Metadata
- Author: alexdanco.com
- Full Title:: Secrets About People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dangerous-introduction-to-rene-girard/
- Finished date:: 2023-02-02
Highlights
The true root of all desire, Girard and others argue, is never in the objects or the experience we pursue; it’s really about the other person from whom we’ve learned to want these things.
Advertisers understand this principle really well: you’re not trying to convince somebody that they want Bud Light or a Ford F150; you’re telling them they ought to desire membership to a particular peer set, and the way to become a part of that group is to drink Bud Light and drive an F150.
We admire our models for being our inspiration, and we simultaneously come to resent them and hate them for being our obstacle and rival.
Girard outlines a spectrum between two kinds of models: models who are far from you, and models who are close to you
If someone close to you like your smart coworker, your successful neighbour, or some other kind of peer becomes a model for you, then it will have a powerful effect on a) what you subsequently desire, in your effort to become more like them, and b) your relationship with that person as they progressively become your competitor, obstacle and riva
Furthermore, because they’re our peer, odds are that they will symmetrically feel the same things towards us: an initial desire to imitate and impress, which yields to envy and descends into symmetric hostility that mirrors and amplifies itself. We don’t fight because we’re different; we fight because we’re the same
the smaller the stakes, the more intense and the more personally ugly the fight.
he smaller the stakes involved, the more urgently you will be compelled to hide the fact that the root of the fighting is your admiration and jealousy of your peer.
Lasting peace and harmony inherently requires differentiation. A stable society is a differentiated one.”
Kings are not CEOs. The power structure of the hierarchy needs to come from something else
Silicon Valley startups have learned this lesson. CEOs, who are promoted into their titles and earn their power by working their way up to it, are in many ways less effective than founders, who rule their companies as if by divine right.
In Silicon Valley, envy is divergent and productive (in that it creates more founders) rather than convergent and destructive (many people jealously competing over one CEO title).
Knowledge of “Good and Evil”, in Girard’s view (and also mine) is really knowledge of Self and Other. The moment that they discover their nakedness is the moment they discover that there is an opinion of the other, that this opinion somehow matters, and that you ought to care about it. This moment at the beginning of the Old Testament is the seed of our worst behaviour: pride, shame, envy, and the other components of mimetic conflict. What happens next? Upon being expelled from Eden, the next major story is the rivalry between the sons Cain and Abel, where Cain initially admires his brother, but eventually becomes resentful of him and is ultimately driven to murder
The Antichrist promises us that the answer for how to be and what to want can be found in one another. Revelations is a warning to reject this: the more we turn to each other for answers rather than to God, the more we are inviting evil, and setting ourselves up for a future where everyone is each other’s peer, everyone becomes a model, and everyone becomes a scapegoat.
I think part of why anxiety and depression has become such a ubiquitous challenge for my generation and younger ones is that the internet has created a forum where everybody is each other’s peer
You’ll be motivated by a feeling along the lines of “the reason why I’m not X person or have X is their fault.
Status, like with many things, is ultimately zero-sum in nature
I think what we need to do is to be able to construct a really solid understanding of what a world that is differentiated but not discriminatory looks like
outrage culture”, “cancel culture”, or whatever you want to call it, which has some recognizable characteristics of scapegoating that we talked about earlier