updated 1d ago
Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
Previously, most victims were totally powerless to defend themselves. Today, nobody has more cultural influence than someone who has been recognized as a victim. It’s as if the poles of the earth’s magnetic fields changed places, the way they do every few hundred thousand years. The scapegoat mechanism has been so thoroughly subverted that there is
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Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
The original scapegoat mechanism brought order out of chaos—but the order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos is meant to shake up the “orderly” system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change it.
from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
Author James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones that “we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”
from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
The scapegoat mechanism works by diversion; the more we see it in others, the less we can see it in ourselves.
from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
While Soros focuses on the principle of reflexivity in financial markets, it operates in many other domains of life. People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfill
... See morefrom Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
This is essentially the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It is not merely the tragic story of two young lovers. It’s the tragedy of a warring city devolving into mimetic chaos. The opening line of the play is, “Two households, both alike in dignity.” Yet they hate each other.
from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
The scapegoat mechanism, he found, turns a war of all against all into a war of all against one.
from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
Engineering desires in robots or in humans raises serious questions about humanity’s future. Historian Yuval Noah Harari ends his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind with these words: “But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires, too, the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’
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Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago
The salient feature of any ideology is the violence that it both covers up and constrains. In other words, an ideology keeps a group “safe” from intruders who might bring with them an infectious strain of thought. There is no room for opposition. Girard once defined ideology as “the idea that everything is either good or bad.”
from Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Zach Kirshner added 8mo ago