Pasha Kamyshev

1. Noooo! Read Girard proper, he's good an the linked piece is not. The piece gets the four stages roughly right, but spends too much time on "all desire is mimetic". It's not that all desire is mimetic, it's just that mimetic desire underlies all culture and social functions.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1213547494547714048 …

2. While reading Girard, it was obvious to me that the formula wasn't desire -> violence (otherwise violence would be pervasive), but rather mimetic desire + scarcity + absence of structured justice -> violence

3. But then, who was the meta-model who told me to pick the second model rather than the first model for advice on what to watch? And who was the meta-meta-model—let’s call it a super-model—who told me to trust that meta-model rather than some other meta-model Answer: The State.

4. On a meta-point, an inability to answer this question should not be a knock on a theory or an automatic fall back to "individual". Individuals are important, but are also a product of causal processes that create them. This fact is deeply uncomfortable.

5. The piece reads like a typical Kegan Stage 4 unwilling to understand Stage 5. The idea that the Individual's values are not born out of some aether, but are a product of group conflict and mimetic desire / anti-desire is true, but uncomfortable for an atomic modern worldview.

6. If someone thinks Zooey Deschanel is more attractive than Ann Coulter, what's at play is not just desire, but also hate. That someone probably hates Ann, because ..... well I am going to guess that their friends hate her... but you knew i was going to say that.

7. Borrowed desires are not "news". Trying to elevate them to a fundamental cause might be news in the current culture (although Buddhists talked about "reducing desire" for a while.