https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fItOlHFQHbw
I think it’s really important to just to get at this idea of the scapegoat mechanism becoming less effective because of society’s concern for victims. And nobody hated. So which, you know, Gerard would say this, our concern for victims is the universal value that now unites the world. Pretty much who will you ever find that says that you shouldn’t be concerned with victims or, you know, people being in injustice, right? And Gerard says this is really the fruit of the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism. We’ve now seen something that we can never unsee and it sort of led over 2000, it led over a very long period of time to that becoming the most important value in the world. To the point that there’s now mimetic rivalry over who can be the best victim because nothing is nothing confers more status and power than becoming a good victim. It’s a weird, weird paradox and inversion of like the true nature of Christianity. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello, everybody. I am here with Luke Bridges. We’ve been trying to meet for months, actually. Finally, we’re able to meet. He is the author of Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life and an expert on René Girard. And, you know, he’s been following what I’ve been doing as well and seeing me talk about sacrifice and René Girard. So I’m definitely excited to see, you know, what kind of insight he can bring to us. So, Luke, it’s good to meet you. Tell us a bit about what brought you to thinking about Girard and Mimetic Desire today. Yeah, well, I’m glad we finally got to make this happen, Jonathan. I’ve been following your work for a while and it was a consolation for me in the darker days of the pandemic. Yeah, so I think fundamental to Girard is, you know, he explained the nature of desire in a way that I simply never heard before. And I came across his work after I myself had underwent a complete revolution in my life in my late 20s, sort of a religious conversion, like a very sort of dramatic spiritual conversion. And I realized that the very nature of it was related to my own desires, the nature of desires. I’d never sort of understood a telos or teleology to desire before. And then I realized that I had some, but I went most of my life totally blind to my own desires, as most of us are. Right. And in many ways, I still am. So Girard’s work, having revolved around desire, was especially intriguing to me and gave me some language to sort of understand humanity and myself both. And fundamental to Girard’s thought, in my opinion, is that human beings are religious creatures, even if you don’t think you are, we’re religious creatures. And if you don’t sort of accept that premise, there’s all kinds of things about the world that you want to understand. I know that you know that. But this was really eye opening to me, sort of an understanding of the world. And in my opinion, what’s central to his thought is the human desire for transcendence. And Girard articulated this, his notion of desire in a very sort of spiritual way, that human beings seek transcendence, whether they know they are or not. And the notion of transcendence is the thread that I think runs through all of Girard’s work. The very idea of the scapegoat mechanism, for instance, right, is a form of false transcendence, right? It’s a form of people trying to achieve something beyond themselves and prevent some form of destruction. But it’s a form of false transcendence. So, you know, as one who had been striving my entire life for something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, Girard helped me make sense of so much of the kind of religious quest and search that I was on, which I didn’t even quite frankly know that I was on, until he sort of introduced me to some very ancient concepts, quite frankly, right? Like fundamental things that at least religious traditions have known for a very long time, especially in scripture. And he sort of gave me a lens to see those things in an entirely new light. In some senses, I was, you know, a bit arrogant in the way that I approached the sort of religion of my youth. You know, like reading the Bible, it doesn’t have anything very interesting to say to me. You know, Augustine de Pippo thought the same thing when he first read the Bible, right? It’s not very, in many cases, not very beautiful language or some weird things going on. I was a bit similar to that. And Girard sort of gave me a lens, like glasses to sort of see myself in the story and to realize that I’m a participant in this story and to sort of see the way that I was part of that story. So, you know, Girard couldn’t be more relevant, I think, to the modern world. He explains so much when it comes to the world grappling with false ways of trying to achieve transcendence and is so relevant to your work, I think, because Girard was an expert at recognizing patterns. So he recognized patterns in human behavior. He recognized patterns in the nature of human desire, a structured desire, specifically mimetic desire. And he recognized, so at the micro level, he recognized these patterns. And at the macro level, he saw that these problems of desire manifest themselves in patterns of conflict, rivalry, and violence at the macro level in human culture. So what is the relationship? Could you talk about this idea of the desire for transcendence? And so what is the relationship between mimetic desire and desire for transcendence? So mimetic desire, if you’re hearing the word for the first time or the term for the first time, Girard sort of coined this phrase, mimetic desire, to say that human beings do not create their own desires ex nihilo, out of nothing. Desire is not our own creation. And there’s a whole theology behind this, right? We can go back to the creation theology and the creation of the world. I’m not the author of all of my own desires, even though many of us think that we are, right, a lot. So the nature of desire, because we’re social creatures, because we’re part of a story, we affect each other, right? And we affect each other’s desires. And mimetic desire simply means imitative desire. So we imitate the desires of other people as part of the social process. So desire is formed through this highly social process, through rituals, through the culture that we’re part of, and especially through specific people or groups that have a special importance to us, that act as models or mediators of our desire. So, you know, if you grew up in a strong, religious, Christian home, some of your models of desire might be the saints. If you grew up in other kinds of communities, every kind of community has certain models of desire. These are people that are sort of held up as exemplars. They bind people together. In sports, right, there might be some really great professional athletes that act as models of desire. So models of desire help inform our own desires and give shape to those desires, whether we know it or not. And we usually don’t know that this process is happening. But the reason that models of desire affect us, the reason that they have some power over us in the first place, according to Girard, is because we are seeking a sense of transcendence and we’re looking for a higher level of being, right, to move into some higher level of reality. And we look to people that model various desires to us as maybe possessing some quality of being that we lack, right? Some quality of being that we lack. And we sort of enter into their orbit, for better or worse, right? This can work in positive ways or negative ways. I can think of all kinds of positive examples of entering into the orbit of somebody who’s modeling a desire for something like good and noble. But very often we sort of look to our right and our left and we find somebody that appears to have some quality of being or some higher level of being that we seek. And they become models of desire for us in some way. It seems to become extremely true in the world of influencers, like the YouTube, Instagram type influencer, where in some ways the person is really just does become a focus of desire. They just buy a bunch of stuff. They wear a bunch of clothes. It’s not actually a quality that is they don’t seem to have virtues. They just seem to actually be desire holes, like vortexes of desire that are celebrated because they’re able to. We can live our excessive desires kind of through them, something like that. It’s very odd. Yeah. So it’s the influencer. It’s the model that has the power over us. It’s not the it’s not the objects themselves, right? This is like the definition of the medic desire is that the choice of the objects that we’re fascinated with come from the model and not from the objects themselves, right? Not from any objective qualities of the objects. They’re just imbued with some kind of symbolic magical quality because of whoever our model of desire is, right? Like what’s what’s a watch other than some kind of talisman of some kind of weird status that every man over a certain age that works on Wall Street wears like one of six different types of watches that all happen to be in the magazines that you see at Hudson News and airports. They’re they’re symbolic. These things are literally symbols of some kind of quality of being or something like that. So these models have have are what’s powerful for us, not the objects themselves. And this creates problems, a lot of problems, because we have a love hate relationship with anybody who’s a model of desire for us, because those those same people act as obstacles to us. Right. Because then we start competing with them for the same things and measuring everything that we do according to the models. So this this leads to rivalry, right? This is a huge part of Gerard’s theory is that mimetic desire, the fact that our desires are formed in this through the social process with other people leads to conflict and to rivalry and some really weird things. Right. Like Gerard said one time, I think the reason that we talk about envy so much is that nobody wants to talk about sex. Right. Like envy is the form in which mimetic desire takes in the modern world. And then you have somebody like like in Montero, we see there’s some line where he says, I want to F the ones I envy. Yeah. Right. So, you know, this crude way that that that’s literally like Gerard, like Gerardian most Gerardian statement that he could possibly make. Yeah. Because the reason that he wants to have sex with the person he envies, the person that he envies is somehow a model of desire for him. And through that act, you’re somehow achieving some some some form of equality with the being of the model. Right. Yes. So integration, you’re like integrated to them or joined with them somehow. Yeah. Yeah. So so we have a love hate relationship with models that leads to rivalry, ultimately misery. And then on the macro level, that plays out in very strange ways in our society as well, which is a whole nother part of Gerard’s theory. But going back, I mean, this all has to do with transcendence, in my opinion, this this human desire to sort of go go beyond their current level level of being. And there are sort of vertical forms of transcendence, which are found, you know, really in mostly in religion, spirituality. And then there are what I would call sort of horizontal forms of transcendence, where we try to find transcendence and all kinds of strange ways. Right. Like through just trans shape shifting and transforming our identity and changing jobs and looking for it in all the wrong places, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And so so the vertical transformation, the vertical call for trend is could account also for things like generals, let’s say Alexander or people who inspire the people who are in the world. Who inspired their men to have certain qualities. And so it’s not all positive, but it would, you know, he would appear as someone who kind of drew people’s desire into him. And they would see him as an example, but also someone to impress someone to outdo all of this, all this kind of happening. Right. Imagine it in sports, you see, you can see that quite clearly as well in terms of the relationship between players within a team and then with the other team, how those things play out in terms of a mimetic desire. Yeah, I mean, a sports team that kind of loses some that loses some kind of transcendent purpose like some kind of like telos like outside of the team itself. Just luck of the locker room just evolves very, very quickly. Right. You sort of like forget what it is that you’re that you’re doing. And I guess it’s why, like, I don’t know, like why some players or teams that win all of the time. Like what what’s what’s next in the teleology for that team? Like what what happens next? Right. And that’s usually why people don’t stay on top for very long. Because you can only sort of go so far. And if you’re seeking to like what’s next, right? I don’t know. You win the Super Bowl three times in a row. What can you possibly do? I don’t know. Tom Brady goes to the Hall of Fame. Like at some point, you sort of exhaust its its purpose for exhausted by the category of the sport itself. It’s like, you know, like, are now we going to go like take over a country? No, that doesn’t work. Like, it’s like you reach the limit and then it’s held in by that very category. Yeah. So it happens in sports teams. This happens within companies all of the time. You know, I think we live in a world where there’s a hierarchy of values. There’s a hierarchy of being again. This is a very ancient religious concept. Right. And I think modern in the modern world, people that reject that idea do all kinds of weird things that end up resulting in more conflict and not less. Right. They do things in the name of in the name of progress that actually increase conflict. Right. So to give you an example, right. Like if there’s a hierarchy, if we live in a hierarchical world and people are sort of looking to other people as as models of desire. By the way, it’s very important for a culture to have like positive like models period, especially positive models. So there’s a weird thing happens, right. Like one of the stories I talk about in the book is, you know, Zappos.com decided to like move from a more traditional management structure, which, you know, they have their problems. Right. I’m not I’m not a fan of bureaucracy or anything like that to just totally collapsing the entire hierarchy overnight turned everybody that worked there into like very confused and in total crisis mode and chaos because they’ve literally collapsed their entire hierarchy almost all the time. I don’t think that they understood that’s the sort of the nature of reality itself is hierarchical. And if you’re going to collapse it visibly, what happens is that an invisible hierarchy sort of develops under the surface that’s becomes like a dragon. You don’t even know it’s there. You don’t even know how it operates. Right. And something is something similar is happening happening with the sexes where we sort of like not necessarily collapsing hierarchy, but but collapsing difference. Right. Like collapsing difference and not admitting of complementarity, not admitting just fundamental things. It leads to a situation where people are trying to reconstitute some form of hierarchy in all kinds of different different ways because we have like a need to do that. Yeah. And you end up having both confused identities. You have these confused kind of gender roles in general. But you also have hyper versions of extremes. You know, I pointed this out to someone recently. You know, people think that it’s only this kind of leveling of gender only leads to, you know, let’s say all the letters and all this kind of fluidity. But it also leads to, you know, hyper masculinity and the kind of hyper sexualized masculinity and hyper sexualized femininity. The types of characters you see in media today, like this kind of hyper male and let’s say kind of whore woman, something that would never would never have been public in the world. You know, for thousands of years, you never would have seen these kind of characters paraded out in public. But now it’s become completely normal to see these hyper sexualized beings, you know, and hyper gendered beings in ways that are that are that are very surprising. And at the same time watching everything become fluid and break down in terms of identity at the same time. It’s like you need a proper, like you said, proper hierarchy that leads to some kind of real transcendence. Right. Yeah. So I’ve you know, I big part of Gerard’s thinking does have to do with sacrifice. And that’s kind of what I would call the societal macro community level pattern that he recognized. Right. Something that happens at the community level, because when when a person when anybody is seeking transcendence, there’s sort of something that has to die in order for them to achieve the sort of different quality of being that they’re that they’re looking for. Right. So that happens at the individual level, but it can also happen kind of at the societal level. And, you know, I’ve listened to your your kind of theory on sacrifice. I know you mentioned Gerard in it, but I’m just curious as to, you know, do you think that Gerard’s sort of idea of escape mechanism squares of what you’re saying? Or do you think it’s sort of just like a subset of a larger kind of theory of sacrifice? That’s what I think. But I mean, maybe you can help me understand it better for me to change my mind. I’d be fine with changing my mind. But it seems when I look at sacrifice, what I see the Yom Kippur sacrifice is probably the best version of a sacrifice because it’s an atonement sacrifice. It’s an you know, it’s an at one minute sacrifice. It’s the sacrifice that makes us one. And it has two sacrifices as part of it. There is on the one hand, the scapegoat sacrifice that really where you take a goat, you put all your all your evil on it and you kind of kick it out. You abuse it, whatever. And then it falls off a cliff or it runs into the desert to become food for the demon. But then you also have another sacrifice, which is the pure animal, which is sacrificed up towards God. And what I see in sacrifice, at least in scripture, is those two types of sacrifices, one which we could be called a scapegoat sacrifice. And you see it in a lot of cultures, you know, right, sacrificing a prisoner, sacrificing, you know, you see they did it even all the way up to Roman times when they would have people fight in the in the arenas. It was basically a human sacrifice of their cap, their captives in order to kind of manifest the glory of Rome in doing it. But then you also have a sacrifice, which I would call a vertical sacrifice, which is giving the best up. And you give the best up. And then that constant that is part of what constitutes the body. And I’ve talked about it like, let’s say in terms of sports team. On the one hand, you do have to scapegoat in the sense that you can’t let anybody into your sports team, right? You have to eliminate behaviors and players that don’t fit into the team. That’s necessary. But then you also need to give your intention and your and your will and your best up towards the goal of what you’re doing. So that’s what I see these two. And so I don’t know if Girard accounts for them with his scapegoat sacrifice or if he has two theories or I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t think there’s any conflict between what Gerard is saying and kind of what I’ve what I’ve heard you articulate, which is just simply like the broader view of sacrifice. I don’t think Gerard, I think he he identified a very particular kind of sacrifice. And I agree with you that there’s all kinds of other sacrifices that don’t necessarily fit into the pattern of the scapegoat mechanism necessarily. Identifying that has been amazing. I think it’s been really helpful to understand Christianity, but then also to understand the 20th century and to understand a lot of the things that we went through, you know, as Christianity kind of started collapsing as well. Have you thought, did Gerard talk about because one of the things that we say, myself and also the people at Lord of Spirits, is we say, you know, Christ is both goats. That is, in the Yom Kippur sacrifice, Christ seems to be both the sacrifice of the one who accepts to be the sacrifice of the stranger outside the city who takes on the sins, who accepts the blame, all of that. But then he also is something like the sacrifice of the firstborn. And the sacrifice of the firstborn, even in scripture, is not the same as the scapegoat sacrifice. So I don’t know, like I also don’t know if Gerard accounts for that idea. Like when Abraham is going to sacrifice Isaac, it’s not a scapegoat sacrifice. He’s supposed to offer his best up to God. And so I don’t know. Yeah, these are things that I think about, but I’m not, I don’t know Gerard well enough to be able to. Yeah, well, I want to go back to your idea of what I like, sort of horizontal and vertical sacrificing up triggered an idea. So I want to get it. But what you’re saying now brings up questions like atonement theology that are super complex, and we don’t need to necessarily get into those right now. But there is an idea, I think you have to be careful that there is one conception of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, sort of, you know, God needing some kind of blood sacrifice. Right. Yeah, I don’t see it that way either. No, I don’t like that. Either do I. Right. And Gerard in his earlier days was sort of implying that. And then he befriended this old priest. I shouldn’t call him old. I don’t know how old they were when he met. But in Austria, Father Raymond Schwager, who sort of helped Gerard understand the theological implications of what he was saying. And I mean, I come from just a very old tradition of Augustine and Aquinas and Gregory of Nyssa and Irenaeus. And my understanding is that, you know, God could have achieved the salvation of the world in many, many different ways. Right. And it needed not be that particular way. But this was a sacrifice of love. Right. And in some senses, it was this the most perfect sort of way, but but needed not be that. Right. So in other words, it’s not like we, you know, we chose to like affect what we thought was going to be yet one more effective scapegoat mechanism. Like, right. And yet the whole thing was subverted by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross because there was the Holy Spirit sort of enlightened the minds after the resurrection of a very, very small group of Christians that for the very first time sort of saw the mechanism that was taking place and saw like what we had brought on ourselves. So it’s a big difference by us sort of being responsible for the violence and God being responsible for the violence. Right. Big, big difference. Right. So it was the it’s the revelation that we had. So God gave the revelation for us to be able to see the scapegoat mechanism in its fullness for the first time through the crucifixion. It’s not the first time that it was ever. There were never hints of it. I mean, the Old Testament is full of the story of Joseph and his brothers gives us a perspective of what’s going on that there’s really no comparable for in any other kind of literature. Like, we see that Joseph is innocent and sort of the victim of the scapegoating through the whole story. It’s almost like we have we have the the directors cut from the standpoint of Joseph or something. Right. And we know that he’s not responsible for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there’s it’s hard to sacrifice is one of the hardest things to think about, by the way, to be honest. It is so difficult to think about because in some ways so primordial and so encompassing. But so what one of the things you see, I think this is my my perception also of what Christ is doing. One of the things he’s doing is that by willingly becoming someone scapegoat, you could say he’s almost he’s kind of flipping or joining the two sacrifices together, where by by in his willingness to die for others, you could say he’s turning the scapegoat sacrifice into something like the the the sacrifice of good odor. Right. This idea of like the best, which is given up. And the reason also why I think that that’s happening is because then you see that pattern pattern modeled in in the early Christian martyrs where the martyrs are basically saying I’ll be your scapegoat. And then that scapegoat will become like a sacrifice of worship up to God. And it’s going to secretly change you without you even knowing what’s going on. It’s like if I if I do that, and I don’t like I tell people like I don’t want to do that, like I don’t want to die. I don’t want to I don’t want people to kill me. I’m not. But I can see it that that seems to be what’s going on. It’s like there’s a mechanism. It really is like a mechanism where self sacrifice seems to be the place where these two sacrifices get joined. And it’s like a refounding of reality. If you do it properly. I think that’s I think that’s right. And that’s there’s it. This the idea of self self sacrifice is the key to I think understanding right. Like Christianity and what’s happening in in liturgy as well. So, God willing, you or I will not have to become red martyrs, blood martyrs and physically. Who knows? Yeah. And, you know, give up our bodies and blood. But there’s what what’s happening in the Christian liturgy in Orthodox and in the West is is a participation in that self sacrificial act on the cross. Right. So it’s what they you know, the early church called white martyrdom or you know, it’s it’s a it’s still a form of dying to yourself and self sacrifice that, you know, if you’re if you really understand what’s happening, you’re sort of uniting your self sacrifice to Christ’s self sacrifice on the cross and it’s all being offered offered, you know. And there’s something really beautiful about that. And and remembering part of a liturgy is an amnesis. It’s a remembrance of of, you know, what is what has happened. Right. It only had to happen once. Right. Doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to continue to participate in it, but it’s a remembrance of that singular event. And also, very importantly, a remembrance of this is why Good Friday is so important. And I always for me, it’s always like one of the most I mean, it’s the solemn and powerful sort of liturgies of the year because it’s a remembrance of of the scapegoat mechanism and what the pattern of human behavior. It’s almost as if we we keep we default back to the old rights to the old sacrificial rights that involve not self sacrifice, but sacrifice of other people to preserve ourselves. So sacrifice. There’s an there’s an element of like self preservation in sacrifice. Yeah, of course. Huge element of to protect protect myself. And if that’s like my default mode of being, then I will inevitably sacrifice somebody else at the altar of my of myself. So there’s an aspect of remembering our our tendency to engage in that kind of behavior and then to see, I mean, every week or every day. Right. To see actually how that’s been completely transformed into an act that can be an act of love. And does I’m I’ve been curious about this. Does Gerard talk about the eating part of sacrifice? Does he address that in his theory or do you just talk about the killing part, let’s say in terms of sacrifice? Because of course, we don’t eat the scapegoat. Nobody eats a scapegoat. But you eat other sacra like the sacrifice up. You tend to eat it. It’s part of the part of the sacrifices that you offer it to God. But then it becomes your body as well. So so in the the Hebrew sacrifices, you would give the meat up and then you would eat it or in the Greek sacrifices that joke about how they would offer up the bones. They tricked the gods and then they would eat the meat. You know, but but I don’t know if Gerard talks about the the eating part. He he in terms of like like consuming the very like being of the other person, like in the activity, he not a lot. I think that it’s in violence in the sacred. His book from the 70s, you know, or thick religions or or fism was sort of founded on its premise of, you know, Dionysus, right. Being like ripped apart and eaten by the Titans and, you know, that that formed the basis of a lot of cults for them. I just wrote an article just a few weeks ago about the cultural fashion fascination with cannibalism. Like what? Yeah, right now, it’s like what the hell is going on with that, right? There’s a movie with Timothy, Timothy Chalamet coming out where he’s like this teenage cannibal who’s on this like love adventure across the country. I haven’t seen it. I don’t think it’s out in theaters yet. But I saw the premiere for that and I was like, wow, there’s been like a lot of movies about cannibalism, like like Jeffrey Dahmer on Netflix. Like what’s going on there? I like our people somehow like I don’t know. Right. Like somehow fascinated by this idea. I think they are. I think I think it’s definitely happening. And it’s not just movies and TV. It’s it’s the idea of also the idea of growing your own meat. Like you saw a lot of that. But like for some reason, they’re always talking about how you could grow your own meat, like you could grow your own flesh and you could eat yourself. Let’s say it has to do with it has to do with like self causation and this problem of it. All of these types of symbolism, like incest, cannibalism, they’re all related because they’re about their end sodomy as well, I’m afraid. So it has to do with like self causation. It’s like it’s not normal, normal procession of being. It’s like a circular type of causation. That’s why it has to do with clowns and carnival and vampires and all of that stuff is all related. So it’s not surprising that cannibalism will appear and so also will more and more just the idea of suicide as a as a normal part of reality, the idea of self killing, self creation, self identification. All these things are all related to this kind of circular causality. Yeah, yeah. And suicide, not to go off on a tangent, but there’s a very mimetic quality to suicides as well. Right. Like the imitation of a desire that one may have not had before its its its model and actually. Garried out in some way, you know, there’s probably something to be said about school shootings. And the point is violence, whether it’s violence to oneself or violence to others, according to Gerard, is one of the most mimetic kinds of behaviors. Right. It’s mimetic contagion. It’s contagious. Right. This this desire for self preservation or the desire to for vengeance. These things have some kind of a mimetic quality to them. Before I forget, you know, this this point that you made about some like the sort of noble, I’ll call it the noble sacrifice of the best. Right. That form of sacrifice. As I read Gerard, the way that he describes the scapegoat mechanism happening, it can happen in sort of in two in two forms. Right. One of them, one is just pure self preservation of a community needing to having decomposed and needing to reconstitute itself through this false transcendence that it tries to achieve through singling out the cancer, usually in the form of a person or a group of people, which it expels or eliminates. Interestingly enough, there’s there’s often a. The sacrifice only works if the person being sacrificed is not too strange. Right. There has to be some similarity to the people that are that are doing the scapegoating. So in ancient cultures, you had, you know, if an animal was going to be sacrificed, that animal would need to be dressed up like a human would need to be fed human things and sort of integrated into the community before it worked. So there was like a kindredness for it worked as an effective sacrifice. This, by the way, this is Gerard’s sort of like weird theory about the domestic how the domestication of animals happened. Right. Like dogs and cats. So they were literally used for human sacrifice, but they had to be domesticated first or else the sacrifice wasn’t as effective. So there’s there’s something sort of weird about that. They’re different. They’re different species, different creature. Yet we have to sort of see ourselves in them in some way for the sacrifice. Yeah, enough for you to recognize what you’re doing, let’s say, because it’s like you sacrifice a flower, you know, it has no it has no connection with you, you know, although you could offer flowers or you could offer them up and not that kind of scapegoat sacrifice. That’s for sure. Now, so the idea of similarity is really important in Gerard. So the two the two concepts of similarity and proximity. Right. These are these are what really trigger a mimetic crisis and eventually the scapegoat mechanism. So, as you know, like the symbolism of the twins is really important in Gerard. You know, it’s really weird in almost every culture in the world. You have a myth where there are twins, usually identical twins, that one of them ends up killing the other one or they end up committing violence against one another. Right. In the book of Genesis, I believe there are five stories of sibling rivalry alone in the book in the just in the book of Genesis. King kills Abel, founds a city. Right. Then you have Joseph and his brothers. You have Jacob and Esau and you’ve got our twins like clear like the clear twins that is a more explicit one. Yeah. Yeah, that’s the explicit one. So the similarity seems to breed conflict. Right. There’s a there. It leads more easily to a conflict of desire or the desire to differentiate oneself. Romulus and Remus, right, the founders of Rome, there are these mythological twins and there’s not enough room for the both of them. So that leads to conflict and then proximity, right. Proximity. So, again, twins are in close proximity to one another. These are what Gerard calls internal mediators of desire, right. Internal meaning that they’re inside of my world. So the scapegoat mechanism only happens with people that are in close proximity to each other. Right. Like like within the community. That’s part of why the sacrificed animal needed to sort of become more alike. Right. It needed to become internal to the community. So you wouldn’t have seen, for example, the killing of foreign captors, foreign prisoners as a scapegoat mechanism. Because that seems to be a universal practice, too. It’s like you win a war, you catch a bunch of people, then you ceremoniously murder some of them publicly in order to make a point about, you know, about your nation and about your strength, you know, up and against another group, let’s say. I don’t know if you would have. I don’t know if you would have said that, but that doesn’t seem to be effective anymore. Right. I mean, and then that could be because maybe it maybe at one point that was effective, but it doesn’t seem effective anymore when that’s when that’s happening. Maybe it’s because it’s not visible or something like that. And this is part of Gerard’s whole thesis is that the scapegoat mechanism is becoming less and less effective. Right. It doesn’t work any more the way that it used to before it was sort of revealed to humanity. And the concern for victims prevents the scapegoat mechanism. Like our eyes are somehow opened to the victim. And that is a direct result of sort of what’s been shown to us in the Revelation, really in the scriptures. And it makes the scapegoat mechanism less, less effective. So we need we either need more of them. We need we need them more often. And they simply don’t work to bind people together. I guess in extraordinary cases, the scapegoat mechanism has worked to bind the world together. You could argue that the Holocaust, you know, in some sense, did that. And like we were all united in this belief like this can never happen again. Yeah. But I’ve actually argued that that that Hiroshima was a human sacrifice in the sense that Americans said clearly we have to kill these innocent people in order to stop the war. We have to kill these tens of thousands of innocent people and in one in one shot. And if we do that, then we’ll get a blessing from heaven. Like we will we will end the war because they weren’t killing soldiers. And it wasn’t it was like a gamble. So it really was. It was very similar to the cliche of how people think human sacrifice used to happen. Right. It’s like, you know, if I kill this person, you know, then then the rain will come or something like that. And it was like, that’s what Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, I think. Yeah, that’s what I calculated. Human sacrifice in the sense that we knew that innocent lives are going to be lost, but not knowing the future. Just hoping that there was some kind of a I don’t know what you say it was like a binding force or just pure like deterrent and fear. I think it was also a binding a binding force. I think it for sure it created, I think, the United States in like the United States is born in Hiroshima in some ways in terms of what it would become, because it’s like the radical action. And the result of it, let’s say, ending the war, this kind of terrible thing, terrible, terrible action at the outset. It seemed to be a kind of founding, I think, for America, you know, leading into the next phase of their existence. So but I don’t know, like I said, that’s my intuition in terms of watching it. I think the intuition is, I think, is right in the sense that Gerard said that every culture is founded on some on a founding murder. Yeah. So culture is always founded on some violent act. It’s why culture emerges as the ritualized like rituals and culture are an institutions arise to prevent the violence of the founding murder from happening again. And in that sense, I sort of see it’s not like America’s only had one culture. I think we’ve had like a special culture since World War Two. And like maybe that’s the founding murder of the new post-World War culture and consensus that we’ve had, right? These founding murders. And there’s a few secret scandals in World War Two that we can’t, that nobody thinks about because they’ve become kind of landed so deep in our psyche. The other example is that we always said we won the war, but, you know, we never say that it was actually the Russians and greatly that won the war. And those Russians, we basically shook the hand with the devil in order to beat Hitler. And now because of that, communism gets a soft play in the United States. And people always wonder, like, why is it people are so soft on communism? It’s a very, very deep, deep mythological reason. It’s because we come with our society is based on a very deep compromise in which we gave half of Europe to an evil empire in order to stop the war. So it’s like there are these really deep sins that are at the origin of our civilization that we can’t see. People kind of can’t see them. But I know that that’s not necessarily sacrifice, but it’s like a weird sin that’s at the origin of things. Well, I think it’s very related, right? I mean, Gerard’s magnum opus is called Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. These are the things that we don’t want to admit about humanity, about our own violence. In Christian terms, you could say sinfulness, right? About our own weakness and frailty, the denial of death, all these things. There’s these things hidden since the foundation of the world are our own propensity to murder and cover up and to cover up these things under rituals, under institutions, right? There’s all kinds of rituals in the world that are really for the sole purpose of preventing violence. It’s like a very important part of Gerard’s theory. There’s an initial act of the scapegoat mechanism that happened at some point, and then it’s ritualized after that in the form of rituals. So companies can have these rituals, like a lot of sports, I think, developed, especially in the Roman Coliseum, developed as rituals to prevent the spread of more violence. The scapegoat mechanism is always about stopping the spread of more violence. So Gerard’s line, Satan casts out Satan. It’s like, I need to do a little bit of violence in order to prevent a lot of violence, which is a dangerous way to think. It’s this very sort of calculating way to think. I think it’s terrible ethics. It doesn’t account for the dignity of the human person. There’s all kinds of problems, but Gerard is saying that this is the pattern that humanity constantly falls back into, is thinking that we can prevent a lot of violence through targeted violence, through making scapegoats. But we always need to find another one. That’s the cycle that Christ stopped by becoming willingly the scapegoat. Because some of the imagery in the story of Christ definitely has to do with this in the sense that even in many of the Church Fathers, they’ll often say, or in the hymnography, we hear how the world is created from the side, from Christ’s side. The side is in Christ being pierced. The water and the blood that come out is the Church. It’s actually the world. St. Maximus talks about the world is being created while Christ is dying on the cross. And this sense that the world comes out of his side, like Eve comes out of Christ’s side, or the Church comes out of his side. And so it seems like the symbolism is carried into Christianity. Because like you said, it’s kind of flipped or it’s subverted because it’s a form of self-sacrifice. Then the civilization that gets founded ends up not being the Roman civilization that pierces Christ, but the civilization that Christ is secretly planting is the one that will rise up and take over Rome, ultimately. Never completely, but at least enough for the transformation to be real. And that symbolism, the symbolism that you’re describing, like the blood and water that flowed from the side of Christ, the Eucharist itself has all kinds of symbolism. You’re talking about like blood, blood and body. And it itself is constituted through a sacrificial act. You have to crush grapes until they can become, and the wheat and the bread. So all of the language and the symbolism of sacrifice is now non-bloody sacrifice, is thoroughly infused in the symbolism of the liturgy, at least the one that you and I think both know. But this idea that the victim, I think it’s really important to get at this idea of the scapegoat mechanism becoming less effective because of society’s concern for victims. And nobody hated, so which Gerard would say, our concern for victims is the universal value that now unites the world. Pretty much who will you ever find that says that you shouldn’t be concerned with victims or people being in injustice, right? And Gerard says this is really the fruit of the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism. We’ve now seen something that we can never unsee, and it sort of led over 2000, it led over a very long period of time to that becoming the most important value in the world. To the point that there’s now mimetic rivalry over who can be the best victim because nothing confers more status and power than becoming a good victim. It’s a weird, weird paradox and inversion of the true nature of Christianity, right? And so did Gerard, my understanding is that at the end, towards the end, he also started talking about the pattern of Antichrist as related to something like that. Something like a kind of twisting of the, the twisting of the recognition of the victim into something like a disturbed version of Christianity or something. Well, there’s two ways out of the conundrum that society has got itself in, according to, this is my reading of Gerard. So one is Nietzsche, who Gerard thought was like the most important philosopher of the last 150 years, because nobody saw so clearly the role of Christ. He compared to the Dionysus myth, and Dionysus, by the way, is the God of insanity and ritualized madness who unites people in ecstasy and drunken parties and blesses the scapegoat, essentially the scapegoat mechanism. And he said, you know, nobody saw what the Christian story was about more than Nietzsche, but he rejected it. And he said, you know, the concern for victims is slave morality. And, you know, we need to do away with the concern for victims. And not only that, in fact, victims should be like the weak, like the protection of it, they should be sacrificed in the name of society, right? Achieving some higher levels of being, which indirectly led to Nazi Socialism. So there’s the Nietzsche approach that the concern for victims needs to be eradicated, because this is the slave morality of Christianity or something like that. And then on the flip side, you have the Antichrist. And the Antichrist is the one way that I would describe that I don’t like the term, but the so-called culture wars is essentially the culture, really the secular culture, trying to be more Christian than Christianity or more Christian than Christ. And saying we care for victims more than you Christians do, right? Or this is the grand inquisitor and Dostoevsky, right? Like if you cared so much, you know, we do a better job at caring for victims than the church has ever done or whatever, right? And so there’s this weird rivalry, almost, that is in some way the culture is like a mimetic rival to Christianity, to the extent that the two of them get in a weird double-bind mimetic war, it’s really bad for both, especially for Christianity. And what is the Antichrist, but the one that comes along and does the best job at that? He totally unites humanity, promises peace, promises to have the utmost concern for all victims, to end poverty, to do all of those things that Christianity promised and couldn’t do. So in a sense, because of a lack of sort of eschatological sort of understanding of antilogical, the Antichrist replaces Christianity by almost becoming what those who have rejected Christ want him to be, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s one thing also about Girard, which puzzles me a little, my understanding, and maybe you tell me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that he also had a sense in which the scapegoat after being sacrificed was also deified somehow, like or was placed in a position of honor, like a high position after the sacrifice. So maybe if you can talk a little bit about that, because I’m not sure I understand, like I’ve seen it. I’ve actually seen it myself. There are some African tribe I remember dealing with in Congo named the Kuba tribe that they had chased the pygmies out of their land. And they had a mask, which was a pygmy mask. And the pygmy mask was something that they would like, was one of their most sacred objects, and they would honor it. But they also would see the pygmies as like basically like forest demons. At the same time, it was like it was just this weird thing I didn’t understand. Well, that’s a huge part of his theory. And it’s because nobody has the power to unite a community that’s embroiled in mimetic violence, which would otherwise destroy itself. Right. That this they can’t save themselves. And the only thing that will unite them together, one way to think of it, the only thing they can agree on, the only desire that will unite them is a shared contempt for and hatred of the scapegoat. So the scapegoat unites them together in this act, in this ritual act of. And by the way, like the scapegoat ritual almost always happened through a long process of, you know, they would parade the scapegoat in Greece is called the Pharma Coast. They would parade the Pharma Coast through the streets, whip them, you know, mock them, all the things that remind you of the crucifixion, by the way. For days. And that was important because that gave the people a sense of catharsis and released all of the pent up mimetic violence that they were aiming at each other. They can collectively aim at the single scapegoat mechanism. They expel the scapegoat, kill the scapegoat, do whatever horrible thing they do to the scapegoat. And then magically, magically in quotes here, right, because this is the false transcendence there, they achieve some level of temporary peace and unity with each other. It feels good. They that what Aristotle talked about that catharsis. So what ends up happening a short time later is that they the scapegoat almost always in ancient cultures comes back is worshiped. They’ll build a shrine over the site where the scapegoat was killed. They’ll do something like that because the scapegoat takes on like a like a sacred power because it’s the only thing that had the power to solve their problem. So then who outside of themselves and that has the nature of a god or some something that you worship. So like a higher being that was able to somehow solve the problem is attributed is projected on to this scapegoat. And this, I know this is a little weird for people listening. It’s kind of a little hard to understand. But, you know, think about great figures in history that like are not revered until after they die. I mean, this had this happens like all the time, like people that were assassinated, murdered, who begin to sort of like take on almost a sacred aura. I mean, and we have myths throughout all of our stories, right. And Tolkien, you’ve got Gandalf the White comes back and he’s sort of more powerful than before. I mean, we just this is like just part of the human story. We have this sort of idea in our imagination somehow. And, you know, this may be a controversial statement, but I think what happened most recently maybe with the death of George Floyd. Right. I mean, it’s sort of had this, this sort of almost there’s been like sacred connotations that have been attached to that, to him now. Yeah. And, you know, I’ve seen him like depicted as like as like Christ. Oh, yeah. Right. And there’s the element of, you know, uniting people around the world and building shrines. And there is a bit of that, like almost a process of deification is how Gerard would describe it. Right. And deification is, I think is more of in sort of the Orthodox tradition, right. The whole like spiritual like life is often described as a process of deification. But this is almost like a false, a false deification, which goes back to the false transcendence where the real deification right being united and becoming more like God becoming holy all of those things is the is a real sort of positive sense of deification. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s interesting, especially because a lot of people point out in the George Floyd story how he was a criminal how he had done horrible things. And so in this theory or in this vision it almost serves the purpose. Like it actually almost narratively and mysteriously would function as a way in which it would even make it stronger that he would then ultimately kind of unite people together and act as this this this new angel that appears, let’s say, and as over over this question, and I hadn’t thought about it that way. Yeah, you know, I think I think Gaddafi did the same thing to the people. You know, Gaddafi, you know, by all accounts was not really a good man. I don’t think he was a good leader. I think he you know, had committed crimes. And what one very well known Gerard scholar Mark Anspach, I like his work a lot. He said, in fact, it’s because of Gaddafi’s kind of guilt that helped him become a better stand in for the guilt of everybody else. If that makes sense, right? This goes back to the similarity thing, right? It’s almost as if because he’s guilty, he could be an easier substitute or sacrificial victim for the guilt for the guilt of everybody else in the country. And if you read and he was literally lynched in the street, yeah, right, like these horrific images. And if you read what some of the people said, in Libya, he one one guy in particular said all of the evil has now been purged from our country. Right. Like in a couple of days after he died, you just can’t have a more sort of textbook example of that happening. And they why do they have to get rid of his body? Well, because right away, there were going to be shrines built to it. And they were they were they’re actually like worried about that process of deification happening. Huh? Huh? So, here’s a very difficult question. Does Gerard talk about about the manner in which it seems, at least to me, that something similar happened to Hitler. It’s like the Germans were able to put all their guilt into one person and and to kind of absolve themselves to not totally, but at least to some extent, and even the West in general, by by making Hitler the one evil, one evil player like the one that like the one person that is the cause of it all. It seems like there’s something of that going on there, like where we just put all the evil in him and he’s still like, still today. It’s like he is the ultimate evil character, the one in which all evil kind of lands, let’s say. Yeah, the personification of all evil, like almost standing in for taking the place of of a satanic figure or or Satan himself. Right. Like, there’s almost something. There’s almost it’s almost as if humanity told its told itself a story for a certain amount of time that like, you know, we took care of, you know, Hitler ended in demise. We we took care of the problem. You know, we built these institutions. It’ll never happen again. We built the memorials and and all of the evil has been personified in this one figure. Yet the scapegoat mechanism runs rampant throughout the world, even still. And part of the problem with mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism is the diversion of attention. I think mimesis in general has to do with what we pay attention to and what we and what we focus on, what we become obsessed with. And because the only way that the scapegoat is made is if attention becomes focused in a group on a single individual through this kind of mimetic process, which diverts us in what which involves projection, which involves of all of our shortcomings and our own violence and our own sins under this one person. And that it involves a process of transference and all of those things simply kick the can down the road and don’t deal with any kind of structural problems, any kind of structural sin, our own propensity to do to do violence, right, which we need to remind ourselves of. So you would you could say that Gerard had a very Augustinian or sort of dark view of human nature and sort of against sort of enlightenment rationality where like, oh, we just we all get like, you know, we just read a lot of books and we discover these secrets about the world and therefore, like we can purge violence from our midst. It’s like Steven Pinker 101. You know what I’m saying? And it’s like, like not not recognizing like sort of these ancient forces that are still very much at work that now just manifest themselves in different ways. And because the ways they manifest themselves are different, we might not recognize them. You know, we’re not usually some parts of the world, but we’re usually not literally, you know, murdering people and dragging them through the streets or just doing it. In other sort of spiritual ways often, right, which, you know, the Gospels actually talk about that under the context of murder. So, you know, I think this the scapegoat mechanism is just evolving and transforming. Yeah, for sure. The cancel the cancel culture that we’re seeing happening is definitely has some of the scapegoat mechanism in it. You know, the way that it manifests itself. It’s like we need to find, especially like the hunt, almost like the hunt for someone to cancel. Like we need to find the next person. We need to purge the world of these two people. And if we do so, then we’ll find some kind of paradise. And so then you have the other version, which I’d like to know what you think about that because I mean, Jordan Peterson has kind of brought out this new vision of, you know, of Solzhenitsyn’s way of seeing this, which is the idea of self blaming, you could say, or of seeing, or taking the sins on ourselves. And that that could be the right transformational process to actually change the world ultimately. And you see that, of course, like I said, in terms of the martyrs, how they’re willing to die despite their innocence. You see it in terms of monastic practice where the monks will take the blame on themselves, even for other people’s sins, that kind of stuff, which I would never do. But it’s like you see it happen in monasteries where the spiritual father would actually take the blame for other people’s things. And so I don’t know if you if you already talked about that, if you’ve thought about that as well. I have thought about that. And that has to do with, again, with self sacrifice and with accepting certain injustices that are committed against you, perhaps even taking on injustices from other people without always seeking retribution, which I think Gerard says is the is the satanic lie, right? That the retribution or the line from the gospel, Satan casts out Satan. It has everything to do with that principle, right? That that little bit of violence will somehow do good. That violence can do good. The self blame thing is the flip side of that. This is something I was reading Gerard last night and I pulled up a quote. So I think this is relevant to what you’re saying. I’m just going to read it. He said, Since Christians have become aware of their failings in charity, of their connivance with established political orders in the past and present world that are always sacrificial. So basically, since Christians are sort of accusing themselves of their own failings in charity and have been part of sacrificial political orders in the past and even now, they are particularly vulnerable to the ongoing blackmail of contemporary neopacianism. That’s a quote from Rene Gerard. So that’s there’s a lot there to unpack. But one way that I interpret that is that because it’s almost like the accuser, right? This ancient language of the accuser and the advocate. And when the accuser accuses you of your own sins and shortcomings and failings with Gerard is basically saying like the church, the Christian world has been is being accused of all of these things and has been for a very long time, right? This goes back to, you know, that we care about victims more than Christ cares about victims, right? Then they’re sort of susceptible to the blackmail of neopacianism, right? Which is sort of like holding is the accusation that because the history of Christianity has not been perfect, that therefore it should cede all of the story and all of the kind of right to to like, let’s just elect like a great president and he’ll solve all of our problems, right? Or something like that. So there’s something to be said about this about the self blame, right? There’s a negative sort of form of that, which I think comes under the which comes from the accuser. Yeah, that’s self blame is different because it’s a weaponized. It’s like a weaponized compassion. You know, I’ve talked about this recently in terms of in terms of if you want to recognize the difference between true, let’s say, taking on of sins or the true examining of yourself in order to see, you know, the good and evil going through your own heart, the difference between that and weaponized compassion seems to be exemplified in the story of Judas. When you see Judas, when the woman comes to pour the perfume on Christ’s feet, Judas says, you know, you should give that to the poor. It’s like that’s exactly that’s exactly what we’re talking about in terms of, you know, you know, I will care for the poor, right? That’s that’s what I’ll do. But in the story, what’s interesting is like, it’s actually I will care for the poor rather than worship the divine, you know, worship God. And so she’s actually worshiping the son of man. And he’s saying, you know, you should give to the poor. But in the scripture, it says, but what he was really doing was taking the money for himself. I think that that’s usually when you can see it, because you just have to watch people who will want to, let’s say, accuse Christianity of all the sins and you and then you just have to look a little bit and realize that it’s it’s actually a power play to take to to to gain power for themselves. There’s nothing authentic about it at all. And the accuser will just a really important point to make is that the accuser is always is never the truth. Yeah, the accusation is never the truth, right? Because the accuser in scripture, I guess, you know, in 2022, it can be weird for some people that hear these two guys talking about Satan or the satanic principle. But I mean, Gerard identified the scapegoat mechanism with sort of the spirit of Satan. And what is what is how is what are some of the different ways that Satan is referred to that Jesus refers to Satan in the Gospels? The accuser, right? The father of lies and a murderer since the beginning. So the accuser is always lying. Right. There’s always there’s always like some some element of lie there. It’s not the whole at the very least. It’s never the whole truth. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s very easy to believe. And I think that’s where that spirit of accusation is what’s behind cancel culture. And it’s part of my personal and just my personal examination of conscience. It’s like, how am I being an accuser and how am I being an advocate? Right. The advocate is usually refers to the Holy Spirit in scripture. How who in my life is an accuser? Who in my life is an advocate? What in the culture is operating on the principle like literally gets power from accusation because anything that that derives power from accusation might say like all of Twitter is basically like this. Hope you are. Muskin solve that problem is is is certainly concerning to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re right. You’re right. There’s definitely something. And there’s also the hypocrisy part of the accuser, which I think Christ points out quite a bit in his ministry, you know, where he sees the accusers in terms of the Pharisees. And he says that the accuser is often hiding his own his own sin. And and that in the case of Judas, that’s definitely the case where Judas is accusing the woman of not caring for the poor when in fact, you know, he just wants power for himself. And so there’s definitely a lot of that going on in terms of in terms of the politics and also the yeah, even even in terms of the fingers being pointed, you know. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that’s the story of the woman caught in adultery is, I think the most memetically charged aside from the crucifixion in the Gospels. Right. It’s just it’s literally there’s a memetic process of accusation that’s taking place. And it’s diffused by the only person in the story. This is the woman who was caught in the act of adultery. So we know she’s guilty. Right. They drag her in front of the temple and in the gospel of John. You’ve got these Pharisees saying she’s guilty, breaking the law of Moses. She deserves to be stoned. And there’s this memetic process of contagion. Everybody in the story is an accuser except her and one other person. And, you know, Christ steps into the story as the only person who stands outside of the memetic processes, the only person who’s not susceptible to them. Right. One is divine person and free of sin. So he’s the only in a sense, most people don’t think of that story as as him diffusing the stoning as a miracle. But if what Gerard is saying is true and that this is the memetic process of violence that’s been operative, it’s the thing hidden since the foundation of the world. It’s the way that what humanity has always done. You could almost say that there is some kind of divine intervention where the only anti-memetic, the only person not participating in the pattern of the memetic contagion in that story was Christ, which is the only reason he’s able to diffuse it. And this is the reason that people are really scared to step in and stop. We don’t really stone people in this country anymore. But people are really scared to step in and avert a cancel, a cancellation or something like that, because then they themselves get singled out. Right. Yeah. And they know what he’s scared. But he just runs for the hills when something like that happens. So I’ve often asked myself, like, we don’t give ourselves enough credit for having the power to because sometimes it just takes one person to be a subversive like break in that process. And, you know, like in the gospel story, Christ totally reverses it. They drop their stones and walk away. And it’s one of the beauty. The reason that’s one of my favorite sort of stories is because it’s negative, memetic violence that’s instantly transformed into positive, memetic desire or positive, like a positive form of mimesis, because it says the elders starting with the elders, they drop their stone models of desire. And then one by one, the rest of them left. Right. So the elders dropped the stones and the rest of them left. You know, it’s possible to actually affect some positive contagion of desire and examination. Yeah, but it’s difficult. It’s difficult because we are caught up in the memetic desire ourselves. And so we also see that, you know, it’s like the reason why you’re afraid of being canceled is because, you know, you’re not perfect. You’ve got, you know, everybody has things that you look back and you’re like, oh, you know, I’m not I definitely have sins in my past. So, yeah, it’s difficult. But you’re right. There are some people that seem to be able to to do it. And and when it happens, it’s it’s very powerful. It’s very beautiful. Yeah. Well, you’re you know, it’s I don’t know if the observer problem is the right way to talk about this, but we are ourselves. It’s weird talking about mimesis and the medic desire, the medic contagion, because like at this very moment, I’m being affected by forces that I probably don’t even know. Right. And I’m very much like inside of the same story that I’m talking about, which makes all of these things somewhat day. I would even say dangerous to talk about, not to talk about, but like to to pretend or to operate under the illusion that we can achieve some kind of permanent, you know, abstraction or removal from them. Right. Like we’re embedded in these things. And like one of the things I hope that when I walk in to go in my parish every Sunday, like, you know, for an hour, it sort of feels like I’m, you know, I’m no longer in the world. Right. And then you’re totally right. And then within within one minute of leaving, I’m like, you know, yelling at the guy who cut me off in the parking lot. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, it’s it’s it’s like we’re making this video. We’re going to put on YouTube. You know, it’s going to get likes. It’s going to get comments. It’s going to get shared. These are the mimetic. These are all these mimetic things that are on steroids right now in terms of social media. And so it’s definitely something that we are we are part of. And it’s difficult to pull, like you said, difficult to pull ourselves through. And we kind of hope that the Eucharist and, you know, participation in the in the self-sacrifice of Christ, if we do it, if we do it regularly and properly, that we it can somehow at least, like you said, give us a different perspective. You know. But then also noticing the times, I think, like at least in my case, I think noticing, although, like you said, sometimes it still is an ememetic process, but noticing the times where I’ve been able to just say, give myself or sacrifice some aspects of myself for others and then seeing the fruits of that. You know, it’s like, wow, that works. It’s not just it actually really does do something. But then that can also be that could also become a mimetic competition. You know, if you’re not careful. It’s funny, isn’t it? I spent a few years living in Rome because I was in seminary studying theology. And it’s an alarming thing when you realize that the guys that are participating in that process of formation, like start competing on and engaged in mimetic rivalries with each other in regards to like how long they’re in the chapel praying and like who’s praying on their knees and who’s not and stuff like that. Yeah, like it’s we can literally like anything can turn into this. Yeah, if we’re not aware of it and if we’re not visually anything can be like good. Right. Like I’m here trying to like make this sacrifice and give it myself to the world and grow in virtue. And yet I can look to my right and my left and get totally distracted from like what in the hell I even came here for in the first place. Yeah, and it’s I mean Christ seems to be warning us about that. And it can help us understand some things that Christ says about the importance of secret right the idea forms of doing things in secret. Because when you do things in secret if you give in secret or you pray in secret or you you you don’t get the credit for it. Then it’s actually a it can be a good healing mechanism or maybe a good a good kind of position which you can find yourself where you can now see, you know, what’s going on a little more clearly because you’re you’re not getting any not getting anything from what you what you’ve done. So it’s interesting to think about. Yeah. Listen, I think this is been a great this is great conversation. I appreciate it. We were having a more spiritual conversation than I than I was. I like that. I appreciate that. Thank you. All right. So I want to send everybody towards your towards your towards your book. It’s called wanting and it has great Peter Thiel gave it a great review and a lot of I was really impressed to see how much how much it’s gotten positive reactions. And I think getting people to think about these questions is important, especially with social media that acceleration of social connection and the the acceleration of contagions of these types of contingent is so everything so fast now and it can happen so quickly that understand at least understanding some of the mechanisms is useful for everybody to understand. Absolutely. Well, thanks, Jonathan. I really hope we can continue the conversation sometime. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for coming on.