Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It’s mimesis. It’s this tendency for people to just join in to meet two momentums. It happens very fast in the US, I think, because so many of us are on social media. It’s our willingness to believe. I think our value system has become so seduced by commercial forces, it’s hard to find serious forms of thinking. Maybe not for you, but for people in much of America. I might be killed for saying this, but when your models are people like Trump, what are you going to get in the way of depth? What are you going to get in the way of . . . I keep saying, “If you want those kinds of people to go away, we have to change the value system in America.” One of the things that creates a value system is the humanities. In a place where the humanities and reading are suffering decline, then the other models are going to come up and spring and be forceful. We listen to crappy commercials. We listen to crappy memes. It’s going to be — without changing how we think by changing what we admire, what we are willing to imitate, the worst will rise to the fore. Does that make any sense? Yes, but I wonder often whether the truly dangerous mimesis is some form of people attacking the superficially dangerous form of mimesis. I’m not at all a Trump supporter, but often, I see more Girardian behavior amongst the critics of Trump than the Trumpians themselves. In some ways, they seem more free-thinking to me, and in ways I object to. But if you want to see your real Twitter pile-on, praise Trump in some manner, even for something good he did, like Operation Warp Speed, one of the few things he did where I would say that was really wonderful. You get creamed much more for supporting Trump than attacking him. Where the dangerous mimesis really is embedded in the system, I’m never quite sure. I understand your point, and I agree with it. I would just like to see us value more thinking. I’d like to see us value literature again. I’d like to see us value poetry again. I think that this is a question about argument. People have tact, and they’ve talked about Nazis that used to listen to Haydn and stuff like that, but I do think that there’s a better chance of something good getting through if you’re reading Czesław Miłosz than if you are reading Twitter feeds. If we valued intelligent thinking, intelligent speaking in our public lives, I think we’d be less likely to get the kind of candidates that we’re getting.…

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