Author:: alexdanco.com Full Title:: Secrets About People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard Tags:#media/article Link:: https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dangerous-introduction-to-rene-girard/
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* highlights from 2021-02-08
* Triangular Desire: We don’t want things; we want to be things
* In more realistic “three-dimensional” or human conflict, the central relationship that matters isn’t between a Hero and an Object. It’s been the Hero and their ideal, the Model. The Hero wants to become the ideal, and the way that he expresses this desire is by mimicking the model: wanting what the model wants and has. Sometimes this can be a literal object, sometimes it’s a love interest, but usually what the Hero wants is something more ephemeral: status, significance, respect; to be seen as a particular kind of person, and to feel like that person.
* Every scene ultimately comes to resemble the fashion industry: it’s a ritualized, interactive structure for creating and navigating status difference.
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* One of the tragic elements of mimetic desire is that it induces a lot of self-deception: lying to yourself in order to reshape your perceptions, your experience and your identity to be consistent with who you feel you ought to be. When teenage you convinces yourself that you actually hate Green Day, not only are you rejecting something that you love, which is sad enough in itself, you’re going to experience shame: the feeling that you are not living up to the kind of person that you want to be
* the tragic elements of mimetic desire is that it induces a lot of self-deception: lying to yourself in order to reshape your perceptions, your experience and your identity to be consistent with who you feel you ought to be. When teenage you convinces yourself that you actually hate Green Day, not only are you rejecting something that you love, which is sad enough in itself, you’re going to experience shame: the feeling that you are not living up to the kind of person that you want to be. You want to be someone who hates Green Day, because that’s who the cool kids are. To rediscover past impressions is a kind of humility: it’s accepting that you may not actually be like those role models. But it frees you to perceive things as they actually are, and enjoy them as your genuine self. Humility and shame, when viewed through a mimetic lens, are opposites.
* When our role model is far away, we continually praise them and draw comparisons between ourselves and them whenever possible. But when our model is close – if they’re our peer, or coworker, our neighbour, or even a family member – we do the opposite. We desperately hide the fact that they are the model for our admiration and jealousy.
* The Girardian mindset basically says, “Lasting peace and harmony inherently requires differentiation. A stable society is a differentiated one.
* One way, which still exists today in different forms, is hierarchy. If I’m a subject and you’re the king, then I may in fact be less jealous of you than I am of my peer and neighbour. That’s because jealousy and resentment isn’t a function of any particular object that’s desired (which you, as king, will have a lot of) but rather is a function of the distance between us
* 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.
* 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.
* A modern civilization with layers of layers of safeguards in its judicial system and society is not automatically therefore full of “good people”. On the contrary, it means that the mechanisms of evil are masked, buried and not as well understood as they were in earlier times. Furthermore, the more connected and cosmopolitan a society (as Rome was becoming), the more opportunities there are in front of you to care about what the Other thinks, and to admire and mimic them.
* When people say “Make America Great Again”, I imagine that at some level this is what a lot of people are talking about: “Bring differentiation back to America. Bring America back to a time and place where we didn’t have this top-down enforcement of ‘everyone is the same’”.
* But that’s not how it’s interpreted by the pro-discrimination crowd. To them, the threat is not so much “people who are different”, it’s “those people deciding that they are just as good as we are.”
* Perhaps one of the paradoxical benefits of the internet, in the long term, is shifting the way we think about peer relationships from “opt-out”, which it’s been since pretty much forever, towards “opt-in.” In an opt-out peer set relationship, we default towards needing to look good in front of people; towards caring what people think, towards being embarrassed about aspects of ourselves, almost automatically – regardless of who the other person is. Not caring about what other people think has to be this deliberate act of bravery that’s hard to do. But in an opt-in peer set relationship, we only people in as peers and role models selectively and deliberately; not caring about what most people think comes naturally, because it’s on by default. This is a healthy thing, I think.
* We do not fight because we’re different; we fight because we are the same
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