Mimetic Desire: Why Do We Want? - Luke Burgis | Modern Wisdom Podcast 344

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   I don't think it's…

   1. LBLuke Burgis0:00

      I don't think it's possible to transcend memetic desire or to get rid of it completely. We'll be rid of memetic desire when we're dead. And it can be a tremendously powerful thing, right? It can spur us on to imitate great models. Um, so I think we have a lot of agency, but we... you know, freedom is something that we can win or lose. (wind blowing)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:18

      I've got a quote that I need you to explain to me. Okay?

   3. LBLuke Burgis0:21

      Okay.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:22

      "We want what other people want because other people want it. And it's penciled in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the Nth circle of hell, where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift over and over again." What's that about? (laughs)

   5. LBLuke Burgis0:39

      (laughs) That is a quote from Dana Tortorici, who's the editor of n+1 magazine, uh, here in the States. Uh, she's talking about memetic desire. She wrote a beautiful piece about Instagram and the effect that Instagram is having on what we want. And her finding was th- basically the topic of my book, that the nature of desire is memetic. Meaning we're... we always look to other people, we look to models who help us understand what to want, and that the social media platforms like Instagram are essentially just these machines of generating desires, memetic desires. Everybody's imitating the desires of everybody else. And, you know, the joke is, it's like turtles all the way down. It's like memetic desire all the way down. Like, where, where does this end? (laughs) It makes us miserable and depressed because we don't realize that that's part of what social media is doing to us. It's just providing billions of desires out there, and we can't tell, you know, the signal through the noise.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:37

      Why do we have memetic desire then? Is it adaptive?

   7. LBLuke Burgis1:41

      Memetic desire is... according to Rene Girard, who sort of discovered this phenomenon in the late '50s and early '60s, is just a part of human nature. It's part of what it means to be human. Uh, perhaps, uh, if we got back to the evolutionary process, perhaps it's something that humans developed in order to sort of separate ourselves, you know, from, from the great apes. So it may... this may have actually been adapted, uh, from an evolutionary perspective, um, to help us create culture, uh, to learn language. I mean, imitation plays a fundamental role in all kinds of very positive human things. Social interactions. Uh, if, if we're not imitating each other the right way, it can get a little awkward. Uh, so, you know, this... Girard said that imitation actually helps prevent violence and helps cultures to form. So, it's part of the human condition, uh, something that we can't escape. Uh, but very few people are kind of a- aware that there is such a thing as memetic desire, and we, we have this modern, hyper-individualistic, hyper-rationalistic understanding or view of ourselves, and why we want the things that we want, where, you know, I lay eyes on something and I want it because of X, Y, and Z, and I describe all of these objective qualities without taking into account that I'm a social creature and I'm constantly looking to other people that shape the perception of value for, for things, for people, for groups. Um, this affects everything from politics to, you know, to the stock market.

   8. CWChris Williamson3:12

      Do we have any wants that aren't memetic, do you think? Or are there humans out there who don't have any wants that aren't memetic?

   9. LBLuke Burgis3:20

      That's a great question, and a topic of, um, of great debate, uh, among people that, that read Girard. Some would say no. Uh, I think there's some nuance, right? There's some, there's some distinctions that we could make. For instance, instinctual things that we have a biological drive for, uh, food and water, um, sexual pleasure, these kinds of things are s- they're kind of like built into us. We could call those desires, but I like to sort of think of those more in the needs spectrum. Uh, but there also seem to be some basic fundamental human desires, like classical philosophy has, has identified these, like the desire for knowledge, uh, the desire for survival. Um, these are just basic things that every... that seem common to all, to all humans, um, unless something kind of, you know, go, goes wrong. Um, but in terms of the more abstract desires, as we get into things that are sort of less grounded in any kind of instinctual basis, and we start talking about careers and lifestyles and fashions, there's nobody that desires those things without having some kind of a model. I mean, they don't generate those desires ex nihilo, like out of thin air, 'cause they're, they're already embedded. We're born embedded into this social process, uh, and, you know, we, we don't... we haven't created these things ourselves. So, even, even today, I mean, the irony is that things that used to be probably not so much in the realm of desire, like drinking water for instance, uh, you know, there was just water. (laughs) And now, now there's like 20 different brands of bottled water with all kinds of different minerality breakdowns and, and, and marketing aspects. Uh, most people, like, haven't actually analyzed those things, so they, they look to other people and they, they shape their... the valuation of those things through mimesis.

   10. CWChris Williamson5:15

       So most people think that they're the conscious agents of their own wants and desires, and then if determinism hasn't put them in the ground, memetic desire can come and hammer the nail into the coffin and throw a bunch of concrete on top of it. Is that kind of how, how it's looking at the moment?

   11. LBLuke Burgis5:33

       Exactly. I, I think that's probably-

   12. CWChris Williamson5:34

       (laughs)

   13. LBLuke Burgis5:34

       ... a, a good way to put it. Yeah, usually the less... the, the less memetic we think we are, the, the more we probably are.

   14. CWChris Williamson5:40

       Fantastic. Uh, there's... obviously there's an implication for Maslow's hierarchy of needs there, that you kind of have this bottom level of needs, but then above needs is desires, and then you say that a lot of these desires are kind of interchangeable, so the hierarchy becomes very messy as soon as you get past the needs.

   15. LBLuke Burgis5:56

       And yeah, in fact, I mean, as soon as you get past the very bottom level of the hierarchy, I would say that there's no hierarchy at all. Uh, in the, in the universe of desire, if you will, there is no hierarchy. So, you know, Maslow's pyramid, if you can picture it, sort of...... uh, goes up and our needs become a little more focused, uh, and, and smaller the, the higher we get towards the top. And I think we could probably lop off Maslow's hierarchy right above the first couple of levels, right? The physiological needs, the needs for security, like having a roof over our head. As we move beyond that, I think we just cut the pyramid right off and we enter this very messy world of desires that doesn't have a, a strict hierarchy because there's, there's often not a lot of objectivity to it. Um, we, we look around at this universe of people around us, and the reason there's no hierarchy is that we adopt desires or we derive desires based on people that we come into contact with, um, more than any kind of like, uh, like teleology, um, that's guiding us towards this very one specific thing. And I'm not arguing that that doesn't exist. Um, if you're religious, you, you could... y- I think you have a strong case to make that there is, uh, there is some ultimate desire. You know, Dante talks about that at the end of The Inferno. But for most of us, um, as, as mimetic creatures, we spend most of our lives kind of bouncing like, like pinballs in a pinball machine, you know, from, from different models and from different desires to the next. Uh, and that's one of the reasons it's important to be able to see our mimetic nature and to be able to sort of put some... to, to lay over some structure, because, you know, if from some objective evaluate... to step back from the mimetic game and to be able to understand like what, what is it that... is there certain things that I should want, um, that are sort of objective goods that may be lost in kind of the mimetic craziness and noise of the modern world?

   16. CWChris Williamson7:53

       Someone said that mimetic desire is to psychology what gravity is to physics. Is that right?

   17. LBLuke Burgis7:59

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson8:00

       Yeah.

   19. LBLuke Burgis8:00

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson8:00

       So if that's the case, how was it discovered?

   21. LBLuke Burgis8:04

       So, um, it was discovered by a, a French academic named René Girard who came to the States shortly after World War II, and his degree was in history. And he scovered- discovered mimetic desire, um, outside of his field of expertise through reading classic literature because he believed that literature, um, even mythological literature, classic fiction held deep anthropological truths inside of it. So the analogy here would be to, um, Heinrich Schliemann, who was a gentleman in 1871 who set out to find the lost city of Troy with a shovel under his arm and a copy of The Iliad under the other arm. So he had a shovel and he had The Iliad in 1871. And all the archeologists, everybody laughed this guy kind of just like out of the room. But two years later, he found Troy because he believed that the text actually held clues, like there was, there was some truth. He took the text seriously, and he scrutinized the text, and it allowed him to discover the city when nobody else took it seriously. So in other words, his method was wrong according to the experts, but the guy used The Iliad, and he found Troy. So they're-

   22. CWChris Williamson9:23

       Yeah, he was the idiot. (laughs)

   23. LBLuke Burgis9:24

       Yeah. (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson9:24

       All he did was read a book. (laughs)

   25. LBLuke Burgis9:26

       All he did was read a book that everybody else had read, but they just dismissed it as, as not important to this quest to, to, to find a city. Girard is like that in that he read classic literature and mythology, and he, he believed that the text held very important secrets about human nature. And he wasn't a literary critic. He didn't even study literature. He was self-taught, but he scrutinized the text that way. And, uh, I think it probably helped that he had fresh eyes. You know, like sometimes we see things easier when we're outside of the domain, um, where people are like in the weeds and we, we kind of stand back and have fresh perspective and we can see things that other people miss. And that's what he did with the literature, and his discovery was that desire is mimetic in a lot of the great classic novels, um, at least of the Western canon, like Dostoevsky, Cervantes, a lot of great French literature, um, like Proust. And he noticed that all of the characters in these novels, none of them want spontaneously, like their desires don't arise out of the blue. There's always some model for them, somebody influencing what they want. And Girard was one of these great interdisciplinary minds. Um, there's not a lot of them left. Like, he, he studied anthropology, history, literature. So he, he saw this discovery in literature the way that Schliemann did in The Iliad, uh, this truth, and then he began to look for it in other places. Uh, and he found it everywhere. And it's now, you know, 60 years later after Girard started talking about mimesis and mimetic desire, we have neuroscientists finding mirror neurons and realizing that, you know, in fact, imitation is like hardwired into, into what it means to be human. And if we imitate things like language and facial expressions and fashion, why wouldn't we also imitate desires?

   26. CWChris Williamson11:16

       That's exactly what I thought as soon as I learned about René Girard's work. Like, why would we believe that our children copy the faces that we pull at them when they're a toddler held in our lap, but the, the... at some point, well, you get agency, someone gives you the agency card at age 16 or something and you're like, "Right, okay, imprinting is over. Mimetic desire doesn't begin." No, of course, the imprinting that you have, the... uh, and it makes sense in an adaptive characteristic as well, right? You, you watch someone do a thing that looks successful. As a hunter-gatherer, that expedites your progress and your learning because you don't even need to be told it. You can just watch them do it. And then maybe you can be told it as well, that adds some flavor to it too. Like, it's just turbocharging learning, so why wouldn't that happen? But as you start to roll into higher levels of abstraction and you have these sort of loftier goals, and especially when you are exposed to far more stimulus, stimuli, than you would've done usually, like, it can be hijacked in a, a pretty sort of crazy way.

   27. LBLuke Burgis12:21

       Yeah. And, you know, the smarter that people are, the easier they can convince themselves of anything, uh, including that, you know, m- memetic desire is not a part of them, you know? So, the funny, interesting thing is that in children we see memetic desire easily. You put a bunch of toddlers loose in a room and one of them picks up a single toy that none of the other- other kids were concerned about. All of a sudden, a second and a third one comes over, and, you know, the- the- the more of them start ogling the single toy, the more attractive it becomes, like this power of attraction. It's kinda like when you're walking down the sidewalk and you see a bunch of people, like, huddled around a corner, like watching s- break dancers or something like that. It just... yeah, it's like moth to a flame, you know? And th- that's memetic desire, you know? We're taking our cues from other people. So, in children, it happens, and it's kind of funny. Um, like, one- one kid wants a single toy and the other one immediately just starts crying if he can't have it too. Um, and we, you know, we know from childhood development that this happens. There's been a- many studies that I reference in the book. But the funny thing... And children are open about their imitation and open about who their models are. You know, we call them role models, and they're not really embarrassed of their imitation. They imitate their older siblings and they're proud to do so, you know? In fact, the- the- the better they can imitate the older brother or something like that, just, you know, th- the better, and they wanna go tell everybody, you know, how much, how well they're doing at being like- like the older brother, whoever. As we get older, though, it seems that the- the memetic part of ourselves, we kind of, like, bury it. You know? It's- it's sort of like it's not good to be known as an imitator as an adult, especially with, you know, the way that entrepreneurship has sort of gone in the last 20 years. Like, we really prize innovation, and imitation has become a dirty word. So, it seems like the- the memetic part of what it means to be human has just went underground. It doesn't mean that it's disappeared. Uh, we haven't, like, engineered it away. If anything, we're probably more memetic than ever because of social media. But as adults, it's not something that we talk about very often.

   28. CWChris Williamson14:23

       Well, we call it out, right? People break the fourth wall with regards to the role models that they follow. Think about the Conor McGregor walk. You know, that walk as he goes into the ring, or the type of shirts that he was wearing. He wore that outrageous Versace shirt to the races one day, and then next summer, every fast fashion brand for men has these sort of floral, like, what would have been typically classed as, like, shit shirts, but now are the coolest thing on the market because Conor McGregor wore it. But everyone's fine with that. People seem to be like, "Yeah, yeah, but that's conscious. I know I'm doing that. I'm doing the walk." It's kind of, um, self-mocking almost, and I'm breaking the fourth wall by, I know I'm doing

2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah, exactly. Breaking the…

   1. CWChris Williamson15:00

      that. And for some reason, we presume that we're the conscious agents of our own desires. It's not Brazilian butt lifts all the way down. It's like Brazilian butt lifts when I choose to get it, but not when I don't.

   2. LBLuke Burgis15:11

      Yeah, exactly. Breaking the fourth wall is a great term to describe this, 'cause, you know, things do happen where we break the fourth wall. The fourth wall is strongest, uh, w- with the people that are close- closest to us, and that fourth wall doesn't get broken a whole lot. So, it's- it's one thing to imitate Conor McGregor, for- for me to imitate Conor McGregor and- and his crazy shirts and the way that he walks and stuff like that, um, because he's Conor McGregor. Uh, it's another thing for me to have that relationship of imitation with somebody that is, like, my colleague or somebody in my workplace, somebody very close to me, or my own business partner. And Girard says there are two different kinds of- of models of desire, for the most part. There are those that are external mediators of desire because they're outside of our world and they don't really imitate back. Um, there's no kind of, uh, there's no- there's no threat of- of this kind of reflexive, uh, weird relational situation that can turn into rivalry and create conflict. And then there are what he calls internal mediators of desire, and those are people inside of our world. We're not just talking about physical distance here. We're talking about s- our social world, like, existentially speaking. These are the people that, if we're imitating them, they might notice that we're imitating them. Conor McGregor has no fucking idea that I, you know, I- I wear his shirts, right? So, these are- these are trickier, and I think, uh, we break the fourth wall on the external ones and we can joke about it, but rarely does that happen with- with the internal mediators of desire.

   3. CWChris Williamson16:42

      No. The only reason that you would ever do that would be if you were taking the piss, right? You've-

   4. LBLuke Burgis16:46

      Exactly.

   5. CWChris Williamson16:46

      You've got some- the new Australian in the office or the Brit in the office, and all of the Americans decide that they're going to try and do the British or Australian accent, which all of you are terrible at.

   6. LBLuke Burgis16:55

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson16:57

      And- (laughs) and, um, yeah, that's- that's the way it works. So, is mimesis a kind of alchemy? 'Cause it seems like you can create a desire or a demand for something which was originally worth nothing by just having other people appear to want it.

   8. LBLuke Burgis17:11

      Yeah. I- I, you know, Rory Sutherland, who- who I've spoken to, he wrote a great book, uh, I think-

   9. CWChris Williamson17:16

      Called Alchemy, yeah.

   10. LBLuke Burgis17:17

       ... would- would certainly say that it's- it's alchemy. Uh, and I- I tell a story about Eddie Bernays, who basically used alchemy to manufacture, uh, an outcome in- in the earliest 20th century in- in the States. Uh, women didn't smoke in public. It was totally taboo, but all the men were addicted to- to cigarettes because they were included in the ration packs in- in the first World War. So, all the men smoked. None of the women smoked in public, very rarely did they. And Bernays was hired by one of the large, uh, tobacco companies, American Tobacco, that made Lucky Strikes. And Lucky Strikes realized that if they could tap into the- the- the market for- for female smokers, especially in public, then they'd make, you know, the modern day equivalent of billions of dollars back then. And Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, by the way, so he- he understood psychology, and even though he wouldn't have used the term memetic desire, uh, he certainly understood the- the principle of mimesis and that humans need models of desire. And what did he do? He engineered this elaborate stunt at the 1929, uh, Easter Day Parade. He had women, attractive women, come out of the churches with packs of Lucky Strikes planted inside their- their fancy overcoats.And on cue, they whipped out the Lucky Strikes and started smoking them, just defiantly walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City. And these women served as models. They were... all of the newspapers were, were photographing them. And Bernays said, "Look at these women smoking torches of freedom. They're, they're, they're defying this taboo. They're finally free because they're able to smoke." And it's... it appeared that they were... they spontaneously chose to do this. But in fact, the whole thing was engineered by Bernays because he realized that this, this model of a bunch of women, at the same time, spontaneously deciding that they were going to defy this, this taboo was incredibly powerful for all of the other women that saw this. I mean, it's... this is like mimetic desire 101. And then there's the element of rivalry in there, um, you know, with, with, with the men and, and he used this to create some kind of alchemy (laughs) to generate a certain outcome. So we do have to be careful. Um, you know, marketers know this very well. Um, and, you know, even people that are sort of like really, really slick in the dating game, uh, kn- know this very, very well too, right? Um, there's sort of no, no better, no better way to, to generate desire for oneself than to be able to walk into a bar and have your, you know, a- attractive friend of the opposite sex just pretend to be totally fascinated with you or something like that, right? Th- there always needs to be a model.

   11. CWChris Williamson20:04

       It seems like signaling and mimetic desire are very closely interlinked. Is there a relationship between this?

   12. LBLuke Burgis20:11

       I think that... I think it's a deep relationship and, and it's very simple. It's just that models of desire signal to us what is, what is wantable. So it acts as a... as a source of legitimacy for our own desires. Think about it, if, if I want something, um, that nobody else wants, or you know, if I wanna, uh, go on vacation to a certain spot or, or, or you know, pursue some path in life, um, most people, if they, if they express this desire and they can't find anybody else around them who also seems to think that that thing's desirable, they begin to doubt themselves and w- and wonder if they're... if they want the right thing. Um, this happens in romance, it happens in careers. Now, I don't think... I, I mean, there's certainly some people, and I think entrepreneurs are the... are the prime example. Like everybody could tell them they're crazy and that they shouldn't do something, but they do it anyway. That's a little bit different though. That's, that's not... that's not necessarily a, a, a d- a desire, that's just people weighing in like, "Well, I don't think this will work for X, Y, and Z reason." When it comes to like actual desires, we look for other people, the models, to signal l- the legitimacy of that desire for us. So I think there's a very deep connection.

   13. CWChris Williamson21:22

       There has to be equivalence of like a first mover, right? As you said, with the kids, you got the kids in the play, play area, and let's say that they're all doing nothing, then one does something. Now, that something can have been iterated on a mimetic desire that they saw yesterday or that they saw two weeks ago, or that they watched mom do in the car on the way here or something. But there does have to be a first mover. So there has to be, um, gradations of how mimetic certain desires are that we have. There are certain people who step further outside of the Overton window of what is normal acceptable behavior with regards to their desires, and there are others that are slap bang in the middle of the normal distribution.

   14. LBLuke Burgis22:03

       Yes. I think thinking of it, uh, as a gradation or as a spectrum of mimesis is exactly the right way to think about it. So let's take the little girl in the room who picks up a bright red firetruck. She may pick up that firetruck because her dad is a firefighter (laughs) and s- and you know, and that's the reason why she was the first mover. So it has nothing to do with the other kids in the room, it has to do with some external factor or something, you know, she saw on TV the day before. But, uh, it could have nothing to do with that. Um, it could just be, uh, because the color red is just this like bright red color and all of the other toys are dull... have dull colors, and there's some kind of instinctual response where the red was attractive. I mean, we s- we know this in animals with birds and flowers. So, so perhaps there, there is an instinctual basis for people moving towards things and, and desiring it, and then the mimesis, uh, maybe follows that. So I think there's all kinds of reasons why somebody could be a first mover, um, different gradations. And the trick is kind of like getting to the source, right? Getting to the bottom of it.

   15. CWChris Williamson23:07

       So if everyone's converging on desires, this must cause conflict because more people are more alike, which means that increased rivalry and a greater desire for differentiation as well has to come out of it.

   16. LBLuke Burgis23:21

       Yes. The, the next step... So the mimetic desire is like step one of Girard's theory. Step two is that mimetic desire quite naturally has to lead to conflict because we're imitating the desire of a model, we're, we're now pursuing what the model is pursuing. So we've, we've de facto made ourselves in- into some form of arrival. So the model is now a- an obstacle to us in, in the pursuit of whatever the thing is. So you think of a... like a hyper-mimetic environment like, um, university. The students come into the university maybe with all kinds of like grandiose ideas of what they wanna do when they graduate. If you poll them on their first day, let's say it's, you know, it's a class of 1,000 students, you might get eight or 900 different answers of, of different things that they wanna do post-graduation. But the funny thing is, by the time that they graduate, if you ask them on the last day, you might get 100. Like s- in, in, in some sense, like th- th- their, their desires of what they want to do just kind of converge (laughs) through this mimetic process. Like one of them is like, "Oh, this is the... this is the company to work for. This is the industry to work in." And their desires converge, and then it becomes hypercompetitive. And they're competing over the same types of jobs, competing to get into the same companies, and it creates, uh, creates conflict. Um, that's a relatively superficial example, but it... this can manifest itself in all different kinds of ways. And we...So basically, the, the counterintuitive idea here for Girard is that our conflict does not arise primarily from our differences. Um, it actually arises from our, from our sameness. It, it arises from mimesis, from imitating each other, which draws us closer together and sort of, um, brings us into a situation of, of imitating one another, but kind of wanting to hide it. Um, this weird sort of situation of, of, of di- of needing to differentiate ourselves while we're all secretly imitating ourselves. And the, the best example of this for me is social media (laughs) . Uh, social media, it has a homogenizing nature to it. If you think about the way that Twit- Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, we all have the same profiles. We all... it's all kind of structured the same way. We have the same wiring, and we have to present ourselves in, in that way. We have the same number of characters to make a point. So, it actually has brought us closer together. Nobody really knows who to... who the models are to follow. I mean, they change all the time. And there's this, um... You, you see, there's, like, this great anxiety to sort of differentiate oneself while in an environment where everybody's imitating everybody else in some way and responding to everybody else. So that's... This is the great paradox, I think, of, of memetic desire.

   17. CWChris Williamson26:12

       Yeah, it's interesting, especially on social media, because you have people that get to the top, right? So they have a power law, um, a- advantage because more people, proportionally far more people see their content, and then they look at it and they think, "Oh, well, he's... Luke's got good reach with that tweet, so I'll add that into the library of potential mimesis strategies." And then, "Oh, Luke's done it again. He's done it again with that same sort of tweet." And you see this, right? You see this with different structures, whether it's putting clapping, clap emojis in between each word or whether it's using a particular hashtag. Like, what is a hashtag? It's other people saying, "This is a trend. This is something else that I agree with." And a lot of what people are trying to do there is achieve success through the adoption of that trend. Here's something that's worked well. That's a signal of high value, high status, intellect, humor, whatever. Uh, therefore, I'm going to adopt it. I'm gonna absorb it into myself.

   18. LBLuke Burgis27:07

       Yeah, y- you see it all, all the time on, on social media. Like, when one person develops a certain tactic, all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere. It's imitated everywhere. Um, you know, and, and maybe the origin of that was some, you know, program of how to get more engagement in 30 days or something like that, right? So, people start doing all kinds of funny things, like asking these questions and, um, you know, I ca- I can... You can almost just sniff it out, right, as soon as you see it. But imitating... The- there's a lot of cargo cult stuff happening, um, not only on social media, but in, uh, you know, in the startup world, for instance. And it's like imitating sort of the, the external things, like, will magically bring about some, some kind of result. So you see entrepreneurs, like, imitating all kinds of, like, surface level things, like ways of dressing, ways of working, kind of lifestyles, like diff- the ways even that we communicate in our email exchanges. Like, there was this, like, hyper-mimetic trend while, while I was living in California, where, like, all of a sudden it seemed like overnight, like, nobody wanted to use capital letters in emails anymore. And it was like, "It's not cool. It means that you're, like, you're not busy enough if you have to capitalize the first word of your sentences and use punctuation." And it's like, in the course of a year, man, I'm not kidding, like, th- like, that just happened. So there's, like, this imitation of, like, all these, like, funny external things that have very, very little to bear on, on the success (laughs) of the company, uh, or on the valuation, right? On, on, on the value creation. So, you know, what we're imitating is, is very important. Is it... Is it, like, the superficial external things? Like, are we doing that with some, like, auto-magical expectation that if I put these three emojis after all of my tweets, suddenly, you know, I will, you know, have the following that, uh, Elon Musk has? No, it doesn't work like that.

   19. CWChris Williamson28:52

       If I wear the black turtleneck, then I get all of the insights from creativity and marketing that Steve Jobs had. This is what we saw with Elizabeth Holmes, right, from Theranos, a woman who was a complete shyster and a total, total con artist, f- very successfully so. Um, and she wore a turtleneck the same way that Steve Jobs did. There's actually clips on YouTube, if you look hard enough, of her real voice, showing this-

   20. LBLuke Burgis29:15

       Changing her voice, yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson29:16

       Yeah, so she lowered her voice to imitate the men that were in the industry because she thought that having a lower voice would signal that she was more masculine, more disagreeable, more conscientious, more industrious, harder working. Um, but the product that they created, the... what was it called? The Winston or something? What was the thing that they made?

   22. LBLuke Burgis29:36

       Oh, I forget the name of the actual product.

   23. CWChris Williamson29:38

       Yeah, anyway, the, uh... Some famous, uh, scientist from the 1900s, they named a... named this thing. Uh, the Edison, that was it.

   24. LBLuke Burgis29:45

       That's right.

   25. CWChris Williamson29:45

       Um, and, uh... But that was shit. Total shit. Didn't do what it was supposed to do at all, but she'd got all the surface area stuff. She'd got all of the easy to achieve things. Here's another thing, man, that, uh, I think about a lot. Scott Alexander put this on his blog a little while ago, talking

3. 30:00 – 45:00

   It's brilliant. And, and…

   1. CWChris Williamson30:00

      about how, um, fashions work two rungs apart in terms of class or group hierarchy. So if you're upper class, Kim Kardashian, let's say, you can wear heels with a pair of popper-sided jogger tracksuit bottoms to an awards ceremony, and people are gonna think, "Oh yeah, that's so cool." It's like the clothes of the underclass. It's the clothes of sort of the street chav, but worn by someone who's really, really classy. But if you're only one rung above them, if you're perhaps lower middle class, you can't get away with that because you're so close that you could be confused. The signal that you're giving off and the mimesis isn't a signal of, "I'm so cool that I can wear something that's two rungs below me," or-... I am so rich, uh, even though I might be in a sort of lower middle class or an underclass position, that I can wear what the people above me are. I just look this way and I'm above my station, basically. Um, so you need to have these gaps. So the way that people model stuff and who they choose is also a signal in itself, right? Okay, what is this going to adopt within me? What am I trying to say with this? Is there any confusion that this might actually be me slipping down a peg as opposed to moving up a peg?

   2. LBLuke Burgis31:13

      It's brilliant. And, and that has everything to do with what we talked about earlier that Kim Kardashian can do that because she lives in a different world. So it's not confusing. She's going f- far enough away into, um, it's an external world for her, right? With external mediators of desire and internal mediators. So she's going far enough away so it's not confusing. Where if she sort of stayed in the world of celebrity and did something, um, it could create a lot of conflict. So that, that has to do with the distinction of, like, what world do the models occupy. Um, and we see that in, in, in all kinds of different domains. The interesting thing with Elizabeth Holmes, though I have to add, is that what she did, like, we can say that it's silly. We can joke about the black turtlenecks, but to some extent, it worked in, in the sense that she created an aura around her-

   3. CWChris Williamson32:02

      Alchemy, man.

   4. LBLuke Burgis32:03

      ... that, alchemy. It was total alchemy, that, that got people, presumably very smart people. I mean, it's embarrassing if you watch the, the documentary, the amount of people, right? (laughs) That are on there touting her. Um, so in a sense, memetic desire models, like, literally distort reality. You know, we, we project all kinds of things onto models, um, like metaphysical things that they don't even possess. Um, so there's a kind of a game that's being played. It's like, who can make themselves out to be the right kind of a model? Um, and if you can do that, you can raise, you know, I d- I forget, some ridiculous amount of money that El- that Elizabeth Holmes was able to raise. And then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the more money you're able to raise, the more people that you get, like, you know, h- former heads of state, the more people don't even question. They just, they, they, they now have models of desire to follow, and it makes the seventh and eighth and the ninth one extremely easy.

   5. CWChris Williamson33:01

      What goes on when mimesis happens to social groups, then?

   6. LBLuke Burgis33:07

      Usually when mimesis makes its way through a social group through kind of memetic contagion, um, it leads to the group becoming more homogenous if there's no kind of external reference in, in the social group. Uh, Girard found that, you know, th- and this can happen at the micro level, it can happen in a family, it can happen in a company. It can even happen in a community or in a country, um, where everybody is reacting memetically to, to everybody else. And it kind of creates this, what he calls, excuse me, a memetic crisis. And Girard found that, uh, at the root of, of a lot of societal crises is, like, out of control memetic desire, where there's no sort of clear models to follow. There's no shared models, and everybody's kind of looking to everybody else and reacting to everybody. It's interesting. We don't, you know ... And, and at least I'm, I'm thinking of, you know, 2021 America, there's not a lot of shared models, right? I mean, what part of the problem is there's not a lot of, like, like, models that we can agree on in terms of like, who we should be following. So it just, it cre- in the, in the absence of that, there's this kind of memetic crisis where different sort of groups and factions form, and everybody is reacting to everybody else. And Girard found that historically, these kinds of memetic crises are solved through, uh, what he calls the scapegoat mechanism, through, um, turning away from one another through the imitation of one another and sort of taking out the tension, taking out the aggression on, on some, on some scapegoat that basically provides some temporary relief from, from the, from the internal mediation that, that created the crisis.

   7. CWChris Williamson34:54

      Can you dig into that a little bit more? Sort of why does that happen? How is it a release valve?

   8. LBLuke Burgis35:00

      It, it happens because the, when people are imitating one another in conflict and in aggression, um, the, they, they ... Think of it this way, think of a bunch of people sort of, um, standing, lo- looking at one another, sort of, um, fighting, taking their cues from the other side, tit-for-tat aggression, and somebody or someone comes on the scene, uh, a third party that allows them to now stand shoulder to shoulder. And (clears throat) , which i- in a sense, like, releases them or makes them forget about their, their aggression towards one another. And they are able to, to essentially unite against whoever the scapegoat is. So it actually, it causes group cohesion, um, when there's a scapegoat. Um, so, I mean, this goes all the way back to ancient Israel where there was a sacred rite for this, right? Every year at Yom Kippur, the high priest would symbolically transfer all of the sins of the people onto a goat, and then they would collectively drive that goat out into the wilderness, into t- into the hands of a demon to die. And the, the act of transferring all of the, all of the blame, the transference of blame onto that scapegoat, and then very importantly, the act of collectively, um, driving that goat o- away, exiling that goat, created cohesion among the people. Whereas before, it was kind of a, a, as Hobbes would say, like a war of all against all, uh, tons of interpersonal conflicts. The scapegoat is like concentrating all conflict and all blame onto a single kind of fixed point. It'd be like, you know, if you have cancer running all throughout our body, imagine how nice it would be if we could concentrate, uh, all of the cancer into one cell and eliminate the cell.Well, the scapegoat mechanism is essentially doing that, but for a social process, not a biological process.

   9. CWChris Williamson36:57

      So, I imagine in an individualistic society, this is even worse, right? Because you're so siloed out, everybody is their meritocratic utilitarian objective metric of success that they can add to society. And this must make the scapegoat mechanism even more so. You got the collapse of grand narratives, all the things that used to cohese us together in the past, attending church, going to the same sports games together. The paradox of choice is that when you can follow whatever interests you have, you're less likely to cohese with the people around you about their interests as well.

   10. LBLuke Burgis37:32

       Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think when I look at, um, like the United States today, the one thing that seems to bind groups together more than anything else, like the most identifiable and easiest thing to identify the group, is who their enemy is. In other words, like, who their scapegoat is. So Girard had a- a funny saying one time, he was like, you know, "Political partisanship is essentially, um, you know, having the same scapegoat as- as- as everybody else." Or- or something to that effect. But aside from politics, it's just, it- the scapegoat mechanism creates group cohesion through this, uh, this kind of transference of blame. It binds people together through that. So, I think that- I think you're right. I think that as our society becomes more, uh, hyper-individualistic and fractured, we will see more and more need for the scapegoat mechanism, because we have less of the shared values. Like, one way to think of shared values would be, like, shared models, right? That's why I said it's hard to find, like, a- like, models that everybody agrees on. I- I once tweeted out, I was like, "Who's a- who's, like, a model that, like, all Americans can, like- like, hold up as a- as a good example?" And I only got one response, and it was Dolly Parton. Um-

   11. CWChris Williamson38:43

       The Rock. The Rock. Everybody loves The Rock.

   12. LBLuke Burgis38:46

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson38:46

       That's who I'd have voted for.

   14. LBLuke Burgis38:47

       I think- I think The Rock is probably up there, yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson38:50

       Yeah.

   16. LBLuke Burgis38:50

       But they're- but they're hard to find. I mean, the fact that we're talking about The Rock and Dolly Parton-

   17. CWChris Williamson38:53

       (laughs)

   18. LBLuke Burgis38:54

       ... show- shows you, and not- and not some, like, ideals or virtues or, like, a sense of, like, what it should mean to be an Am- like, that just says everything that you need to know about the state that we're in. (laughs)

   19. CWChris Williamson39:05

       There's a study that my buddy Rob Henderson told me about. In 2008, which was when Obama got elected the first time, um-

   20. LBLuke Burgis39:15

       That's right.

   21. CWChris Williamson39:15

       ... both parties loved their own party or liked their own party more than they disliked the other party. 2012, when they were polled, people disliked the other party more than they liked the one that they were voting for. So, it literally is like a protest vote. It's a vote against what I don't want to happen, as opposed to what I want to happen, which is crazy when you think about it like that. There's um, you had a story of how Lamborghini came to fame in the book. Can you tell us that?

   22. LBLuke Burgis39:44

       Yeah, this is a beautiful story of a memetic desire that turned into memetic rivalry that ended well, uh, which is rare. And- and it's why I thought it was important to tell the story, because y- memetic desire can lead to great innovation, and it can be a tremendously positive motivating force for people, as long as you don't let it metastasize and become, uh, negative and destructive and self-destructive. So, the story of, um, Ferrari and Lamborghini is fascinating. So Enzo Ferrari, of course, built the- the Ferrari automobile company known for these great racing cars. And Ferruccio Lamborghini, who's the- the founder of what we today know as the- as the Lamborghini automobile company, started out making tractors in the middle of the 20th century. He made these beautiful tractors, and he did very well for himself as a businessman, and to the point where he could buy himself a few Ferraris. So you have this successful entrepreneur, Ferruccio Lamborghini, driving these Ferraris, and in- in one of his top-of-the-line Ferraris, the clutch just kept on breaking on him, and he couldn't figure out what was going on. He would take it to the Ferrari shop, they would charge him an arm and a leg, (clicks tongue) send them back, and the thing would break three months later. Just infuriated, he finally had his tractor engineers open up the hood, uh, take a look at the clutch, and he found out it was the same damn clutch that he used in some of his cheaper tractors. Now, this really pissed him off, because when he went to Ferrari, of course, you know, they charged him 10 times more than the cost of the part. So Lamborghini said, "Screw this, I'm just gonna take a really top-of-the-line clutch and- and put it in my car." So he rigged his car, he made himself a better Ferrari by putting one of his really sturdy clutches in. And his- his argument was like, "They're not using, uh, a clutch that can handle the power of this vehicle." So he did it, uh, and then he souped up the engine while he was at it. And then he- he would go out on the autostrada near where the Ferrari factory is, where the Ferrari engineers would test their cars, and Lamborghini had souped up his Ferrari to where it would beat the new Ferraris coming out of the garage. And they're like, "What did this guy do?" Finally, Lamborghini said, "I gotta go tell Enzo Ferrari, you know, what I think about him and his cars." So, he- he finally gets a meeting with the great Ferrari, and he- he tells him, "Listen, I think your clutches are shit." And Enzo says, "Well, maybe you don't know how to drive a Ferrari, and you should just stick to making tractors." So, you know, Fer- Lamborghini leaves that meeting, um, and- and basically resolves from that day that he's gonna make a car, and he's gonna make a better car, uh, to- to prove to Ferrari that- that he's a better engineer. He- he was an engineer by- by trade. And within two years, he had. Um, he went on a whirlwind tour of- of the- of the world. He went to Japan, he went to Detroit, uh, he looked at the great automobile manufacturers, and he imitated th- the crap out of them. And it's funny, he- he says in his, uh, in his book, he goes, "I have no shame." He goes, "I learned from the best, I imitated the best. Um, I didn't in- in- innovate much at all. I just took the best- the best parts from all of these cars, the manufacturing from Detroit, like the- the- the- the beauty- the beautiful design from the... I just put them all together."And within two years, he made a Lamborghini model that i- in many respects was superior to the Ferrari in, I think, 1966. Um, and he... and, you know, he... they've been making cars ever since. So, you know, th- that... the whole company was born, in essence, out of memetic desire. The thought of making a car didn't... hadn't even dawned on, on Lamborghini, uh, until he had the right, the right model and the right rival for it. Um, he didn't just wake up one day and decide to go into the car business, right? It a ro-... it arose through this, this memetic, uh, rivalry that he had. And then the ending of the story is, um, he realized after, after a decade or so of fierce competition with Ferrari, uh, there was debate whether Lamborghini should enter into racing. Um, and at the time, they, they, they weren't... they didn't race. They just made beautiful touring cars that had trunks in them, s- d- different than a Ferrari, which was primarily a racing car. Um, I'm getting into Formula 1, by the way, these days. It's why I... because I wrote that story. It's, it's solid. It's giving me one more thing to bet on. Um, anyways, uh, he, he eventually realized that the rivalry would not end well if he continued that way. He wanted to spend more time with his family. He knew that if he entered the racing business, um, he, he would just be in a war with Ferrari until the end of his life. So, he said, "We're not going to enter the racing business." Um, he handed over control of the company to other people. He retired to a beautiful winery, uh, which is still in Italy to this day. You can go buy Lamborghini wine, uh, and visit, uh, Ferruccio Lamborghini's, uh, estate, where there's a beautiful bed and breakfast. Uh, you can get a tour of a, a barn, where he's got all his classic cars. And he, he lived a very, very happy and, and fulfilling, you know, end of his life. Um, and then, w-... you know, it was an... it was an example of him recognizing, um, "Listen, my rivalry produced this beautiful company and car, but if I, if I don't stop, um, it will basically lead to my, my death." And, and he was a... really big into bullfighting, and he sort of likened

4. 45:00 – 57:31

   And the badge on…

   1. LBLuke Burgis45:00

      himself to the bull in a bullfight. And he said, "I'm, I'm like a bull, and I, I know what happens to the bull, um, if, if it, if it doesn't realize that there's always one more thing, there's always one more thing that I could do. So, I'm gonna resist the temptation to kinda take this to the end, uh, and I'm gonna kind of opt out of the game while, while, while I'm ahead," (laughs) basically. And that's what he did.

   2. CWChris Williamson45:21

      And the badge on a Lambo is a bull, right?

   3. LBLuke Burgis45:24

      It's a bull. That's where it comes from. It comes from his lifelong fascination with, uh, with, with bullfighting, and there's probably a little Hemingway involved in that story, I'm sure.

   4. CWChris Williamson45:33

      That's so sick, man. 'Cause I'm fascinated with people's ability to step into their own programming. So, so far, we've laid out a fairly bleak picture of human nature. We're just kind of these NPC, uh, m-... very easily, uh, imprintable creatures. What about stepping into our own programming? Like, is y-... is it even desirable for us to get rid of our memetic desires? Surely, there has to be some wisdom in crowds, right? The evolution of memes is... and, and, um, ideas would suggest that the ones that stick about are at least partly useful.

   5. LBLuke Burgis46:07

      Yeah. I, I think we, um... I don't think it's possible to transcend, uh, memetic desire or to get rid of it completely. Um, you know, uh, uh, you... we'll, we'll be rid of memetic desire when we're dead. Um, you know, as, as... as... while, while we're living, we'll, we'll always have it, and it can be a tremendously powerful thing, right? It can spur us on to, to imitate great models. Um, so I think we have a lot of agency. We have a great deal of agency. Um, but we.... you know, freedom is something that we can win or lose. Um, you know, it's what happens with, with, you know, vices and addictions, you know. We, we literally lose freedom, or we can develop freedom. So, I think we can develop, um, freedom to, to be more intentional about, uh, our lives and the kinds of models that we choose, the kinds of desires that we pursue. But we can't do that if we're not even aware that this is going on. Like, if we can't step into our own programming, we have to know what the program is. And part of why I wrote this book is just to let people say, "Here's, here's part of the programming." You know, part of a fundamental way that, that humans are wired is, is to be memetic. We're constantly looking for models of desire. And just being aware of that t-... uh, allows us to step back, gain some self-possession, take stock, um, of your life, um, of the decisions that you're making, and then step into it, uh, in a m-... in a more intentional way. But I find that very, very few people even acknowledge that this is a, a hidden force, uh, in the world. You know, a hidden force that is to psychology what, what, what gravity is to physics. Um, you gotta know that it exists, or you can't develop the right muscles to combat it. It's... it'd be like going through life not knowing that, that gravity exists, you know, and you never work out, and you wonder why you have... like, your back hurts. So, memetic desire is, is, is similar. Um, we can step into it. We can... I, I... yeah, I think stepping back, uh, taking stock, and then stepping back in is kinda the, the approach that I recommend in the book.

   6. CWChris Williamson48:01

      Well, thankfully, the audience that listens to this show are terrifyingly reasonable and unbelievably sensible. They're happy to, to swallow whatever sort of uncomfortable truths they need to. So, let's say that someone's listening, and they want to become this intentional agent, right? They want to become a, a sovereign individual. What are some of the tactics that they can use to notice when they've been memetically hijacked?

   7. LBLuke Burgis48:23

      Yeah. I think, you know, as you become aware of it, you can actually name some of your models, positive and negative. I think any time you're able to name something, uh, just kind of like emotions, you, you gain some control over them. So, you know, when I can... when I can name, um, the people that I'm emulating and the people that I look to as, as, as rivals, I gain some control o- over them. So, I mean, it's an exercise I would do. I'd actually, like, take stock. Take a piece of paper, um, and take stock of what your world of models looks like in different domains. Um, who's your model for investing? Who's your model for fitness?... who's your model for, like, what you know your relationships want to look like, your family life.

   8. CWChris Williamson49:01

      What are some good, good identifiers of this? Someone says, "I want to find out who my model for fashion is, or for fitness, or whatever." What are some of the things that, the questions that they can ask themselves to, to help identify that?

   9. LBLuke Burgis49:13

      Mm-hmm. You can, um... I mean, when it comes to negative models, you can always ask yourself, like, who, who makes you uncomfortable, um, when, when you see them during cer- doing certain things or having certain successes? Um, that might be the kind of negative model or rival. I think the most powerful way to do this, though, is to actually look at your past and the, and the formation of, of your goals and your desires. So, I had a, a good friend of mine say... I don't know if you've seen this movie called A Few Good Men. It came out in the late '80s, Jack Nicholson. He, he watched this movie 20 years later, and when he watched it, he realized that for the last 20 years of his life, he had been basically saying things that came from the movie and, like, modeling certain mannerisms and certain ways of dealing with people based out of some of the characters from that movie. And it wasn't until he saw it 20 years later, he was like, "Damn, that movie was literally, like, my model for certain kinds of, like, goals that I've set-"

   10. CWChris Williamson50:08

       Oh, shit. So, that had been his genesis that had trickled through other people and then come back to him?

   11. LBLuke Burgis50:13

       And then come back to him, yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson50:15

       Fuck.

   13. LBLuke Burgis50:15

       So, so doing almost like a, like a history of desire in our lives, starting with our parents and f- and family and friends, and, uh, that's, that's an important exercise to do. And I, I guarantee you, if you take the time to do that, you will begin to identify some models that you probably forgot that you had. Um, that's one, that's one really, real- really easy way to, to get started. But it's not a, it's not an easy exercise, because it takes time. Um, you might start w- just with college. And then s- and then ask yourself, like... You know, you might realize like, "Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm in this career that I'm in today because of some models that I had while I was in college. And I... You know, at the time, I never kind of critically tested them. I didn't kick the tires. I just, like, took them for granted, and, and now here I am, and, you know, I'm not really that happy. Uh, and maybe it's because, you know, I've never really taken the time to understand how they influenced me." So, uh, that's, that's one... That's an easy tactic. Naming the current ones is, is, is another one. Um, you know, I, I recommend in the book the importance of, uh, of, of a retreat every year, if y- if you have the time to do it. And the reason that's so important is because w- it's hard, it's hard to see something that you're in, that, that you're literally in, especially something that's inside of you.

   14. CWChris Williamson51:25

       (laughs)

   15. LBLuke Burgis51:26

       So, you have to extract. Y- y- you know, without, without some form of, like, pulling back or extracting ourselves, you know, we don't have the perspective that we need. So, you know, this is like a Bill Gates ThinkWeek, but, but for desires. Um, I try to take a few days every year. Um, I, I mean, it's the most important thing that I do every year. Um, you know, I, I, I recommend that to, to gain the perspective. Just to sit, to sit in silence. Like, things will bubble up. Um, I talk about that a lot in the book, actually, because it's, you know, it's, it's the genesis of this whole project for me. Um, if I hadn't had the luxury of taking that time, I, I never would have realized some of these things.

   16. CWChris Williamson52:00

       That's... Uh, I, I find at the end of a year, I make more growth around my end-of-year review and my new year planning process than at any other time, and it's so dumb. So today, I've actually done my half-year, uh, check-in. I was like, "Right, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna dedicate half an afternoon to it, and just go through everything." And you get so much more clarity, 'cause you actually think, "Look at all of the things that when I was less encumbered by culture and habits and routines and fears and desires and all this sort of stuff, look at the things that, as close to my truth I was able to get on a piece of paper." And then-

   17. LBLuke Burgis52:36

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson52:37

       ... "Look at what the fuck I'm doing with my time now and look (laughs) at how far, how the huge delta chasm that's between these two..." And I go, "Right, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, okay, let's brush away all of this stuff. Let's get rid of all of that shit. Let's get back to the things that really matter, the highest points of contribution."

   19. LBLuke Burgis52:53

       No doubt. You know, and I, I like... There's a quote by James Clear that I like a lot that I, I kind of transferred to the book. And it's, you know, "We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems." And part of why it's so important to do this is to see the systems that we're part of that we might not even know that we're part of. Like, what is this, what is this system of desire that I'm, like, swimming in right now? Um, well, you know, what riptide might I be in? Um, i- i- we, we never sort of see that while we're in the moment. It's only in those moments of, of, of stepping back and gaining perspective, because we all have systems, right? There's probably one for podcasters. There's... I'm sure... There's definitely one for authors. I'll b- be the first to tell you that, h- having just written a book. There's a system of desire. There's certain things that I'm supposed to want, there's certain lists I'm supposed to be on, certain, like, thi- And, you know, I need to create a distance from that and say, "Well, is the goal to be a, a New York Times bestseller, or is, is there a better goal than that, maybe like a long-term, 12, 15, 20-year goal?" Um, and, and it's important to gain that perspective, or else we just take the... We, we basically... Other people give our goals to us if we don't do that.

   20. CWChris Williamson53:54

       Yeah, I, I'm hearing a lot of Goodhart's law throughout this. When the measure becomes the outcome, you end up having some very sort of strange externalities. So, for instance, you could sell a book which did a million copies, but let's say that it made the world a totally awful place, or let's say that it was really xenophobic or something and, and absolutely annihilated your career and people were hate-buying it so they could burn it in the street, and you were causing riots to occur. Like, you have achieved the goal, but because you've looked at the measure as the actual outcome that you're after... And I suppose that in the modern era as well, again, collapse of grand narratives, lack of reach-back to tradition and stuff like that. People don't really know what it is that they're supposed to want. We look to other people, and just over time you get this weird sort of Fisherian runaway increase in caricaturism of bigger lips, bigger boobs, bigger arms, bigger bank balance, faster car, bigger house, so on and so forth. I imagine there must be... Is there an inversion of a model, then, that you... Someone that you look to, that you're kind of obsessed with, but is a role model that you're using as an example of what not to be? You, you... Everyone's got the, the sort of car crash Instagram accounts that they hate-watch all of the stories of online.

   21. LBLuke Burgis55:11

       Yeah. Yeah, that we, that we hate watch. Um, you mean me personally or just in, in general?

   22. CWChris Williamson55:16

       Well, just in, in terms of the, uh, mimetic desire infrastructure, I suppose.

   23. LBLuke Burgis55:21

       Mm-hmm. I mean, I think it's im- I think it's critical to have, um, those kinds of models that are typically transcendent to the systems that we're in. Um, you know, it, it could be somebody fr- you know, from, from history or just some, some ideal. Because if we don't have any kind of tr- uh, model that transcends our environment, we're kind of constantly subject to the, whatever the tyranny of our age happens to be. Like, we're always a product, we're always a child of our age. Um, and I think that is... With the collapse of, uh, with the collapse of, of sort of meaning and grand narratives, uh, we risk, um... we risk that, right? We, we don't have kind of any- anything, like, outside of... You know, it's like you're, you're, you're drowning in, in, in quicksand and you don't have anything to, like, latch onto. Everything that you're grasping for, other people that are also drowning in, in the damn quicksand. So, I think it's, it's critical to have some transcendent models. It doesn't have to be a person. Um, it could be, it could be an idea, um, right? It could be, it could be some- something that is kind of what, you know, pr- classic or perennial philosophy would just call, like, these perennial truths of what it means to be human and what leads to a, you know, to the good life, right, as Aristotle would say. That, uh, that can sort of save us from the, the destructive effects of mimesis, to, to be able to, to, to have something to hold on to in that way.

   24. CWChris Williamson56:49

       Luke Burgis, ladies and gentlemen. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life will be linked in the show notes below. If people want to check out what else you do, where should they go?

   25. LBLuke Burgis56:59

       Uh, lukeburgis.com. Uh, a lot s- didn't make it into the book, so I, I try to write a Substack, uh, called Anti-Mimetic every week, uh, where I, I try to connect all these ideas to current events.

   26. CWChris Williamson57:09

       Sick, man. Thanks for coming on.

   27. LBLuke Burgis57:10

       Cool. Thanks so much for having me.

   28. CWChris Williamson57:12

       Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.

Episode duration: 57:31