The Far-Right is Satan, The Far-Left is Anti-Christ | Girard's Mimetic Theory

Summary

In this lecture, Johnathan Bi explores Rene Girard's perspective on modernity, connecting historical forces with contemporary society. Girard's theory reveals how ancient dynamics, like mimesis and scapegoating, continuous to drive today's world. By examining Christianity's rupture with pagan traditions, Bi highlights the emergence of love, truth, and innovation, juxtaposed against modern pitfalls such as hypocrisy and dogma. The lecture also connects these themes with broader societal issues, positing that understanding love, truth, and innovation can guide humanity towards a better future, amidst hypocritical and dogmatic tendencies.

Highlights

• Girard's theory shows that ancient conflict dynamics like mimesis persist today 🌟
• Christianity disrupted pagan traditions, introducing love, truth, and innovation ✝️
• Modernity struggles with hypocrisy in love, dogma in truth, and fashion in innovation 🔍
• Gerard's insights emphasize the need to navigate modernity's challenges 🤔
• The paradox of scapegoating and victimization remains a core issue in society ⚖️

Key Takeaways

• Girard's theory unveils how ancient scapegoating and mimesis still influence today's world 🌍
• Modern society grapples with love, truth, and innovation, but faces hypocrisy and dogma ⚔️
• Girard offers insights for both progressives and reactionaries to avoid modern pitfalls 🧐
• Science, though powerful, is often idolized, leading to dogmatic stigmas 🚀
• Understanding these dynamics helps navigate modernity's challenges and potential apocalypse 📚

Overview

In this gripping lecture, Johnathan Bi dives into Rene Girard's mimetic theory, linking long-standing historical dynamics such as mimesis and scapegoating to today's societal challenges. Girard's insights cast light on how the ancient mechanisms of conflict continue to shape modernity, revealing connections between past and present struggles in human interaction.

Bi further delves into how Christianity, by rupturing pagan traditions, gave rise to forces of love, truth, and innovation. He discusses the dual nature of these forces, showcasing how they are interwoven with the very fabric of today's society and its challenges. The failure to fully realize these ideals can lead to modern pitfalls like hypocrisy and dogma, pointing to the ongoing struggle between our higher aspirations and human nature.

Concluding with a look at future implications, Bi stresses Girard's viewpoint on navigating through these complex dynamics. Girard offers a guide for understanding societal issues, encouraging both progressives and reactionaries to avoid modernity's pitfalls. The lecture underscores the importance of comprehension to steer clear of apocalyptic outcomes and embrace a future shaped by love, truth, and innovation.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction This chapter introduces the forthcoming discussion on modernity, particularly focusing on the shift to present times from historical analysis through the lens of René Girard's theories. It acts as a turning point or crescendo following the initial five lectures, setting the stage for exploring the application of Girard's concepts in modern contexts.
• 01:00 - 04:00: Gerard's understanding of history and modernity The chapter explores Gerard's understanding of the parallels between historical conflicts and modernity, using concepts like mimesis, metaphysical desire, resentment, and scapegoating. It explains how these forces that drove old stories like Romeo and Juliet and historical events like the Trojan War are still relevant and influential in today's world. Gerard's Theory is linked to thoughts from biologist EO Wilson, providing a framework to better understand the continuity of human conflict through time.
• 05:00 - 09:30: Christianity's rupture and societal trajectory The chapter discusses the core issue of humanity, which is described as having Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. Despite advancements in technology, institutional design, and rational understanding, human nature remains stagnant. The chapter explores Gerard's perspective on modernity in the context of this tension.
• 09:30 - 14:30: The scapegoat mechanism and Christian revelation This chapter focuses on the concept of the scapegoat mechanism and its relation to Christian revelation. It continues from previous discussions about Pagan religion and society, highlighting the rupture caused by Christianity. The chapter emphasizes how Christian values, specifically love and truth, have influenced modern culture, serving as a moral framework. The discussion sets the stage for an exploration of modernity and hints at future predictions about an impending apocalypse, drawing from Christian teachings and themes.
• 14:30 - 25:00: The continuity and change brought by Christianity This chapter explores the transformative impact of Christianity on human society, contrasting it with the foundational principles of paganism and other societal structures grounded in violence and deceit. It raises questions about how society has absorbed such a fundamentally different and threatening element, and the historical trajectory set in motion by this 'foreign injection' of values.
• 25:00 - 35:00: Christian love vs. Eros In this chapter titled 'Christian Love vs. Eros,' the lecture discusses four powerful forces Christianity introduces into human history: love, truth, innovation, and violence. The focus is on the first three positive forces: love, truth, and innovation, exploring their causes and consequences within the framework of modernity. The chapter sets the stage for the next lecture, which will address the fourth force, violence, in the context of apocalypse.
• 40:30 - 55:00: Hypocrisy and persecution in modern culture The lecture titled 'Hypocrisy and Persecution in Modern Culture' is introduced as one part of a two-lecture series examining modern society. This lecture explores the contemporary world through the lens of it being akin to the kingdom of God. In contrast, the subsequent lecture in the series will assess modern society as if it remains a pagan society. This dichotomy represents two distinct ways of understanding modernity.
• 55:00 - 80:00: The force of truth and the impact of Christianity The chapter explores the transformative impact of Christianity on modern society, contrasting it with a pagan society reliant on scapegoats, myths, lies, and deceit. It examines the Christian message's role in fundamentally altering mechanisms of violence and assesses both the progress humanity has made and the persistent challenges due to human nature.
• 80:00 - 100:00: Science, reason, and the problem of deification This chapter explores the historical trajectory influenced by the Christian rupture, which set human societies on a path away from cyclical times defined by founding murders. Traditionally, societies fell into chaos through a memetic contagion that resulted in the arbitrary choosing of a scapegoat, often leading to their expulsion or death. This founding murder would temporarily restore order, marking the cyclical nature of societal times before the influence of the Christian rupture.
• 100:00 - 125:00: Innovation and imitation The chapter explores the concept of innovation and imitation, beginning with a discussion on how miraculous events are often mythologized by people. This mythologization can lead to scapegoating or deification of individuals, which are based on a psychological projection by the crowd rather than any inherent power. The text explains that the victim, in such scenarios, is attributed with causing or ending chaos despite having no such capability. It highlights the deceitfulness of these projections, which are grounded only in unanimity. The narrative suggests that myths born from such foundational events eventually lead to the formation of core institutions in pagan societies.
• 125:00 - 136:00: Fashion as the perversion of innovation The chapter explores the concept of 'Fashion' as a distortion or corruption of true innovation, focusing on societal prohibitions that prevent violence. Rituals serve as a safety mechanism against violence. However, myths and their institutions, as forms of controlling ideology, inevitably lose their prestige and moral force over time, leading societies back into chaos. This cyclical process involves recurring stages of chaos, founding, murder, deification, and myth-making, suggesting a never-ending cycle of societal breakdown and renewal.
• 136:00 - 144:00: Summary and implications This chapter introduces the concept of the scapegoat mechanism, as articulated by Gerard. It describes a complex interplay of ultimate evil and worldly good, wherein a single entity is sacrificed for the greater good, restricting individual freedom to ensure communal stability. Through this mechanism, violence and deceit are employed to maintain worldly order. The 'positive' aspect highlighted is that only one innocent person needs to be sacrificed to benefit the entire community.
• 145:00 - 147:00: Conclusion and foreshadowing of next lecture The chapter discusses the scapegoat mechanism, highlighting the necessity of its operations remaining concealed. It elaborates on the idea that sacred power in Pagan religions hinges on deceptive unanimity, where the innocence of the victim is obscured. This concealment is essential to prevent the arbitrary nature of the power structure from being revealed, which could cause the entire system to collapse.

The Far-Right is Satan, The Far-Left is Anti-Christ | Girard's Mimetic Theory Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 lecture six the Triumph of modernity so far we've only discussed Renee Gerard's understanding of History but in this lecture we're going to Leap Forward and examine the present for me this was the crescendo that we've been building towards for the past five lectures and we're going to see how all of the gerardian concepts that we've come to
• 00:30 - 01:00 understand together such as mimesis metaphysical desire resentment scapegoating how all of those things manifest in our world as it is today the same forces that drove conflict in Old stories like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and historical events like the Trojan War they still animate the world today and Gerard's Theory puts words to what the biologist EO Wilson once said and I
• 01:00 - 01:30 quote the real problem of humanity is the following we have Paleolithic emotions medieval institutions and god-like technology and we've made great strides in our technological capacities our institutional design and even our rational understanding of the world but still the stubbornness of human nature refuses to budge and with that tension in mind let's dive into Gerard's understanding of modernity
• 01:30 - 02:00 two lectures ago we began detailing our past Pagan religion and Society last lecture we discussed the rupture Christianity in this lecture we're going to discuss the present modernity and in the next we're going to discuss the near future imminent apocalypse it should be evident hopefully from our last lecture that the values of Christianity love and truth are not just
• 02:00 - 02:30 different but diametrically opposed to the foundations of pagan and indeed all of human society which are violence and deceit rupture then is really not an exaggeration to describe Christianity how will Human Society digest such an incompatible and threatening substance what trajectory has history been set on with this foreign injection these are the questions that I hope to answer in
• 02:30 - 03:00 these last two lectures Christianity unleashes four powerful forces within human history three magnificent and one less so in fact one is apocalyptic love truth Innovation and violence in this lecture on modernity then we will be analyzing the cause and consequences of the three good forces and in the final lecture on apocalypse we will examine the fourth and final force of violence
• 03:00 - 03:30 you know the split between these two lectures are temporal one is about present and the other is about the near future but I also encourage you to understand the split between these two lectures as both examining modernity but from radically different lenses this lecture will examine current society as if it already were the kingdom of God the next lecture will examine current society as if it were still a pagan Society
• 03:30 - 04:00 in the next lecture by examining our current society as if it were still a pagan Society needing scapegoats and myths and lies and deceit we're going to understand how the Christian message has fundamentally altered the mechanisms of violence and in this lecture by examining our current society as if it were already the kingdom of God as actualizing Love and Truth we can understand where we have made genuine progress and where our fallen human nature refuses to budge
• 04:00 - 04:30 but before we delve into these three forces let me give you an idea of the trajectory of history that the Christian rupture has set us on for millennium Human Society operated on a cyclical time whose Cycles were demarcated by founding murders right societies would first descend into chaos this was a memetic contagion a scapegoat would be arbitrarily chosen to inherit all the blame and expelled often meaning killed and his founding murder would bring back
• 04:30 - 05:00 a piece so miraculous that people attributed the saving Force to the victim the now dead victim deifying it paradoxically and of course both the scapegoating and the deification are equally deceitful the victim neither had the power to cause or end the chaos it's all a psychological projection by the crowd grounded on nothing but unanimity myths then will be created out of this real foundational event and out of these myths spawn core institutions of pagan
• 05:00 - 05:30 societies prohibitions prevented violence and rituals acted as a release valve for violence but as any ideology or worldly order these myths alongside their institutions would start to lose their Prestige over time the moral Paradigm would lose its force and that Society descended again into chaos this whole process had to begin Anew a chaos founding murder deification myth-making at infinitum
• 05:30 - 06:00 this four-fold process is called the scapegoat mechanism and for Gerard was deeply deeply ambivalent combination of both ultimate Evil and worldly good sacrifice one for all limit freedom of the parts for the stability of the whole and used violence and lies to establish worldly order but the good thing about it is you only need to kill one innocent man to save the entire community
• 06:00 - 06:30 now what is required for the functioning of the scapegoat mechanism was that its mechanisms had to remain hidden because sacredity and Pagan power as we discussed are predicated and based on a deceitful unanimity the victim's innocence must remain hidden lest the whole arbitrariness be exposed and the entire edifice come crumbling down for Pagan religions to work the crowd must not know that the source of power
• 06:30 - 07:00 of their God actually comes from the psychological projections of the crowd this is where Christ comes in Christ through the crucifixion showed precisely the innocence of the victim the guilt and the projection of the crowd and gave us a moral Paradigm through which we can expose the code and free ourselves from religion altogether the Christian Revelation for Gerard becomes the rupture point of human history slowly but surely Humanity loses its
• 07:00 - 07:30 ability to create myth out of these deified scapegoats and with it the legitimacy of prohibitions now considered oppressive and the efficacy of sacrifice now considered cruel also began to deteriorate but remember this is not in an unqualified good thing if violence and lies properly directed are the foundations of worldly order then Love and Truth can only bring about worldly chaos and so we might say in a
• 07:30 - 08:00 very reductionist fashion that the scapegoat mechanism is a worldly good but an ultimate Evil whereas Christ in Christ's Revelation is ultimately good but brings forth worldly chaos Gerard reminds us that Christ himself tells us as much I quote to you Matthew 10 34. Christ has this to say think not that I came to send peace on Earth I came not to send peace but a sword
• 08:00 - 08:30 Christ pulls the cultural rug underneath our feet and takes Humanity from cyclical time to a linear time but history since Christ can not only be interpreted as a rupture but also as a strong continuity with Pagan Society it is a continuity in the first and weak sense in that the Christian Revelation takes time to work in the world the demythologization takes time because mythology has been with us for so darn
• 08:30 - 09:00 long even Christianity itself according to Gerard became mythologized succumbing to this inertia past 2000 years has been a gradually waning off of religion for the human race but it is a continuity in a deeper and much more interesting sense because the building blocks of human nature have not changed everything that we've discussed and the lectures on psychology mimesis mimetic desire metaphysical desire memetic rivalry our need for catharsis
• 09:00 - 09:30 all of that remains constant to put it succinctly then what has ruptured is our social historical conditions culture is fundamentally different we protect victims now whereas they used to be persecuted we value truth now whereas we used to believe dogmatically but what is continuous then are the people within those cultures their yearnings and capacities their psychology and needs and the key interplay between the break and culture
• 09:30 - 10:00 and the continuity in Psychology will be the hidden motor driving these two final lectures if you consider that the cultural conditions we have been freed from are in some sense natural to The Human Condition in the sense that you know we naturally create religion we naturally scapegoat and thus the conditions we are in now as unnatural it is readily intelligible why so many problems of modernity take on the form of hypocrisy persecution under the banner of
• 10:00 - 10:30 protecting victims rigid adherence to Scientific dogmas under the guise of free intellectual exploration or the most derivative of inventions packaged as the most radical Innovations the core problems of modernity that we will explore in this lecture take on the shape of hypocrisy because we live in a fundamentally Christian culture that identifies and tries to correct the flaws of our natural psychological Tendencies and as a result has to go
• 10:30 - 11:00 against those natural tendencies it is this incompatibility then between our cultural ideals and our natural tendencies that leads to hypocrisy we are no longer living in a cultural environment which we have evolved and adapted to yeah I've always liked the line from the biologist EO Wilson who says the real problem of humanity is the following we have Paleolithic emotions medieval institutions and god-like
• 11:00 - 11:30 Technology I think that quote is apt and getting to the point if we consider culture to be a type of technology that we're really forcing ourselves to live up to these cultural ideals which are some form of technology that we really can't achieve the metaphor then that I think best captures this radical break as well as stubborn continuity is the period when a rocket has launched but has not reached escape velocity I think this analogy is
• 11:30 - 12:00 apt first because such a rocket is clearly a radical break from when it was stationary but it is also a continuity because it is still governed by the logic of gravity and still within the gravitational pull the same I think can be said for the point of History we are in now there's a clear radical break between our culture that protects victims and all the ones that have come before which made them into scapegoats stubborn gravitational pull of The Human
• 12:00 - 12:30 Condition Remains the Same we still need to persecute and find victims to blame this analogy of the rocket I think is apt second because such a rocket can either reach orbit and be freed once and for all or just be blown to Smithereens and for Gerard our future is just as binary kingdom of God or violent apocalypse with no in between Christianity sets us free or perhaps just as aptly Exiles us from the comfort of circular time and sets us on a linear
• 12:30 - 13:00 accelerating path the aim of these last two lectures then is to describe the forces within and the direction of this linearity by thwarting the scapegoat mechanism Christianity unleashes again four forces within history that slowly but surely take us to the modernity which we find ourselves today as with all things Gerard these forces are deeply ambivalent within the Pandora's Box we have the good love
• 13:00 - 13:30 truth Innovation and the bad violence that are growing and have broken free all at the same time what's more even within these forces Gerard's analysis is ambivalent love often manifests hypocrisy truth becomes Dogma Innovation degenerates into fashion and even within violence Gerard sees a key motivational force that has brought forth the most enviable living conditions of man and channeled through
• 13:30 - 14:00 capitalism let us use the rest of this lecture then to examine and reflect on the three good forces of modernity beginning with love the most laudable force that comes out of the Christian Revelation and the destruction of pagan culture is Love This Love stands in stark contrast to the Greek notion of arrows Eros is marked by two qualities first a fundamental concern for oneself rather than the object that is loved and second
• 14:00 - 14:30 Eros is limited often to a select group of individuals or objects you know what's coming to mind here is I I wonder if romantic love is an example of both of these qualities so let me explain what I mean first that romantic love is as you're saying clearly limited to one person I mean just think about how much in our modern world we prize monogamy in the modern West but there's a second Point here that modern dating is often less about the other person as an end in themselves and
• 14:30 - 15:00 more about choosing the other person actually as a means to look cool or to make you stand up and be proud and confident but the problem with that is that you're not loving them for who they are but you're loving them for what they do for you and when that's the case it kind of reminds me of buying clothes or something where it's less about love it's a transaction I think that is a good modern example of
• 15:00 - 15:30 Eros and I think your intuition is spot on there that there's something perverse about arrows because it's a concern for the other that really isn't a concern for the other it's a concern for the self disguise is the concern for the other the love that the Christian Revelation has Unleashed on the world Christian love Agape is not like this at all it's different on both points it's fundamentally one a concern for the
• 15:30 - 16:00 other for the sake of the other and two importantly it's undiscriminating it is a love that stems from identification with the other and expands to all Humanity now the reason that Gerard thinks Christianity is responsible for this agape love or obvious Christ's defining quality the one he asks us to imitate is his unconditional unwavering love furthermore the destruction of rituals which legitimize catharsis and the
• 16:00 - 16:30 violence and anger and hate that followed catharsis also led to the growth of love but most importantly it was the collapse of prohibition of social difference the breaking down of arbitrary distinctions among men that led to this love taking root in the world in societies that have been touched by Christianity we are no longer primarily Brahman or shudra man or woman German or Italian we are first and foremost human
• 16:30 - 17:00 we are equals and Christianity is this equalizing Force framed negatively the love predicated upon difference say um the concern a lord has for his subjects and serfs or the serf's loyalty to the Lord it is incomplete because first the scale of it is rather limited our social roles only have us have responsibilities towards so many people
• 17:00 - 17:30 but second the love that stems from one's own social roles stems from a fundamental concern for oneself and isn't it a deep way prideful my concern for you my surf is rooted in me wanting to maintain my own self-conception as a good Lord the love predicated upon difference then is Eros whereas the love predicated upon Christian equality is agape and so much of our society nowadays is underpinned by this Christian love and the unique
• 17:30 - 18:00 Christian concern for the victim would appear to be secular Concepts secular intuitions secular institutions once we look under the hood so to speak we'll find Christianity underneath to what you're saying here we live in a Christian Society and we don't even know it take the idea of Human Rights it's self-evident right and that's why it appears in the Declaration of Independence that's the wrong way to think about it the idea of Human Rights
• 18:00 - 18:30 it's Downstream of the idea of Imago day which is the biblical idea that every person no matter what they look like is made in the image of God and therefore has inherent worth so it's Christianity it's Christianity that inspires the famous line from the Declaration of Independence which says and you've heard this before we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal but the craziest thing is that the same secular people who dismiss Christian
• 18:30 - 19:00 values those are the same people who are the most passionate Defenders of Human Rights and what's funny about it is there in subsets the most religious of all and they don't even realize it I think that's right that most people don't realize the true source of where their ideas really stem from but I don't think it's just Concepts like equality and human rights that you've identified that's Downstream Christianity take this phenomenon that I find quite curious adding big
• 19:00 - 19:30 anything in our society automatically makes it bad big Tech big Pharma big philanthropy and I think this is another Christian concept this goes to show how the Christian moral Paradigm of protecting the victim protecting the little guy is so steeped into our culture and it's really everywhere and Gerard identifies so many different institutions as well as modern intuitions that are really Christian in
• 19:30 - 20:00 essence for example he sees Christian love and the concern for the victim as operating in domestic institutions let me give you a quote since the high Middle Ages all the great human institutions have evolved in the same direction more Humane private and public law penal legislation judicial practice the rights of individuals when viewed in terms of the large picture the social and cultural Evolution goes always in the same direction towards the
• 20:00 - 20:30 mitigation of punishment and greater protection for potential victims end quote but that's not it Gerard also sees this love as operating in foreign affairs I quote again when a catastrophe occurs at some spot on the globe the Nations that are well off feel obligated to send Aid or to participate in rescue operations you may say these gestures are more symbolic than real and reflect a concern for Prestige no doubt but in what era before ours and under what Scots has
• 20:30 - 21:00 International Mutual Aid constituted a source of prestige for Nations there is just one rubric that gathers together everything I'm summarizing in no particular order and without concern for completeness it's this the concern for victims end quote even our refusal to declare our achievements Gerard believes is an achievement of the Christian concern for the victim this is how pervasive it is let me quote one more time we can compare ancient societies to one
• 21:00 - 21:30 another but the global Society now in the making is truly unique its superiority in every area is so overwhelming so evident that it is forbidden paradoxically to acknowledge the fact especially in Europe this prohibition stems from the fear of a return to tyrannical Pride it is also the fear of humiliating Nations that don't belong to the privileged group in
• 21:30 - 22:00 other words it is once again the concern for victims that dominates what is permissible and impermissible to say end quote hidden uneasily alongside Gerard's anticipation of Apocalypse then is a restrained but nonetheless fundamental affirmation of modernity that can easily be missed between Gerard's dense lines on violence as these passages show Gerard Praises modernity wholeheartedly he answers a
• 22:00 - 22:30 resounding yes to the question are we the best society that has ever been now Gerard is not being naive here as a sober analysis of international care suggests he does not think that all that appears to be compassion and love actually takes on this Noble Christian form of Agape this genuine undiscriminating concern for the other more often than not it's more that our society has rendered compassion prestigious and people are pursuing it
• 22:30 - 23:00 out of vanity we might call this theater because it's putting on a display for others and this is what Gerard has to say I quote again even the renunciation of violent memetic desire cannot spread without being transformed into a social mechanism into blind imitation rather than an authentic exit from the medic desire then there's mimetic submission to a culture that Advocates the exit end quote George's Point here is that just as we
• 23:00 - 23:30 have conformed to stoning victims before we are now conforming to helping victims the action may be different in content but the form of that action is still the same Conformity of mimesis the acts of theatrical love that Gerard has in mind are people who just play along with the cultural occurrence yeah sure I'll volunteer my time sure I'll donate to this cause sure I'll post a social media post to spread awareness not because they have a grounded belief but simply because it's the fashion of
• 23:30 - 24:00 the times and they want to be seen on the right side of History what appears to be Agape here then is really Eros they are doing it for their own vanity and they only help the victims that are fashionable to help there's a deep critique here of contemporary culture that humans have not fundamentally changed we haven't let go of our pride in favor of love as individual choices or even more strongly if you drop the
• 24:00 - 24:30 same people who are sheepishly protecting victims in another cultural environment they would readily join the stoners but this is also a deep Praise of our current Society after all we shouldn't expect people to behave otherwise that's what being the medic creatures means in any social Community the amount of authentic individuality is relatively small compared to mimesis and its forces so we should be glad that people are conforming to as Noble and ideal as love
• 24:30 - 25:00 Gerard's comments here on this theatrical display would be his most urgent warning on the topic if not for the fact that there's an even more pernicious mutation of Love That threatens to delegitimize love altogether that is hypocrisy hypocrisy goes a Step Beyond mere theater whereas theater sees you performing the actions of Love without being motivated by love it hypocrisy
• 25:00 - 25:30 sees you acting against Love In The Name of Love hypocrisy actively persecutes its own victims in the name of protecting victims the idea is this the Christian Revelation has exposed our evil Tendencies towards persecution and as a result our culture is one that sides with the victim and against persecution but our stubborn human nature Remains the Same and we still need to persecute however it's no longer fashionable as was it the case in say the day of
• 25:30 - 26:00 Achilles to openly share or desire for Conquest Vengeance and hatred we can only pursue these desires discreetly secretly but disguising them in pro-social motives our culture the only acceptable reason we can have for persecution is to stop persecution the wolf must now Don the sheepskin I mean think back to the personal example I gave of my college acquaintance who was in economic
• 26:00 - 26:30 Progressive the story went something like this he was very passionate about distributive justice and every time I would meet him he would go on and on about how much more we could be doing for the least fortunate and initially I thought well what a loving compassionate caring guy however as I got to know him better I realized that he was a really resentful and spiteful person and I had a hard time squaring his seemingly religious concern for the poor with his own lack of concern and care as a person but it
• 26:30 - 27:00 all made sense when he confessed to me that what was motivating his progressivism wasn't a universal benevolent concern for the poor but a localized resentment of the rich you see my acquaintance came from a middle-class family but grew up with upper middle class peers and was always made to feel poor his orientation of values against wealth was not for itself but to get back at his peers by painting money making as immoral he found himself on
• 27:00 - 27:30 the moral High Ground she wasn't concerned with economic victims that much at all but in the culture we are in the best way for him to attack his richer peers was to accuse them of victimization and economic exploitation I think this quote from Gerard captures the essence of the story that I've been trying to tell quite well the victim's most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors and our neighbors do the same
• 27:30 - 28:00 they always think about victims for whom they hold us responsible end quote on this front Gerard isn't convinced Society has really changed that much at all that we've really given up persecution rather it's more a superficial switch of who we think it's acceptable to persecute the canonical victims are completely off limits the ethnic minorities the lower classes the disabled and Gerard thinks that's a great thing but we've simply flipped it
• 28:00 - 28:30 on its head now we feel warranted perhaps even compelled to persecute all types of privilege right whether it's white privilege ableist privilege whether it's class privilege or men's privilege Gerard has this to say our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of Cruelty end quote and this cruelty is the first problem of hypocrisy that it does exactly what it explicitly vows not to do persecution
• 28:30 - 29:00 unless we trivialize the dangers here by just give an example of a harmless economic Progressive Gerard reminds us of the terrible atrocities committed in the name of protecting victims I quote hypocrisy is dangerous then because it leads to what it claims to prevent the persecution of victims anyone familiar with the tragedies of the Soviet Union grounded on protection of the victimized proletariat should look at America's cut
• 29:00 - 29:30 up in victimhood ideology with trembling fear this other totalitarianism this Inquisition in the name of victims is the form that arbitrary unjustified violence takes place today the persecution of persecutors end quote but there is an even more dangerous problem with hypocrisy Beyond doing explicitly what it vows not to do and that's this hypocrisy delegitimizes love from the inside and
• 29:30 - 30:00 legitimizes engenders the opposite violence recall in gerardian Psychology we hold intellectual positions political positions less for the positions themselves but because of our relationships with the people who hold those positions reductively if we feel an affinity towards them then we are nudged to adopt their position and if we feel disgusted or disdained towards them then we are nudged away from their position the
• 30:00 - 30:30 problem is that people naturally feel repelled by Hypocrites so if most of the people who are spousing love are hypocrites then love and concern for the victim itself would start losing its cultural prestige even though we may try to use our faculties of reason it is very hard for people not to feel repulsed by the hypocrisy by those like my college acquaintance and pushed to the opposite side of the spectrum but lest I trivialize what is at stake here
• 30:30 - 31:00 let's briefly turn to Hannah arendt's origins of totalitarianism to see how hypocrisy engendered the Nazis now one of the key questions that a rent wants to answer in this book is how Germany and most curiously of all how the German intellectual Elite could have so readily welcomed Nazism after espousing humanistic compassionate loving values for centuries but rent's explanation begins with the
• 31:00 - 31:30 Bourgeois of Germany the capitalist lead of the time now not unlike the woke capital of today but rent reasons that a double morality emerged within the Bourgeois German Elite of the early 20th century there was a private morality of acquisition that stood in Stark contradistinction with the publicly paraded humanitarian values of compassion concern for the weak tolerance that they paraded in short the
• 31:30 - 32:00 Bourgeois hypocrites and it was none other than this hypocrisy that first made the values they espoused so Hollow it delegitimized love and compassion and pushed people towards the openly violent values of the Nazis second it was the Bourgeois lack of consistency that made the Nazis consistency seem refreshing if the Bourgeois claimed they were Saints and acted as gangsters at least the Nazis acted like gangsters and claimed they
• 32:00 - 32:30 were gangsters that's why they were refreshing to the people of the Weimar Republic in short it is not a pull towards the value of the Nazis that made the intellectual Elite give their support but a push away from hypocrisy the Nazis were simply the opposite of what the woke Capital the Bourgeois were and that's why people rally to them I will share with you a rent's own words here I quote since the Bourgeois claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and
• 32:30 - 33:00 confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life but actually held in contempt seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty disregard of human values those who traditionally hated the Bourgeois it had voluntarily left respectable Society saw in the Nazis only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability not the content of Nazism
• 33:00 - 33:30 itself that's a terrifying thought it is a terrifying thought and I think it has very practical contemporary relevance to the disastrous consequences of the woke capital and Progressive hypocrisy today to summarize even within this one force of love that Christianity has let loose in modernity we see three different strands that range from the Divine to the worldly to the apocalyptic
• 33:30 - 34:00 genuine Christian love helps others indiscriminately for the sake of others it is a force as strong as ever that we can genuinely be proud of theatrical love performs the actions of love for the sake of one's vanity although conformist it is still somewhat laudable hypocritical love acts against Love In The Name of Love Gerard sees this form of hypocrisy rampant in our victim-obsessed society and is capable of delegitimizing Love
• 34:00 - 34:30 altogether as a cultural value and engendering its opposite a reactionary killing of victims as it had in the Weimar Republic the second force that Christianity injects into history which reaches its Pinnacle in modernity is truth like love it is one of our great triumphs in fact these two forces truth and love as we'll soon see are inseparable what does Gerard have in mind when he talks about the increase and proliferation of truth
• 34:30 - 35:00 there's too many things that I can bring up here there are the countless victories of Science of the Mastery of travel and Land Air and sea there's the victory over disease and starvation the dispelling of Illusions and myths but I think Gerard also has in mind the way reason has gained Prestige I mean look around our world everything is or at least claims to be grounded on reason social political theories all gain legitimacy not through Divine mandates or hereditary lineage but appeal to
• 35:00 - 35:30 reason our system of law is not based on the God's prohibitions but claims at least to be the product of Reason however valuable reason also has not been as heavily praised or rewarded in Industry than it has now in our knowledge economy more so than almost any civilization we appear to Value knowledge more and believe in reasons ability to obtain it far are we from the garden of Eden's prohibition against the tree of
• 35:30 - 36:00 knowledge far are we from the intellectual humility of job far are we from the lessons of Oedipus that knowing more can lead to disaster so what caused this proliferation of Truth and who's responsible won't you be no surprise that Gerard's answer is Christianity this may seem an implausible answer initially indeed we often pit Christianity and reason certainly science and Christianity as against each
• 36:00 - 36:30 other Gerard's answer here then is as interesting as it is counter-intuitive the first negative way that Christianity brought forth truth is that it is spelled myth this should be a familiar idea at this point Christianity exposes the deceitfulness of worldly foundations and begins to tear down prohibitions rituals and all Pagan religions and it is only when we cease to look for truth in myth does reason even have the fertile ground to Bear the fruits of Truth after all if something is already
• 36:30 - 37:00 explained by a wildly wildly prestigious myth that it's fatal for me to question then reason will not even want to begin to question it I think Gerard's interlocutor sums up his views very nicely I quote it is really Christianity that makes science possible by desacralizing the real by freeing people from magical causalities once we stop seeing storms as being triggered by the machinations of the witch across the street we start being
• 37:00 - 37:30 able to study meteorological phenomenon scientifically end quote Gerard tells us that The Disappearance of religion is a Christian phenomenon par excellence because Christianity was the original truth-seeking discipline that sought to dispel false religions in this View modernity is concern for truth is more judaic than Athenian in fact Christianity not only foresaw
• 37:30 - 38:00 but in some sense actively brought about its own demise as the content of Christianity The Pursuit Of Truth started to rebel against the religious form of Christianity science then for Gerard is the patricidal son of Christianity patricidal because it unjustly scapegoated Christianity rejecting all of it and not just the religious form son because science is a Christian
• 38:00 - 38:30 discipline through and through continuing the tradition that Christ began of accessing truth and dispelling myth but there is a much stronger and positive reason that Christianity is responsible for the proliferation of Truth reason and science Beyond just the negative dispelling of myth and clearing the fertile ground so to speak and that reason is none other than love Gerard has this to say I quote love is at one in the same time the
• 38:30 - 39:00 Divine being and the basis of any real knowledge the New Testament contains what amounts to a genuine epistemology of Love end quote Gerard is arguing for a strong causal relationship here that love the first Force we described is a necessary precondition for truth but why is that why is love a necessary precondition for truth we conceive of
• 39:00 - 39:30 Truth as a self-standing activity why does love a relation of people matter for truth well when I frame it in that way the gerardian answer is quite obvious the relationship between person and object say it with me here really represents a relationship between person and person this is one of the fundamental conclusions of mimesis this is what it means that we're social creatures in order for my relationships with other people to not mediate the truths I
• 39:30 - 40:00 access either positively or negatively then I can't either hate nor unduly fetishize any single person I mean think about when the condition of love is not satisfied think back to my college acquaintance he felt resentment for his Rich peers which mediated him into an economically Progressive position and think about German Society they didn't believe that Nazis values were true but they simply aligned towards them because they were resentful of the hypocritical bourgeois Nazism was not
• 40:00 - 40:30 the truth for German Society any more than economic progressivism was for my acquaintance in both cases the truth has been distorted because of a resentful mediation among people and of course this works in the positive direction too if I overly fetishize someone if they want to uh to use gerardian language here acquire their being then I might subscribe to their positions even if I don't find them true
• 40:30 - 41:00 Christian love as we discuss is not possessive and deeply desirous and it certainly isn't hate it's neither a push nor pull from the self because the self really isn't in the picture here it is a concern of the other for the other which means that my own being my own Pride my own self-conception Falls by the wayside when I love someone in this Christian way it is a dissolution of myself which takes away the strength of metaphysical
• 41:00 - 41:30 desire and when we do this in an indiscriminate way when we learn to love all we become freed from mediation and we are free to pursue truth whether that means our genuine desires or objective scientific inquiry I hope this helps us make sense of Gerard's quote Christian love is the place of objectivity then because it is the only type of relationship where the self is not in view and where the relationship between self and other are
• 41:30 - 42:00 in harmony in love we are not overly resentful or overly admiring of others and thus are not mimetically pulled by them this is all quite abstract so let me give you a few examples this is a story that I've shared before and I grew up idolizing entrepreneurs the Steve Jobs of the world and when I went to college I felt like I had to drop out and start a company as soon as possible so I did that at my freshman spring I dropped out raised a small round and the company ended up crashing and burning out of
• 42:00 - 42:30 vanity and it's not that I didn't enjoy building companies but the degree to which I desired it and certainly the urgency which I felt like I had to achieve it was disproportionate to my genuine desire dropping out was not my truth now when I did go back to school out of resentment for my peers who had dropped out and built successful companies I went the complete other direction right I rejected the worldly altogether switching from CS to philosophy going to a Buddhist Monastery
• 42:30 - 43:00 for three years I didn't do that much at all in Industry out of resentment again it's not that I didn't enjoy philosophy in Buddhism but the degree to which I pursued it and certainly the degree to which I renounced the world was not genuine this was not my truth either in the first case I was unduly fetishizing of entrepreneurs and positive mimesis took me away from my truth I should have just stayed in school and started working on side projects in the second case I was unduly resentful of entrepreneurs and negative
• 43:00 - 43:30 mimesis took me away from my truth I should have continued to keep a pulse on developments in Industry while I explored philosophy the reason that I feel like I'm doing a bit better job now of balancing and finding my more authentic desires is because I resolved my deformed relationships before when I met a philosopher entrepreneur who was younger and more successful than I I became both resentful and jealous but now I can to some degree respect and affirm their
• 43:30 - 44:00 life and wish them well genuinely without exaggerated admiration or Envy and it was only when I first made peace with myself and made peace with the relations around me that I was no longer so strongly mediated by other people's life decisions it was in the place of Love Alone could I access truth and genuine desires here's another example whenever I get into a heated argument with a colleague
• 44:00 - 44:30 a friend or a family member no matter what they say no matter what facts they present to me with I always see my own side reason becomes my spokesperson and lawyer and reason can't bring about a resolution by itself I found that in these scenarios when I'm arguing with people when there's a feud when I'm angry at them the best way to resolve the conflict is to wait it out and just let the anger pass or perhaps even to think about the good times I've shared together and develop a degree of affection towards
• 44:30 - 45:00 them the removal of that hate is primary only then are you at a headspace access truth and begin reconciliation Spirit precedes reason we are primarily social and not rational creatures helplessly mediated by others so what's most important is getting our relationships right truth does not have the power to engender love but love has the power to
• 45:00 - 45:30 engender truth now let me not trivialize this with just individual examples for my own life the same goes for society-wide issues as well I mean take a closer look at what polarization is doing to our society I would wager that polarization which effectively is an absence of love right it's seeing enemies in the other it's not just silencing the exchange of ideas but it's limiting the very formation of ideas for different groups of people certain
• 45:30 - 46:00 ideas are completely off limits not just to share but even to entertain because they are associated with the other side whom they so loathe many people on the left can't even entertain that capital is genuinely bring forth an important technological innovations because these ideas are associated with the Enemy similarly many people on the right can't entertain the idea that there are legitimate claims within social justice movements because those are the talking points of Those whom they hate
• 46:00 - 46:30 it's not just normative political positions that are susceptible to mediation intellectual positions can be off limits as well if we fail to practice love and respect in Nazi Germany for example theoretical physics was devalued because it was considered a Jewish science the point here is that even for the most objective and theoretical of disciplines we can still form subjective biases based on what we think about those associated with those disciplines
• 46:30 - 47:00 what we find in drawn's epistemology of love then is a solution to our perennial problem of mediation how do we as individuals access our authentic desires and how do we as a society engage in meaningful dialogue answer is that we must have the right social relations in place before reason can even begin to access truth we need to love Gerard has a very famous but hard to
• 47:00 - 47:30 decipher phrase he says the invention of science is not the reason that they are no longer witch hunts the seizing of witch hunts is the reason science was invented end quote this must be interpreted under the light of Gerard's epistemology of love in a violent World truth and science do not have the power to bring about love here represented by the seizing of witch hunts no matter what facts you present to people if they are angry and violent they're going to keep on killing only in
• 47:30 - 48:00 a loving world where we have stopped killing witches can science and reason flourish I encourage you to relate all of this back to my example of personal conflicts truth does not have the power to engender love but love has the power to engender truth but just like love Gerard thinks that modernity is often hypocritical when it comes to truth just as persecutions now proceed under the banner of the concern
• 48:00 - 48:30 for victims dogmas are now disguised as free inquiry specifically Gerard thinks that we are idolizing and making a religion out of reason and science I quote it is because we've wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force in a retrograde violent form he's talking about how fervently people believe in atheism these days in this it will perhaps have been our
• 48:30 - 49:00 last mythology we believed in reason as people used to believe in the gods end quote Gerard's claim here is that there's been an intellectual founding murder since the Enlightenment what we have expelled is religion and what we have divinized is reason and science the best example I can think of of us deifying science is this in the old days scientific rational
• 49:00 - 49:30 activities geometry astrology music all wanted to snuggle close to Divinity for example think about how musical composers wanted to show that they were capturing the harmony of the heavens but today the divinities of yesteryear are trying to snuggle close to science I took a course in college on a Buddhist Meditation and it was named contemplative science my professor tried really really hard to argue that the Buddhists were doing signs I was also
• 49:30 - 50:00 walking down New York I think on Fifth Avenue and I saw a banner that said fifth Church of Christ scientist the fact that the literal deities of yore are trying to Cozy up the signs is perhaps part of this divinization of signs that Gerard is talking about but what's the problem with reason and science gaining such an immense Prestige what's wrong with that the first and most obvious problem is the one that we've been discussing for this entire lecture series if we deify reason and
• 50:00 - 50:30 attribute to it too much power in the human psyche then we're designing Society for what we want humans to be and not what they actually are but that's not the only problem second by being deified science can become unquestionable and can justify terrifying political actions in the same way that appealing to scripture or the edicts of the Catholic Church Justified a terrible political actions on The Prestige of Christianity Gerard is deeply worried that political agendas
• 50:30 - 51:00 are now wrapping themselves up in a veneer of science to be equally unquestionable Gerard's worry is that science isn't independent from narratives and Fashions and thus is also susceptible to mimesis and all of its problems it's not as objective as we think it to be here's the passage from an anthropologist am hocard that he always likes to bring up I quote the first Gibraltar a half-man half ape skull was discovered in 1848. it passed
• 51:00 - 51:30 quite unnoticed the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 it was until men had become thoroughly used to the idea of man's descent from an ape-like creature the skull was brought out of its obscurity in order to become a link in the evidence it wasn't the direct evidence of a man ape that converted biologists rather having been converted by comparative evidence Darwin's narrative essentially they set
• 51:30 - 52:00 out to find direct evidence in order to confirm their deductions it took 35 years of the Origin of Species to set them really looking then Dubois went out to find the ape-like fossil and found it since then Discovery has succeeded Discovery and the illusion of direct evidence has taken possession of the minds of anthropologists end quote this is an incredibly damning story for
• 52:00 - 52:30 Gerard because it shows that even if science can objectively access the facts that only gets us so far the fact of finding a half-man half ape skull did nothing and didn't change our understanding of the world at all and it wasn't direct facts that convinced biologists of man's descent from apes it was the power of Darwin's narrative now a narrative that's grounded on tangential facts like the
• 52:30 - 53:00 evolution of bird beaks but not the direct evidence like humanoid skulls not unlike many Christians then the biologists believed before they saw the direct facts we need a theory to situate facts in we need a narrative to convince us and those narratives even if they are checked by the facts are incredibly susceptible to mimesis this is why even in the most objective of Sciences there are intellectual
• 53:00 - 53:30 fashions your point about Darwin and Gibraltar reminds me of the plank principle which comes from the scientist Max Planck who said that science doesn't progress because people change their minds change their views which is what most people think but rather what happens is that each new generation of scientists they have different views different ways of seeing the world different beliefs and then as old Generations die and pass away new ideas are accepted because new scientists come into power and then that
• 53:30 - 54:00 that Changing of the Guard is how scientific consensus changes that's very interesting and I think what both the plank principle suggests as well as the Gibraltar example from Gerard is that science is governed less by facts in rational agents changing their mind objectively as we are led to think and that these interpersonal mechanisms of mimesis actually plays a much greater role even in very objective signs I think so but
• 54:00 - 54:30 Gerard has another concern for science that this Gibraltar example brings up even more damning for drug the Gibraltar example shows that science doesn't really truly have an objective command over this facts independently of narratives think about it like this the first humanoid skull was ignored when the narrative wasn't there and when the narrative was there people began seeing them everywhere I think it was Peter Thiel who had this line as an undergrad if we look for
• 54:30 - 55:00 oppression we'll find it everywhere but I think it's not just oppression even objective facts become distorted by the narratives we hold we are not truth-seeking creatures but creatures who are able to believe in myths lies and narratives if others around us believe them as well this is what worries Gerard that science like reason is quite impotent and turns out to be just as susceptible to narratives and mimises by deifying it we
• 55:00 - 55:30 turn something we should all be very very suspicious of into something unquestionable that can justify atrocities for example the terrible Eugenics movements of the 20th century was draped with the veneer of science Eugenics was a tremendously popular and prestigious discipline it wasn't a pseudoscience at all it was supported by Nobel laureates like Hermann Mueller and political leaders like U.S president Theodore Roosevelt there was even a chair for eugenics in University College
• 55:30 - 56:00 London Not only was the discipline of eugenics grounded on the most prestigious of Sciences of the day not the least of which being Darwin's theory of evolution but some of the most important developments of Statistics flowed out of eugenics research the fathers of eugenics many of whom prestigious professors at UCL invented the correlation coefficient significant tests to better measure populational differences in the same way that Newton had invented calculus to better understand physics so hopefully you can
• 56:00 - 56:30 see Gerard's Point here what is really a political agenda is dressed up in science indeed the facts are that there does exist population differences between races but what people chose to do with those facts that is really narrative dressed up in science perhaps what is more damning for Gerard then is that we didn't stop Eugenics because of a scientific Victory because
• 56:30 - 57:00 we defeated it on the fields of facts we stopped because The Narrative of eugenics had lost its Prestige by being so closely associated with Nazis in fact much of the same science continued under different guise Britain's annals of eugenics was renamed annals of human genetics American eugenic society became the society for the study of social biology and the magazine Eugenics quarterly was renamed to social biology
• 57:00 - 57:30 let me be crystal clear here Gerard is not a eugenicist in fact the opposite he is terrified of eugenics and showing us the dangers of deifying science Eugenics unfortunately does not stand alone in disastrous narratives disguised as Science History is littered with examples of scientific hubris ranging from the comical to the disastrous think about Malthus in the 18th century reasoning that living standards would go back to subsistence because population
• 57:30 - 58:00 grows geometrically while food increases arithmetically think about the 1970s where there was an entire wave of a ridiculous dubious climate science championed by the times the New York Review Columbia Brown they were all publishing articles on an inevitable Ice Age here's another example in January 1970 life reported and I quote scientists have solid experimental and theoretical
• 58:00 - 58:30 evidence to support the following predictions in a decade Urban dwellers will have to wear gask masks to survive air pollution by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half end quote in many of these examples it's not that the science was bad people weren't faking numbers but that the science and facts are extremely limited and open to a whole host of narrative interpretations the reason certain narratives get
• 58:30 - 59:00 selected often has nothing to do with science at all it has to do with mimesis Prestige shock value career advancement of the scientists grants political agendas what is so hypocritical to our things about our deification of science is that we disguise subjective opinions public dogmas mere narratives with The Prestige of objectivity the reason that it is dangerous to deify science is the same reason it was dangerous to deify the Catholic Church
• 59:00 - 59:30 just as the European conquest of the Americas was at least partially legitimized through the appeal to Catholicism of spreading the gospel today we too need to legitimize our political Pursuits with a Sprinkle of reason and a dab of science and just as whomever used to disagree with the Catholic church we called Heretics we call those who disagree with politically charged questionable signs as anti-science someone whose positions we don't even have to contend with when deified science becomes a blocker
• 59:30 - 60:00 to truth and genuine inquiry because it is a conversation stopper and therein lies the hypocrisy last but certainly not least Gerard believes of the deification of signs leads to a systematic rejection of certain types of Truth perhaps I can summarize Gerard's position here like this science confuses its epistemic limitations for an ontological Theory what I mean to say here is that the defining methods of science verification
• 60:00 - 60:30 limits signs to the study of objective external material phenomena in the early days of science that was fine because science can find itself to the study of external phenomena astronomy physics Etc yet assigns became more successful and prestigious they aimed to apply this criteria of verification on other domains such as psychology social theory still only permitted external material phenomena to be used as evidence thereby
• 60:30 - 61:00 categorically rejecting whole domains of Truth now the best example of this is perhaps the behavioralists John Watson BF skin are those guys who even in the most charitable reading believe in the thesis that human behavior can be fully explained by appealing to externally observable phenomena past behavior and interactions with the environment tools like introspection and the objects of introspection mental States emotions Concepts representations were thought of
• 61:00 - 61:30 as causally irrelevant on the most charitable reading and perhaps non-existent on the least charitable reading and I don't think it's a stretch to see the development of behavioralism as the dogmas of Science and the scientific method as going too far where they don't belong when it comes to matters on The Human Condition material external events are quite Limited in how much they can explain introspection intuition subjective experience and maybe even religious Revelation this is the one that Gerard cares a lot about are much
• 61:30 - 62:00 more important yet these types of truths have all been de-prioritized if not excommunicated in our scientific age while the crude materialism of the behavioralist no longer represent the most sophisticated views in the Academy I think it has captured a large part of society how many times have you heard this sentiment walking around Silicon Valley oh yeah or just a bunch of neurons firing oh yeah we're just Adam's squirting chemicals this materialism is
• 62:00 - 62:30 the default position for those educated in signs it certainly was for me and I think at the very least it leads to a lot of nihilism and existential despair do you see now why I suggested we interpret Gerard as saying that science confuses its epistemic limitations for an ontological Theory what began as external material is all that science can perceive and epistemic limitation became with a behavioralist as the best example external material is all that really
• 62:30 - 63:00 matters not unlike the historical church which had a monopoly on what sources counted as the most important truths namely scripture the Church of science also has its dogmas on what types of truths it does and does not consider as legitimate now maybe it's good that we don't consider religious Revelation as serious truths anymore but we also as an entire society stop taking the fruits of meditation introspection maybe even
• 63:00 - 63:30 philosophical inquiry and subjective experience as seriously we want charts and graphs we want studies and numbers we want opinion polls and measurements we gave up the types of truths that matter most to humans in exchange for truths that can be reproduced falsified and verified Gerard's surprising conclusion here is that just as those who claim to fight for victims are the real persecutors of modernity the staunchest rationalists in
• 63:30 - 64:00 scientists are the most religious and dogmatic of all people in modernity now let me be Crystal Clear Gerard thinks that the development of science and reason are great things with fantastic achievements we should all feel proud of in fact Gerard himself tries very hard to convince us that what he is doing for anthropology is science like what Darwin did for biology the problem is simply that reason and science have been deified they've gotten out of hand and this deification leads
• 64:00 - 64:30 us to design poor societies be exposed to disastrous political narratives posing under the guise of Science and systematically ignoring whole categories of Truth quintessential to human flourishing but given Gerard's Love For Truth perhaps what he fears the most from the hypocritical deification of science and reason is the problem with hypocrisy we just discussed that it corrupts the original position and pushes people to the opposite
• 64:30 - 65:00 Gerard is worried that politicizing and deifying science will delegitimize science altogether just as liberal hypocrisy spawned Nazism perhaps Gerard would attribute the rampant anti-intellectualism today as a response to the hypocritical parading of scientific dogmas over the heads of others the final analysis then what is most worrisome about this church of science and reason is that it threatens to push people away from science and reason all together and
• 65:00 - 65:30 towards a new Dark Age the third Major Force that gets introduced by Christianity is innovation the creative ability for Genesis the fact that we are the most Innovative culture is so obvious that I won't even bother giving too many examples here space flight modern medicine nuclear weaponry political systems gender Norms money Western Civilization at least in the past 300 years is defined by and Prides itself with change with probably
• 65:30 - 66:00 little surprise at this point there are things that Christianity is responsible for our Innovative capacities because it provides the cultural firmware if you will for innovation that firmware is summarized in one utterance by Gerard I quote the main prerequisite for real Innovation is a minimal respect for the past and the Mastery of its achievements I.E mimisis end quote there are two key ideas captured in this one sentence
• 66:00 - 66:30 the first is captured in the word minimal a minimal respect for the past Gerard is heeding against an exaggerated worship of the past here what is not conducive to Innovation is the reactionary idea not in common throughout most history perhaps most famously amongst confucians and Christians but our best days are behind us and the best we can do is to blindly imitate the past and press the brakes on the downward trajectory of History under such a world view the very word
• 66:30 - 67:00 Innovation had very negative connotations in the west up until about the 18th century these connotations were so negative because Innovation implied a deviation from a sacred albeit static and rigid ideal provided by myths of yore Innovation was practically synonymous with heresy before the 18th century now such an exaggerated respect of the past is often grounded on a religious belief in a mythologized past
• 67:00 - 67:30 Christianity frees us from this blind worship because it is a force according to Gerard that tears down myths it reveals to us what we once thought of as immutable as arbitrary in terms of what you're saying I see this in the a historicism of Silicon Valley and people there are so oriented towards the future that they have this hubris sometimes that the past doesn't matter and I think it's really interesting how the most
• 67:30 - 68:00 Innovative place in the world has the least respect for its own industry and I'll explain what I mean if you talk to people there they're freakishly intelligent they Pride themselves on the expansiveness of their knowledge they they just know so much about the world but then they know surprisingly little about the roots the origins of their own industry but I'll compare that to something like I don't know the oil industry or something and the oil industry is more slow changing and people there they have this
• 68:00 - 68:30 reverence for what came before they understand their history deeply you know I think that's a quite interesting and relevant correlation that you drew out between Silicon Valley and the oil industry that the more Innovative an industry is the less historically aware and respectful it seems to be and I think that's precisely the correlation that Gerard is trying to draw out with the first half of that sentence that a minimal respect for history is required because we all need
• 68:30 - 69:00 to have this as you coined it silicon rally hubris to not believe that our best achievements are already behind us in order for us to all have a future orientation but there's a second idea here and that's captured in the word respect importantly Gerard does not say disrespect but a minimal respect we must have enough reverence or at least curiosity to see history as worthy of Engagement what Gerard is heeding
• 69:00 - 69:30 against here is the exaggerated Progressive idea the past has nothing to teach us that we are so much better that we ought to bring down anything tainted with the stench of the old what is this respect allow us to do mimesis it allows us to imitate the past and master its achievements and herein lies Gerard's most interesting views on Innovation I quote in a truly Innovative process it is often so continuous with
• 69:30 - 70:00 imitation that its presence can be discovered only after the fact through a process of abstraction end quote how can this be after all Gerard is seemingly drawing out a connection between imitation and Innovation yet we all conceive of imitation and Innovation to be Polar Opposites how can this be what underlies this claim is Gerard's understanding of innovation as always proceeding internally within a system we as humans never create anything
• 70:00 - 70:30 meaningful ex nilo let me read you the passage that surrounds the original quote real change can only take root when it Springs from the type of coherence that tradition alone provides tradition can only be successfully challenged from the inside here's the line the main prerequisite for real Innovation is a minimal respect for the past and a Mastery of its achievements to expect novelty to cleanse itself of
• 70:30 - 71:00 imitation is to expect a plant to grow with its roots up in the air in the long run the obligation always to Rebel may be more destructive of novelty than the obligation never to Rebel end quote Gerard is making a burkian conservative Point here that tradition despite its many flaws has a degree of wisdom and coherence that we must rely on to build meaningful things as individuals we need to stand on the shoulders of giants and
• 71:00 - 71:30 we can't simply create ex nilo any more than a plant can grow with its roots in the air so with this idea of innovation at least meaningful Innovation as internal to a system it's clear why Innovation is synonymous with imitation after all how else do you understand all the intricacies of a system without learning and imitating history is littered with examples where repetition replication imitation is a
• 71:30 - 72:00 necessary precondition for Innovation think about Gerta who is a master of reproduction reproducing the great poetic forms before he began to Pioneer his own but not just artistic Innovation Gerard reminds us that industrial Innovation follows a similar pattern I quote again it began with Germany which in the 19th century was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English and this at the precise moment it surpassed them
• 72:00 - 72:30 continued the Americans in whom for a long time the Europeans saw mediocre Gadget makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role and it happened once more with the Japanese who after World War II were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority it's starting up again it seems with Korea and soon perhaps it will be the Chinese all of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of
• 72:30 - 73:00 imitation cannot be due to chance end quote this surprise of innovators when they're imitators when they're copycats suddenly innovate in their own right is perhaps a modern phenomenon it is because we draw a false dichotomy between Innovation and imitation let's take a look at two historical examples that we take to be Polar Opposites but I think we'll reveal the same form Jack ma with Alibaba and Einstein with general relativity
• 73:00 - 73:30 in the 2000s many thought of Alibaba as but a copycat of eBay or Amazon but transplanting an entire business model to a different country is not just about mere regurgitation there are different Customs there's different needs there's a different regulatory environment such that they had to adapt the business model considerably which necessitated innovation it's a little surprised then that in the 2010s Alibaba genuinely started building
• 73:30 - 74:00 completely new business models that did not exist in the Western Tech ecosystem and today their entire careers in Silicon Valley made by observing leading Trends in the Chinese technology ecosystem most of which in consumer and implying that or seeding similar companies in the U.S on the inverse we think Einstein's theory of general relativity is truly original but he did not create it ex-nila such a naive view occludes the years upon years of study
• 74:00 - 74:30 of training of understanding of imitating classical physics which Einstein improved upon these two activities which in our modern mind could not be further apart reveal the same form study and imitation which leads to Mastery which leads to genuine and meaningful innovation this project interpreting Gerard itself is an example of imitation being identical with Innovation I was trained in a historical philosophical approach
• 74:30 - 75:00 where the philosopher in training learns by reconstructing the arguments within the Canon and not just philosophizing ex-nilo in an armchair but reconstruction is not just regurgitation because you are burdened with interpretive Freedom go read Gerard and then come back to these lectures go read Hegel and then go to coyev you'd be surprised at how much innovation has to come from The Interpreter there's restructuring excluding highlighting adding giving examples
• 75:00 - 75:30 to summarize then the necessary perspective for real Innovation is a delicate tightrope between a reactionary idolization in the past and a progressive rejection of the past we need to Revere it just enough to learn all of its Secrets but not so much that we don't feel licensed to make improvements this delicate delicate Balancing Act allows us to properly imitate those who have come before us and in mastering their achievements become Masters and innovators ourselves
• 75:30 - 76:00 no active Innovation can be entirely done from a vacuum and thus must involve some degree of imitation and no imitation can be adopted without being adapted and thus must involve some degree of innovation so how has Innovation become perverted in modernity the perversion takes on the form of hypocrisy it's the same story over again it's the fetishization of innovation of the new of change of originality that
• 76:00 - 76:30 proves itself to be the most derivative Conformity disguised as rupture and Gerard encapsulates all of that under the word fashion while Gerard means for fashion to Encompass a much broader set of phenomena we can tease out the form of this perversion by looking at Fashion in the colloquial sense our clothing fashion at least to my understanding a great deal of popular fashion observes this logic it derives its value from being original from not being owned by
• 76:30 - 77:00 others it's a form of distancing that distancing is conformist because it is determined by the other this is the lesson we had learned in negative mimesis let me give you a funny example I actually had a very good friend who wore Two Shoes each with completely different colors for the sake that no one else wore shoes this way in some sense this negative fashion is more arbitrary than pure Conformity as this example shows because Traditions such as wearing the same colored shoes usually
• 77:00 - 77:30 exist for good reasons and I think fashion is also conformist because many times the way we try to distance is exactly the same as others think about the example we talked about in American Psycho and the business card scene where all the bankers wanted to differentiate themselves but they did so in the same way Printing and getting very very similar business cards and I don't think this intuition is too far off from the logic of popular fashion a new trend is arbitrarily set off by some influencers to differentiate themselves
• 77:30 - 78:00 from the crowd everyone in the crowd slowly starts to converge onto the trend because they too want to be different and that Trend slowly starts to lose its value and the whole cycle needs to start overall again fashion then is a desire for Innovation for its own sake and a strong distaste for imitation and it has permeated Society more than ever we want to be individuals we want to be original but Gerard warns us this way I quote
• 78:00 - 78:30 can't subvert tradition except from within once you are exterior to everything you're in the void and you're there to stay that's where I think we are today the more we condemn imitation the more we surrender to it under various guises fashion has never been more powerful than it is today end quote we don't want to spend years anymore studying classical physics we don't want to spend our youth imitating the traditional poetic forms we no longer want to be mere interpreters of other philosophers and we feel ashamed when we
• 78:30 - 79:00 imitate other people's business models problem is that meaningful Innovation is dependent on imitation and as a result what we get are grotesque displays of originality that are arbitrary and in fact very derivative Gerard has this to say again the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs you should never say what others are saying never paint what others are painting never think what others are thinking and so on since this is absolutely
• 79:00 - 79:30 impossible there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything more and more often they're obliged to turn their coats Inside Out perhaps not unlike my friend wearing two colored shoes and with great Fanfare announce some new epistemological rupture that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom this rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things
• 79:30 - 80:00 just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis the more we celebrate creative and enriching Innovations the fewer of them there are for two thousand years the Arts have been imitative and it's only in the 19th and 20th Century that people started refusing to be mimetic why
• 80:00 - 80:30 because we're more memetic than ever rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exercise imitation end quote the thing that resonates with me about this quote is the section about the the Arts I find that Modern Art is is aimless and nihilistic and this quote gives me a window into why I feel that way Modern Art just tries too hard to be
• 80:30 - 81:00 original and I compare that to the pre-modern era at a time when artists were pursuing Beauty and trying to capture the world to try to be accurate instead of trying to be original and now I think modern art has devolved because it tries so hard to be original and Quality quality is no longer the primary Pursuit I think that's right but the problem with fashion isn't just that no meaningful Innovations can ever be
• 81:00 - 81:30 produced in the case of art that there's no more quality and it's been traded for originality anymore in your words but that fashion can even turn us off from Innovation itself for example I think the public is growing sour on the technology sector partly because of how much it exaggerates its own originality the most trivial and derivative of companies are painted in the light of radical Innovations and ruptures I mean look go build Uber for dogs and go build
• 81:30 - 82:00 Facebook for nannies they might be great and meaningful businesses but don't disguise them as radical Innovations find that is this type of hypocrisy that makes Innovation somewhat of a laughing stock and delegitimizes it as a cultural value altogether what hypocrisy is to love what Dogma is the truth fashion is to innovation perennial problem of all forms of hypocrisy is that it delegitimizes the position which it claims to Champion
• 82:00 - 82:30 in summary then even when describing the Triumph of modernity Gerard's Theory captures both our highs and our lows what is so unique exciting praiseworthy but also what is so perverse hypocritical and distasteful and why the two are intimately conjoined it is the forcefulness of love that makes our hypocrisy so unpalatable it is the importance of truth that makes our dogmas all the more frustrating and is
• 82:30 - 83:00 the heights of innovation and makes our Fashions all the more laughable think back to the rocket analogy if love truth and Innovation is the Divine trajectory which Christianity has laid out for us then hypocrisy dogma and fashion are consequences of the gravitational pull from corrupt Human Nature but make no mistake overall Gerard is a champion of all these positive forces we
• 83:00 - 83:30 mentioned today from the birth of science all the way to the expansion of global Aid just as a good parent does not hold back unnecessary criticism and tocqueville a self-identified Ally of democracy certainly did not mince words on Democratic shortcomings Gerard's criticisms are so severe because he desperately wants modernity to succeed modernity then for Gerard is a legitimate Triumph of man despite the hypocrisies we can embrace it
• 83:30 - 84:00 wholeheartedly even if we can't embrace the whole of it Gerard's achievement I would argue is his ability to make sense of legitimize speak with and give advice across the entire political Spectrum from the progressives who affirms the direction of History to the reactionaries who want to bring back classical ideals and just about everyone in between the progressives Gerard legitimates their championing of
• 84:00 - 84:30 the key forces within modernity concern for victims justice for all science and the seeking of Truth Innovation all the technological advancements that have brought us here however Gerard warns them to not fall prey to hypocrisy to Dogma to Fashion for Not only would they be committing the very mistakes they claim to avoid they would be delegitimizing these positive forces within modernity and engendering the opposite to the reactionaries Gerard sees them as
• 84:30 - 85:00 primarily reacting against Progressive hypocrisy he's able to understand their distaste of modernity after all what is more disgusting than the championing of evil is championing Evil under the banner of good Gerard warns reactionaries however to separate their dislike of Hypocrites from the fundamentally good values that the Hypocrites promote love truth Innovation are praiseworthy
• 85:00 - 85:30 even if many who championed them today are not even the Triumph of modernity is Tainted with perversion as our stubborn human nature Rebels against the path Christianity has set for us the careful listener will observe violence lurking in the shadows behind all three of these forces the hypocrisy of love and genders and legitimates violence truth tears down the rituals that make for easy
• 85:30 - 86:00 resolution and the prohibitions that have kept violence in check and Innovation arms violence with increasingly powerful means violence is the fourth and final force and it will step out of the shadows and be the central topic of our next and final lecture alas this Triumph of modernity will show itself to be fragile and ephemeral indeed the conclusion to Gerard's Theory will
• 86:00 - 86:30 also be the conclusion to the story of mankind [Music] [Applause] [Music]