René Girard
On Mimetic Theory
"Mimetic Theory rests on the assumption that all our cultural behaviors, beginning with the acquisition of language by children, are imitative. He sees the world as a theatre of envy, where, like mimes, we imitate other people's desires. His theory builds upon the kinds of books and people that modern people tend to ignore: The Bible, classic fiction writers such as Marcel Proust, and playwrights like Shakespeare. Mimetic conflict emerges when two people desire the same, scarce resource. Like lions in a cage, we mirror our enemies, fight because of our sameness, and ascend status hierarchies instead of providing value for society. Only by observing others do we learn how and what to desire. Our Mimetic nature is simultaneously our biggest strength and biggest weakness. When it goes right, imitation is a shortcut to learning. But when it spirals out of control, Mimetic imitation leads to envy, violence, and bitter rivalry."
Peter Thiel on Girard
"[Girard's ideas are] a portal onto the past, onto human origins, and our history. It's a portal onto the present and onto the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. It's a portal onto the future in terms of where we are going to let these Mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence... It has a sense of both danger and hope for the future as well. So it is this panoramic theory... [It's] super powerful and extraordinarily different from what one would normally hear. There was almost a cult-like element where you have these people who were followers of Girard and it was a sense that we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did."
Fight Club
"We work jobs we hate, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like."
On Thiel's operating philosophy
"People who work with Thiel are told to look for heterodox ideas and people with clear visions of the future. Thiel doesn't like to be an operator because it's a low-leverage activity. Instead of banging the keyboard himself, Thiel installs strong CEOs and leaders whose judgements are similar to his own. Time and again, these skilled operators have the agency to act without Thiel's approval, and are encouraged to pursue bold visions of the future. They have freedom to pursue bizarre ideas and people who don't fit the standard mold."
Best characterization of Facebook
"Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it's about word of mouth, so it's doubly Mimetic. Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it's about our natures." Its success hinges on meta-mimeticism.
Good company advice
"In response, as CEO of PayPal, Thiel set up the company structure to eliminate competition between employees. PayPal overhauled the organization chart every three months. By repositioning people, the company avoided most conflicts before they even started. Employees were evaluated on one single criterion, and no two employees had the same one. They were responsible for one job, one metric, and one part of the business."
Tim Keller on Hope
Tim Keller spoke about the core tenets of Christianity: faith, meaning, satisfaction, identity, morality, justice, and hope. In one of his talks, he spoke about the human transition from hope to optimism. From praying for a better world to working hard to ensure a better future. In the sermon, Keller argued that humans are future-oriented beings. If we don't have a positive vision for our future, we become slaves to the desires of the present day and crumble under the suffering of daily life. That's why we need to believe that our lives are marching towards an end that's worth striving for. Otherwise, we will become adrift like a log in the ocean.
On Seneca and Augustine
Seneca created the notion of progress: "mankind has advanced in the past and will advance in the future." Progress has ancient philosophical origins. But it did not crystallize until Augustine in City of God: the assumption that all that has happened and will happen is necessary, and the vision of a future condition of heaven on earth.
On Augustine and Progress
"Of all the contributions to the idea of progress by Christian thought, none is greater than this Augustinian suggestion of a final period on earth, utopian in character, and historically inevitable."
Thiel on short-term thinking
To Peter Thiel, short-term thinking is the essence of sin. Like The Bible, he advises us to make plans and sacrifice the present for the future. Greatness is like chess. To win, you must study the end game and work towards the one you want to see. Thiel's favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca who said: "To begin you must study the end. You don't want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing."
On Cathedrals, Thiel, and Long Time Horizons
In a thought-provoking essay called Peter Thiel and the Cathedral, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues that Cathedrals were the equivalent of the Apollo project in the High Middle Ages. Like America's Apollo program, each Cathedral required a specific and ambitious plan for building it. Medieval cathedrals were the first man-made structures to soar higher than the Egyptian Pyramids, which were monuments to death. But cathedrals are dedicated to the triumph over death. Moreover, cathedrals can only be built with scientific knowledge and communal support. They require scientists, mathematicians, engineers, craftsmen, and artists. And all of them need a long time horizon. Long time horizons aren't just psychological. They're cultural. Modern society suffers from temporal exhaustion. Or as sociologist Elise Boulding once said: "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future." Greatness is like chess. To win, you must study the end game and work towards the one you want to see. Thiel's favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca who said: "To begin you must study the end. You don't want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing."
On Christ
"Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. I am well within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one, solitary life."
Peter Thiel on trends
"Once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend... So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere."
The Problems with Institutions
As Julia's story demonstrates, academic rivalries are vicious because they focus on hierarchies over knowledge. They bicker over trivial details and compete for a limited set of status-based titles. In each department, there can only be one chairman. In each university, one president. Speaking about the faculty relationships at Harvard, Henry Kissinger once said: "The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small." By obsessing over their competitors, the faculty lost sight over the big picture and fought over the small scraps of superficial status games. The more they strived to be different, the more their actions mirrored each other.
The Narcissism of Small Differences
Shakespeare wasn't the only writer to identify the vicious Mimetic impulse. Sigmund Freud called the tendency for conflict between two similar people "The Narcissism of Small Differences." We reserve tooth-grinding envy for people most like ourselves. Thomas Hobbes wrote that "if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End... endeavor to destroy, or subdue one another."
Don't Copy Your Neighbors
"Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever." — 1 John 2:15-17
Everybody imitates. We cannot resist Mimetic contagion, and that will never change. But there are bad ways to copy and good ways to copy. Bad imitators follow the crowd and mirror false idols, while good imitators copy a transcendent goal or figure.
Everybody imitates. We cannot resist Mimetic contagion, and that will never change. But there are bad ways to copy and good ways to copy. Bad imitators follow the crowd and mirror false idols, while good imitators copy a transcendent goal or figure.
Peter Thiel on escaping Mimetic traps
"When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, 'You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.' Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of. Because their identity was defined by competing so intensely with other people, they could not imagine leaving... On the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out."