Notes from: Wanting by Luke Burgis
"O hell! to choose love by another's eyes"
-Hermia, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Homogenizing forces are creating a crisis of desire. The more that people are forced to be the same -- the more pressure they feel to think and feel and want the same things -- the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves. While technology is bringing the world closer together, it is bringing our desires closer together and amplifying conflict.

Girard believed that all true desire is metaphysical. People are always in search of something that goes beyond the material world. If someone falls under the influence of a model to mediate the desire for a handbag, it's not the handbag they are after. It's the imagined newness of being they think it will bring. " Desire is not of this world," Gerard has said, "...it is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence."

Lamborghini [who refused to extend his rivalry with Ferrari into the racing arena] didn't buy into the distortions caused by metaphysical desire, which leads people to seek satisfaction under a never-ending assortment of obstacles with no end. Gerard explains the tragedy: "A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone. He turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such a futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up. So he begins to look for a *stone which is too heavy to lift* -- he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it." Lamborghini chose not to.

C.S. Lewis called this invisible system "the inner ring." It means that no matter where a person is in life, no matter how wealthy or popular a person is, there is always a desire to be on the inside of a certain ring and a terror of being left on the outside of it. "This desire [to be in the inner ring] is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action," Lewis said. "It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it -- this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement.... As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want."

Nearly all people are religious in the sense that they subconsciously believe that sacrifice brings peace.
     Consider how ingrained sacrificial thinking is in our psyche. If only we could destroy that other political party, that other company, those terrorists, that troublemaker, that fast food joint next door that has caused me to gain ten pounds, everything would be better. The sacrifice always seems right and proper. Our violence is good violence; the violence of the other side is always bad.
     For many years, according to Girard, sacrificial rituals were so effective that they hindered scientific progress. "We didn't stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches. We used to blame droughts on witches; once we stopped blaming witches, we looked for scientific explanations for drought."
     Humanity still tends to revert to a primitive, sacrificial mindset the characterized our ancestors and kept them stuck in a cycle of violence. From the perspective of the crowd, the scapegoat mechanism is entirely rational. So when scapegoats become the sacred center around which a culture turns -- when myth and superstition reemerge as dominant forces in a culture -- actual rationality takes a back seat.

The tenth commandment prohibits rivalrous desires because they lead to violence. "Thou shalt not covet [desire]..."

     The crucifixion of Jesus failed to unite the community unanimously against a scapegoat. It did the opposite -- it caused enormous division. For a short period of time, the crucifixion seemed to have the desired effect. The mob was quelled, and order was temporarily restored. But very shortly after Jesus's death, a small number of people -- those who knew Jesus intimately -- came forward to proclaim his innocence and said that he was alive.
     A division opened up between those who wanted to preserve the old sacrificial order and those who saw the scapegoat mechanism for what it is: an unjust sacrificial mechanism.
     The gospel texts are radically different from Greek, Roman, and other common myths. In the pagan accounts of unanimous violence, the reader or listener gets the impression that the violence was done to someone guilty, deserving of punishment. That's because the only people left to tell the story are the scapegoaters. The stories are told from the standpoint of the persecutors, who honestly believed in the guilt of the scapegoat. In the crucifixion of Jesus, the reader is meant to identify with the crowd, but also to see the folly of the crowd and move beyond it -- to finally, for the first time, grasped the truth about human violence.
     I told the story of the pool party from the standpoint of an omnipresent narrator who knew that the guy who went on the beer run was innocent. If one of the murderers had been the narrator instead of me, you never would have known that the scapegoat had done nothing to merit the anger of the crowd. You would have heard only one interpretation of the event and not even known to look for another. It would have been the same story from every single person who had been in the pool: the victim was guilty.
     I told the story as someone who was aware of the scapegoating mechanism. This is how the gospels worked. For the first time in history, the story was told from the standpoint of the victim. Gerard sees this as a definitive turning point -- the moment when the scapegoat mechanism began to lose its absolute power. The story forces people to come to grips with their own violence. A veil was lifted on the recurring cycle of violence and human history.
     That lifting of the veil, as we all know, did not put an end to violence. The revelation has worked its way through time slowly. But the revelation is not reversible. If the modern world seems to be going crazy, it's partly because we are hyperaware of the ways in which exploitation and violence against innocent victims occur, but we simply don't know what to do about them. It's like we've been told something terrible that we didn't want to know, and which we are powerless to fix entirely on our own. And that's a recipe for madness.

P 127: "Examine ancient sources, inquire everywhere, dig up corners of the planet, and you will not find anything anywhere that even remotely resembles our modern concern for victims," wrote René Girard. Think about how peculiar that is.

The scapegoat mechanism has been so thoroughly subverted that there is some semblance of a reverse scapegoating mechanism, whereby a wave of support swells up around a victim. George Floyd is an example.

What makes the scapegoat mechanism possible is the idea that you are not capable of it.

P 137: Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals. The more we bring that system to light, the less likely it is that we'll pursue the wrong goals.

Paris chef Alain Senderens, on bucking the Michelin star system: "I feel like having fun. I don't want to feed my ego anymore. I am too old for that. I can do beautiful cuisine without all the tra-la-la and chichi, and put the money into what's on the plate."

We can't know ourselves without knowing the history of our desires.

Was Sébastien Bras's decision (to renounce his three Michelin stars) easier because he has already achieved three stars? Probably. He certainly couldn't be accused of sour grapes.
[A diversion to explain the "sour grapes" fable - a fox can't reach big juicy grapes so he claims they are sour.]
If you accept this notion uncritically, then you might believe that one can't despise rich people without first being rich, or scorn Ivy League schools without having gained admission to one, or reject the desire for the Michelin stars without having earned them. To do so would self-deception, resentment, weakness.
Don't believe that a person has to buy into and play a mimetic game and WIN before they can opt out of it with a clear conscience... "Don't knock it till you try it" is a sophomoric argument.
Girard recognized that resentment is real (and primarily occurs in Freshmanistan not Celebristan, because we lack distance)... But only the worst kind of cynic believes that every renunciation necessarily has something to do with resentment.
The fox in the fable was alone. We rarely judge alone: we are social creatures and we would not want to lie about the grapes being sour because we would be embarrassed. The other people keep us honest.
A year later Bras received a phone call... "I was being reintegrated into the guide - and with two stars."
"And what was your reaction?"
"I laughed," he said. "I laughed a lot."

P. 177: Real truth is anti-mimetic by it's very nature - it doesn't change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is.

On the decline of organized religion in the US:
From my perspective (as one on the inside), there was a wholesale liquidation of deep desire - a form of Gresham's Law, an economic principle specifying that bad money drives out good. In this case, thin desires drove out thick ones.

[American society lacks] a transcendent reference point outside the system. Meanwhile, everyone is more or less imitating everyone else. Our culture is stuck because we're fighting over space in a pool, next to the ocean.

To live with desire is to live with tension.

From Tactic 13: Look for the coexistence of opposites... they point to something transcendent. The reason things seem like they shouldn't coexist is that they don't map onto how I experience the world. They don't have a place on my map of meaning, my mental model of how the world works. They are a sign that I need to go further, to reevaluate... The coexistence of opposites is often a sign, pointing us in the right direction.

I sometimes wonder how top-down company culture cults are any different than the phenomenon of *cuius regio, eius religio* (whose realm, whose religion) of the Holy Roman Empire, in which different princes or rulers had the right to enforce their preferred religious beliefs on the population.

From Tactic 14: Meditative thought (as opposed to calculating thought) helps us sink down into reality and notice *divergent* possibilities rather than *converging* on one.

The market is good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones.

From an Amazon review of "The Contrarian":
Girard argued that many texts are “persecution texts,” that is, history written by the victors – the persecutors – and that the differentiated characteristics of the scapegoat are in these texts exaggerated beyond belief, in order to justify the violence against the victim.