Easy Pickings
Mimetic Desire: What We Want and How it Makes Humanity
When you’ve read a few thousand books and scoured the internet daily for 20 years, it becomes genuinely difficult to find new ideas.
There are still some options, but the easy pickings seem far between.
Option 1 - Go deeper in.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Lagrangian Dynamics or the Calculus of Variations. Well one could dive right in to figure how it works in detail. The intuition of it however, is not so difficult. Or perhaps, you’ve heard about the microprocessor. Well, there is enough information out there to figure it out. In the case of microprocessors, Vikid realized, it was more like finding the Wizard of Oz, a silly man pulling some levers and flipping some switches. It popped his balloon to realize all of computing was essentially flipping switches.
Option 2 - Go into the Jungle
Oh, yes, there are some truly great secrets hidden there, like Shamans with mind blowing potions, a trip to the other side. Angels and Demons. It needs a bravery for this particular journey but it is beyond enlightening. It is the merger between spirituality and modernity. Well worth it if you have the constitution.
Option 3 - Combinations
A lot that is new happens when you combine things. Like mixing Sodium with Chloride and getting Salt. You can mix ideas in combinations no one has ever thought about to get chimerally emergent concoctions. It requires breaking barriers in your mind and flirting with insanity. Like mixing Magnesium and Water to get white lightening but only it’s in your mind and with some luck you don’t blow the fuse.
Option 4 - Blind Walk
But once in a while you find something interesting by simply stumbling into it in the darkness and that’s what happened at 2am one fine morning, while Vikid was in the mountains.
He bumped into the works of René Girard.
The core part of the renegade philosophers thinking was reformulating how we thought about desire, or why we want things.
Is it because of the object itself, as in do you want it for what it actually is?
Or is it because of what it makes you, especially in front of other beings? Did you obtain this desire from modeling other human beings, often subconsciously, or was it within you?
Take the desire of young men to own a Ferrari.
Do they really want the sleek automobile or is it because it says something about you? That you are successful and can be used as a stepping stone to picking up cute women?
Did Vikid read books for his own knowledge or was it a desire to look smarter than his fellow human beings? Or was it to use his findings for gain in some other field such as investing or just to feel less stupid? To avoid the pit of confusion?
Did he write out of the joy of it or was it to prove something?
He also formulated a social theory for the phenomenon of Scapegoating and how it is an integral part of civilization and a cheat code for cathartic release of tension. How this directly led to pagan gods and religions as a method of avoiding total destruction through war and conflict.
What was really surprising is how he reformulated Christianity and the figure of Christ as a totally new and divergent form of thinking. A way out of this quagmire.
What struck Vikid was his originality and that it was an easy picking.
He hadn’t read all Girard’s books yet. That would probably be years in the making, but what he found was the next best thing. A series of seven video lectures structured around a conversation between two bright scholars.
He hoped you would like it, to indulge in some out of the box imagination with the power to change your world view. Here’s the first one, just follow the lead…
And that’s,