Sixian

Internet subcultures, by contrast, are building grand narratives and meme worlds that help people feel their way through the chaos that’s currently unfolding. These stories cut deep, down to the most foundational questions of race and religion and destiny. We shouldn’t be too surprised that complex conspiracy theories, intergenerational trauma, and... See more

Modern epistemologies are forward-facing; they centralize the knower. And they often thrive on what some philosophers would call representation nihilism. That is, the presumption that the world is outside, external. And our work is to adequately represent it, right? In our ideas, in our language, and our concepts, to bring it in, so to speak, to... See more

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable... See more

The value of objects is not objective—it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: we assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want.  

Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter.

You can physically outlive the period in which explaining things in this way makes sense.

Girard taught that all desire is fundamentally a desire for being. In other words, all desire is metaphysical—it seeks a kind of inner transformation, a transfiguration of identity, which we desperately seek but even more desperately deny.