Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Luke Burgis on Why You Need to Know Mimetic Theory (Episode 28)
620 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Why do you want what you do? Are your desires even yours?
In this conversation, Caleb Ontiveros speaks with Luke Burgis. Luke’s most recent book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, covers mimetic theory, as does this conversation.
Mimetic theory is essential for Stoics to know because it explains why we end up wanting so many things that are outside of our control. Luke shares how mimetic theory does this and tactics for focusing on “thick” as opposed to “thin” desires.
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Magnetic Desire and Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
Manetic desire often manifests itself in shadow sides and in negative, unhealthy ways that don't ultimately lead to happiness. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Conversation with Luke Burgess
00:00:26
Speaker
My name is Caleb Montaveros. In this conversation, I speak with Luke Burgess. Luke is a philosopher, writer, and serial entrepreneur. His most recent book is called Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. And that's what we talk about in this conversation.
00:00:47
Speaker
Luke gives us a basic crash course on the ideas of memetic theory and suggests some routes for practice after understanding the theory. Memetic theory is so important for Stoics to understand because it's an account of how we come to want things that are not up to us, things that are outside of our power, things that are not really valuable.
00:01:14
Speaker
Luke is doing the excellent work of describing practical, relevant, and deep ideas that can so often be described in esoteric or unnecessarily jargon-filled ways. So here it is. So let's start with
Luke's Personal Journey and Realizations
00:01:33
Speaker
this question. What's your story?
00:01:36
Speaker
My story, that's a good opening. We're good to be with you. My story is one of desire, like everybody's story is. And sort of the reason why I wrote the book that I did is that I didn't realize that my story
00:01:51
Speaker
was a story of wanting various things and often not knowing why I wanted them. The objective story, the story that you would see from the outside looking in is the kind of resume questions, right? I'm from Michigan and born and raised in Grand Rapids on the west side of the state, went to school in New York, graduated from NYU Stern, worked on Wall Street, was pretty miserable.
00:02:17
Speaker
in my investment banking job and it's just 2005 so I'm definitely dating myself and I was hearing about many of my friends and other people doing really cool things and
00:02:34
Speaker
startup world. And this was before startups are really that cool. Silicon Valley was certainly, it was very much a thing, but there wasn't the memetic attraction to it the way that there is these days. So at the time I was working in Hong Kong and quit my job as an investment banker in Hong Kong, flew to California, started a series of companies in my 20s.
00:02:56
Speaker
before becoming relatively disillusioned with the process of starting selling companies, closing companies down, which I had to do once, or walking away from them. And I realized that this disillusionment that I had or the lack of meaning that I felt was completely detached from the degree of success that any businesses that I started had. There was something detached from that.
00:03:24
Speaker
And when I had that realization, it was kind of a startling one because I was really convinced that I was seeking certain things, financial freedom, all these typical things. And when I realized that I wasn't going to solve my problem through mere hype, it was a real scary thing for me to realize. And I stepped away from one of my companies in 2008.
00:03:47
Speaker
really embarked on a, sometimes I call it my seven years in Tibet, like really going into the desert, going into the mountains.
Spiritual and Philosophical Exploration
00:03:57
Speaker
In my case, it was actually the desert. By that point, I moved my company to Las Vegas and I was running my companies in Vegas and I quite literally went out into the desert.
00:04:07
Speaker
and just sort of was away from those things for a while to understand what it was that was really driving, which led me on a very long journey that was deeply spiritual, led me to study philosophy and theology for several years, do a lot of reading. Frankly, I deeply dove into stoicism during that time, which listeners may be interested in.
00:04:31
Speaker
And then I came out the other side of that process with just a much more integrated understanding of who I was, of what business was all about, of why I do the things that I do. And I prefaced my very short little story there with, this is the objective view. These are the things that you could probably find
00:04:53
Speaker
everything that I just said online. But everybody has a subjective story, right? It's like the story that only they could tell, the story from the inside, the story about what was really going on, which is always the more important story. And we can't always see people's desires from the outside looking it. We're the only ones that know what our desires are. Frankly, we often don't even know what our desires are.
00:05:18
Speaker
So for me, it was this real chaos of being drawn to a bunch of different things without having done a lot of internal reflection about the powers of attraction that were pulling me in these various places, which made me feel like I whiplash for a long time. I mean, certainly throughout my twenties. So I'm a lot older than that now and wear a lot of different hats now, which is how I like it because I get bored doing any one thing for too long.
00:05:43
Speaker
So, you know, I'm now, my story has taken me to a place where I'm still very much an entrepreneur with my hands in a lot of still very early stage things. I'm a professor of business at Catholic University of America in Washington D. And of course, I'm a writer, both sort of long form stuff like my book.
00:05:59
Speaker
and regularly write weekly because I'm realizing how important the process of writing is for me to actually think, right? Writing is kind of the way that I understand what it is that I actually think about things is through writing, often poorly at first and trying to work out ideas in my mind.
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, it is funny how you have the initial sense of a crisp idea, some crisp insight and then move to writing it and it seems like it falls away or wasn't as crisp as you initially thought. You realize it's not so crisp anymore. Yeah, writing is definitely a humbling process.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Understanding Memetic Theory
00:06:33
Speaker
So one team concerns looking at desire, of course, looking at once, and it's primarily focused on the mimetic theory, a theory that comes from the philosopher René Girard. I wonder if you could help us walk through the basics of that.
00:06:51
Speaker
Sure. So, pneumatic theory is a complex set of interrelated ideas and articulated first by the social theorist named René Girard, who was originally from France, but moved to the US shortly after World War II and is most well known several decades long stint that he spent at Stanford, where he was a professor of French literature and civilization for many years, and he died in 2015.
00:07:20
Speaker
And he had some very famous students who have really done a good job of carrying on his legacy. But Rene Girard's core idea was memetic desire. So he realized that human desire is by its very nature imitative. We imitate the desires of other people without knowing that we're doing it almost always.
00:07:45
Speaker
And this is a real innovation and thought, like this realization. Nobody had ever said it this way before. Many great thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, both.
00:07:59
Speaker
were speaking about the role that imitation plays in human life. They spoke about imitation in arts and imitation in education. For instance, it's the way that we learn languages, right? You know, we're just babblers as babies, and then we learn to imitate a specific language, usually, that our parents speak. And it's the only way that we can stop babbling is if we start imitating within very short constraints. Otherwise, we just imitate everything.
00:08:27
Speaker
So it just plays a fundamental part in human development, but nobody had really thought about imitation going down to this deeper layer of the human experience, which is desires. And it really kind of makes sense if you think about it.
00:08:47
Speaker
We moderns have this idea, I think, of generating our own desires,
Cultural Impact of Memetic Desire
00:08:52
Speaker
right? Like we have this authentic, autonomous self, and my desires just come out of that autonomous self.
00:09:00
Speaker
But you really stop and drill down into that, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I was born into a family and into a culture and into a context. And I definitely have some things that I can want that are just built into my kind of evolutionary biology. Like when it comes to knowing when I'm thirsty or hungry, cold, all of these things.
00:09:24
Speaker
But there's a whole universe of desires that fall outside of the things that I just like to think of them as needs, the things that I need, that my body tells me that I need. And when it comes to these kinds of things, like who I'm going to follow on Twitter, what brand of fancy bottled water I'm going to buy, what kind of career I start fantasizing about in my mind when I'm in high school, what kind of style I adopt when I'm a teenager, all of these things
00:09:53
Speaker
They have to come from models of desire that are outside of ourselves. In other words, Gerard's point is if this desire wasn't in some way modeled to us, there's no way that we can have it. We don't just generate these things out of thin air.
00:10:08
Speaker
And that can sound like a trivial point sometimes, but Gerard really went deep with this idea of mimesis and mimetic desire. And he said that, in fact, the notion that
00:10:25
Speaker
human desire is imitative or derivative in some way, explains a lot of strange things about our culture, such as conflict and rivalry, like why do we tend to be to gravitate towards wanting the same things that other people want and then become their rivals or become envious of them.
00:10:50
Speaker
Well, it's because of memetic desire. It's because this mimesis is a force that draws us towards other people, which can be in positive ways. It can draw us to be more like people that model positive empathetic desires to us, or it can draw us towards people for all the wrong reasons.
00:11:08
Speaker
because we somehow want what they want. And we think that if we get that thing before they get that thing, that we're somehow, you know, winning, okay, to make it overly simplistic.
00:11:25
Speaker
And Girard used the core idea of memetic desire to explain human conflict and rivalry and explain why we're more rivalrous creatures than we really like to talk about. You know, we talk about rivalry in politics and sports, but very rarely do we speak about it in the rest of life and business world inside of our company and our family. It's not something that we like to talk about a lot, but often memetic desire and mimesis is driving some of those things.
00:11:51
Speaker
And if you take his theory all the way to the end, it's actually a theory of human culture and cultural development and the things that, and how memesis, right? Negative memesis can lead to violence and all of the things that we do to prevent ourselves from our negative imitation destroying us, basically, right? All of the different things that humans do.
00:12:16
Speaker
to protect us from ourselves, right? So it's very complicated, but the core of his whole theory is the idea of mimetic desire, and mimetic is simply, it comes from the Greek word that means to imitate, means imitation. So just when you hear mimetic desire, you can think imitative desire, that we imitate the desires of other people. And he used the word mimetic though,
00:12:43
Speaker
for a reason. He could have just called it imitative desire, but he thought that it needed a different word. Because imitation is something that is a bit more out in the open, and we can speak openly about the models that we choose to imitate. But mimesis has a bit of a hiddenness to it.
00:13:06
Speaker
So it's not like a nomadic desire means that we're imitating in this subtle, often unconscious way. And bringing it to light, bringing some of that mimesis to light is important because it helps us understand some of these hidden models in our lives that may have been shaping our desires without us even knowing it.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, so many people have noticed that humans are very social creatures. We imitate each other to a very large degree, but what Girard brings attention to is not just in our behaviors, beliefs, but our very desires, as you say, are imitative. And almost what it is to desire is not just to have something
00:13:53
Speaker
you know, all by ourselves as some isolated unit, but to desire is to do so through someone else. It's a social activity and not one, as you said, that's obvious.
Desire, Lack, and Transcendence
00:14:04
Speaker
It's often quite subtle or hidden from our introspection, at least initially. Yeah. And, you know, if desire is also always for something that we feel that we lack, otherwise it wouldn't be desire at all. So,
00:14:24
Speaker
It seems like a simple statement, but it's actually, these are Girard's words. It's actually a profound statement, right?
00:14:32
Speaker
The very nature of desire is social, yes, but it's also for something that we feel that we lack. So desire stems from almost an inadequacy that we feel or a lack of being. And it's why Gerard said that all desire ultimately is a desire for being, right? It's a desire to be. And this implies that desire is closely related to the human
00:15:02
Speaker
need for transcendence, right? So we feel like we lack something and we need to somehow transcend where we're at. Like we think that our by desiring that thing will help us to transcend.
00:15:17
Speaker
where we're at and bring us from one state to another, right? You could almost think of it like a rite of passage, like a desire, if it's working the way that we think it will, is a rite of passage out of one state of being and into another. Now, oftentimes
00:15:37
Speaker
this, that's a total illusion. I desire a Tesla because I have this story in my mind that if I start driving a Tesla, I'll actually acquire some kind of
00:15:55
Speaker
you know, magical property where I'll suddenly be like a more, I don't know, environmentally conscious person. I'll be more technologically plugged in. I don't know, I'll be a better husband. All kinds of crazy things, right? We could start imagining like that. These objects become like talismans in our minds where we think that if we complete the rite of passage and we get the thing that we desire, that will somehow be transformed. And I think,
00:16:22
Speaker
most of consumerism lies behind this idea and is largely fueled by this journey of desire that people make. Yeah. It's not the lack of an object, but it's a much deeper lack, a lack that we are a specific person.
Girard's Desire Models
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:39
Speaker
I like how you make this sort of the modeling concrete with the notions of Freshmanistan and Celebristan. I wonder if you could talk about those concepts a little bit more too. Gerard says that there are two main kinds of models of desire in our world.
00:16:56
Speaker
The first kind is the kind that we typically think of as a role model, but not just a role model. Somebody who's outside of our world, we don't really come into contact with them in any way. They just kind of exist in a different plane of existence. So Michael Jordan, to most basketball players, unless you played with him, is going to be this kind of a model. And Gerard calls these external models of desire. They're models that are outside of our world.
00:17:25
Speaker
There's no possibility of coming into contact with them. And most importantly, there's no possibility of like a conflictual rivalry with them. They probably don't know that we exist. So they're like a safe kind of model, right? You can imitate them without them knowing it.
00:17:45
Speaker
In these kinds of models, Girard calls external models of desire. I call this world of the external models, celebra-stan. And we all have a celebra-stan. You could probably name one person who's in your celebra-stan. Maybe they won't always be in your celebra-stan. Maybe someday that will change. That's happened for me. But right now they're outside of your world. And the other kind of model is the more important one, really.
00:18:11
Speaker
These are the kinds of models that we don't typically recognize or acknowledge, and they're the ones that are inside of our world, the ones that Girard says are internal models of desire. So they're somehow bound up with our very lives. We can come into contact with them. They might know that they're our model.
00:18:31
Speaker
So, you know, you think of a, I don't know, in high school, you think of, you know, a classmate, for instance, right? Somebody, you get a haircut and, you know, the next day somebody walks into class with the same haircut, the same, you know, brand of jeans or something like that. And you sort of notice and you're like, huh.
00:18:49
Speaker
this person is paying attention to me in some way or vice versa, right? Like, you know, so we can normally acknowledge and know that. And this is a different, imitation works a little differently in this world of internal models. And in my book, I give a nickname to this internal world and I call it Fresh Manistan because the best example that I can think of, of a world that's dominated by internal
00:19:16
Speaker
The internal mediation of desire is like being a freshman in high school or college. It was certainly my experience of it where everybody's kind of in the same boat. Everybody has a lot of similarities and everybody can imitate everybody else if they want. And there's kind of a level of reflexivity in the imitation that doesn't exist with the external models of desire.
00:19:39
Speaker
So there's the possibility of noticing that you're imitating or that somebody is imitating you. And if you think about how strange imitation is, it's strange in the world of Freshmanistan. It's not really strange in the world of Celebristan. We all kind of know how that works, you know, like you admire Michael Jordan, you imitate his style, he might buy his shoes, but in Freshmanistan,
00:20:05
Speaker
the rules are different. It's kind of hidden. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to acknowledge that we have models. And there's this really strange phenomenon that we kind of like being imitated in Freshmanistan, kind of like to know that people are imitating us.
00:20:22
Speaker
but not too much. There's this real delicate dance of imitation that people need to play in this kind of world. And probably everybody listening, who's either been through high school or is in it, understands what that's like. And we all kind of go through this delicate dance of mimesis in Freshmanistan.
00:20:45
Speaker
And the point that I make in the book is that it doesn't end when we graduate. We're not in school anymore. There are many different kinds of Freshmanistan, right? Like inside of organization. I think like all of most of social media is like one giant Freshmanistan that kind of works like this. So one of the hypotheses that I have is that our world is kind of moving.
00:21:12
Speaker
from a world where there used to be more external modeling of desire, where there were like these big kind of celebrity stand figures that people would openly imitate, right? Like people like culturally agreed upon models. And now we're sort of, that's kind of collapsing into more of a world of internal mediation in terms of fresh manna stand.
00:21:36
Speaker
where everybody's kind of looking to everybody else, and that's a very different kind of world. It's a world that's not as stable, and it's a world where there's a lot of very complex and dynamic social things that are happening at all times.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting the move from perhaps, or at least the decrease of people having these external maul. One thing we do in stoves, we have an exercise called the Contemplation of the Sage, which is familiar to many traditions that basically involves meditating on a role maul. Classically, it'd be someone like Socrates for the stoics and thinking about how they would
00:22:21
Speaker
challenge you, observe you, or perhaps what they would do in your place if they're in the same situation. And a common email we get is, I'm having a hard time picking a role model, or I don't feel like I have any role models, which strikes me as plausibly a distinct phenomenon from what we might see in the past. I'm not sure if it seems like that fits your observation as well.
00:22:50
Speaker
That's interesting because I run a similar exercise with all of my students in a course that I teach, which is the introduction to entrepreneurship. And I do see a similar phenomenon actually where they have a hard time.
00:23:07
Speaker
finding just one at least. Maybe they have five and they need to cobble together like a synthetic model from the five. But it is important to concretize the things in figures or people. Socrates is a great one.
00:23:24
Speaker
It's a really important exercise to go through because ideas, concepts, dispositions that are spoken about in the abstract that are just floating around are much harder to understand. Humans need figures, humans need stories. It's why any decent book, you have to tell stories.
00:23:45
Speaker
to incarnate the ideas. I think that's a really important exercise for people to go through. My approach is to challenge, at least my students, to find one. And sometimes that is the project, is finding the one. They might need to take a lot longer on that than they thought. But you're absolutely right. It is a distinct
00:24:08
Speaker
thing from what I'm speaking about. But I perhaps, and I'm just thinking of this now, perhaps that exercise wouldn't have been so difficult 50 years ago. Perhaps this shift that I'm describing is why it's not as easy as it used to be, but I do think it is distinct.
00:24:29
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So how does this lead then to conflict, rivalry, this phenomena of memetic desire? On a basic level, if you just walk through the way that memetic desire works, it's kind of obvious why it leads to rivalry, because we're taking another person, especially in the world of Freshmanistan that leads to rivalry, doesn't really in the world of Celebristan. And that's why I focus on Freshmanistan.
00:24:59
Speaker
for taking somebody as a model of desire. We want what they want. And so not the object that they want, we desire their desire in some sense. So as their desires change, our desires change. If somebody is a really powerful model of desire for us, then
00:25:23
Speaker
We're tethered to their desire and not to the objects of their desire. This is a really important thing to understand when you're trying to understand Gerard. Think of an younger brother and an older brother, where the older brother is like a really powerful model of desire, younger brother.
00:25:43
Speaker
You know, one year, the older brother is really into skateboards. And then after a few years, you know, he switches and he's really into, I don't know, they live in Southern, he's really into surfing now. Okay. They live in Southern California. So the younger brother will often follow the desire. So it wasn't the skateboard that was important, it was that the brother
00:26:09
Speaker
desired to be good at skateboarding. So Girardian desire is not object-oriented desire. It's person-oriented desire. We become fixated on a person.
00:26:25
Speaker
And sometimes that's fine. It can even be healthy. I think in the case of younger brothers and older brothers, it's fine. Unless that doesn't allow a process of individuation to happen, that's a whole separate conversation. But it leads to rivalry and conflict because we sort of can't untether ourselves from
00:26:45
Speaker
from the people that are these strong models of desire for us. And we begin to measure ourselves according to what they want and where we're at, the kinds of things that they're pursuing. And it can prevent us from ever becoming ourselves in a way, right? Or ever taking the time to gain some detachment and separation and understand that the relationship that we're in with our models of desire can
00:27:12
Speaker
Distort reality in various ways, right? It can sort of make things valuable that don't have a lot of value in themselves, right? Their value only comes from the attention that the model is paying to it. Yeah, there's a whole lot to be said about even about NFTs when it comes to this. So it can just it can lead to rivalry because we're now wanting what somebody else wants and
00:27:40
Speaker
we can become caught in kind of a never-ending cycle where we can never kind of escape that gravitational
Introducing Stoa: Meditation Meets Stoicism
00:27:47
Speaker
pull. I mean, you should almost think of it as gravity, as sort of like planets orbiting around a sun. But in the case of people, right, that kind of attachment can become unhealthy and can lead to Mars.
00:27:59
Speaker
Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Here's what our users are saying.
00:28:18
Speaker
I'm new to Stoicism and wanted to dive deeper with guidance. This is it. I love the meditations. I've practiced meditations with other apps, but this just seems to be more impactful. Life changer.
00:28:31
Speaker
With Stoa, you can really get a sense of how to take yourself out of your thoughts and get a sense of how to handle different difficult situations. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. And how is this a common idea that's connected with Gerard, of course, this idea of scapegoating? So how does this come into play with we have some initial rivalry situation and then scapegoating?
Scapegoating in Memetic Theory
00:28:58
Speaker
How does that solve or not the situation?
00:29:01
Speaker
Uh, scapegoating is, you know, we probably need to need more time to dedicate to scapegoating than, than I can do justice to in the rest of our conversation. But you have to move. So everything that I've been saying so far is kind of on the micro level, right? I've been describing the way that mimesis and mimetic desire and rivalry works in, in, in single relationships between, you know, two or three people for the most part, or like in a high school classroom.
00:29:27
Speaker
In groups, though, this kind of memetic contagion can spread. You can even think of this in a classroom, but this can happen on a societal level as well.
00:29:43
Speaker
There are no external models of desire. Everybody's an internal model of desire to everybody else. It's unclear who is imitating who. This process of mimetic contagion leads to what Girard calls a loss of differentiation or a crisis of sameness. In other words,
00:30:05
Speaker
There's not, people are subconsciously imitating other people, yet they have a deep need to escape their fixation with whoever these internal models of desire are. They've become rivals with.
00:30:27
Speaker
Right, because it just leads to absolute, like a memetic chaos where there's no way out, right? I mean, on a psychological level, it leads to misery. It can even lead to conflict and even physical violence when everybody's turned inward on everybody else, right? So that's like the key image, right? We're turned inward towards each other and we're fixated on each other. And the idea of a scapegoat
00:30:55
Speaker
is the idea that it's the thing, it's the mechanism by which we become unattached to each other, like focused on each other, ready to kill each other, and we can collectively turn towards a single person or a single group
00:31:15
Speaker
and projects all of our memetic anger, violence, rivalry, you name it, onto the single individual or the single group. And it discharges, in Gerard's mind, it discharges the memetic tension that was directed internally at one another. And we expel the person, we cancel the person. In older ancient societies, they would kill the person through a variety of means.
00:31:45
Speaker
And it temporarily causes us to go from turning inward in a standoff, in a face-to-face sort of group standoffs, to standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a green, that somebody else is the problem. And what that does, it just has the effect of taking the
00:32:10
Speaker
the conflict that was between us and completely imputing it to somebody who kind of has to bear the whole brunt of the memetic tension.
00:32:23
Speaker
There are rituals in the Christian and Jewish scriptures. It says once a year, the entire Israelite community came together and they chose a goat and they symbolically transferred all of their sins onto the goat and then drove the goat into the desert.
00:32:45
Speaker
That's where the word comes from. It comes from this ritual of literally, symbolically transferring everything onto the go. And Gerard would argue that although we don't normally doesn't have it in that ritualistic way, we still do it in a variety of more subtle, invisible ways. Whether it's through social media and our families and our companies, we still have that need to find somebody to discharge all of the memetic tension that is built up.
00:33:16
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Sorry to put you on the spot with a big question on scapegoating. I did my best. Yeah. It's just an intro. All right. Yeah. So it's an exceptionally deep question. You can expand to different scales, the scale of society, think about how to explain the very ideas of sacrifice and so on. But I think it's also useful to think about in our own different
00:33:40
Speaker
concrete life, so in personal life. So one example that Gerard gives in the book, I saw Satan fall like lightning is a man who comes home after work and mistreats his children and wife, treating them as scapegoats, perhaps for some to release the amount of rivalry that has arisen in the office. So he's taking on these sort of competitive type
00:34:06
Speaker
desires by being in some sort of business environment, frustrated at that, and comes home and mistreats his family as a result. Perhaps I think all of us have done something like this and we've not realized that we were involved in sort of transferring or purging some kind of rivalry that emerged elsewhere into some, basically some innocent people who were completely uninvolved, right, often our families.
00:34:33
Speaker
It's a great example that Gerard gives and thank you for that. I mean, it's the idea of transferring rivalry is an important one. And the only thing that I would add to that example is that we transfer the rivalry to a situation where we can win easily. You know, so, you know, we can transfer it on, you know.
00:34:52
Speaker
Uh, some people like to treat their animals like they take out, right? And or like, or, or even their children, right? Like taking out rivalry in a situation where, where they can win because in a traditional nomadic rivalry, there is no real possibility of, of, of, of winning, right? So unfortunately we, we do try to, because winning is what provides the short amount of catharsis, right? We're looking, we're looking for that, that win.
00:35:20
Speaker
And this is just such an applicable example that I think we can all relate to where like, in what instances do we do this in our everyday lives, right? And it may not be your family. It may be a friend, right? It may be actually like acting out online, right?
00:35:37
Speaker
going on social media and attacking somebody because you can, you know, you can get like a momentary, like, Oh, whatever, right? A little wet, right? And so just seeing the way that rivalry transfers itself in a variety of ways is just a really practical application of the philosophy.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm always interested in four different life philosophies. You know, what's the account of sin? What's the future of humanity that makes us always so unhappy all the time where happiness is met in so that the deep you don't mind accepts not the same feeling good sense of feeling good. And for the ancient Stoics,
00:36:19
Speaker
They thought that we were essentially corrupted by people around us. They didn't have quite the same sophisticated picture that Gerard did, but it's actually quite similar. They had a sort of tabula rasa view of humanity. We thought humans came into the world unperverted, and then we became worse by interacting with others, by interacting with whatever environments we happened to find ourselves in.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I suppose with Gerard on the first pass, you know, the account of sin is that we are of course deeply mimetic creatures. We take on others desires, but is there something deeper here that is like what there's some desire that's not purely mimetic, but something that we come in the world wanting to be
Teleology of Desire and Human Excellence
00:37:06
Speaker
something else. So it's almost this desire for being, being greater than we are wanting to be something we shouldn't want to be.
00:37:14
Speaker
So, the answer is definitely yes. There's a teleology of desire and Gerard's viewpoint. And you could think of it as, not everybody agrees with this, by the way. And there's even a difference between, you'd say, the early Stoics and later Stoics or Christian Stoicism when it started to be a bit intermingled with Christian thought and inform it.
00:37:42
Speaker
And at least in some of the later Stoics and the Christian, there is a teleology of desire, just meaning to say that we do have desires for certain ends. Desire is an aiming thing, and it aims for certain ends, like happiness.
00:37:59
Speaker
human happiness. Aristotle would say that excellence in share is living well, acquiring virtues, entering into nourishing relationships with other people. There's an element of the common good that makes me happy. I often don't know what I want.
00:38:19
Speaker
in less or until I know what my wife wants because I want for both of us and I want us both to be happy because I have a relationship to my wife. So if you ask me, Luke, can you come out hiking with me today? I would like any good husband. I would say, well, I don't know. Let me check with my wife because if she wants me or needs me to be home today, then I can't. So in a sense, my desire is informed by my wife's desire, right?
00:38:45
Speaker
we're social creatures. So the condom good, it makes me happy to make my family happy because we're on this shared journey. So there are all kinds of human desires that I think are directed towards these things that we can rightfully call good, that do perennially made humans happy.
00:39:04
Speaker
And my Girardian interpretation is that mimetic desire can both help us on that journey. If there's a model of virtue, for instance, then often the way that we acquire that is to look at a role model like a Socrates or somebody in our lives and imitate them in a positive way. It's how we acquire these things. But also mimetic desire can
00:39:26
Speaker
throw us off the path that we're on as we start looking to our right and our left. I like to think of it as a compass. If you know how a compass works, the needle points north, but you can very easily get false north if you have an iPad or a phone or metal things, technology near the compass, the needle is going to point towards that thing.
00:39:49
Speaker
And you're going to get a false North. And that's, I think of a medic desire that way, right? So like, it can make us forget that kind of more traditional, the more traditional sort of perennial human desires for those things. So what was the second part of your question? I'm forgetting now. And I think that that was
00:40:08
Speaker
That was the base of it, right? One reading of my initial reading of Gerard was something like his account of sin is basically that he thinks that it's bad that we imitate people so often and it's not maybe imitate their desires, but another reading would be that
00:40:26
Speaker
imitation is sort of how we express a deeper flaw in ourselves. So, I mean, a quick definition of sin in kind of a Girardian lens would be that sin is disorder, desire in some way, where the desire becomes, for instance, detached from
00:40:46
Speaker
a common good where we can stand shoulder to shoulder with another person and seek some good that transcends the two of us. And it disorders our desire by sort of like the compass, by having that desire be deviated and sort of move towards things that ultimately won't make us happy. And that through memetic desire, that process off.
00:41:10
Speaker
often have. So I think that to say that memetic desire is only, just to be super clear, that memetic desire is bad or sinful would not be what you're already saying. You would say that it's this neutral force that because of sin often manifests itself
00:41:29
Speaker
in negative ways. There's a slight distinction to make there. Because we seem to be creatures that don't know what we want and have these darkened intellects, we often manifest itself in shadow sides and in negative unhealthy ways that don't ultimately lead to happiness.
00:41:54
Speaker
right right that makes sense so you have several tactics in your book for better relating to this aspect of our nature what are several that you found either useful in your own life recently or you've seen the useful in the lives of sure i i just got time for a couple there there are 15 that
00:42:12
Speaker
I articulated in the book that they really just, they're things that I've done. And I'm sure there's probably hundreds of more
Exploring Deep Desires through Silent Retreats
00:42:20
Speaker
things, right? But a couple of the ones that have been particularly powerful for me, one is something that very few people have ever done, and I'm very, very grateful to have had the opportunity to do it, is go on a completely silent retreat for at least a day, totally unplugged from technology.
00:42:40
Speaker
It doesn't need to be in a special location, it doesn't need to be a destination, but truly a full 24 hours of dead silence. You can have books, that's totally fine, but no devices, no noise other than silent reflection. What you begin to realize after you've been in the silence for 12, 18 hours is
00:43:06
Speaker
desires and things start bubbling up that you didn't even know existed. So I think oftentimes there's just so much noise that prevents us from even hearing or understanding the desires that we do have. So that's one. And I try to organize a few of these retreat-like experiences every year because I need them.
00:43:29
Speaker
You know, I need them on a regular basis, right? Sometimes I go for three to five days. So if there's any way that you can do a mini one in your, this is an ancient practice, like, you know, I'm not inventing this, it's very old spiritual practice, you know, that to me was a game changer. It was actually in the context of a silent retreat that I first picked up a book off of an old dusty library in a monastery and found one of Gerard's books.
00:43:54
Speaker
And I don't think that it would have settled in my bones had I been reading it on my phone while I was walking to a meeting. So context and form of an experience and the form in which we receive content.
00:44:10
Speaker
matters. I think we've forgotten form in our world. We think of content exists as content. No, it always comes in a form. The tweet is different than a book, which is different than the conversation that you and I are having right now. Another one, the second one that I'll give you is I believe there's real value
00:44:29
Speaker
in trying to distinguish between what I like to call thin desires, which are highly mimetic desires, which are, there's nothing really enduring about them. You know, I want something today and tomorrow I can throw it away. Tomorrow it won't be important. Next week it won't be important. Those are what I call thin desires and I've sort of learned to recognize them when I have them. I can laugh at them. Like my wife laughs at me when I have them. You know, I just, by now I have some pattern recognition.
00:44:59
Speaker
And those are different than thick desires, which seem to be something enduring and perennial, things that have manifested themselves throughout my life. Like the deep desire to read classical literature I've had since I was a kid, and that thick desire got covered up and buried for me.
00:45:17
Speaker
when I was in my frantic startup days, and I couldn't figure out what was something, I was missing something that clearly nourished me in a deep way. And it was being covered up with thin desires. I like to think of thin desires like in the fall, the leaves fall, and you don't rake them, you forget what's underneath.
00:45:40
Speaker
And for me, there was a process of like doing a clean out of the fin. And I did that by doing a real history of my desires and thinking, you know, Luke, what are some of those times in your life when you've been engaged in this, in an action, when you achieve something, when you put your mind to something and did it, and
00:45:58
Speaker
It gave you a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that was truly enduring, that lasted for more than a day or a week. The kind of thing that lasted for years just thinking about it. You're really, really proud of whatever that thing was because you felt fully alive when you were doing it.
00:46:20
Speaker
And I think that those experiences, if we can identify them in our lives, you might have to go back to the very early time in your life, which is the whole point of the exercise. You can go back as long as you want and you find at least a handful of these kinds of experiences.
00:46:38
Speaker
you can often find a thread that runs between them. And the thread is often a signpost to what I call sick desires, right? The kind of desires that may not be driven as memetically as some of the other ones. Excellent. Yeah. Thanks for starting this too. That's actually helpful.
00:46:58
Speaker
Perfect. Well, one last question. I would be remiss not to ask you about any thoughts you'd like to share on Stoicism. So, you know, what's, what's took out to you about Stoicism when you were doing the deep dive and meditating on the different, different classical religious texts?
Stoicism and Dialogue with Other Philosophies
00:47:13
Speaker
I think stoicism is fascinating and it has evolved so much and it's continuing to evolve and even within what we call the classical text, as we spoke about earlier, there was this development.
00:47:29
Speaker
And I think that stoicism is very seminal and generative in the sense that a lot of different things can come into contact with it that can be better explained, or that can add life and energy to stoicism. And I think that Gerard is one of these thinkers that I'd like to see come into more contact with stoicism. There's an inherent tension, I think.
00:47:55
Speaker
between Stoicism and Girard, this idea that there's this idea of
00:48:04
Speaker
we have desires and desires you could almost think of like, if you think of desires like ideas, like we have desires, what do we do with them? What relationship are we in with our desires? Just like the, like the thoughts that come into our mind, like our emotions, how are we in relationship to those desires and ultimately to ourselves?
00:48:26
Speaker
And I think this is where stoicism offers some really compelling insights. But I think that stoicism benefits and other thought like Girard and memetic theory benefit from being in dialogue with one another. I think one of the things that I've always appreciated about stoicism.
00:48:44
Speaker
is how generative and rich it is and how much it's open to other ideas coming into contact with it and then providing some mutual sort of enlightenment.
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's well said. I think for stoics like to always be dividing their judgments about what is good or not and see what is up to them and always focusing on virtue. And I think Gerard offers one way in which when you're not vigilant about the judgments you're making, you might be making a mistake or making judgments about what is good that are essentially just copying others. And I think he brings out how subtly that can occur in a way that is very beneficial for stoics.
00:49:27
Speaker
No doubt. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks so much, Caleb. I enjoyed it. Perfect. Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:49:52
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.