Introduction to Mimetic Theory

Introduction to Mimetic Theory | René Girard

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Күн бұрын

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@marcusmagalhaes5008 Жыл бұрын

It's literally absurd that this level of content and production is completely free. Thank you very much, Johnathan! Incredible work!

@bi.johnathan Жыл бұрын

My pleasure!

@macleod73 Жыл бұрын

@@bi.johnathan Science existed DESPITE Christianity - take Galileo as an example - Girard was just flat out wrong at the idea that Christianity enabled science.

@nickratti5796 10 ай бұрын

Legit was thinking this exact same thing haha. I'm 25min in and all I'm thinking is what a time to be alive haha

@tocreatee3585 10 ай бұрын

this is start of another scientology. 🤣🤣🤣

@hosoiarchives4858 6 ай бұрын

Huh

@jorje0068 6 күн бұрын

Strong start. "Thanks for the compliments, but my failures are what got me here."

@samtheeagle799 2 күн бұрын

This is the strangest thing I've ever experienced. It's like it's scripted. False. Odd....so fake, unnerving. Are people really like this?

@jorje0068 2 күн бұрын

@samtheeagle799 I was only listening, but I think alot of the time he was reading quotes. That might be raising your alarm.

@tomkleingers6483 Жыл бұрын

I will never understand how fantastic content like this gets less exposure than the unimaginative, from-a-kit, novocaine of mainstream media.

@dangerdac 10 ай бұрын

Most adult humans are unfortunately morons.

@dangerdac 10 ай бұрын

Mimesis. Mimesis is literally the answer to your question 😂

@yogamac 6 ай бұрын

Because they are both tools. With Shithead socks.

@intelliGENeration 6 ай бұрын

Real eyes realize real lies… calibrate your goggles and you’ll understand there’s only empty suits in this room.

@EvanShlom 4 ай бұрын

Pretending to be surprised helps no one. It’s obvious why

@arlesbarkly 10 ай бұрын

the whole format of this lecture is another form of status signaling etc - a more refined form of mimesis! the suits the backdrop, the way they speak, the haircuts, etc! honestly, it’s great. when i was in college my problem wasn’t the mimesis itself, but the fact that people werent imitating the right stuff. now here are some actual smart, relatively independent-thinking people imitating the philosophy elites of the past. which is awesome, i mean that, but its not a transcending of mimetic desire, rather we like it because its a preferable type of person to imitate!

@thepotatoist 7 ай бұрын

This comment is gold. Everyone here should read it.

@krishnashukla9154 7 ай бұрын

True it would be much better if they did the interview naked and didn't do their hair.

@gmbs360 6 ай бұрын

@@thepotatoistseconded.

@404errorpagenotfound.6 6 ай бұрын

@@krishnashukla9154 😮😂😂

@aadhunik1861 6 ай бұрын

what about the analog watches

@evolutionclubmedia Жыл бұрын

This is one of the best hidden gems of KZbin.

@turtle-n8z 4 ай бұрын

no its not

@joaodanni 4 ай бұрын

Yes it is! (Go say that to me again! What a great way to spend our time! 😄)@@turtle-n8z

@SuperAlphaKirby 2 ай бұрын

Why@@turtle-n8z

@R3nxt 3 ай бұрын

This is arguably one of the best documentation series on the internet.

@Mariaamirasharif 4 ай бұрын

His speaking skills are impeccable and I can tell he worked very hard to make sure his lecture flowed with with grace and eloquence. Thank you! This podcast made this concept very simple to understand.

@banelegugulethukunene5472 3 ай бұрын

Watching this right now, I’ve never felt more aligned and experiencing the power of synchronicity. Absolutely honoured and humbled to be exposed to such material free of charge. I’m utterly at a loss for words. I found my community.

@rorrymaul1005 10 ай бұрын

this right here, is the content i want to see in youtube, educational, well made, entertaining, engaging, pls gents keep doing the great work you are doing.

@chudy.w Ай бұрын

Bravo!!! Everything about this lecture deserves an applause... everything! Thank you for putting this much effort into a free resource. Speaking for myself (and maybe others who, like me, are hungrily scavenging KZbin for a philosophical education), I hope you don't stop doing what you are doing. It is truly appreciated. 🇳🇬

@Inateacupfullofgold 4 күн бұрын

This interview is such a audiobook worthy, this is included as Insane with the E for quality. I’m impressed to not say exclamation mark to much in excess.

@DavidPerellChannel 2 жыл бұрын

Studying Girard made me see how much the drive for prestige shapes our ambitions. Ever since we finished this lecture, I’ve been asking myself: “What opportunities can’t I see because they’re not prestigious enough?” The very best opportunities are rarely prestigious when there’s big money to be made with them. In my experience, the lust for prestige is the strongest amongst high-status people. When looking for jobs, children from high-status families tend to value prestige the most. In another world, these people would take bets on exciting, but non-prestigious projects with big upside. My friend Justin Murphy writes: "You don't really outperform your peers with quality per se, you outperform your peers by finding underpriced quality that others don’t judge to be valuable.” Everybody wants to be high status. But despite the financial rewards, few people are willing to work on low-status projects, even if they have the potential to become high-status. Most of the people who are jumping into Bitcoin now weren’t willing to commit a few years ago, back when people scoffed at the idea of digital money. Only after reading Rene Girard did I realize the dangers of chasing too much prestige. The worst rivalries, he said, come when people aren’t competing for a physical object. Duels and comment thread wars come to mind. To that end, it’s no coincidence that the Latin word for prestige is praestigiae, which signifies an illusion or mirage. The world is filled with under-priced opportunities that are only available to people who are comfortable with promising, but low-status projects. Beware of chasing prestige.

@InquilineKea 2 жыл бұрын

Omg everyone should Google David his essays are incredible

@ebiekutanmichael7661 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks David. Your essays and ideas have always been inspiring. And Justin is a great guy too. The way he links up scriptures with Bitcoin, Ah amazing

@ytaccount 2 жыл бұрын

"vanity of vanities, all is vanity" - ecclesiastes 1:2

@johnpor175 Жыл бұрын

1:26:02

@The_paradox_of_Youth 10 ай бұрын

🤌🏼

@FrancisSkodzinski 4 күн бұрын

I love the contact and I’m very impressed with the lecture

@vimota 2 жыл бұрын

"What makes us unique to Girard, is not our ability to determine truth, but our capacity to believe in lies, in so far as others around us do as well." Love it, keep it up guys.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for engaging with our work Victor!

@MarcoBonechi 5 ай бұрын

When humans started to talk, lies were inherent in language as language has no limits. Religion was the way to control language by deciding which lies to adhere to (that's what believing means).

@paulatreides9895 Жыл бұрын

Digging, digging, digging for answers…. Oh, what’s this? I see a vein….wait, omg! It’s the mother load!!! Thanks for this. Presenting it in such a concise and enjoyable way. Very much looking forward to the rest of the series.

@vinavsharma9391 8 ай бұрын

Nothing to advertise in the background. The lecturer actually knows what he is talking about and the listener is not just listening, he is absorbing. You could tell the originality of the piece when the speaker tells the moderator that though he got all the things right about his career achievements, but he missed his failures. Including them is important as he attributes to where he is today because of them only. An amazing discourse on Rene Girard's school of thought. You guys are doing a great service to the society.

@khievmusic2842 10 күн бұрын

My absolute new favorite channel. Keep up the great work gentlemen! Bravo! 👏🏾

@mosiahkeels8987 10 ай бұрын

Thank you for this depth of art you have curated for the general public.

@ilovetriple90210 2 жыл бұрын

Well done guys. So much work went into producing this so we can digest the content in a format that's actually entertaining. Kudos to you both

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks Eric, we tried!

@Belioyt 10 ай бұрын

@@bi.johnathan you got yourself a new subscriber 😊. Keep them coming

@rosschristopherross Ай бұрын

Thanks!

@JoJoJoker 2 жыл бұрын

Mimetics: learning about the theory for the first time and finding this lecture which is only a few months old. Thank you for this, it’s possibly the most important podcast I’ve listened to in my life.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks JoJo, the rest of the series is live, hope it doesn't disappoint.

@CWCoffman 2 жыл бұрын

Well done David and Jonathan-you’ve produced a cracking lecture on Girard! It’s a great act of compassion and generosity to raise general awareness to the urgent need for all of us to begin “untangling from the mimetic web.” This awesome introductory lecture is a fitting culmination to David’s outstanding and insightful essay on the theology of Peter Thiel-which I found startling at the time, since his excellent book “Zero to One” gives no hint of his Girardian conceptual foundation. Although Jonathan’s lecture and David’s comments are rigorous and scholarly, it felt authentic and poignant to listen to you both offer personal testimony to the difficulties, even anguish, which brought you to Girard’s work-those personal comments resonate as such a profound critique of the elite world in which we now live: “We had to lie to ourselves . . . (about) this path of prestige . . . What was so existentially depressing was not the presence of wrong . . . but the absence of right. Even the victories felt so hollow and meaningless . . . because they were not the result of our own genuine desire . . . They were fundamentally plagued with the same type of existential problems: “make money you don’t need to buy things you don’t want to impress people you don’t like.’ The same despair and hollowness . . . but even worse.” The courage you both showed in your own life journeys in order to reject the delusion of mimetic desire and to be honest-and to begin to live differently-and now to share what you know with the world, affirms the truth of Leonard Cohen’s insight “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” Leonard of course is himself a singer of mimetic desire. That’s not my insight, but that of my mentor Geoffrey Green, who studied with Girard at Buffalo. Girard was one of the readers of Geoffrey’s PhD thesis, and they stayed in contact for the rest of Girard’s life. Geoffrey points out that Leonard’s songs are full of the triangle of mimetic desire--I could offer many examples but this comment is too short. Your lecture is an outstanding, in-depth introduction to ideas that are urgently important for our world-and for what’s coming next, which we all feel, with uneasiness and growing alarm-but without being able to identify what, exactly, is coming. You both are providing the Girardian tools to discern the general form of what’s coming--even though we can't predict it's exact manifestation and specific expression: mimetic envy and desire gaining momentum through digital-enabled media into a vast contagion before violently manifesting in (a perhaps global) scapegoat event. The last fifteen minutes of your lecture in which you discuss the four takeaways of truth, love, innovation and violence is absolutely brilliant. I so look forward to Jonathan's full discussion of these insights in subsequent lectures. Jonathan talks about Girard’s thought being “cheap” in a good sense, and compares the power of Girard’s idea of mimetic desire to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex and shows how much more profound and powerful mimetic desire is. I came to Nietzsche long before Girard and had a similar realization in relation to Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment, which is such a feature of our world-and I too realized that Girard’s idea of mimetic desire and mimetic contagion is a much deeper and more profound explanation than Nietzsche's insight. Jonathan may already be preparing to go there in the next lectures in the series, but may I suggest that Girard’s idea of mimetic desire is just as fundamental an explanation for human psychological, social and political development as natural selection is for evolutionary biology? I realize there are many lectures to come, and I hope that you both explore the Girardian implications of mimetic desire as it’s now manifesting in NGOs, philanthropic foundations, the widows and ex-wives of billionaires deceitfully mimicking the appearance of capitalist structures while pouring huge resources into pursuing their own personal mimetic status-seeking instead of actually improving general wellbeing. Their mimetic behaviour is actually enflaming the conflagration of popular mimetic resentment in our society already becoming incandescent (literally-as in the summer of 2020-and figuratively) through identity politics and its many metasizations. The transfer of wealth from John Heinz to John Kerry, which required the creation of a multi-generation family dynasty, Heinz’s second marriage to a beautiful expatriate Leftie wife, a tragic plane crash, and her subsequent status-seeking marriage to the politician John Kerry, is now a routine paradigm that can happen in one or two steps, facilitated by the magic of Donor Advised Trusts and other modern instruments of civilizational self-destruction as the oligarchs in our master class hurry us all towards apocalypse. I hope in future lectures Jonathan discusses how neuroscience also strongly affirms the Girardian focus on human sociality in ways to complex and wonderful to mention in this comment, but I hope Jonathan delves into the neuroscience and the latest developments in evolutionary biology emphasizing mothering and socialization generally as the key to human evolution. Another deep topic for Girardian analysis is economics of course-the science of allocating a society’s resources in the context of limitless human desire-a fundamental field for Girardian analysis, and I hope Jonathan and David follow this up based on your own knowledge and experiences in FinTech and Silicon Valley. Certainly David’s insight that many entrepreneurs he knows were criminals in high school is very true and, as Jonathan says, a testament to the miracle of how capitalism channels aggressive, competitive mimetic desire into activity that has improved general wellbeing so such an extraordinary degree. Your lecture series is an urgently necessary antidote to the increasingly frightening consequences of the over-production of pseudo-elites in our time, who are anointed only by mimetic consensus. Our Master Class, oblivious to the Girardian dynamics you have revealed so clearly in this first lecture, are mimicking the original capitalist and Constitutional processes of the American State-which in their period of great flourishing both created unprecedented virtue and unimaginable benefits to humanity through the Girardian ratchet mechanisms of channeling mimetic desire and competition. Only now, unconsciously in the grip of white-hot mimetic contagion, our Master Class is performing these functions in destructive ways that are intensifying mimetic desires and resentment and generating increasing violence and escalating an emerging popular longing to identify and murder-and then, yes, perhaps deify-a scapegoat or class of scapegoats, along with the millions of others who will be inexorably sucked into what may be the coming Great Terror of the 21st Century.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the incredibly detailed comment here Christopher and my apologies for being too busy to muster an equally thoughtful response in reply. We've filmed all 7 lectures already but you managed to anticipate a lot of what is to come: the neuroscience of mimesis (mirror neurons), an elaboration on the forces of innovation, truth, love, and violence, etc. I look forward to hearing your comments on the rest of this series.

@CWCoffman 2 жыл бұрын

@@bi.johnathan Thanks for your reply Jonathan-you must be exhausted after such an epic feat! Congratulations again to you and David.

@Brandon-tg7dl 2 жыл бұрын

@@bi.johnathan looking forward to watching the subsequent lectures! Well done, sir

@josephk.4200 10 ай бұрын

A simpler explanation of the modern instability would be that the concentration of power into fewer hands while the planet is dying within a couple decades might be causing common people to be just a little afraid that our ruling class doesn’t care much for reality.

@kdpunshon3073 2 жыл бұрын

Brilliant! So well done! Waiting for lecture 2. You two could fire up any sluggish mind. Thank you so much!!

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

The wait is over KD :) Lec 2 and 3 are up with more coming in the next two weeks

@Sll8mag3 2 жыл бұрын

Johnathan you've done a brilliant job and I'm glad to see the many positive responses. I've been reading Girard for over 20 years and wrote the book "Compassion Or Apocalypse: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of René Girard." I would love to connect with you sometime. Well done.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the kind words James!

@Heaven-Born 2 жыл бұрын

James, please read or your book to us on video. I’m stuck in the car 2 hours a day commuting to work!

@Sll8mag3 2 жыл бұрын

@@Heaven-Born I will pass the suggestion for audiobook on to the publisher. Thanks. Hope you find lots of great stuff to keep you occupied in the meantime.

@Need_better_handle Жыл бұрын

@@Sll8mag3 there are a lot of apps that that can do it automatically now. Before this recent AI wave the last few months they were really robotic sounding. But there is a new one that can listen to your voice for a minute or two, and then it can automatically copy your voice and play the rest of the book with your voice automatically. It is not perfect, but it is close and the longer you speak the better it will fake your voice for the rest of the book.

@wellsm5930 2 жыл бұрын

This lecture was so compelling that it overshadows the personal quibbles by others on here.

@cryptoinvestearn 4 ай бұрын

Johnathan, I'm very impressed with your speaking and presentation abilities. This is exactly what the internet needs and thank you for putting this out. I'm not exactly sure how I stumbled upon your video as a programmer who mostly isn't on this side of KZbin, I must say hearing you speak about Girard has inspired me to read about him and his life and understand these concepts and adopt them as my own. Maybe me finding this during this time in my life was divine. Keep up the good work.

@itcouldbemedia Жыл бұрын

I have watched and rewatched this series multiple times

@moiponerasekoala3140 2 күн бұрын

Thank you for introducing me to Girard. Beautifully presented.

@ymatsu7823 Жыл бұрын

Wow, this is the greatest lecture I've ever had on youtube. Thank you Jonathan for this wonderful content. The buddha who founded Buddhism, once said " The root of suffering is attachment (desire)". We will suffer from desire or attachment when we lose or can not attain it. So the Buddha believed we should get rid of everything of attachment or desire to escape from suffering. Girard pointed out our tendency of metaphysical desire to intimate other people or want what people want. And It's strengthened by other people's desires. I believe this might be a problem that should be solved by Buddhism.

@barkbellchennai 2 жыл бұрын

"Who's this guy?" Absolutely brilliant! Great work Jonathan and David!

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you Srikkanth for engaging with our work

@alexandervansteenberge1308 2 жыл бұрын

This is my first to hearing about Girard and memetic theory. What an introduction!

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks! Hope the rest of the series don't dissapoint

@alexandervansteenberge1308 2 жыл бұрын

@@bi.johnathan I surely will!

@Heaven-Born 2 жыл бұрын

Oh My God. I think this is the best thing I’ve ever seen on KZbin. Amazing

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for engaging with our work!

@TahaAburakhis 4 ай бұрын

Listening to this kind of philosophical talk made me reflect on how much our current way of life pales in comparison and how limited our thinking has become.

@mattayoubi9829 2 жыл бұрын

This was unbelievably engrossing. Well done Jonathan.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks Matt! Hope the rest of the series don’t disappoint

@madloop2456 2 жыл бұрын

I have never seen something like this, brilliantly done. Eagerly waiting for the next set of lectures!

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks Shikhar, post production is taking its time but they are coming!

@BenningtonJorbitz 2 жыл бұрын

@@bi.johnathan lemme say that I completely agree with Shikhar and also happen to be a filmmaker who specializes in post production and I would very much love to pitch in and help get this off the ground.

@Sad.vocate Жыл бұрын

*Beauty always carries a cost*

@ozongwuegbukings.9051 8 күн бұрын

Superb delivery. Jonathan Bi you are simply a moving encyclopaedia!!!

@ginojuice3690 6 ай бұрын

Last night, I came across some high-value content about higher men; Master v Slave. I'm now totally captivated by Jonathan's philosophy and ideas as he delves into different theories of philosophy.

@Stanzin_K 6 ай бұрын

same here🙌

@scottinguito5997 Жыл бұрын

Excellent intro to Girard's thought. Very helpful to my own ongoing integration and practice of his ideas.

@CristineChenChen 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you for this Johnathan and David. I am so happy this exists. I'll watch all the lecture series. Cheers to both of you.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for engaging with our work Cristine!

@samismx 2 жыл бұрын

Don’t listen to the haters. This is absolutely riveting. Absolutely well done.

@bi.johnathan 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you Sam! Hope you enjoy the rest of the series as well.

@jmalin9133 2 жыл бұрын

The internet is coming to life. The signal is starting to circumambulate and separate itself from all the noise for those who earnestly seek. It’s an incredible time to be alive.