Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think it’s not a prediction, it’s not a way that you can predict something. I think that there are too many variables in almost any equation to make it foolproof in that sense. One of the things that always interests me about René was the way he could pull up factors that you didn’t see in a situation, the thing that you weren’t looking at. What did he think of Buddhism? Because Buddhism, at least on the surface, is an attempt to escape the cycle of mimetic desire. He wrote a book about some of the Eastern religions called Sacrifice that was mostly focusing on Hinduism. People ask that question, “What about Buddhism? What about Confucianism?” But we use these labels of religions. There are millions of individuals within them, and whatever the religion says, there are mimetic behaviors. Human behavior doesn’t suspend itself because of the label of religion that you’re going under. He did say and he did feel that Christianity and Judaism — beginning with Judaism — were the first religions to focus in such a concentrated way on competition, strife, and the reasons for conflict, and the pressures to scapegoat.…

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