#media/article: https://app.getpocket.com/read/2574839711 Author: Alex Danco differentiation but not discrimination as good
- “Triangular Desire: We don’t want things; we want to be things” *
- mimetic desire
- We don’t want, we want to be ^_7ugKXaCf
- “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. 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.”
- shame from giving into mimetic desire and betraying who you are to be what society deems good
- humility is when you accept yourself for who you are
- alternative to hero’s journey with chasing after the model
- “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.”
- this conflict is really chasing status
- “Every scene ultimately comes to resemble the fashion industry: it’s a ritualized, interactive structure for creating and navigating status difference.”
- ”We do not fight because we’re different; we fight because we are the same”
- distance to model matters a lot, if they are very far and therefore not achievable, we don’t feel shame for not reaching it
- “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.” ^dSURhqtQ1
- mimetic violence
- conflicts over nothing just because of mimetic desire
- violence happens over the inconsequential things
- answer is distance and differentiation
- The Girardian mindset basically says, “Lasting peace and harmony inherently requires differentiation. A stable society is a differentiated one.” “As the Bible puts it in so many ways, the Devil acts through making us conscious of the Other. 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.” “Social Networking and the web is like our own version of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge: the Internet is basically a supercharged, everyday reminder of the presence of Self and Other. When the other is not your peer – if they’re far away, the more they’re differentiated from you in a particular way (like they’re older or younger, or have a different background or life experience), then awareness of the other is less of a problem. But when the Other is your peer, when they are close to you, and when their mediating influence puts you into t” “I’ve heard a line repeated a couple different times about the differences in American racism between the North and the South: “At least in the South you know where you stand.” If we put this in Girardian terms, it’d basically say, “A stable society is a differentiated one; in the South, that differentiation is explicit.”” ” 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’”.”