‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream’ (IV.i.206‒9).

The ‘inner voice’ is just the noise of others echoing inside your own emptiness.

We have been on a strange journey. I have founded this book on an unusual claim: that thinkers as different as Zhuangzi, Spinoza and Girard share a common core idea.

Understanding our innovation famine requires us to understand how many of our communities, whatever their stated purpose might be, are really identity regimes driven by egotism – patrolled and sustained by individuals determined to persevere in a certain idea of themselves: a fragile idea that cannot bear much novelty.

The crowd might believe that it is rooting out threats to its security, but in fact it is looking for threats to its identity: a crowd is united by a feeling of having discovered the right way to act and be, and nothing challenges the basis of this collective identity more than the prospect of individuals achieving admirable results by diverging fr

into our own multifarious and superdeterminate depths. We could stop fighting against the irresistible currents of a world in which things, despite our sternest ethical injunctions, refuse to simply be what they are – ourselves included.

And then, like the fluid face of Hundun, we could always be ready to be transformed into something new, never fixed into a single visage.

Unwavering belief that social liberation can solve the deepest riddles of life will only lead us to assign political diagnoses to everything, and to search everywhere for the problem except in our own desires. Girard’s conclusion is anti-utopian: ‘Whatever political or social system is somehow imposed on them, men will never achieve the happiness a

Girard is not opposed to movements of liberation, but he reminds us that they will always be liberation to mimesis. Liberation from instinct, prohibition, law, politics, etc., means freedom to more intensively pursue the being of others. The liberation is genuine, but anyone who feels suddenly