here’s G.K. Chesterton on Christianity.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Aside from spiritual paths, the pathway of virtue is also ancient. Aristotle laid it out in his Nichomachean Ethics, and millions of men and women have tried to walk it since. There is nothing esoteric or complex about it; it is not a hard path to find. It is simply a hard path to walk. There’s nothing terrible innovative about it, yet it’s terribly rare to find someone who possesses a high degree of many different virtues.

I know we’re not talking about business here; we are, rather, talking about a baseline without which the innovation will always be in the wrong direction. I am trying to stretch Zero to One to its limits because, as I said in the beginning, it is not merely a business book but a worldview.

I like Rowan Williams’ definition of creation. He says that it’s “the setting in being of a living system designed to grow toward beauty and order, even if this beauty and order is not at any given moment fully apparent.”

He is talking about creation that properly attends to the created order, not a kind of blank-slate ‘innovation’ that dispenses with reality or tries to refashion it according to its own laws.

I see this problem playing out in the debacle that is ‘social media’. Nobody designing these platforms took the time to properly attend to what human relationships and communication is, or think seriously about how these platforms might enhance it rather than alter it. They jumped straight to the creation, and they optimized for growth and profit.

Responsible creation, on the other hand, is about attending to the integrity of what is already there (things like human relationships, or nature).

Consider the example that RJ Snell, author of Acedia and Its Discontents, uses:

Attending at-tends—tends to—in awareness of and care for the nature of things. This is what it means to be a husband in the agricultural sense of knowing the carrying capacity of land…If the husband knows (pays attention) and cares (tends), he can rotate the cattle from plot to plot in a way which provides ample nutrition for the good of the cattle without harm to the grass or the soil, and, given particularly intelligent husbandry, to the benefit of the soil and grass itself…

Without that initial attending and intelligence that grasps the nature of things, the farmer’s innovations will always do some violence to what is already there. The farmer who attends, though, could build some fantastic technology that develops the soil—but he does so after having gained a profound understanding of the soil and the ecosystem he is working in.

Can we say the same about some of the people leading technological innovation in the domain of human communication?

Let’s continue.

Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

It’s impossible for me to read this line without thinking of the black monolith that appears to the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Watch this scene carefully, keeping in mind Girard’s conception of mimetic theory and particularly his conception of the scapegoat mechanism as a kind of ‘social technology’. We’ll be revisiting this scene as we get further into this book.

Let’s bring in one more resource. In his book Miracles, C.S. Lewis writes: “Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”

Perhaps we can relate this to what Thiel is saying here (and what 2001: A Space Odyssey) is hinting at: technology appears miraculous to us because it harnesses powers in nature that we simply did not know existed. Technology allows us to transcend some previously existing boundary and explore it in greater depth.

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Books are always in conversation with other books. In the case of James Clear and I, I’m grateful that this conversation has extended beyond the books to a personal chat. Below I’ll explain one of the many important connections I seen between his book, Atomic Habits, and my book, Wanting. James weighs in with a few words of his own in response to a few questions from me. I hope you enjoy.

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What follows is a story that was originally intended to appear in Chapter 2 of Wanting. A special thanks to Dan Wang for making me aware of it. I’ve made this short excerpt available here as part of the extended cut material I plan to release to premium subscribers to this newsletter in 2022.

In the summer of 2017, ten members of Harvard’s incoming class of 2021 class had their offers of acceptance rescinded after administrators discovered a Facebook group of newly admitted students sharing raunchy memes. At one point, the group was called “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens.”

The newly admitted freshmen had started out in a “normal” Facebook group set-up by the university itself with the intention of helping classmates get to know each other. But soon after the group was formed, a few members broke off and started a secret spinoff group. 

To join the secret group, students in the original group had to post a “dark” meme publicly to prove their worthiness to enter the private group. The memes quickly became sexually explicit and offensive, targeting minorities and feminists (among others).

Cassandra Luca, who joined the official Harvard Class of 2021 Facebook group—but not the “dark” group—tried to explain why the original group started to get edgy. It was, in her words, a “just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-have-fun kind of thing.” 

Maybe. But what was the second group about, then?

One possible answer comes into view with an awareness of how mimetic rivalry works in a closed environment where everyone has a lot in common. This is what I’ve referred to in this book as “Freshmanistan”—the world of internal mediation, where desires are mediated to people from inside of their own world. Yes, the irony is deep: these Harvard freshman, like all freshmen and first years anywhere, are literally in Freshmanistan.

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The most plausible raison d'être for the second group, at least from a mimetic framework, is that it was a Just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we’re-alike kind of thing.

The question of identity was on the line for each of the students. In an environment where everyone is smart, they needed a way to figure out who was who. Everyone may be smart, but not everyone can be, or wants to be, a shitpoaster.

A dividing line had been drawn, and it helped to relieve some of the initial terror of being in a room where everyone looks the same.

Recall this fascinating fact from earlier: Identical twins are always involved in stories of violence against one another in nearly all of the world’s mythology. Sameness is a threat. And no threat is more dangerous than the sameness of desire.

It’s one thing if someone mistakenly wears the same shirt that we’re wearing; it’s another thing entirely if they wanted to wear the same shirt.

Now when we’re talking about hundreds highly ambitious Ivy League

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This is part of the story behind the story found in the introduction to my book, Wanting. I’ve never told this part before.

My story was sad. But like anyone addicted to Hustle Porn and hustle culture, I didn’t believe in sad stories—let alone my own. Like most entrepreneurs, I was extraordinarily good at lying to myself, at creating a carefully curated presentation of my self in the world (‘self’ with a lowercase ‘s’, because I was not a real Self at that point). Social media before social media.

I found that when entrepreneurs did share stories of adversity or failure, they inevitably included a “but then…”

The moment of triumph.

And they always fit an archetypical narrative arc so perfectly that at some point I realized something was off. My story and my experience was simply not tracking.

Either their stories were true and unrecognizable to me because I was on a different track; or their stories were not the real stories. There was the possibility that my experience was real, but nobody had the balls, or self-awareness, or time to tell their own. A lonely place.

I suspected this strange phenomenon extended way beyond the startup world and into workplaces everywhere. Perhaps the gradually recognition of the mimetic traps is partly behind the so-called ‘Great Resignation.’ It’s worth asking, though: what are people resigning from? It is really a job? Or is it the pursuit of an unfulfilled desire that has finally been exposed as shallow and thin?

Back to the early 2000’s: I was on a hyper-mimetic track in college. I graduated from NYU Stern (I fought ridiculously hard to be near the top of my class, even with the infamous ‘Stern curve’—the most mimetic grading system known to man), worked on Wall Street (and for a small private equity shop for a short period of time), and finally made my way to California where I sank my end-of-year bonus—and eventually about $150,000 in credit card debt, too (yes, they gave me that much)—into my first startup.

Fast forward about six years. Even after having had success, I was miserable. I hadn’t been able to cultivate anything even remotely resembling a healthy relationship. When I wasn’t working, I was in the gym blasting EDM directly into my eardrums and texting clients, partners, and vendors between sets.

I knew—at least in those rare moments when I was honest with myself—that I had a hole in my soul. I also knew that listening to podcasts on stoicism, going to yoga, or making a pilgrimage to look at an effigy of a burning man in the desert weren’t going to save me. Around that same time, a bunch of friends were running the Las Vegas Rock’n’Roll Marathon (I was living in Henderson, NV, by this point), but I couldn’t help but thinking: ‘What are they running from?).

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One night I was in a casino with the late Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who was a heavy smoker. He planned to run the marathon that year. He told me that he followed a program that he found online where you could go from being almost completely sedentary (and smoking) to running a full marathon in just 3 months of preparation, as long as you follow the prescription exactly. “It’s science,” he told me as he took a drag from his cig that night in the casino. He was starting the program the next day. “You should do it.”

“No thanks,” I replied. Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I felt like any physical pain that I would’ve endured preparing to run the marathon would’ve been a poor substitute for the spiritual pain that I needed to endure in order to come to grips with my many faults and failings.

I woke up the next morning with a burning desire to go to confession with a priest. I was raised Catholic, but I hadn’t been to church in a very long time—and I hadn’t confessed my sins to a priest since I was about nine years old, at St. Andrew’s Elementary school in downtown Grand Rapids, MI. (And c’mon, does that even count? I think I may have been mean to a cat or something at that point.).

So I made my way to the Guardian Angel Cathedral on the Las Vegas strip—literally right next to the Wynn Casino where I’d gotten wasted the night before.

I poured out everything I could remember to this poor priest during the general confession time (open to the public) prior to the noon mass. I was in there for about 15 minutes, holding up the massive line behind me (who knew? there is demand for forgiveness in Vegas…). When I was done, the priest asked me to sit in silence in the church for 10 minutes and to consider doing something ‘generous’ for the poor (likely because part of what I had confessed to him was the squandering of my money on frivolous and selfish things).

I think that when you have multiple bank accounts with a certain number of digits in them, various outstanding debts, and the ability to win (or lose) large six-figure contracts overnight, money becomes something very abstract, and there is a strong temptation toward financial nihilism—in other words, a way of thinking that making and losing a lot of money is easy and relatively untethered to any form of real ‘value creation’, and that ‘nothing really matters, certainly not this bottle of Greygoose I’m about to buy for $500—it’s just money.’

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I did my time in penance and dropped whatever cash I had on me in the ‘Poor Box’ on my way out of the Church, and I left feeling an extreme sense of understated peace. There were no tears, no heart-wrenching agony. No montage music started playing as I walked to the car. But I drove home knowing that something important had happened, and I’d just experienced the most radical honesty and vulnerability and mercy of my life.

‘Mercy’ was word was on my mind for the rest of the day and the week. What role does mercy have in business, if any? How I live a less transactional life? What does it mean to build a company and create a company culture that rewards acts of heartbreaking love just as much as and maybe more than works of staggering genius?

I had no answers, but I distinctly felt like I needed a re-eduction in what it means to be human.

So much of my humanity had been stripped from me. In the tireless effort to ‘grow’ my businesses, there was little energy left for personal growth. My humanity had been stripped from me because I had stripped it from myself; it was the same baneful wear and tear that makes med school students begin to start walking out in public in sweatpants having not showered for three days, so focused as they are on studying, and which makes it hard to look at a person and not see merely a body. Market forces, in their own way, have a way of making us lose sight of the person at the heart of the market.

What is it that you are studying, Luke, by running yourself into the ground like this? Markets? Politics? ‘Business’? ‘Success’? And to what end? All of these things came down, I thought, to the study of desire. Markets are simply a reflection of what people want; how people vote is an indication of what people want or don’t want. And success in business has come to be thought of as Adding Value™—yet what kind of value? That, too, has everything to do with desire.

This phrase Adding Value™ seems to mean the value that one places on unfulfilled desires, so you ‘add value’ whenever you help someone fulfill a desire whether it is leading them to fulfillment or misery. In the horizontal exchange of value, each party subjectively fulfills a desire which they value, on the margin, more than the other party.

If you take it far enough, ‘Adding value’ usually means nothing more than ‘adding desires.’ That is why, as Adam Curtis terms it, the economy became one giant Happiness Machine beginning in the early 20th century.

(In the video below, you’ll learn all about Eddie Bernay’s and his Torches of Freedom stunt, which I mention in the first chapter of Wanting. Some great video footage of the man…)

The idea of ‘value’ seemed to me to be one of the most convoluted and confusing words in the English language. Does anyone actually knows what it means? Doesn’t seem like it.

I made it through four years of undergrad business school getting asked questions like ‘What’s your ‘value proposition’? without anyone ever stopping to seriously explain what the fuck value really means. It is understood vaguely, at most. I believe in values and in ‘value’, don’t get me wrong, but it is curious how this word and the idea it represents has taken on mythic proportions.

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​We hear a lot about goal setting, but hardly anything about why we are so obsessed with goal setting in the first place. Many of us relentlessly pursue goals — which we take for granted as good — without pausing to ask ourselves whether we should.

​There’s a meta dimension to goal setting. What are the circumstances and environments out of which certain kinds of goals emerge? Where, or who, do we adopt our goals from in the first place?

It turns out that there are systems of desire behind nearly every goal — from education to investing to social media — which generate and shape the goals of the people within the systems. And the systems I’m referring to are systems of desire.

​We should spend a lot more time thinking about these systems — even mapping them out and understanding our place within them — and less time talking about how to achieve the many socially derived goals that emerge from them.

If we see the systems, we gain the ability t…

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What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. - Franz Kafka

How do you choose which books to read?

In my early twenties, I defaulted into books—I read the easy stuff that came to me naturally.

All of us default into things—career choices, relationships, diets—without exercising personal intentionality. That intentional choosing is an important skill to develop in life, but it’s not easy. Books are an easy place to start, though.

When I say that “I read the easy stuff”, I don’t mean page-turners or Dan Brownesque thrillers; and I don’t mean the books that make the bestseller lists or a celebrity author’s ‘Book Picks of the Year.’

(I learned how most ‘top lists’ work over the past year, and Good God, it’s depressing.)

I’m also not referring to the eas…

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Introduction

A reminder that Anti-Mimetic has a growing Discord community. If you haven’t already, please consider dropping by and introducing yourself. Here’s the private link: https://discord.gg/w4XNMB72HM

Today’s topic: the reflexivity of books, plus a few selections from my library.

(Above: that’s not my library. It is the home library of former Johns Hopkins University Humanities professor Richard A. Macksey, once a friend and colleague of René Girard.)

The Reflexivity of Books

Winston Churchill famously said that “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The remark came during a debate about how to rebuild the Commons Chamber, which had been bombed during a blitz. He advocated keeping an adversarial rectangular structure in place because he believed that two-party debate was essential to British parliamentary democracy—and that the shape of the old chamber had been directly responsible for the form of the debate.

Could we not say the same thing about books? Th…

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I realize some of this might be “basic”, or a review, for those of you who have followed my newsletter for a while now. It’s meant to be a very simple intro for people who have never heard of René Girard or the term mimesis. But sometimes hearing things more than once and in different formats brings some clarity.

If you’re in the States, have a great Fourth of July!

Best,
Luke

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about how mimetic theory relates to the cryptocurrency markets, be sure to follow my friends at Bankless HQ for a long-form podcast episode that drops on Monday.

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This is early-process writing that I did for Wanting, adapted for Substack. This story didn’t make it into the book—not because I don’t think it’s important, but because it would’ve broken the flow of a chapter. Not to mention this thing called ‘word count.’

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​We hear a lot about goal setting, but hardly anything about why we are so obsessed with goal setting in the first place. Many of us relentlessly pursue goals — which we take for granted as good — without pausing to ask ourselves whether we should.

​There’s a meta dimension to goal setting. What are the circumstances and environments out of which certain kinds of goals emerge? Where, or who, do we adopt our goals from in the first place?

It turns out that there are systems of desire behind nearly every goal — from education to investing to social media — which generate and shape the goals of the people within the systems. And the systems I’m referring to are systems of desire.

​We should spend a lot more time thinking about these systems — even mapping them out and understanding our place within them — and less time talking about how to achieve the many socially derived goals that emerge from them.

If we see the systems, we gain the ability to see goals that lie outside them.

Moving Goalpo…

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Below is the prologue to my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

In the summer of 2008, I experienced the moment many start-up founders live for: I learned that I would be able to cash out on my company’s success. After an intense period of courtship spanning several months, I was on my way to have celebratory drinks with the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Zappos was going to acquire my e-commerce company for wellness products, FitFuel .com.

About an hour earlier, Tony had sent me a direct message on Twitter (his preferred form of communication at the time) asking me to meet him at the Foundation Room, a bar on the sixty-third floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. I knew that he had attended a board meeting earlier that day and that one of the agenda items was the acquisition. He wouldn’t be inviting me to the Strip if the news was not good.

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I’d been pacing around my house all day. I needed the deal to go through. Fit Fuel was burning through cash. Despite our …

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Wide is the road that leads to destruction, and narrow is the path that leads to creation—to life.

Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, said: “Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one.”

I think Naval is partly right. We certainly have to suffer in order to fulfill our greatest desire. But you don’t pick your single greatest desire; your single greatest desire picks you. Your job is to recognize and embrace it.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing more about my journey and the spiritual dimension of mimetic theory—including sacrifice, the origins of violence, the role of prohibitions and taboos, the scapegoat mechanism, and how and why we’re all religious. So strap in.

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There’s no avoiding it. If we don’t go there, mimetic desire will only be understood at a surface level. There’s no life hack or tool or technology that solves the “problem” of mimetic desire. In fact, it’s not a problem at all. It’s a reality. It’s part of human nature.

I believe that…

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In the introductory edition of this newsletter, I promised that subscribers would get unpublished material from my upcoming book, Wanting, plus a deeper dive into the material that wouldn’t necessarily be suitable for a general-interest reader.

So today I’m sharing a draft Preface to Wanting that was ultimately cut from the final edition. My hope was that by laying out the founding myth of Rome (a city where I lived for three years), we could begin to see how the fight for political power is playing out in the modern world. The story includes nearly every step in the mimetic process.

You may be familiar with it. But here it is, in my own words.

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