What René Girard Teaches Us About Human Desire - Luke Burgis | The Remnant w/ Jonah Goldberg

Luke Burgis, author and professor of business at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, grants Jonah a well-deserved break from punditry with a crash course in mimetic theory. René Girard takes center stage as Luke and Jonah discuss the roots of human desire; how such desires lead to tribalism, conflict, and violence; and the relationship between mimetic processes and social discord. Scapegoats and gossip abound as Luke schools both high-minded Remnant listeners and theoretical normies on the psychology of nepotism, institutional debacles, and mob mentalities.
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#science #philosophy #psychology #politics #conservative

[@3506Dodge]

Girard was one part anthropologist, one part historian, and one part theologian.

[@littlerainyone]

Rene GIrard has had a huge impact on my thinking, but I find the analysis of scapegoating more compelling than the reduction of all desire to mimetic desire, so I am usually disappointed by the treatment Girard's work gets from public intellectuals. Girard makes a compelling case that scapegoating is at the genesis of all traditional (primitive) religion, So why have so few people made the obvious inference that scapegoating holds the key to understanding political religion? Scapegoating is not just about mimetic desire. In witchcraft cultures it serves a function closer to what you might call a "democratization of blame". In a modern context, for example, conspiracism is not a sign of rising acquisitiveness. It is just an attempt to return to the easy blaming available to people in primitive socieites. So it's not just our acquisitive instinct that is at work. It is cultural norms with regard how we assign blame.

[@amorfati4096]

so desirability of bitcoin is not because of its scarcity?🤣