Introduction to Mimetic Theory | René Girard

lecture one introduction to mimetic theory no philosopher has influenced my thinking more than renee gerard he showed me how i was caught up in meaningless status competitions and how much i was driven by desires that weren't even my own and i wasn't the only one too many of my peers were miserable pursuing things not because they actually wanted them but because society told them to and sometimes i look back and and wonder how i ever functioned without gerard's ideas i see how swept up i was in vain pursuits pointless social games and status signaling which

gerard exposed and rescued me from and if there were ever a set of ideas that radically changed my life these would be it the journey of acquiring these ideas however was a long and painful struggle gerard's writing is is hard to understand his theories seem antiquated and abstract and his books jump from idea to idea without an apparent structure this this is why the series exists over the next seven lectures we're going to cover the entirety of gerard's system in a structured and understandable way while exploring the relevance of his ideas for the contemporary world

my name is david perrell and i'm going to be moderating these lectures which are made possible by the generous grant of tyler cowan's emergent ventures program as your host i'll be listing and learning here with you and with that i'd like to introduce our lecturer jonathan b jonathan i know you're busy thanks for taking the time thanks for having me if you're going to do all the hard work of setting up and i can just ramble on philosophy you can have me any time of the week well i'm glad you could be here and before

you introduce us to gerard i'd like to introduce you to our audience and i want to start with how we met i was hosting a philosophy discussion group in new york city and at the time we were reading augustine city of god and i remember you being on the other side of the room and you start sharing and i was so impressed with the rigor and the intensity of your discussion i was like who is this guy and so we became fast friends i audited your philosophy class at columbia now we both live in austin

texas where we must have dinner together two to three nights a week and in that time i've been very impressed and what stands out the most is just the discipline and the thoughtfulness that you bring to philosophy and what i would like to do now is talk a little bit about how you got here today so you were born in china where you were raised between beijing and later moved to vancouver and you spent most of your formative years training in olympiad math at 15 you won a canadian gold medal in the pascal mathematics competition

at 17 you were an invitee to the canadian mathematical olympiad at 18 you were awarded a full ride scholarship at columbia where you studied computer science as one of the top 20 eggleston scholars in a class of over 2 000 people at 20 you finished your computer science degree and that's when you were introduced to gerard and because of gerard you pursued a second degree in philosophy where you focused on continental social philosophy and buddhist theory at 22 immediately after graduation you started building a fintech startup with joe lonsdale which you've been working on for

the past year now did i get that right yeah i think factually that is uh correct although i don't know about the exact ages i'm a bit worried that you've hyped me up a bit too much uh perhaps not unlike our equity markets you've set me up so high that there's only one direction that i can go from here and that's down although in terms of what the question of whether you missed anything i think you did miss quite a few important things to no fault of your own because no one gives introductions this way

that are relevant to my engagement with gerard and those are all the the personal failures and the suffering that i've had along the way that really led me to gerard i suspect this is probably a much broader point that when you give an introduction to a gerardian that you should highlight perhaps their failures just as much if not more than their successes because it's often their failures that really drive them to gerard i don't think gerardian insights are rewarded shall we say in the victory of a triumph but you have to go out there and

scavenge them from your fields of defeat and so it wasn't out of a mindset of achievement or even a leisurely strolling into gerard out of theoretical curiosity that i was acquainted with him but i crawled to him out of a desperate existential necessity so then how did you find your way to gerard yeah well like i mentioned mostly personal uh personal suffering and strife but maybe to be a bit more specific like many other teenagers uh certainly ambitious teenagers i was struggling quite a bit in my first years at columbia not academically not professionally not

socially but in a deep personal and existential sense as a freshman at an elite college i if you'll excuse a funny metaphor i think you kind of end up in a zoo with 2 000 other hyper conscious status oriented prestige seeking teenagers and the one word that i think which captures the existential problem of such a community well is hollowness and now this wasn't true for everyone but most of us weren't really doing things i think for their own sake but out of what gerard would call mimesis our natural capacity and tendency to imitate others

i mean think about it like this 2 000 of allegedly some of america's smartest and most independent kids all end up after college wanting to go into four fields finance tech law and then medicine now during college we're supporting political causes we didn't care about to fly the right colors we hung out with the right people we wanted to see in dating the right person and we worked our asses off hustling for prestigious internships that a lot of us actually secretly loathed and i think what made this all so much more perverse was that we

had to lie to ourselves to sustain these pursuits that if we just squinted hard enough and intoxicated ourselves in the equally drunken rhetoric of our peers that we could uh fool ourselves into thinking that this path of prestige is the right one for us to really be on and what was so existentially depressing if you will about such a life was not the presence of wrong you know we weren't being tortured we weren't starving but it's the absence of right that even the victories felt so hollow and meaningless like getting a prestigious internship that was

a one day or three day buzz that went away as fast as it came and i think these victories were so meaningless because they weren't out of our own genuine desires but a product of mimesis what we felt like we had to do out of some kind of social pressure and what was the wake up call for me was in my sophomore year seeing where this path of mises was leading me down towards i was talking with adults some of them alumni living in working in manhattan and these were the guys who had made it

right they had the right postal code they had the right job they had a hot partner but they were fundamentally plagued with the same type of existential problems they were making money they didn't need to buy that they didn't want to impress people they didn't particularly like and in them i saw the same despair and hollowness but in some sense just even worse because it's developed a bit further out and how can one not be hollow when you're living life in such a way where you're motivated not by a core strong impetus of genuine desire

but this external shell of social expectation yeah i see this all over the place i see the influence of medic theory in so many aspects of society you see it with people who take out a loan to buy some fancy car and they don't have the money to do it right you see it in the way that management consultants you'll be talking to them and they'll talk about the director level title at the company as if that's the salvation that's going to make them happy forever they get it now they're no happier once they get

that but the worst kind of memetic competition that i saw was in high school and there was this weird thing where the parents would be really competitive and conniving over where their children would go to schools like a status competition among them and they wanted their kids to go to ivies these prestigious schools and the trophy at the end was those bumper stickers on the back of the mercedes or the university logo and i saw how through mimesis that people had lost their own way and they weren't even aware of the nature of their own

desire and i think it's this lack of awareness that if you don't have a proper understanding of these forces makes it so easily for us especially in today's modern society to get caught up in these forces and i think throughout college i started getting a more more intimate awareness of the logic behind all of these phenomena that you experienced not because i was above the fold if anything i was so aware of it because i was the most guilty that i was the most memetic of them all and what was so frightening to me was

the realization as a sophomore that i could live my entire life like this fundamentally not for myself i knew i had to change before it was too late and i knew that there was a point where it was going to be too late where the ship was going to get too much speed where if you'll humor another metaphor the dagger is too deep in the old king's heart fortunately in the pits of my despair i was introduced the work of renee girard and so gerard saved me and i really do mean that in a very

literal sense of the term in the same way that virgil saved dante by exposing to him the manifestations and the mechanisms behind human evil as well as guiding his purging of more milder forms of perversion now gerard saved me by presenting to me a theory of human nature that explain the true origin of desire and its terrifying consequences if not directed properly he gave me a more accurate map with which i myself could slowly unravel and untangle myself from the mimetic web and with this lecture series my hope is to be able to gift this

map to you and our listeners as well so jonathan i got to ask you is the power of gerard's ideas that they're gonna stop making us be memetic or do you still feel like you're still as prone to chasing prestige and envy as before yeah you're definitely right it's definitely the latter um gerard's ideas do not work on us by magically making us stop being memetic and social creatures in the same environment i would say i'm just as susceptible to mimetic forces as i was before but he his theory does have practical personal benefits and

let me explain with an analogy i think there was a military theorist by the name of john boyd and he said something uh i'm gonna have to paraphrase here i don't know the exact quote like superior fighter pilots use their superior judgment to make sure they get into situations where they never have to use their superior skill and the idea under that line is that what's perhaps more important than the ability to deal with bad situations is the foresight and judgment to fundamentally not get into those situations and i think the same is true for

what gerrard has done for me when i am say already deeply envious or deeply prideful the battle is already lost there's nothing that understanding gerard and memetic theory rationally can do for me the medic theory however gives me a framework to avoid situations which inspire debilitating envy which ignites sort of unproductive pride it tells us what type of person to avoid and who to have close it teaches us how to construct a social environment that is relatively sober and how to identify ones that are prone to memetic contagion memetic theory does not give us the

power to resist damaging instances of mimesis in the moment but it does give us the foresight to avoid them altogether so do you think gerard is worthy of engagement because of how therapeutic he is how how he can rescue us from suffering yeah i would say the answer is probably yes and no but perhaps let me answer that with with an anecdote one of gerard's collaborators was asked that similar question that why he was a gerardian and he answered because it's cheaper than psychoanalysis now this is supposed to be humorous and the literal and perhaps

uninteresting interpretation is that you don't have to pay anyone to study gerard's ideas but it can still have a therapeutic effect of solving your problems but there's a much more interesting reading i think that cheaper here means economic being able to explain much more phenomena with much less assumptions and not just personal therapeutic phenomena but social historical as well take the example of uh freud and psychoanalysis if you're familiar with that he had this idea of the oedipus complex right where the sun is rivalrous with the father and he the son desires the mother that's

a very heavy heavy assumption that we all have this inbuilt desire to have sex with mom and it can only explain one set of phenomena gerard's a memetic theory takes the same example but sees humans as naturally imitative and desire is contagious between people including between father and son and as a result the medic theory can explain not only the oedipus complex but a much broader set of psychological social historical phenomenon where people desire similar things and then enter into rivalry hence memetic theory is cheaper than psychoanalysis doing much more with much less so i

think gerard to answer your question directly now is probably only so therapeutic because he hits on fundamental truths of the human condition truths which are overlooked or perhaps even more provocatively systematically hidden by modernity and these truths help us not only understanding ourselves but understanding the world and even the trajectory of history i think gerard's ideas help us navigate the world and help us see opportunity where others may see barren land and see danger where most people have already let their guard down let me let me give you a direct example here that i prepared

for later on but i think it's a very fitting example here and it'll go to show the unique predictive power of gerard's theory in the social world beyond just personal therapy because i don't want us to trivialize memetic theory the example i'm going to give is quite timely it has to do with the relationship between china america the sino-american relationship the crowd gerard in 2007 anticipated the deterioration of the sino-american relationship and you have to recall and remember how contrarian and unlikely such a prediction was in 2007. i mean remember that in the 2000s and

certainly in the 90s a dominant view was that china's relationship with the west was only going to get better and better through economic liberalization and i think such a view which obviously seems hopelessly naive these days was grounded on two flawed premises that were accepted the first one was that china's rise would sort of lift the boats of the world economy and make most people in the west richer through cheaper goods and therefore much happier they would people in the west would be happy with china's rise and the second point the second assumption that this

optimistic view was grounded on was that the increasing similarity between china and the west would lead to political harmony the deal went something like you know as chinese people started watching western movies as they started idolizing american sports as they wanted to send their kids to ivy leagues that their values would be much closer aligned to that of americans and therefore much less conflictual now gerard's memetic understanding of human nature enabled him to see through the flaws of both assumptions on the first point we are not rational utility maximizing creatures but social creatures prone to

relativistic comparison for gerard america would be more unsettled even if it were richer but its gap between china had closed down the absolute increase in goods matter little to humans compared to a change in relativistic social standing and on the second point gerard believes that it's similarity rather than difference that causes individuals and nations to enter into conflict desiring a similar set of objects would open up the two nations to a larger surface area of competition and therefore potential conflict and even violence and so at the peak of sino-american optimism in 2007 and this was

right before 2008 where the congeniality between the east and the west had never been greater gerard stood against the crowd and warned us of such a conflict a conflict that will come from the very mechanism that most thought would establish peace trade let me read you a quote directly from gerard a conflict between the united states and china will follow everything is in place but it will not necessarily occur on the military level at first trade can transform very quickly into war from this point of view we can reasonably fear a major clash between china

and the united states in coming decades this looming conflict between the united states and china has nothing to do with a clash of civilizations in fact the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar end quote of course 15 years later gerard proves depressingly correct we are in the midst of this very trade war and relationships have deteriorated beyond what most could have possibly imagined in the 2000s so i hope this is a satisfying albeit somewhat startling answer to your question of why gerard is worth engaging not only does

he help us understand and i think manage the part of ourselves most important but previously opaque to us i think his theory also enables us to understand the world in human society in a different and often much more predictive light but before we jump too far ahead if it's okay with you i'd like to give an overview on the structure of these lecture series as a whole please do why don't you take the lead and i'll jump in with questions and comments great i have two goals over the next seven lectures one theoretical and one

practical theoretically i aim to give you an encompassing overview of gerard's entire theory from psychology to his theology from his theory on human evolution to predictions for apocalypse from readings on greek literature to his critique of modern institutions i will present to you the entirety of gerard's system practically i wish to show you how this theoretical system applies to your life in modern society through bountiful historical and contemporary examples we're going to analyze through a gerardian lens of course celebrity advertisement romantic relationships ritual sacrifice the relationship between covet and social unrest the invention of coinage

social media the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand the genesis of law modern victimhood culture the philosophical basis of innovation and much much more my goal is not to leave you stranded with sterile intellectual concepts let's give you a map with which you can identify the gerardian forces animating our world and your life in order to navigate its relatively choppy waters now i've prepared these lectures for a public audience at a intermediate undergraduate difficulty that is to say it's not going to be a walk in the park but no prerequisites are necessary to understand these lectures

now we are going to engage quite frequently with the western philosophical canon the hegels and plato's and rousseau's of the world we're also going to be engaged perhaps even more frequently with the world literary mythical canon the epic of gilgamesh the hindu hymn to purusha the iliad the odyssey sophocles shakespeare but rest assured all of these along with core gerardian concepts will be properly contextualized and introduced there's no prerequisites for these series of lectures other than interest now specifically the ordering of these lectures are such this lecture lecture one will give an overview of gerard's

life and his work it is a condensed summary of this entire lecture series for people who are short on time but still want to get a brief taste of gerrard if you will and moving on for lecture two and three we're going to discuss gerard's psychology gerard focuses on as you probably can already tell the memetic parts of human nature our capacity and tendency towards imitation now with this psychological grounding in lectures four to seven we will dive into gerard's philosophy of history which starts from the very beginning man's evolution from ape and goes to

the very end our imminent apocalypse gerard thinks the world is literally going to end very very soon now given that we're going to be talking about such weighty concepts such as apocalypse the literal end of the world i wanted to throw out a quick disclaimer here so that i don't receive either undeserved credit or misdirected anger all of the ideas i'm about to share with you are not mine but the most charitable reconstruction to gerard this is not me but my interpretation of gerard now i have many theological methodological psychological disagreements strong points of contention

with jarrar and i could do a whole lecture series just on my reasons for those disagreements but this is not interpreting b it's interpreting jarrar i will present to you the most charitable interpretation of gerard i can muster even if i privately disagree with him some of them at least because i've been taught in a philosophical pedagogical tradition that sees the lecture me not as a door-to-door salesman of a single product but as a wandering merchant with a whole caravan of goods i shouldn't be in the business of knocking down your door and shoving my

single ideas down your throat regardless of what your needs are instead i should open up my little merchant caravan of ideas and try to argue the best i can for each idea in my inventory for why they are attractive so that you the listener can have agency to make that decision but before i show you my gerardian ware so to speak let me give you a brief introduction about the man behind the theory on december 25th 1923 renee noel theophile gerard was born as the the second of five children to a catholic learned mother and

an anticlerical archivist father in avignon france gerard's father had served he'd lost a brother he'd been wounded himself in world war one and passed his views on the meaninglessness of conflict onto gerard and i think this view was further corroborated as gerard spent his formative adolescent years in france under nazi occupation now of course as anyone in that place in that time period the cruelty of the nazis left an imprint on gerard but so did the cruelty of the french resistance you see once they had been liberated by the allies the french resistance now in

control of france started scapegoating and persecuting anyone who had tangential affiliations to the nazis during the time of occupation often these victims were innocent many innocents mostly women too vulnerable to defend themselves were scapegoated by the french mob blamed for nazi collaboration they were humiliated dragged around on the street and often killed without trial on groundless accusations let me let me read you at the vivid scenes depicted by gerard's biographer some of them were young mothers with no means of support motivated by hunger and need rather than by treason or even desire some were unmarried

school teachers who were forced to meet with german soldiers in their homes others were restless teenage girls who just flirted with the foreign soldiers one was a char woman who cleaned the german military headquarters there were no trials only stylized rituals of retribution a shameful carnival that often included stripping these women to their underwear and loading them onto trucks to drive around the town they were exhibited to the sound of drum rolls shouting and cat calls as if the trucks were tumbles in 1789 the french revolution had come alive again end quote these scenes of

innocence being scapegoated will leave a lasting imprint on gerard and be a common thread throughout his work both the meaninglessness deceitfulness and arbitrariness of conflict and the perennial need of troubled human societies to find innocent victims to blame and murder for catharsis now gerard's intellectual trajectory on the other hand could be described as and unorthodox through and through he was always an outsider he was an outsider from the very beginning unable to bear regular school he had to go to a private tutoring program reading at his heart's content and not to the dictates of any

syllabus he was trained in indiana university in history but his generative curiosity soon overflowed the boundaries of his diploma he made little contributions to history and was self-taught and an outsider in all the major fields that he did actually contribute to first he made his mark in literary theory by articulating the idea of mimesis through close readings of literature next he jumped disciplines into anthropology where he shed light on the need for scapegoating and then he jumped disciplines once more to theology mounting a serious defense for christianity now despite being accepted into the prestigious french

academy and holding professorships at john hopkins buffalo and stanford gerard still remains to some extent an outsider in all of these disciplines the literary theorists have beefed with him for not respecting the methods and conventions and fashions of the day the anthropologists distrust his liberal use of evidence and lack of fieldwork and even parts of the christian community have shunned him for his quite unorthodox reading of the crucifixion so the title of this lecture series is called interpreting gerard exiget of apocalypse why do you call him an exigent why not philosopher or maybe something more

provocative like like profit yeah yeah well that's a good question we're not in the business of drama here so i think i skipped profit but mostly i called him an exegete because that's what he called himself and i wanted to have respect for his self-conception you see he explicitly in interviews rejected both terms philosopher and prophet and i think it'd just simply be too narrow to call him a literary theorist and anthropologist or a theologian now an exegete is someone who performs exegesis the interpretation of scripture and i think that is the most accurate way

to understand gerard's system and the vast terrain that he is forced to traverse you know he's less a careful analytical philosopher but a visionary expanding and articulating a moral insight informed by scripture through all of these domains i get a feeling that reading gerard for him these vast domains weren't these divergent disciplines these separate buckets that he was dipping his toes into but simply different manifestations of the same core insight and i think gerard's aim wasn't to revolutionize literary criticism anthropology or theology but to articulate what he conceived to be the core insight of christianity

now that we have some context on gerard the man let's move on to the meat and bones the meat and potatoes of this lecture which is a brief summary of gerard's system i will attempt to give a reduced and simplistic summary of this entire lecture series which covers the entirety of memetic theory sharing with you gerard's key concepts and conclusions but probably not the full reasons and repercussions behind these conclusions here i will trade precision for breadth now for people who don't have the time for the full 10 plus hour lecture series first shame on

you but secondly this could be a summary that should be sufficient for you to get a taste of gerard now for those who are embarking on the full journey with us i think this summary can be a map for the expansive tumultuous and dizzying terrain ahead for you to gain your sea legs and get an orientation of the landscape the best way for me to give you a taste of gerard's system in one telling is to give a comprehensive history of humanity beginning from man's evolution from ape all the way to apocalypse i'll start by

summarizing gerard's psychology how he thought humans were psychologically different from animals then i will articulate the problems this unique psychology created for early human societies and their respective solutions and after that i will detail how christianity represents a meaningful rupture for gerard from these early societies and lastly i will articulate how christianity brought us all the way here to modernity and how it will imminently deliver us to violent apocalypse so let us begin with psychology gerard's apocalyptic conclusions begin with a rather innocuous observation mimesis what defined for gerard our evolutionary breaking away from our great

ape cousins is not reason it's not truth it's mimesis our gradually increasing capacity and tendency for imitation now the best metaphor i can think of to explain nemesis is that of co-vibrating violin strings now when you put two violin strings together in close proximity as you flick one a similar frequency of vibration will translate to the other and i think in a like manner gerard identifies a species of human behavior and here i use behavior for the lack of a better word and largest sense possible send actions experiences judgments intentions that proceed also from copying

an external instance of that behavior now humans are social animals through and through prone to this type of co-vibration just as strings on a violin aren't independent neither are we mimesis is the fundamental capacity and tendency to gain access to the subjectivity of others as well as to reproduce objective cultural forms in other words mimesis is what constitutes us as social beings and makes us different from other animals mimesis this tendency to ingest the behaviors and values what have you of those around us is why perhaps prestige and recognition matter so much to us humans

you know when a majority of a social group that you are immersed in believe something is good or beautiful or believe something should be done in this way or that we tend to slowly take on and ingest those positions as well through mimesis and i think our everyday notions of prestige already have an understanding of mimesis when we say something is prestigious we are perhaps also saying that on its own it does not deserve the value we attribute to it right when we call prestigious rolex harvard bentley maybe not cornell but the other actual prestigious

things partially what we're saying is that the value we attribute to it is not fully accounted for by the objects themselves but there's some surplus value where the object doesn't deserve gerard would say that that surplus value does not come from the object but our peers value it and us ingesting their opinions through mimesis now for gerard mimesis in everything but everything to some degree is memetic the rush of adrenaline that infects you in a roaring and lively sporting stadium the tribalism of politics the madness of cults and how they sustain each other's delusions the

passing on of accents even as animal as an activity of replenishing ourselves drinking water we may still call to mind however subtly how our favorite athletes drinks gatorade right that's the purpose of those commercials to get that in your head this is how broad and all pervasive mimesis operates humanity for gerard would be completely unrecognizable without it the species of a memetic behavior that most concerns gerard in both senses of the word is desire it's fine and dandy when what mimesis transmits is accents or cultural codes but when mimesis converges the desires of people well

that invites them into competition conflict and often violence gerard separates the entirety of human desires into two species the desire to be which he terms metaphysical desire and the desire to experience which he terms physical desire metaphysical desire is directed at what objects say about me physical desire is directed at an experience confirmed by the qualities of the object itself look let me give you a few examples to clarify i can pursue for example sex for the experience out of physical desire and what i would be after there would be pleasure or intimacy feelings in

the moment but i can also pursue sex for being what having sex with a certain type of person really says about me right and this is a real psychology that people have this is the psychology of the don juan or the coquette for these people sex is no longer about sex but something more core to their identity they are not out there to experience something but to prove something or take another more trivial and mundane example i can buy a car for the experience the trouble would save me from walking everywhere but i can also

buy a car because i want to be a certain type of person because i just want to have the coolest car on the block and have people admire me you for example david i must applaud you because clearly from your car i can tell that you're a very saintly man clearly you do not care what the car says about you you are freed from metaphysical desire in this domain congratulations i don't want to hear it my toyota is beautiful joe yeah yeah just just please don't stop driving a reductive but hopefully illuminating way to put

this is that physical desire aims at utility whereas metaphysical desire aims at identity now certainly this boundary between experience and being between utility and identity is not so clear you know who we conceived ourselves to be colors our experiences as much as our experiences if ever so subtly shapes our self-conception but just think about how drastically different these experiences are right think about pursuing a profession because the work is engaging versus doing it because it's the right job to have or dating a person because you like spending time with them versus dating some person because

you like to be seen with them or traveling to a place because you're interested in the culture or because you just want to be seen in the coolest locale clearly the distinction that gerard has drawn here if a bit muddied is nonetheless meaningful especially at the extremes this desire to be at the heart of metaphysical desire is aimed at a fullness of being we want to exist gerard believes in great measure metaphysical desire takes form as a pursuit of objects in the broadest sense of the term wanted to climb mount everest wanted to build a

unicorn company wanted to study at an ivy league or more mundane buying a particular car dating sally instead of susan enjoying a fancy restaurant but in all of these experiences gerard would say it's never objects we are really after i don't think this is a foreign concept to our this worldly achievement-focused consumer society we want to acquire objects to bolster and back up our identity and the way we go about choosing which objects to go after gerard believes is imitating individuals whom we already consider to possess this fullness of being celebrities parental figures entrepreneurs an

outstanding co-worker we take on their desires as our own the objects they value as the objects we also strive for the faulty logic here being that it must be the acquisition of these objects that grant these models the fullness of their being yeah this reminds me of uh celebrity advertisements it does indeed right you see a celebrity and you want what they want that's the whole logic behind these advertisements and i think the one line and celebrity advertisement that gives it all away is the tagline for jordan michael jordan's sneakers be like mike what it's

promising you isn't just a product or utility but the being and prestige of michael jordan so that you can have a piece of that as well it's not jump like mike it's not score like mike the advertisement of basketball shoes doesn't talk about anything of the most important physical qualities of the basketball shoes the lightness the grip the bounce it's promising you something you want all the more being be like mike gerard's central thesis is that what often appears to be a subject pulled towards an object due to the intrinsic value of that object is

really the subject wanting to acquire that object to be like some model what we are really after isn't the object but the being of the model whereas we think of desire as unidirectional flowing from subject to object gerard thinks it's actually triangular proceeding from subject through a model to the object now because what is at stake in metaphysical desire is our identity it is the strongest drive in the human motivational repertoire i think it's quite obvious when we are motivated by such a drive because we can become obsessed and compulsive we think that achievement obtaining

the objects that metaphysical desire wants will fully transform us i think in different stages of our lives metaphysical desire usually directs us towards a limited set of objects you know for me first it was a specific toy that i really wanted and then a weapon in world of warcraft and then dating a person and then an ivy league etc etc i think we're always oriented at different stages in our lives towards something and these are the objects pointed to by metaphysical desire these are objects in each period of our life that take on a disproportionate

weight such that you define progress as inching towards the object and whenever it slips away however subtly however minutely your heart just thuds and you feel a deep existential despair romance provides a good example here often you won't even be after the woman that you're interested in and you won't be that interested and what will happen is all of a sudden there's another suitor who comes along and they are interested in this woman and all of a sudden you get excited about this person too and it is in that competition that we are inflamed by

the mimetic spirit but then there's a second point here about this existential dread that we can feel you ever feel those tremendous highs and lows in the early stages of of talking to a woman or something and you'll be so excited because the texting is going well you'll be skipping down the halls and then all of a sudden she won't respond and you're freaking out you're texting your friends what's going on here you can't sleep that night and you wake up in the next morning your alarm clock goes off and you see a text and

she's responded now you jump out of bed and you wake up faster than a double shot of espresso that's precisely the right example to think of in fact gerard would commonly go to romance as his canonical examples of metaphysical desire and these two qualities you mentioned first the object not contributing anything or too much to desire as well as these bipolar swings all make romance or at least the iterations you've described as textbook examples of manifestation and look gerard's point is even in as intimate a domain as romance our desires are if you'd excuse a

pun helplessly penetrated by those of others even our desires for our partners tend not to be informed fully by our partners but by people around them gerard's point is if even such a personal desire can be so external in origin then the same must also be true for other domains as well career choice political orientation aesthetic tastes philosophical opinions this is a full-scale attack on the modern conception of individuals who can form their own decisions with the reason to have an authentic core of desires to tap into now if this attack was not already threatening

enough gerard's next point will make it all the more so and further problematize authenticity just as mimesis and metaphysical desire can make people conform they can also make people diverge put in another way even a breaking away from the group in a so-called carving one's own path can be radically socially determined i mean think about it like this the logic of metaphysical desire is to pursue the objects associated with those who do have a fullness of being right and so a natural continuation of this logic is to avoid or distance oneself from objects associated with

those we conceive to be as having a deficiency in being we both want to be like the cool kids but also distant and be different from the social outcasts here's an example the tech elite with their plain t-shirts are not independent from gerard's perspective from the status games of finance finally addressed elite even though they appear to be rejecting that game in reality it's merely the continuation of the same game in a more accelerated form i mean think about it like this showing up with a five dollar t-shirt to a dinner where everyone was wearing

500 suits is in some sense much more of a power play than showing up with a 5 000 suit to the same dinner because it's saying that i am so much better than you that we aren't even playing the same game that i take your highest values what you hold most here is vulgar as nothing this is the logic of the negative phase of the mises to distance oneself in order to show one's superiority this breaking away from a group is no more authentic or independent than conformity because your choices are still made for what

they say about you and not the object itself now in my own life decisions if i may share a bit of a personal story i think i've been led astray by both the positive and the negative forces of mimesis you know i grew up idolizing entrepreneurs the steve jobs of the world and as soon as i got into college i felt like i had to drop out and start a company asap and so i did my freshman spring i dropped out i raised it raised a small round and the company crashed and burned out of

vanity and it's not that i didn't enjoy building companies that's not why i was led astray by mimesis but the degree to which i desired it and the urgency of which i felt like i had to achieve it not unlike your romance example was disproportionate to the value of the object itself in other words i desired being an entrepreneur and not necessarily the processes of building a company now when i did go back to school as a sophomore a semester later i had a resentment for my peers who had dropped out and did build successful

companies i think i went the other direction rejecting the worldly altogether switching from siesta philosophy going to a buddhist monastery for three years i didn't do that much at all in industry out of resentment now rejecting industry and building companies was my moral weapon to secure victory over my more successful peers to turn my failure into a triumph but this was equally if not more inauthentic and perverse now the same story goes it's not that i didn't enjoy philosophy and buddhism the degree to which i pursued it and certainly the degree to which i renounced

the world was not genuine it wasn't reflective of how much i liked philosophical and meditative practice and certainly not how much i disliked the worldly active life of industry and i think i really didn't miss out on valuable career opportunities because i was too resentful to engage this carving of my own path was just as socially determined it was a form of coping so that i didn't have to feel lesser than my more successful peers as a society i think we all recognize this first move of conforming to this dropout culture as socially determined as

prestige seeking as not authentic but i think the second move of rejecting the group is just as socially determined in that it was still primarily the relationships with people that determined my choices not for the choices themselves admiration led me to converge in the first case and resentment led me to diverge in the second the direction is different but the essence is the same but of course in our society to break away from the group to carve one's own path so to speak is thought to be a sure sign of independence but that is not

so gerard here is trying to tear down what he conceives of as the romantic lie the lie goes something like this at the bottom we're all individuals with a core of what we can call the authentic self and then there are these layers of social constraints one on top of the other with the origins external the way to access authenticity so this romantic lie goes is by following one's heart with a bold breaking free of the group uh peeling away of these social layers gerard says not so fast this breaking free from the group can

be just as socially determined as rigid adherence you're confusing difference for autonomy you're confusing distance for independence and your confusing originality for freedom the reality is we can just as easily be socially determined by rejecting a group out of resentment as we can by conforming to the group out of admiration or peer pressure the mises operates positively and negatively mimesis and metaphysical desire then entrap us in every direction both in conforming as well as in breaking free man is shown to be a social creature through and through if you take one thing from gerard psychology

it is this the most powerful and explanatory element within the human psyche is our sociality our values our political orientation aesthetic taste and even philosophical positions are heavily often primarily determined by others in deep and often unconscious ways and not chosen for their own sake we may think our desires are our own we may think we desire our spouse just because of who they are or at the very least because of their physical attractiveness but gerard shows that even this turns out not to be the full extent of the story we may think reason can

hold the reins and guide our decisions but this social dimension of ourselves is often much much stronger reason pretends to be its steward but in reality is its lawyer and spokesperson engaged in more often than not post-hog rationalization oh yeah of course you know i want to be an entrepreneur because i want to change the world for the better or on the other hand of course i would never be an entrepreneur because industry is vulgar and capitalism is immoral the reasons we give our decisions often come after we've already sworn allegiance to those decisions due

to ulterior social motives now for gerard our memetic natures the extent to which we are socially determined is what differentiates us from animals and the main direction of human evolution from ape this direction of evolution is not as commonly thought the increase of our ability to reason and grasp truth after all gerard would say other animals engage in truth-seeking behaviors as well there's echolocation there's tapping into magnetic fields there's night vision these are all truth-seeking activities but we are the only animals who create gods who tell stories who spin up fictions who would go to

war for an abstract conception of honor which we can neither taste nor smell nor touch who would trade food and shelter for pieces of paper who would die for myths and gods that clearly never even existed animals are the sober ones we are the nut jobs what makes us unique for gerard is not our ability to determine truth but our capacity to believe in lies insofar as others around us do as well for the modern mind this is a deeply alien conception of human nature and it opens a pandora's box of questions what does it

mean to protect individual freedom if we like co-vibrating vial in strings are never truly free to begin with how can we follow our own authentic desires if every part of our psyche is so helplessly external in its origin how is the democratic process not as arbitrary as the whims of a single dictator if we are so easily influenced and swayed by the mob these will have to remain questions for now wrestled with over the course of the next seven lectures because mimesis presents us a much more pressing and threatening problem in this evolutionary story that

we must now turn to everything we've talked about up until this point what we've discussed so far are the core psychological faculties that define humanity now let us jump back into gerard's history to see the unique challenges which this psychology brings about we are officially moving from psychology to history as early humans evolved to be more and more memetic the simple dominance hierarchies that were able to contain animal groups started breaking down the ideas go something like this dominance hierarchies where there's a clear chain of alpha to beta to gamma all the way to omega

works fine if there's little mimesis insofar as the the beta doesn't desire what the alpha has and the gamma doesn't desire what the beta has then all is well but the memetic tendency of early humans started to become so strong that there started to be frequent cross-pollination of desires across the hierarchy metaphysical desire at least the strength of it is unique to humans and this led subjects to enter into rivalry with their models converging and competing metaphysical desires would rip social groups apart in wars of all against all destroying all those societies that were involved

drug reasons that the only hominoid groups that survived and formed lasting cultures were ones that stumbled upon a unique cultural technology to stop this escalating conflict and that he called the scapegoat mechanism now in the midst of such a war of all against all think a civil war a french revolution when society is in utter chaos societies gerard observes often converge upon a single victim or a small set of victims attributing to them all the blame and frustrations of the chaos that they are in now is this like a rational process similar to the way

that a jury sentences a victim or what should i have in mind here yeah it's not a rational process it's not a committee that say picks the victim but a somewhat random process where certain accusations against certain people just start gaining steam until the whole group falls under its spell think about the randomness of the french revolution rather than a calculated drone strike i think that's what you should have in mind here this victim if not fully innocent certainly does not deserve the extent of the blame leveled on him this group is always deceitful and

their certainty is only bolstered by unanimity the fact that everyone believes in the victim's guilt this victim will be expelled often murdered very brutally as the group gains a cathartic release and peace is restored there are unfortunately too many examples of innocent scapegoats throughout human history think about socrates trial and death at the hands of the athenian jury think about the black death which is blamed on witches and witchcraft think about the nazis scapegoating the jews for german decline think about mccarthy era witch hunts persecuting innocents under the crimes of communism it's not enough drug

reasons for us to find guilty parties but we want to find one radical source of evil to blame everything upon with the scapegoat mechanism gerard is highlighting the perennial need of human societies in times of chaos to identify a single source to blame and murder to truly establish a peaceful society in a time of turmoil this murder must be maximally cathartic and as a result has to be maximally violent and deceitful often blaming a singular victim for the entirety of the society's problems gerard thinks that this murder is wrong that it's based on a lie

that it's regrettable that should not be done but it worked and it was the only thing that worked which kept early human societies alive now to make sense of drugs claim here because this is quite a radical claim on the violent foundations of society we must go back and think about gerard's psychology for every social philosophy i would wager that we must ask who the subject is right for marx the subject is class for fascism is the nation-state for augustine it is a christian soul for liberalism it is a rational agent gerard's subject of his

social philosophy is the spirited animal not one who thinks in terms of utility in numbers but vengeance and pride honor and being who experiences envy and resentment now for such a social creature the primary mechanisms that govern him isn't consensus it's not the mandate of heaven it's not the common good it's certainly not rational political discourse for gerard we aren't rational agents interested in a systematic analysis and nuanced solution but social spirited creatures needing a cathartic release against a radical evil in moments of extreme turbulence we aren't interested in truth but a grand lie and

founding murder that can grant us catharsis the lie however goes even further while this no longer happens in modernity for reasons that we'll have to explore a bit later on in early pagan societies the peace that descended unto the crowd would be so miraculous so instantaneous and unbelievable that people would struggle to make sense of what just happened how did we go from being in each other's throats to being fully reconciled and so just as deceitfully as the crowd would blame the victim for causing chaos they now deceitfully praise the now dead victim for ending

the chaos turning the victim paradoxically into a god gerard's point is that the scapegoat mechanism is such a unanimous process people feel so justified in their expulsion that they don't even feel their own agency and so they don't see themselves as bringing peace all they have in view is the victim and reasons that it must be the victim that has brought us that peace the victim must be a god these pagan gods are all powerful with the power to begin and end destruction these gods are seen as both good and evil the example gerard will

point to is the story of oedipus as told by sophocles now we're going to spend an entire lecture with oedipus but let me give you a very very brief outline first an oedipus is a new king of thebes that is being ravished by a plague oedipus is guilty of having committed both patricide just the killing of one's father as well as incest having sex with one's mother because of this the entire city blames oedipus for causing the plague and expels him the people get their catharsis and the plague goes away oedipus wanders the greek states

and as time progresses something very very strange happens rather than only being an object of scorn that everyone wants to expel to distance from people are now competing to invite oedipus into their lands see a prophecy has gained momentum in greece that wherever oedipus's remains will be buried shall be granted lasting peace and in this oedipus myth then we see both movements of the scapegoat mechanism right first we see the scapegoating oedipus might have been morally bankrupt for patricide and incest but it was certainly an exaggerated line to think that he was the cause of

the entire plague right his expulsion was a groundless lie second we see the movement of demonization as oedipus's expulsion brought about lasting peace through catharsis he started to gain a dual character still evil for causing the plague but also radically good with the power to end plagues and bring peace oedipus at the end of the story has been demonized or at least fetishized gerard's claim is that in all pagan religions we can find traces of a once victim turned god at the foundation of the culture we will investigate in due course across this entire lecture

series the nordic myth of baldur's death that resembles a collective expulsion the greek myth of the birth of zeus and its yearly similarities to murder and the hindu him to purusa where a genesis deity is sacrificed with his remains giving birth to hindu society and its casts it's not just religions however that are born from the scapegoat mechanism but pagan culture and society as well i mean take take the example of julius caesar who's the victim turned god of the roman imperium in the story of caesar we also find the key movements of the scapegoat

mechanism right first roman society is in a state of utter chaos and civil war julius caesar is famously scapegoated blamed and collectively murdered on the senate floor now peace does not come immediately to rome indeed but it does come at the hand of another caesar caesar augustus julius's nephew and so with augustus's victory julius caesar is literally deified recognized as a literal god by the roman senate and becomes a fountainhead of roman legitimacy and prestige from then on rulers derive their legitimacy from their relationship to caesar often explicitly right by bearing their name calling themselves

caesars that's why there's so many caesars in the history of leaders the victim turned god captured through myth for gerard is what lies at the heart of pagan religion and society but of course we need much more than stories to run a society and keep the peace so out of these myths and founding murders two sets of real institutions were derived prohibitions and rituals the logic of prohibitions is to prevent chaos from erupting by creating social difference between people so that metaphysical desire does not spread as easily caste systems gender roles guild lineages however oppressive

these served a crucial function in pagan society to keep people from competing with each other now when prohibitions failed another set of institutions must be used and these are rituals rituals aim to enact the founding murder in a constrained way to generate a similar level of catharsis as the founding murderer did ritual incest debaucherous festivals human sacrifice however cruel these institutions also served a crucial function in pagan society to generate catharsis in order to keep the peace they are a release valve to summarize them the scapegoat mechanism proceeds from a real cataclysmic event where a

troubled society murders an innocent victim gains cathartic release and receives a set of new gods this real event is dramatized and captured in myth and then translated back into real institutions in the form of prohibitions and rituals this arc going from real event to myth to real institutions is not only how pagan gods and religions have been made but also how all human societies and cultures are founded now of course these societies and myths are based on lies through and through both the scapegoating and the deification are equally deceitful because the victim neither has the

power to cause or end the chaos it's all psychological projection by the crowd grounded on nothing but unanimity and importantly this deceitfulness is always occluded by myth because myth is written from the perspective of the persecutor the persecutor writes from a position of the crowd and from that vantage point all will seem real the blame the praise the deification are all deserved and not mere projections but more importantly none of this could be revealed because if they were then gods would lose their powers if people realize that it was they themselves who through unanimity projected

the power onto them it's all deceitful and all arbitrary this explanation of pagan religion by gerard then begs an important question why is gerard a christian primophasia christianity perfectly conforms to this logic that he attributed to false pagan religions right there's civil unrest in jerusalem where christ eventually gets crucified there's obviously christ's unjust scapegoating and murder on the cross there's the resurrection and divinization there's the mythologization through the bible and then there's the institutionalization through the catholic church and many of its prohibitions and rituals the question is this how can the christian story be true

for gerard but the pagan religions be false gerard's answer is that the christian story is indeed going to have the same structure as pagan religion because christ is going to be scapegoated but there is one crucial christianity will be the first story told from the perspective of the victim remember pagan myth always sides with the murderers it always believes in the guilt of its victims sophocles telling of oedipus affirms the judgment of thebes that oedipus was indeed responsible for the plague because of his patricide and incest or take the founding murder of the roman republic

that of romulus and remus where romulus kills remus to establish rome the canonical telling here again paints the killing as however regrettable as justified by remus hubris and transgression from ignoring romulus's city's boundaries what the bible is doing then is to tell the same type of story as pagan religion but from the other perspective not the perspective of the persecutor which all pagan religion has been told from but the victim i mean think about it what does the bible tell us he tells us that christ is not guilty even his sentencer pontius pilate declares his

innocence the mob that convicts christ is shown to be arbitrary the true source of evil the sentencing of christ is depicted as unjust through and through with the charges against christ nothing more than psychological projections by the crowd this is what that story tells us and of course the whole story is written down and told to us by the disciples the side of the victim and not the persecutor christianity tells the story of scapegoating but from the opposite truthful side we are like jurors who have been hearing the criminals lies for so long in pagan

religion suddenly exposed to the truth of the victim's testimony the crucifixion exposes the lies of all religions to show that the mob is deceitful the victim is innocent there's no sacred pagan power that is merely projection this is the fundamental resounding message that comes out of the crucifixion for gerard and it is a message that will expose and begin to tear down the scapegoat mechanism slowly but surely from this moment on we will be reading myths in the light of the gospels which allows us to see through their lies christ's innocence and unjust persecution through

the proliferation of christianity becomes the dominant lens through which we will view the world from then on we will always be looking out for unjust persecution we will always be siding with the victim we will always be aware of the deceitfulness of the mob christ knows that reason alone that an analytical articulation of the scapegoat mechanism like the one i just provided you is not enough to shake societies out of this perennial cultural practice what we need is an equally compelling story that shakes us into a radically new mode of seeing the world to your

point i'm always surprised by how much of our secular world is grounded on christian concepts i think of i think the protestant work ethic our concern for victims human rights you know yeah and this is how powerful the christian story is we are all in a sense living in a christian paradigm even if we're not explicitly christians because christianity grounds the fundamental philosophical intuitions of modernity christianity then for gerard is the religion to end all religions the myth to end all myths the founding murder to end all founding murders by exposing their violent unjust and

deceitful origins the right metaphor to think about christianity and pagan religion then is the relationship between a vaccine and the original disease the efficacy of a vaccine to neutralize the original disease lies in its proximity not its radical difference right the structurally the covert vaccine is very similar to the original covet disease just with a few tweaks and it's that similarity is what makes it an effective coveted vaccine and not like a polio vaccine for example the bible then for gerard is a myth vaccine and so the strategy of many modern christians to show that

the bible has nothing to do with the myths of yore that is radically different is misguided i mean take the epic of gilgamesh one of the first known myths of mesopotamia modern christians blush at the similarities between this myth and the bible right there's a quest for a fruit of immortality from the tree of eternal life these are things that both exist in the bible as well as the myth of gilgamesh there's a deceitful snake eating a fruit and robbing us of our immortality and there's also great floods from which the chosen are protected gerard

would say look don't blush and don't try to distance the bible from these myths the bible is effective because and not despite of its proximity to myths the bible is a trojan horse that frees us from pagan religion from within gerard's surprising conclusion is that christianity is a demystifying force here to end all religions the christian moral paradigm takes away the core foundational bedrock of all early human societies slowly but surely christianity allows us to decode and escape from the scapegoat mechanism which cannot function if people know that the victim is innocent if the victim

is shown to be innocent then catharsis cannot be achieved without catharsis there is no peace without peace there's no deification without deification pagan worldly institutions lose their prestige and without prestige they can no longer properly function christianity takes humanity out of cyclical time demarcated by these relativistic moral paradigm shifts and accelerates us towards a linear trajectory now the direction of this linearity is defined by four key forces that christ lets loose on human history love truth innovation and surprisingly drug thinks violence as with all things gerard even his analysis on the worldly effects of christianity

are deeply ambivalent within this pandora's box of forces that christ has just let loose on human history we have the good love truth innovation but also the apocalyptic violence they are both growing and have broken free all at the same time what's more even within these individual forces gerard's analysis is deeply ambivalent love often manifests as hypocrisy truth becomes dogma and innovation degenerates into fashion and even in violence gerard sees a key motivational force that has brought forth the most enviable living conditions of man when channeled productively through capitalism let's examine each of these forces

in turn the first force that christianity unleashes on history is love love is the force that has made all of our institutions like law so much more humane it's the force that sees developed nations competing for the prestige of helping troubled nations it's the force that has freed us from cruel practices of human sacrifice and bloody rituals it's the force underpinning the modern political ideals of human rights and equality gerard believes that christ is responsible for all of this because that was his key message renounce violence turn the other cheek develop love love thy neighbor

as thyself we are so concerned with the poor and the dispossessed these days we naturally side with victims in the same way that pagan societies might have cited with the strong because christ's story is about the innocence and the moral purity of victims culturally we are radically different from pagan society with their worship of power and disregard for the weak but in some sense stubborn human nature still refuses to budge gerard thinks we still need to persecute but the only acceptable way to persecute is now in the name of victims in the name of stopping

persecution in a way then gerard isn't convinced society has really changed that much at all that we've really given not persecution rather perhaps the better reading is that it's a mere superficial switch of who we think it's acceptable to persecute because of our victim-concerned culture anyone who looks like a traditional victim is completely off limits ethnic minorities the lower classes women the disabled and gerard thinks that's a great thing but the problem is that we've flipped it on its head now we feel warranted nay maybe even compelled to persecute all types of privilege white privilege

ableist privilege class privilege and male privilege gerard has this to say i'll give you a quote our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty end quote gerard accuses modernity of hypocrisy and he reminds us of the terrible atrocities committed in the name of protecting victims let me give you another quote hypocrisy is dangerous then because it leads to what it claims to prevent the persecution of victims anyone familiar with the tragedies of the soviet union grounded on protection of the victimized proletariat should look at americas caught up in victimhood ideology with trembling fear this

other totalitarianism this inquisition in the name of victims is the form that arbitrary unjustified violence takes place today the persecution of persecutors end quote now that's love and the same ambivalent story could be told for the second force of christianity truth gerard asks us to look around in the modern world more so than any almost other civilization we value truth and believe in our ability to obtain it far are we from the garden of eden's prohibitions against the tree of knowledge far are we from the intellectual humilities of job far away from the lessons from

oedipus that knowing more can lead to disaster and far away from witch-hunts and superstitions perhaps unsurprisingly at this point gerard takes the crowning achievement of truth science to be engendered by christianity this might seem ridiculous but let me give you a first pass at his argument christianity paved the way for scientific inquiry by expelling myth and clearing the ground as it were this should already be a familiar idea at this point christianity exposes the deceitfulness of worldly foundations and begins to tear down prohibitions rituals and all pagan religions it is only when we cease to

look for truth in myth does reason even have the fertile ground to bear the fruits of truth after all if something is already explained by a wildly prestigious myth that is fatal to question then reason will not even want to begin to investigate it gerard's interlocutor sums up his view quite nicely here let me quote again it is really christianity that makes science possible by de-sacralizing the real by freeing people from magical causalities once we stop seeing storms as being triggered by the machinations of the witch across the street we start being able to study

meteorological phenomenon scientifically end quote now i need to say a lot more and i will to convince you of this point but before we celebrate too early the same problem with love occurs with truth just as the protection of victims is the banner which persecutors rally under we love science so much that we have fetishized it into an unquestionable religion but what's what's the problem with science gaining an immense prestige what's wrong with that gerard's answer is this by being deified science can become unquestionable which can silence opposing voices and justify terrible political agendas think

about malthus in the 18th century he reasoned that living standards will go back to subsistence because population growth grows geometrically while food increases arithmetically now in the 1970s there was a whole wave of ridiculous climate signs championed by the times the new york review columbia brown they were publishing articles about an inevitable ice age that just seems ludicrous from today's perspective and of course the terrors of the nazis were justified on the latest science of the day eugenics far from a pseudoscience eugenics enjoyed enormous prestige in the early 20th century it was grounded on darwin

the latest evolutionary biology of the day and responsible for the development of statistics there was a university college london chair of eugenics in the same way there might be a chair for biology today and eugenics was supported by nobel laureates like hermann mueller and political leaders like theodore roosevelt so i hope the problem of deifying science is clear gerard thinks the reason that it is dangerous to defy science is the same reason it was dangerous to deify edicts of the catholic church just as the bloody european conquest of the americas was at least partially legitimized

through the appeal to catholicism as spreading the gospel today we too legitimize our often questionable political pursuits with just a sprinkle of reason a little dab of science and just as whoever used to disagree with the catholic church we called heretics we call those today who disagree with politically charged questionable signs as anti-science someone whose positions we don't even have to contend with when deified science becomes a blocker to truth and genuine inquiry because it becomes a conversation stopper therein lies the hypocrisy now the third force of christianity is innovation and it has been engendered

by christ in a very similar way that science was by tearing down myths we are freed from an exaggerated idolation of the past and we are enabled empowered to imagine its future the idea that gerard has in mind here might be better approximated by thinking about the negative case what is certainly not conducive to innovation is the reactionary idea not uncommon throughout most of history most famously perhaps among the confucians and perhaps many christians that our best days are behind us right and such a view lends to the practical orientation that the best we can

do is to blindly imitate the past and press the brakes on the downward trajectory of history under such a world view the very word innovation had negative connotations in the west up until the 18th century its connotations were negative because innovation implied a deviation from a sacred albeit static and rigid ideal provided to us by the myths of yore innovation before the 18th century was synonymous with heresy now such an exaggerated respect of the past is often grounded on a religious belief in a mythologized past christianity frees us from this blind worship because it is

a force according to gerard of course that tears down mythologization it reveals to us what we once thought of as immutable as arbitrary so we are free to experiment and innovate one of the surprising things that i've seen is this weird anti-correlation between mythologizing the past and innovation and i started to get this hunch when i would spend time around silicon valley types and you have dinner with them and they boast about their knowledge of the world but then you start talking to them about the history of their own industry and it's not something that

they think or talk about a lot and i compare that to the people i've met in the oil industry or the finance industry these older and more established industries where the people who i meet there they know the history of their industry's cold you know what i mean yeah and that's a very interesting observation that there is a negative correlation between how innovative an industry or person is against how much they know about history or at least seem to respect it yes and i think gerard would say that the difference between uh the tech industry

and the oil industry is the same difference between modernity and pagan society that we are much less idolatrous and concerned with the past and as a result much more oriented towards the future due to christianity now as we are freed from the grips of the past innovation has brought about drastic technological and social change clearly if you just look around our world right there's the mastery of travel and land air and sea there's the victory over disease and starvation the political systems gender norms money western civilization at least in the past few hundred years is

defined by and prides itself with change now the problem with innovation is the same problem with love and truth hypocrisy we've now fetishized innovation we are conforming to contrarianism we are obediently rallying under the banner of originality gerard has this to say it's so good that all quoted in full the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs you should never say what others are saying never paint with others are painting never think what others are thinking and so on since this is absolutely impossible there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes

everything more and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and with great fanfare announced some new epistemological rupture that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom this rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things the principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis the more we celebrate creative and enriching innovations the fewer of them there are for 2 000 years the arts have been imitative and it's only in the 19th and 20th century that people started refusing to be memetic why

because we're more memetic than ever rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exercise imitation end quote the problem that gerard is identifying here with categorically rejecting imitation and idolizing innovation is that imitation and meaningful innovation are often inseparable you need to imitate and gain mastery first before you can make any real innovations history is littered with examples where repetition replication imitation is a necessary precondition for innovation think about goethe who was a master of reproduction reproducing the great poetic forms before he pioneered his own think about the industrial powers that started off

as mere copycats but grew into innovators in their own right let me read gerard again it began with germany which in the 19th century was thought to be at most capable of imitating the english and this at the precise moment it surpassed them it continued with the americans in whom for a long time the europeans saw mediocre gadget makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role and it happened once more with the japanese who after world war ii were still seen as pathetic imitators of western superiority it's starting up

again it seems with korea and soon perhaps it'll be the chinese all of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance end quote gerard's point here is that by fetishizing contrarianism innovation originality and by rejecting repetition replication imitation we paradoxically doom ourselves to never make any meaningful innovations whatsoever because innovation is dependent on imitation now as you can see even the three quote unquote good forces of modernity are deeply ambivalent cultures fundamentally changed there's never been a society as loving truthful and innovative as ours but stubborn human nature refuses

to budge we still need to persecute to deify and to conform and so the perversities of modernity for gerard all take on the shape of hypocrisy persecution under the banner of protecting victims rigid adherence to scientific dogmas under the guise of free intellectual exploration the most derivative of imitations packaged as radical innovations the metaphor then that best captures this radical break as well as stubborn continuity is a just launch rocket struggling to reach escape velocity i mean think about it such a rocket is clearly a radical break from it was stationary but it is also

in a continuity because it is still governed by the pull of gravity the same perhaps can be said for the point of history that we're in now there's a clear radical break between our culture that protects victims and all the ones that have come before which made them into scapegoats but the stubborn gravitational pull of the human condition remains the same we still need to persecute and find victims to blame it's this tension between cultural advancement and the constancy of human nature that plagues modernity for gerar now our rocket ship of modernity is already in

trouble but the fourth and final force of christianity will send it crashing towards the ground violence you may be surprised that gerard conceived of violence as one of the forces coming out of christ defeating the scapegoat mechanism but given gerard's understanding of how worldly peace is brought about this conclusion in some sense should flow quite naturally after all if worldly order peaceful society is founded on a deceitful violent act of catharsis then truth and love which christianity has unleashed must be threatening if not harmful for this foundation right the scapegoat mechanism is a deeply morally

ambivalent process for gerard it is deceitful it is wrong but it's also so damn effective just a single innocent man has to be murdered for the entire community to be saved sacrifice one for the peace of all limit the freedom of the parts for the stability of the whole and so we might say in a highly reductive fashion that the scapegoat mechanism is a worldly good but ultimate evil whereas christ is ultimately good but brings forth worldly destruction gerard constantly reminds us that christ himself says as much matthew 10 34 christ has this to say

think not that i am come to send peace on earth i came not to send peace but a sword christ's sword is aimed at the scapegoat mechanism which lies at the foundation of worldly order now while the consequences of the christian revelation for gerard are violent and destructive christ's intentions surely are not christ did not cut down the worldly order for the sake of cutting down worldly order but only so we may be freed from violence and lies such that we can love each other christ took off our training wheels so that we may be

freed yet we've simply fallen and stumbled without the scapegoat mechanism we no longer have our old prohibitions to stop metaphysical desires from running rampant nor do we have sacrificial rituals to bring about catharsis so to put in other words we've lost both our tools to prevent and resolve violence so why haven't we gone bust yet after all the world looks pretty peaceful to me gerard responds don't confuse the lack of the actuality of violence with the lack of the potential for violence violent energies have been building up and increasing but they've been contained and productively

channeled for now by two new institutions of modernity the first institution is capitalism capitalism is the channel that absorbs and productively directs violence now let me be clear that when gerard says that capitalism is a channel for violence he doesn't have in mind you know whipping slaves to build the pyramids but that the same violent competitive energies of glory of pride of desire for conquest are the dominant ones driving capitalism today gerard reminds us i quote it is not by chance that the european aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style

end quote george's point is that when we peek behind the motivational curtains of actors in capitalism we shouldn't expect to find a desire to help others we shouldn't even expect to find a materialistic greed instead what people are really after are the same social goods recognition honor prestige glory the princes and heroes of yore who would have amassed armies now find themselves competing to make products and services gerard warns us such don't be fooled by the altruistic aims that capitalistic actors so desperately advertise it's the same drive that drove achilles to kill hector that drove

germany to invade france that drove caesar to capture versus generics that underpins our world economy today it's funny you're referencing ancient stories there but even today i'll look at my friends who are successful entrepreneurs and a shocking percentage of them were criminals in high school right and i think that the same energy that drove them to be criminals what capitalism does is it redirects that energy towards entrepreneurship yeah and i think this is both a deep critique of capital right that it's fundamentally driven off these spirited irrational forces but also a deep praise of capitalism

right what a miracle it is today that people who seek revenge who seek glory who seek domination who seek an outlet for their criminal energies have to do so not not by killing millions in zero-sum wars as people have done for thousands of years but they have to compete in making better end products and services for others what a miracle gerard's analysis on capitalism is deeply ambivalent now capitalism can only properly function in this way when it is supported by law law is the second important institution of modernity that contains violence for gerard law only

works in situations where there's an entity with a monopoly over violence that can arbitrate between disputing parties law does not bring about peace through catharsis nor the edicts of law justified on the prestige of some deity it keeps peace by threatening with you with more violence if you the injured party aren't satisfied with the outcome of a trial and seek private vengeance by killing or hurting the criminal who injured you then the state right will come after you and punish you with more violence law only functions when there is such a powerful entity with a

monopoly over violence that can easily overpower disputing parties that's where its efficacy stems from this is why within a single nation laws are often inviolable and sacrosanct yet between nations right think uh the laws of the un or the geneva convention these laws without an entity without a monopoly over violence are so often transgressed with little consequence for gerard capitalism is this bubbling stew of violent competitive energies that must be contained by law if that violence is not to overflow that is why gerard thinks the dyke will break where capitalism intersects the weakest points of

law in between nations in global trade global trade is where national pride and competitive energies are piled up yet there is no monopolistic force of violence to arbitrate law between parties under this light let me read you gerard's startling predictions 15 years ago once more he said this again at the height of sino-american optimism when popular wisdom all believed that relationships between china and the us would only get better through trade i quote to you again a conflict between the united states and china will follow everything is in place though it will not necessarily occur

on the military level at first trade can transform very quickly into war from this point of view we can reasonably fear a major clash between china and the united states in the coming decades now if such a war between colossal nation states were to actually happen it could very well be the last war with the invention of nuclear weaponry gerard thinks we generally do live in an apocalyptic moment where the entire world can go up in flames in mere minutes what is unique about the nuke isn't its singular destructive force right the firebombing of tokyo

the mongol mass murders i think are all comparable to the devastation of a singular nuclear strike what is unique about the nuke is that it forces rivals to utterly destroy each other at the first glimpse of provocation unlike firebombing or a mongol horde that takes time to maneuver through terrain there are no frictions to unleashing your entire nuclear arsenal before the nuke nations fought wars like a boxing match taking time to maneuver resting in between with fatal blows rare and after taking a very long time the nuke allows nation states to fight wars like a

duel an instant and fatal escalation in many ways it's worse than a duel because it allows the dead party to shoot the person who is live even if you nuke my entire land mass into oblivion my nuclear submarines can still avenge me post-mortem this is what it means by mutually assured destruction framed in this light gerard's worries of apocalypse is less theological speculation than deja vu on october 27 1962 a soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo was located and targeted by an american carrier group dropping signaling depth charges essentially like underwater bombs intended to

destroy the submarine at the height of the cuban missile crisis the crew in that submarine had completely lost contact with moscow for days and thought that a new world war had broken out they were debating and considering whether to fire the nuke believing that they were under direct attack now this submarine required all three senior officers to agree to launch the strike two of them decided to do so only one officer's stubborn refusal prevented an almost certain nuclear attack and likely armageddon this is how close we were the will of one man was all that

stood in the way with the collapse of the soviet union the specter of apocalypse has long faded from the public imagination but gerard prophesies that this ghost of yore will soon return to haunt us once more if the end of the world had a beginning i think we could do far worse than attributing it to the invention of the nuclear bomb so how ot one live in the end times with apocalypse around the corner what otwan do gerard's answer is brief as it is unsatisfying withdraw withdraw from the world leave it all behind tend to

your own garden there's nothing you can do to stop apocalypse you're only going to muddy your own moral character by trying to get involved in such a mess withdraw stay away from it all so that you can nurture your soul the kingdom of god will not be established here on earth but perhaps we can preserve ourselves to be worthy of it in heaven on november 4th 2015 gerard passed away peacefully in his home in stanford california at the age of 91 leaving us in deafening silence stranded in an apocalyptic moment with nothing but the advice

to withdraw this is how torah's story ends and where our lectures will also come to a screeching halt hopefully i've given enough reason already to engage with gerard and continue with these lecture series i fear that as time progresses gerard will prove to be if you'll entertain another metaphor a seismograph of history able to feel the slight tremors that would balloon to tectonic shifts before others even know that we are standing on a fault line gerard begins his final work as such this is an apocalyptic book it will become more understandable with time because unquestionably

we are accelerating swiftly towards the destruction of the world end quote unfortunately his most unlikely prediction of worsening sino-american relationships has already been made more understandable with time on the topic of apocalypse i desperately hope gerard is wrong but i fear that he is right if he is right then gerard is worth engaging because he is one of the only guys to help us navigate the end time one of the few virgils left who still take apocalypse literally and seriously however i would be a deceitful merchant of ideas if i also didn't share with you

why you shouldn't engage with gerard or continue with these lectures there's a common metaphor given about philosophy philosophy is often compared with medicine that it has the power to cure our souls and societies and i think that's a quite apt metaphor but just not taken far enough because just as medicine has side effects so do philosophies and i wish that philosophers wrote on the side of their books the unwanted side effects of their philosophies as pharmaceutical companies did it on their drugs warning disdain for the material world if you take too much of these platonic

dialogues in one sitting caution more than one dose of nietzsche a day makes patients with pre-existing health conditions descend into uncontrollable rage side effect erectile dysfunction if you take these buddhist sutras too seriously attention inability to form coherent sentences if you read too much adorno in one sitting just as a drug will course through your veins and infiltrate your entire system gerard's ideas will latch themselves onto your psyche and colonize your world view so we must ask what are the side effects of engaging gerard i've presented to you the red pill but as any honest

merchant i must also tell you why you should take the blue pill instead the likely but not necessary side effects of gerard are threefold first alienation gerard will likely show your most intimate long-held desires ones that your entire identity have been staked on as external and alien the career you've always wanted since you were four the type of person you wanted to marry since childhood the political cause that you've dedicated your life to your core desires will likely be thoroughly alienated and shown to be external and perhaps even perverse memetic theory could also alienate you

from others from this point going forward you will have trouble fully participating in any political or collective activity always aware of the deceitfulness of mimesis and the madness of crowds second in action gerard is the most ambivalent writer that i've ever come across what should we do with the scapegoating well on one hand it's a huge lie you're killing innocents but on the other it is the only way that pagan societies have brought peace should we fight to remove caste systems well if you don't then you will subject people to arbitrary distinction meaningless oppression grounded

on nothing but lies but if you do you open them up to competition of all against all metaphysical desire will burn through their communities and set it ablaze should we participate in capitalism capitalism is a competitive cesspool of violent energies that has brought about the most lovely prosperous and peaceful society known to date if you are looking for clear-cut answers or even answers at all you've come knocking on the wrong door go to a marks or hegel instead the extreme ambivalence in all of gerard's ideas in addition to his deep pessimism on the human condition

and history tends to incapacitate those who've digested them a bit too thoroughly third and certainly not least the side effect of gerard is hopelessness by now the point should be familiar apocalypse is imminent there is nothing you nor i nor anyone can do about it if you do wish to remain hopeful after understanding and digesting gerard just know that that hope is gonna have to come from you and not gerard you are going to have to dig yourself and all of us out of this apocalyptic hole gerard really has nothing left to offer turn back

while you still can i have warned you thus now to those stubborn or perhaps morbidly curious enough to continue i can only heed one last time against continuing on these lectures by echoing what dante inscribed on the gates of hell abandon all hope ye who enter here [Music]