Transcript of Girard Lecture I | Introduction to Mimetic Theory

0. Introduction

David Perell: No philosopher has influenced my thinking more than René Girard.

He showed me how I was caught up in meaningless status competitions, and how much I was driven by desires that weren’t even my own. And I wasn’t the only one. Too many of my peers were miserable pursuing things not because they actually wanted them, but because society told them too. And sometimes, I look back and wonder how I ever functioned without Girard’s ideas. I see how swept up I was in vain pursuits, pointless social games, and status signaling – which Girard exposed and rescued me from. If there were ever a set of ideas that radically changed my life, these would be it.

The journey of acquiring these ideas, however, was a long and painful struggle. Girard’s writing is hard to understand, his theories seem antiquated and abstract, and his books jump from idea to idea without an apparent structure. This is why this series exists. Over the next seven lectures, we are going to cover the entirety of Girard’s system in a structured and understandable way, while exploring the relevance of his ideas for the contemporary world.

My name is David Perell, and I’m gonna be moderating these lectures, which are made possible by the generous grant of Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program. As your host, I’ll be listening and learning here with you. And with that, I’d like to introduce our lecturer: Johnathan Bi.

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David Perell: Johnathan, I know you are busy, thanks for taking the time.

Johnathan Bi: Thanks for having me. If you are gonna do all the hard work of setting up, and I can just come and ramble on philosophy, you can have me any time of the week.

David Perell: Well, I’m glad you could be here. And before you introduce us to Girard, I would like to introduce you to our audience. And I wanna start with how we met, I was hosting a philosophy discussion group in New York City, and at the time, we were reading Augustine’s City of God, and I remember you being on the other side of the room and you started sharing and I was so impressed with the rigor and the intensity of your discussion. I was like “Who is this guy?” And so, we became fast friends. I audited your philosophy class at Columbia. Now, we both live in Austin, Texas, where we must have dinner together two or three nights a week. And in that time, I’ve been very impressed and what stands out the most is just the discipline and the thoughtfulness that you bring to philosophy.

And what I would like to do now is talk a little bit about how you got here today. So you were born in China where you were raised between Beijing and later moved to Vancouver and you spent most of your formative years training in Olympiad Math. At 15, you won a Canadian gold medal in the Pascal Mathematics Competition. At 17, you were an invitee to the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad. At 18, you were awarded a full-ride scholarship at Columbia where you studied Computer Science as one of the top 20 Egleston Scholars in a class of over 2000 people. At 20, you finished your Computer Science degree, and that’s when you were introduced to Girard. And because of Girard, you pursued a second degree in philosophy, where you focused on continental social philosophy and Buddhist theory. At 22, immediately after graduation, you started building a fintech startup with Joe Lonsdale, which you’ve been working on for the past year. Now, did I get that right?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, I think, factually, that is correct. Although I don’t know about the exact ages. I’m a bit worried that you’ve hyped me up a bit too much. Perhaps, not unlike our equity markets, you set me up so high that there’s only one direction that I can go from here and that’s down.

Although in terms of the question of whether you missed anything I think you did miss quite a few important things – to no fault of your own, because no one gives introductions this way – that are relevant to my engagement with Girard. And those are all the personal failures and the suffering that I’ve had along the way that really led me to Girard. I suspect this is probably a much broader point that when you give an introduction to a Girardian that you should highlight perhaps their failures, just as much if not more than their successes. Because it’s often their failures that really drive them to Girard. I don’t think Girardian insights are rewarded, shall we say, in the victory of a triumph but you have to go out there and scavenge them from their fields of defeat. And it wasn’t out of a mindset of achievement or even a leisurely strolling into Girard out of theoretical curiosity that I was acquainted with him, but I crawled to him out of a desperate existential necessity.

1. The Case for Engaging Girard

David Perell: So then, how did you find your way to Girard?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, well, like I mentioned, mostly personal suffering and strife. But, to be a bit more specific, like many other teenagers, certainly ambitious teenagers – I was struggling quite a bit in my first years at Columbia – not academically, not professionally, not socially, but in a deep personal existential sense. As a freshman at an elite college, if you’ll excuse a funny metaphor, I think you end up in a zoo with two thousand other, hyper-conscious, status-oriented, prestige-seeking teenagers. And the one word that I think which captures the existential problem of such a community well is hollowness.

And this wasn’t true for everyone – but most of us weren’t really doing things I think for their own sake but out of what Girard called “mimesis” – our natural capacity and tendency to imitate others. Think about it like this, 2000 of, allegedly, some of America’s smartest and most independent kids all end up after college wanting to go into 4 fields: finance, tech, law, and medicine. And during college, we’re supporting political causes we didn’t care about to fly the ’“right” colors. We hung out with the “right” people. We wanted to be seen dating the “right” person. And we worked our asses off, hustling for prestigious internships that a lot of us actually secretly loathed. And I think what made this all so much more perverse was that we had to lie to ourselves to sustain these pursuits. That if we just squinted hard enough and intoxicated ourselves in the equally drunken rhetoric of our peers, that we could fool ourselves into thinking that this path of prestige is the right one for us to really be on.

And what was so existentially depressing, if you will, about such a life was not the presence of wrong – we weren’t being tortured, we weren’t starving – but it’s the absence of right – even the victories felt so hollow and meaningless. Like getting a prestigious internship, that was a one-day or three-day buzz that went away as fast as it came. And I think these victories were so meaningless because they weren’t out of our own genuine desires but a product of mimesis, what we felt like we had to do out of some kind of social pressure.

And what was the wake-up call for me was in my sophomore year, seeing where this path of mimesis was leading me down towards. I was talking with adults, some of them alumni living in Manhattan and these were the guys who had “made-it”, right? They have the right postal code, they have the right job, they have a hot partner but they were fundamentally plagued with the same type of existential problems. They were making money they didn’t need to buy shit that they didn’t want to impress people they didn’t particularly like. And in them, I saw the same despair and hollowness but in some sense just even worse because it’s developed a bit further out. And how can anyone not be hollow when you’re living life in such a way where you’re motivated not by a strong core impetus of genuine desire but this external shell of social expectation.

David Perell: Yeah, I see this all over the place. I’ve seen the influence of mimetic theory in so many aspects of society. You see it with people who take out a loan to buy some fancy car, and they don’t have the money to do it. You see it in the way that management consultants, you’ll be talking to them, and they’ll talk about the director level title at the company as if that’s the salvation that’s going to make them happy forever: they get it and then they’re no happier once they get that. But the worst kind of mimetic competition that I saw was in high school, and there was this weird thing where the parents would be really competitive and conniving over where their children would go to school. It was like a status competition among them, and they wanted their kids to go to Ivies, these prestigious schools, and the trophy at the end was those bumper stickers on the back of their Mercedes with the university logo. And I saw how, through mimesis, that people had lost their own way and they weren’t even aware of the nature of their own desire.

Johnathan Bi: And I think it’s this lack of awareness that if you don’t have a proper understanding of these forces makes it so easily for us, especially in today’s modern society, to get caught up in these forces. And I think throughout college, I started gaining a more and more intimate awareness of the logic behind all of these phenomena that you mentioned. Not because I was above the fold, if anything I was so aware of it because I was the most guilty, that I was the most mimetic of them all. And what was so frightening to me was the realization (as a sophomore) that I could live my entire life like this – fundamentally, not for myself. I knew I had to change before it was too late, and I knew that there was a point where it was gonna be too late. Where the ship was gonna get too much speed, where if you’ll humor another metaphor, the dagger is too deep in the old king’s heart.

Fortunately, in the pits of my despair, I was introduced the work of René Girard. And Girard saved me – and I really do mean that in a very literal sense of the term – in the same way that Virgil saved Dante by exposing to him the manifestations and the mechanisms behind human evil, as well as guiding his purging of more milder forms of perversion. Now, Girard saved me by presenting to me a theory of human nature that explained the true origin of desire and its terrifying consequences if not directed properly. He gave me a more accurate map with which I myself could slowly unravel and untangle myself from the mimetic web. And with this lecture series, my hope is to be able to gift this map to you and our listeners as well.

David Perell: So Johnathan, I gotta ask you, is the power of Girard’s ideas that they’re gonna stop making us be mimetic? Or, do you still feel like you’re still as prone to chasing prestige and envy as before?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, you’re definitely right. It’s definitely the latter. Girard’s ideas do not work on us by magically making us stop being mimetic and social creatures. In the same environment, I would say, I’m just as susceptible to mimetic forces as I was before. But his theory does have practical personal benefits, and let me explain with an analogy. I think there was a military theorist by the name of John Boyd, and he said something, I’m gonna have to paraphrase here, I don’t know the exact quote, like – superior fighter pilots use their superior judgment to make sure they never get into situations where they have to use their superior skill. And the idea behind that line is that what’s perhaps more important than the ability to deal with bad situations is the foresight and judgment to fundamentally not get into bad situations.

And I think the same is true for what Girard has done for me, when I am, say, already deeply envious or deeply prideful, the battle is already lost – there’s nothing that understanding Girard and mimetic theory rationally can do for me. Mimetic theory, however, gives me a framework to avoid situations which inspire debilitating envy, which ignites a sort of unproductive pride. It tells us what type of person to avoid and who to have close. It teaches us how to construct a social environment that is relatively sober and how to identify ones that are prone to mimetic contagion. Mimetic theory does not give us the power to resist damaging instances of mimesis in the moment, but it does give us the foresight to avoid them altogether.

David Perell: So, do you think Girard is worthy of engagement because of how therapeutic he is … How he can rescue us from suffering?