The term “sour grapes” was popularized in one of Aesop’s fables. A fox sees a beautiful cluster of ripe grapes hanging from a high branch. The grapes look ready to burst with juice. His mouth begins watering. He tries to jump up and grab them, but he falls short. He tries again and again, but the grapes are always just out of reach. Finally, he sit

If you’re taking a poll or a vote in a public place, it’s essential that people cannot see how other people are voting—if you want anything resembling a true, pre-mimetic reflection of what people think, that is.

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

Mimetic rivalries don’t end well unless one of the two parties involved renounces the rivalry.

Desire is a path-dependent process. The choices we make today affect the things we’ll want tomorrow. That’s why it’s important to map out, the best we can, the consequences of our actions on our future desires. Start by thinking seriously about what a positive cycle of desire might look like for you. Start with a core desire. It might be spending m

An idea that challenges commonly held assumptions can feel threatening—and that’s all the more reason to look more closely at it: to understand why.

A negative mimetic cycle is disrupted when two people, through empathy, stop seeing each other as rivals. Dave changed my way of thinking and my reactionary impulses by modeling something different—a core desire that is common to every person, but which often goes unfulfilled: to know and be known by others.

If the modern world seems to be going crazy, it’s partly because we are hyperaware of the ways in which exploitation and violence against innocent victims occur, but we simply don’t know what to do about them. It’s like we’ve been told something terrible that we didn’t want to know, and which we’re powerless to fix entirely on our own. And that’s a

But after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.