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Joe Rogan is Burning
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Joe Rogan is Burning

How the Cancellation Ritual Harms Science

Luke Burgis
Feb 23
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Before I get to this week’s article, two important announcements:

  1. The eBook of Wanting is currently on sale for $2.99 this week only. My publisher alerted me about the down-pricing; it will never be this low again. Please consider picking up a digital copy for yourself or sharing the news with anyone you know who might enjoy the book.

  2. I will be hosting a 1-hour seminar on discovering your Core Motivational Drive with my friend, Dr. Joshua Miller, tomorrow evening. There are still about a dozen spots left (I am capping at 100). This event, like many others in the coming year, is free for Premium Subscribers on a first-come, first-served basis.

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    Thanks you, as always, for reading.

The Unwanted Side Effect of Joe Rogan’s Controversy

This article I wrote was originally published in The Scroll, a publication of the Tablet.

A segment of the public, whipped into a frenzy by baby-boomer musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, demanded that music streaming giant Spotify sacrifice popular podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant vaccines. Faced with the crime of giving a platform to guests who question the science—seemingly the best practice for advancing the state of scientific knowledge—Rogan pledged more balance, and Spotify said it would place a mandatory disclaimer before each show. This witch wasn’t so much burnt as singed, and the stock market responded to this irrational act of sacrifice as one might expect in an increasingly irrational age: Spotify’s stock rebounded in the wake of Rogan’s apology.

As we regress to a superstitious, quasi-pagan world of witch burning, civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating, and our science will ultimately suffer. But why is this so? The big answer, as I argue in my book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, is mimetic desire, the phenomenon that philosopher René Girard summarized as “desir[ing] what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Girard perceived a close connection between mimetic desire and violence. “People everywhere today are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance,” he wrote.

The mimetic contagion of anger and moral outrage is always dressed up as exceedingly rational: There are good reasons for it, in the minds of the accusers, just as there were in the minds of those who were burning witches in 17th-century Salem. There is an inverse relationship between science and sacrificial rituals because the rituals lock people into a kind of hermetic incomprehension that prevents true knowledge. The only way out for those caught up in it is not through; it’s seeing themselves as rivals to the very object of their outrage. And that is a level of self-awareness that few seem capable of reaching.

“More and more … 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,” Girard wrote. These small, interpersonal conflicts function as a microcosm of the instability that threatens the foundations of the entire world—and the world of 2022 is exceedingly unstable, at least by modern standards.

In his famous work Violence and the Sacred, Girard explained that past human societies turned to sacrifice to stave off mimetic conflict. They would expel or destroy a chosen person or group—a scapegoat—and this action would have the effect of preventing more widespread violence. By discharging their anger onto the scapegoat, societies achieved a temporary resolution of their conflict.

Girard saw this violent process as the fundamental basis of all culture. But it was an awareness of the scapegoating process and its innocent victims, particularly as described in the Old and New Testaments, that gradually altered our collective understanding of these stakes. We reached a point where victims had to be protected at all costs—sometimes even at the expense of the societies that might have been preserved by their sacrifice.


Scapegoating originally brought order out of chaos—but the resulting order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order.


For the most part, that’s an admirable sentiment. But this shift in understanding changes the fundamental way the scapegoating mechanism operates. Scapegoating originally brought order out of chaos—but the resulting order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos shakes up the “orderly” system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change it.

In today’s world, everybody seems to at least tacitly recognize the role—and the power—that victims play in effecting cultural change. James G. Williams summarized Girard’s thinking on this point: “Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power … [and] one claims victim status as a way of gaining an advantage or justifying one’s behavior.”

Self-appointed victims drawn together through mimetic desire can now fashion new scapegoats of their own choosing. Those who today seek to wield the accompanying economic or spiritual power alighted on a pair of highly visible targets in Joe Rogan and his corporate paymasters at Spotify.

In a time of confusion and uncertainty regarding the simplest of COVID-19-related messaging—the efficacy of cloth masks, the reliability of so-called “booster” shots—from official government agencies, Rogan’s social crime is readily apparent. He transgressed by using his sizable entertainment platform to host scientists and medical professionals critical of the supposedly established yet ever-shifting scientific discourse around COVID-19.

Although questioning the science is what advances scientific understanding, and charitable hearings of alternative viewpoints constitutes the bedrock of free and open civil dialogue, this isn’t what the crowd clamoring for Rogan’s head for months cared about. These people needed a sacrifice, and Rogan had gotten too big. He was willing to question nearly every cultural shibboleth in his gentle, stoner-bro way. Never mind that one of the voices that lit the pyre belonged to Neil Young, himself guilty of far more heinous remarks about gay men at the height of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The biography of the messenger was irrelevant; the fulfillment of mimetic desire and resulting implementation of the scapegoat mechanism was what mattered.

Rogan left this affair chastened but with his show and Spotify deal intact. But that likely doesn’t matter in the long run. Mimetic outrage will eventually catch up with him and many other scapegoated dissidents and contrarians. “We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats,” wrote Girard. “Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat.”

The real lesson here—the one most people will choose to ignore because it requires both grace and humility to appreciate—consists of stepping back and candidly examining our own role in sustaining this violent cycle. We need not act in haste, serving up the rash accusations and recriminations required to fuel this feedback loop of mimesis. Instead, we should respond deliberately, opting for self-reflection and personal transformation over a chance to cast more kindling into a universe-sized fire pit, irrationally participating in the burning of mob-identified witches whose true relationships to us remain unknown and perhaps even unknowable.

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Charlie
Feb 24Liked by Luke Burgis

I just found your Substack and bought your book, so my take on this might be premature. I find it interesting that the mimetic lens might be seductive insofar as it makes it too easy to draw conclusions like this. However, this is a very thought provoking idea. Like:

(1) In this theory, is there an opposite of a scapegoat? It seems that a lot of people are lionizing Joe Rogan, and really making him into a hero. If you read the comments under any of his Instagram posts, people frequently say things like how much they changed his life and how much they look up to him.

(2) There seems to be a tendency among some people to scorn people who inhabit intellectual spaces and have tendencies toward political correctness, and a related tendency to infantilize the people against whom this first camp is reacting. For example, this sentence: "Self-appointed victims drawn together through mimetic desire can now fashion new scapegoats of their own choosing." This is a great description of what's happening in thoughtpieces and on Twitter in regard to India Arie resurfacing Joe Rogan's old videos. However, it's a similarly apt description of what another group of people are doing on social media with Anthony Fauci. If you were to get 1,000 of Rogan's loudest critics in an arena and brought Rogan in by helicopter, and then do the same with another arena next door, where you got 1,000 of Fauci's loudest critics and brought him in by helicopter, which arena do you think would descend into a pre-biblical style scapegoating first? Which of these scapegoating rituals is more harmful to science?

Again, I just found this stuff and find it very fascinating, so a lot of what I'm writing might be premature and you may have touched on it already, but if mimetic desire is the desire to want what others want, then isn't it obvious that Substack would be overflowing with defenses of Joe Rogan and jeremiads concerning cancel culture? (And to be fair, wouldn't comments like mine about Anthony Fauci be at home in the NYT, Atlantic, or CNN?)

I look forward to finishing your book, and as I will pose to you now the question I take into my reading of the book: In a situation where there are two very clear, obvious camps, how do we differentiate and make ourselves independent of desires we have arrived at mimetically without accidentally just assuming a second, opposing, mimetically acquired stance?

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Dave Howlett
Feb 23

Great piece! I find myself falling prey to Kahnemann’s “System 1” thinking much more than I’d like, which I believe is what’s happening with Rogan et al. Do you have any suggestions on how to incite more “System 2” thinking when we encounter so many of these emotionally charged situations? Many thanks!

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