I’ve just written this essay for the Ideas section of WIRED Magazine. It’s titled:

“THE THREE CITY PROBLEM OF MODERN LIFE: What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem—and what do either have to do with Silicon Valley?”

Yes, I flipped it.

I am trying to articulate in a more thorough way what I have alluded to here before: my belief that the world is clustering into at least three different groups, each one with its own epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions. This makes it extremely difficult—some think impossible—to co-exist with the others.

These three groups, which I refer to as cities (each with its own rulers), are more fundamental categories than political categories. In other words, there are people on the Right and the Left who live almost exclusively in Athens, Jerusalem, or Silicon Valley. The inhabitants of the cities have more in common with one another than the inhabitants of a ‘party.’ They are secretly mixed together.

Here is an adapted excerpt from my essay:

Two-body problems, like mapping the movement of one planet around one star, are solvable. These binary orbits are easy to predict. But a serious complication arises if a third body is introduced. The moon, because both the sun and the earth’s gravitational forces are acting upon it simultaneously, is part of an infamous three-body problem. 

Trying to solve for the movement of three large bodies in one another’s orbit creates a circular logic—the calculations rely on the initial positions of the three bodies, but these initial positions are unknowable over time because the bodies always affect one another in unpredictable ways.

The three-body problem is the best metaphor I’ve found for a social complexity that affects us all today—a problem resulting from the interaction of three major centers of gravity, or three ideologies. This dynamic is scrambling our intuitions and making us long for order in what feels like an increasingly chaotic world. We’re caught on the inside of a three-city problem. 

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked the Christian apologist Tertullian in the third century. By this he meant: What does the reason of the philosophers have to do with the faith of believers?…

But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of a great entrepreneur to not be “reasonable”), nor by the things of the soul (the dominant belief seems to be a form of materialism); it is a place, rather, governed by the creation of value. And a large component of value is utility—whether something is useful, or is at least perceived as good or beneficial.

I’d like to elaborate briefly on one aspect of the Three City Problem that didn’t make it into the article due to space constraints—namely, what life might look like for an Anti-Mimetic person of the future who resists the isolationism that the rulers of each place seem to believe is necessary in order to build their empires. Each is built on a reductionistic vision of what it means it means to be human.

Who will resist?

Living in the space between the three cities—or at the intersection—may require some adaptations like the Fremen in Frank Herbert’s Dune books. The Fremen (originally called “Free Men” in an earlier outline of Herbert’s) lived in small groups called sietches in rocky formations in the desert of the planet Arrakis.

I am not suggesting the answer to the three-city problem is more isolationism. Quite the opposite. I am looking at the Fremen as the only people who are not isolating inside the comfortable walls of an ideological city—who choose to live in the harsh and messy reality in the space between them. More specifically, I’m thinking about the adaptations they had to undergo in order to not sell their souls or lose an essential part of their humanity, or their culture, or their freedom.

What adaptations will be necessary for us in this three-city world?

The force driving people to cluster in each of these three cities is a form of mimesis. Living an integrated life, then, is an anti-mimetic act.

A few of the adaptations that I think are necessary for these “New Fremen” to live well in this new world are:

1. The development of an incredibly thick skin. I’m beginning to realize that there is a direct correlation between thick desires and thick skin. Only people with thin desires and a feeble or non-existence sense of self are easily offended when someone disagrees with them. Those without thick skin, or those who lack the self-possession to live in reality without losing themselves, will continue to follow their mimetic instincts and retreat to the comforts of ideological and social bubbles. I can tell you from personal experience that the people you see out there projecting the most confidence and harshest rhetoric are the people with some of the thinnest skin.
   

2. Learning how to move smartly through the American media wasteland. In the Dune novels, the Fremen have developed a technique called the “sand walk” to move across open swaths of sand without attracting the attention of sandworms. To live well in modern reality, the New Fremen will need to develop a way of moving through the technological landscape, especially its media component. It will require some combination of limited access and/or boundaries and the development of anti-mimetic disposition that prevents one from getting drawn into ridiculous and ultimately fatal encounters. As everyone knows, there are equivalents to Sandworms on social media–it’s easy to get swallowed up in an instant if you’re moving the wrong way. I’m not referring to getting canceled; I’m referring to something much worse: not getting canceled, and continuing to live a life of mediocrity dominated by thin desires.
   

3. Defusion. They will be masters at the art of de-escalation, or defusing mimetic bombs. This is something several Girard scholars I know have dedicated their lives to, working in conflict resolution or within jails or prison systems where conflict escalates extremely quickly (due to the Freshmanistan that any prison is). It’s easy to escalate a mimetic crisis; it’s extremely hard, and requires skill and tact, to de-escalate one. It’s an anti-mimetic act. The world needs more people who are good at it.

I realize this is only a beginning. I’m on the road this weekend and gearing up for a new academic year back in Washington, DC.

I’d like to continue the discussion here, though, and perhaps even make this “three city problem” the topic of our next Anti-Mimetic Salon which I will plan to host and lead. (In case you missed it, the recording of the last conversation with writer Thomas J. Bevan is now available for paying subscribers here.) I’ll circulate an announcement in the coming days.

See you in the desert.