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Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, Catholicism, and the Age of Social Contagion
19 Aug 2026 26 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 14evaluation 7preference 4prediction 1
Evidence policy
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Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
26 published records
“I think sometimes if something happens that is traumatic and tragic, like a serious war, even worse than the wars that we currently see in the world today, maybe it will take something like that to actually help people build something.”
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“We eat dinner later. I love everything about it. It would probably be living in Italy for the most part, or at least making that my home base, brushing up on my Italian, working less.”
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“I think even people that would consider themselves very secular have obviously adopted a lot of Christian ideas, in the West, I assume you mean.”
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“I think jazz clubs in every city would go a long way toward helping men and women.”
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“I think that even among my tech friends, I’m seeing a lot of pessimism for what a thinker like the pope might say and not even giving him the benefit of the doubt that we might be entering an age where we can actually learn more about what it means to be human than less.”
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“There’ve been some New York Times articles. The food has drawn some people, I think.”
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“I hated it at the time, but now I think about how wonderful it was to have to go through the four seasons every year.”
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“There’s a lot that I don’t want to say, but I can tell you more than I think I’ve said so far.”
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“I think he himself worried about that, and that was a running joke while he was still alive in his circle at Stanford.”
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“” Then the way that it was pitched to me was very much like, if I care about the future and the good of humanity, then this is definitely something that I could do.”
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“I think we’re very much in a Christian society, and there are some people on the integralist right that don’t realize how Christian of a society we actually do live in.”
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“One of mine is I’ll go live in a third-tier city in Mexico. I’m not going to do it, but sometimes I think about it.”
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“I think that I’m very much a von Balthasar Catholic in the sense that I do see a lot of the goodness and beauty and aesthetic characteristics of the church as related to truth.”
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“There were all kinds of innovations, architectural innovations, agricultural, winemaking innovations that happened. It was really the largest church in the world for 300 years, the most important institution in Europe, in my opinion.”
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“I think that Silicon Valley, for instance, would be healthier if it actually wasn’t as allergic to religious thinking, for instance.”
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“The things that can be measured, usually with effective altruism, are often not the things that I think are most important in life.”
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“I think the best chance that I have to help somebody see what I see in the church is not to try to convince them of the argument of why Christianity is true, which is the only good reason to be Christian, in my opinion.”
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“One of his fundamental points is that Christianity has created the conditions for the runaway violence precisely because the scapegoats don’t work anymore.”
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“I’m going to go with Dostoevsky, though, because I think his book Demons diagnoses what can happen at a psychic and spiritual level when social contagion runs rampant.”
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“I don’t think the sameness is a bad thing. I think the sameness is very charming.”
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“It’s a little more reserved. I would say that because of that, it’s less mimetic than the South.”
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“We often sort based on what we think our preferences are before we’ve had a chance to encounter a flesh and human person of the opposite sex, and perceptions are formed, often wrongly.”
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“The idea that there are truths that are hidden is something I would like to just drill down on just for a second, because in Catholicism, it’s that the truth has basically been revealed fully in the person of Jesus Christ.”
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“There are some parts of it that I think can be dangerous, but San Francisco is still the most important city in the world, particularly because of the AI boom, because it’s never been replicated anywhere else.”
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“All of the things that I learned in a very good undergraduate business school did not actually seem to be used in the day-to-day.”
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“He says, “We are legion,” and this is the quintessential gospel story where the demonic has and always has an element of contagion because the entire herd is infected by this demon and is driven off into the sea.”
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