Luke Burgis: belief

Transcript context

…At what point does being anti-mimetic itself become a mimetic identity, and do you see some signs of that in Silicon Valley? Everyone’s supposed to be contrarian. There’s a kind of false contrarianism. You don’t even know anymore what’s a contrarian point of view. Are we at that stage with Girardianism? I think Girard would be relatively mortified that mimetic theory was very mimetic and so popular. I think he himself worried about that, and that was a running joke while he was still alive in his circle at Stanford. I do think it’s an issue. It goes back to why I said we shouldn’t think about it too much. The book is titled The One and the Ninety-Nine. The message, as you know from having read it, is not that everybody should become a rugged individualist and that the goal is to become the one. I think that’s incredibly dangerous. It’s actually, in a world where all of the focus is on the one, maybe we need to think more actually about the 99 and the relationship between the one and the 99 and the way that the group and the self affect one another. I think the focus has actually swung way too far in the direction of the one. I mean, all of us are the one in some sense, but the challenge of today is how do we live in communities without clustering in communities where everybody shares the same values and thinks the same things? Those are the most boring communities for me. I don’t want to be in one of those communities, but I get invited to them almost on a daily basis, and I usually decline. Let’s say we put you in charge, either of the government or of certain voluntary norms, and you can change one thing. What’s the thing you would change within the realm of it being somewhat feasible?…

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