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Franz Kafka wrote one of his most important works near the end of his life, a short story he titled A Hunger Artist, published in 1922.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, “fasting artists”—basically, living skeletons—were exhibited at fairs and circuses. People paid a price to see and marvel at them. In Kafka’s story, crowds lose interest in the main protagonist, a stricken hunger artist. He is dragged out of his cage and replaced by a muscular and menacing panther.

Our fascinations wax and wane with the mimetic tide.

According to René Girard, Kafka’s story is an allegory of our entire culture. He wrote this about it [words in brackets mind]:

“Certain trends were visibly at work in our culture [even in 1922] long before they influenced our alimentation, and the current prominence of physical anorexia and its bulimic variations must be regarded as an essential moment in the tragic and grotesque revelation of what is happening to us, which is much more significant than an epidemic [pandemic] that would hit us at random, or a bizarre cultural fad [insert your favorite here] unconnected with the general evolution of our society.”

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I continue to hear variations, even book-length ones, of the “social media is ruining our society” arguments. I’ve begun to wonder if it’s just a subtle version of the scapegoat mechanism. Sure, social media has had negative effects. I’ve written about some of them in Wanting. But those of us who use it are attracted by something that is fundamentally good. What that good thing is, though, is not the subject of this week’s newsletter.

The thinning and thickening of desires is the theme, and I’d like to briefly explore that theme across eight specific domains. As far as social media goes, though, I would propose the following perspective:

(Summed up beautifully by @CosmosTheInLost with h/t @Pseudoplotinus for pointing out to me).

Our unwelcome and old friend, the mimetic rival, comes to visit again. And this time he fits in our pocket and into the palm of our hand.

Eight Theaters of Battle

It seems increasingly hard to develop thick desires—enduring, sustainable, and ultimately fulfilling desires—in a world that is becoming mimetically thin, where the petty rivalries dominate politics and Hot Take Artists sit in their cages, hungrier than ever while inducing hunger in others.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of people this past year who admit to being unable to identify or name a single thick desire. I’ve become convinced that recovering them and feeding them—especially those that represent the highest and greatest parts of humanity—is a mission worthy of undertaking. Certainly a mission worthy of my time.

I do believe that that work is partly an anamnesis, a remembering, to borrow a term from Plato. If we forget what it means to be human, the enemies of humanity win. Because how can we even know what we’re fighting for, or what to defend, if we have forgotten what our homeland looks like?

There are eight spheres of culture which I think are primary contributors to the thinning out of desire: education, institutions, politics, technology, our relationship with sex, work, art, and the media.

In each of these domains, there are structural incentives that make humans want less, not more, of what their hearts most deeply desire: to be fully alive.

Here are a few words about each, with the intent to explore each of them in greater depth (some of that will happen in the group learning experience that is being developed—more on that at the bottom of this newsletter):

Education

Education is focused to such an extent on new ‘programs’ and ‘standards’—with entrepreneurs intent on ‘disrupting’ old ‘systems’, and universities completely caught in self-preservation mode—that the unique person at the heart of education has been lost. The best education is personalized education. It is not entirely scalable.

Because our current model represents one of the strongest mimetic systems in existence, it is generating thin desires—and it is profiting off of them and making it harder for people to discover who they truly are. In fact, most education is specifically designed to make them forget, or become confused about what it is they want and who they most fundamentally are.

Institutions

I generally follow Girard’s understanding of cultural institutions as katechons, or things that restrain violence. Girard himself probably would have been surprised that our institutions have been able to constrain violence so well—and perhaps that is why every time we think we’re on the brink of some cataclysmic event like nuclear war, the fears turn out to be a bit premature.

Yet institutions like NATO are being revealed as thinner than we thought they were—it’s almost as if they might crumble under the weight of a single rock. NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin because it scarcely recognizes that he has any.

And that is the case with any of our cultural institutions: underneath the marketing pablum lie real people with real desires. And they are messier than we think.

Politics

The right and the left sound increasingly alike: monstrous doubles to one another, horrified by their own reflections in the mirror, projecting the worst of themselves onto their enemy. I’ve seen people become shells of themselves in the past 5 years, having given themselves over like a sacrificial holocaust to the mimetic game.

Thick desires have been left behind; thin desires, like impressing their favorite politician with a spicy and rhetorically aggressive take on twitter, totally dominate. They’re ‘winning’.

And we can no longer pretend that the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the American government can function as they were intended to when the first thing someone thinks to do when they encounter resistance is to change the rules forever.

The idea that the rules are ‘unjust’ in the first place is a tacit recognition that every institution does indeed participate in violence, and it preserves itself through that violence. There is always an outside and an inside.

So those who cry foul do not know quite how right they are, but it would be no use telling them.

How do we find a transcendent good that is able to unite people and make them stand shoulder to shoulder, as friends in search of truth? It seems like many have given up on that ever happening. I have not.

In order to break out of the mimetic cycle were going to need to find something worth hoping for. As hope dies, so too does the ability to follow any form of transcendent desire that goes beyond the existing, pathetic, paradigm.

Technology

Technology, including social media, both exacerbates and diffuses mimetic desire at the same time. It’s similar to printing an excess supply of money: we don’t realize that we have so much of it floating around because it is constantly being funneled into new projects—and markets have provided unlimited outlets for the expression of it.

Social media has brought tremendous benefits to humanity; it has also stretched us beyond what we are morally capable of handling. C.S. Lewis said it best:

"We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function."

Simply privatizing Twitter, as Elon Musk is trying to —under the guise of just protecting ‘free speech’—solves very few problems. They are structural, and they are mimetic.

I often wonder what would happen if social media had a way of holding up a mirror to each user and giving them a more accurate picture of who they really are—revealing them to themselves, like the alcoholic who is finally confronted with the 30 cans of beers he drank over the past 3 days and looks on in abject horror as his wife digs them one by one out of the trash can hidden in the corner of the garage.

If we can find a way to represent to people the destruction that people have caused online and show them the negative impact not only on others but at least on themselves, then perhaps some will have the fortitude to change. Until then, they (we) are looking through a one-way mirror.

Sex

Readers will know by now that I believe pornography is one of the primary scourges on our culture, particularly our youth. I’ve been asked several times about its relationship to mimetic desire. The ways are almost too numerous to count, and certainly for me to elaborate on here. It will be a separate post this year.

To start with, though: Every time a young boy watches porn he is literally watching a mimetic model, an adult, show him what to desire—a particular kind of partner, or a particular kind of sex—and the kid lives vicariously through that model. He then undergoes the pain and humiliation and loss of self-worth associated with constantly degrading himself at the feet of his mimetic model, mediated to him through the faint glow of a laptop screen in the darkness.

Where does all of that energy go? Underground. He attempts to act out all of his mimetic desire and rivalry by using other people and acting our not just sexual fantasies but mimetic fantasies in real life.

The porn actor, who has become the perpetual model-obstacle for the viewer, drives desires underground where they play out in bedrooms and behind laptop screens every minute of every day in nearly every corner of the country.

If porn weren’t the epitome of thin desire, then people wouldn’t throw away their movies or move on to the next ‘Hub’ site as soon as their last session were done: its allure only lasts about as long as the first meeting. There is nothing more left to see.

The problem with porn is not that it shows too much but that it shows too little—it doesn’t show the full humanity of any of the actors. If it did, viewers would run away in terror.

But all of this is hidden from the enraptured viewer: there is always another fleeting moment to capture, another thin desire to stoke.

Work

If more people’s work was rooted in thick desires, we would not have undergone the great resignation and seen a record number of people express dissatisfaction with their jobs these past few years.

Yet the disillusionment with traditional work arrangements is a sign of hope: it means that people aren’t completely dead. We can now begin to think seriously about the meaning of work, and perhaps break free from the old notion of work being something you do for money so you can live the rest of your life.

This is why one of my favorite memes of the past few years—one of only two that have stuck with me—has been Oliver Bateman’s “Do the Work” slogan, which he applies to almost everything from bench pressing to copyediting to eating right.

Work is part of a co-creative process through which we become who we are, and so everything becomes a kind of beautiful work when viewed in the right light.

Some people do the work; many do not. And now I’ll close out the work of writing this paragraph.

Art

This newsletter is named Anti-Mimetic, but by anti-mimetic I never mean the unhealthy obsession with thinking of oneself as original. In fact, I think one of the best things that I can learn to do is become a good imitator—and a good imitator of the right models.

(Readers of scripture will know that the Apostle Paul even exhorts the young church: “Be imitators of me, just as I am an imitator of Christ,” he says.) Other spiritual and artistic traditions have similar sayings, and there has been a long (but dying) tradition of apprenticeship by which a disciple immerses himself in the life of an unrivalrous master to learn.)

When it comes to the false notion of ‘anti-mimetic’, though, René Girard himself saw how ridiculous thin mimetic desires had taken over the world of art. It is one of the only times he uses the phrase ‘anti-mimetic’:

“In all arts, beginning with painting, and continuing with music, architecture, literature, and philosophy, the ideal of radicalism and revolution have long been dominant. What these labels concretely imply is the escalation of a competitive game, which invariably consists in discarding one by one all traditional principles and practices of every art. The late comers being still dedicated to the same anti-mimetic principles as their predecessors, they must paradoxically imitate them by doing away with whatever has not yet been discarded by the previous waves of radicalism. With each generation, a new batch of iconoclasts boast they they are the sole genuine revolutionists, but they all really imitate one another, and the more they try, the less they can get away from imitation.”

All the hipsters leave the beaten path and fall, one by one, into the same ditch…

Media

The landscape of media is shifting beneath our feet as rival factions work to build their own networks, free from contamination by their enemies—free from coercion or policed speech or wokeness or anti-wokeness or [insert a grievance].

The list goes on. And it’s ironic because the new things being built are mimetic echo chambers within walled cities; the solutions are contributing to the problem—and not only contributing, but making the problem 10x worse.

Meanwhile, the legacy media keeps churning out content but knows it has to say things in ‘sharper’ ways to provoke the right reactions, whether from friends or foes.

But to think of the media as such a different beast than what is already happening in private is to miss the soil out of which the media has grown. The media is merely a reflection of what’s happening on the ground all over the world.

I’ve been invited to a number of conferences in recent years—things falling on what you could call both the political right and the left—where the ever-predictable ‘speaker lineups’ read like jokes: the same people at the same events saying the same things, over and over again, ad nauseam, to raucous applause. It’s about throwing and devouring red meat, with some awkward networking mixed in.

I often wonder what value there is in attending these things, and then I remember that red meat, properly cooked (medium rare) tastes really good. And that’s the strongest case for veganism I’ve ever heard.

Coda: Update on the Small Group Learning Experience

Thank you to all of you (hundreds now) who have expressed interest in the Small Group Learning Course/Experience that I have been exploring over the past couple of months.

I am finally starting to gain some clarity on what it might look like, and I’m in the early stages of drafting a plan. The tuition may change, but the early-admission price is going to be $1500 for non-premium subscribers and $750 for premium subscribers for a 45-day, intensive experience beginning either later this summer or early in the fall. It will require anywhere between 4-8 hours of weekly commitment, with several of those being group Zoom calls.

Premium subs will be invited first and be able to reserve seats first; if there is still any room left, I will open up seats to everyone else.

If you haven’t already, please fill out this form to help me gather more feedback.

I am still looking for a handful of experienced people to volunteer as facilitators. Facilitators will have tuition completely waived. Please drop an email to m@lukeburgis.com (if you haven’t already done so) if you have any interest in being part of the leadership team for this pilot program. It would involve a light commitment from you as part of a working group with me and the other facilitators in the lead-up to the course. I am also looking for:

1. A highly organized person and excellent writer who help with ‘Curriculum Design’ so that after the initial cohort is finished things will be codified and improved for round 2. Experience preferred. This is a paid position.

2. I am looking for an Executive Assistant to help me organize and run this project and help with scheduling, communication, and general organization. Work-from-home, ~10 hrs. week. Looking for longer-term commitment.

Lastly, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to a few of you in the past couple of weeks and it has filled me with confidence that I can pull this off—and that the experience will be powerful, if for no other reason than the quality of the participants and the wealth of experience and generosity they (hopefully you) will be bringing to the table.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Luke