Philosophy

Early in his career, professor and philosopher René Girard was asked to teach literature. For the first time, he read classic novels by authors like Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Flaubert. During his readings, Luke Burgis tells us, he noticed a pattern: none of the novels were plot-driven or character-driven; they were desire-driven. The object of the characters’ desires? Other characters’ desires. We are hardwired to imitate. Our desires, he realized, are mimetic.

Models of desire are all around us, which is why I’m using mimesis as this week’s theme…

To Be or To Do

The best American Fighter Pilot in history, John Boyd, first gave his famous “To Be or To Do” speech to the young Captain Raymond Leopold: 

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody . . . you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself . . . . you may not get promoted . . . .  and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superior. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.”

To be somebody, or do something. To work for a title, or for a cause. To want what other people want, or what you want. To think mimetically, or purposefully.

Torches of Freedom

In 1929, the president of the American Tobacco Company asked public relations expert Edward Bernays to help rid the negative stigma around women smoking in public. Bernays agreed and decided on the perfect time and place: the Easter Day parade in New York City. The parade was a way for high-society New Yorkers to sashay down Fifth Ave, showing off for the feverish media and lower-class onlookers. Bernays convinced a few of the parade’s influential women to smoke while they strutted down the street. He made sure that the photographers and journalists covering the event referred to the women’s cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. It worked. Women began lighting up in public, a celebration of liberty. Within a year, sales of Lucky Stripe tripled.

Peter Thiel’s $500,000 Bet

Our tendency to model behavior is what makes Facebook so influential: it’s full of billions of models of desire. It’s not celebrities or pro athletes that influence us most, it’s the people who look like us. When asked about his $500,000 Facebook investment that earned him $1 billion, Peter Thiel told Luke Burgis, “I bet on mimesis”. 

Find Yourself a Cato

Roughly two millennia before Girard put a name to it, Epictetus saw mimetic desire firsthand. As a slave in Nero’s court, he witnessed the endless cycle of competition and conflict. He watched as people fought and conspired over power, money, and fame—things they wanted because other people wanted them.

Five hundred years before Epictetus, the Buddha recognized our proclivity to mimic what we see. We’re on the constant lookout for change, he said, which is why desires and cravings seize us from moment to moment. As Karen Armstrong writes, the Buddha understood that “we are consumed and distracted by the compulsion to become something different.” 

We’re inclined to become something different, but we’re also inclined to become something better. That’s why we have ambition, why we want to grow, why we work so hard: to become who we’re capable of becoming. And the best place to start? Choosing a model worth following, a person whose values align with ours, and whose example teaches and challenges us.

Seneca advises us to “choose ourselves a Cato.” Choose someone whose high standards encourage us to raise our own.

“If, at any moment, you are unable to name a great man who is, or has recently been, having an influence on your conduct,” Ernest Dimnet said, “you will be passing the verdict: ORDINARY on the quality of your own thought and existence.”

Find a model whose greatness inspires your own.

One day, as a small boy, the Buddha sat under a rose-apple tree and watched as the fields were plowed for the coming crop. As he looked on, he saw insects and their eggs destroyed during the plowing. This saddened him. As Karen Armstrong writes in Buddha, he “gazed at the carnage and felt a strange sorrow, as though it were his own relatives that had been killed.”

But then he felt something else: pure joy. The kind of joy that blooms in your chest when you’re absorbed in a moment, when you’ve forgotten yourself. The kind of joy that fades the second you become aware of it, when you attach an “I” to it.

“The child had been taken out of himself by a moment of spontaneous compassion, when he allowed the pain of creatures that had nothing to do with him personally to pierce him to the heart,” Armstrong writes. “This surge of selfless empathy had brought him a moment of spiritual release.”

His compassion for all living beings gave him his first taste of enlightenment. And this compassion came, in part, because he forgot about himself.

The Buddha said that the main reason we suffer is that we don’t see things clearly. And we don’t see things clearly because of our tendency to over-identify with our “self”, thoughts, and feelings.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. We too can decide to not take ownership of our thoughts and feelings.

The Buddha said our being (mind, body, soul) is in constant flux; we have no permanent “self”. Nowhere on your body can you point to and say “this is me”. We’re constantly changing from moment to moment.

Our thoughts, fears, cravings, and desires are always changing too. They’re so fleeting, so impermanent, so empty that the Buddha regarded them as “remote phenomena that had little to do with him”.

But how can we view thoughts—which are about as local as they come—as remote?

It may be best explained by the theory popular among Vipassana meditation teachers and evolutionary psychologists, called the modular model of the mind theory.

Basically, this theory says that our unconscious mind is a collection of interconnected and fluid, yet specialized, modules. As Robert Wright says in Why Buddhism Is True, these modules are activated by feelings and are responsible for sending thoughts to our conscious mind.

According to this theory, our conscious mind doesn’t create thoughts—it receives them. We choose whether to take ownership of them, or let them float by.

For instance, let’s say we’re watching Halloween. This might activate our “fear” module. This fear module might then send the thought—make sure the front door is locked—to our conscious mind. Or, let’s say you’re on the lookout for a romantic partner and you see an attractive man or woman. Your “find a suitable partner” module might activate, telling you to show off.

If we choose to take ownership of the thoughts we receive, it’s likely that we will also take ownership of the feelings—putting ourselves at their mercy. 

Similar to the Stoics, the Buddha taught that if something is outside of your control, and it’s causing you to suffer, stop identifying with it.

Easier said than done, I know. (Buddhist monks spend their entire lives practicing this type of detachment.) But it’s powerful enough that whether you practice it one time or millions of times, you can benefit from it.

Once a skeptic, Robert Wright now uses mindfulness to help relieve his pain. If he’s experiencing anxiety, he might ask himself, Where, exactly, is the source of this feeling? Maybe he discovers the feeling is in his chest. He will then direct his attention to his chest, studying this newfound feeling as an outside observer, mindful of its separateness. It may be anxiety, but it’s not his anxiety. By not identifying with it, it loses its power.

Thoughts bubble up. Feelings demand our attention. But the less we identify with them, the clearer we see. And the clearer we see, the more compassionate we are, and the less we suffer.

I filtered the notes I took while reading Discourses to share the two rules that Epictetus repeatedly gives for eliminating anxiety and fear:

1. Concern yourself only with what is in your control; remain indifferent to everything else.
2. Align your will with nature. Nothing can go contrary to your wishes if you wish for things to happen the way they happen.

Plenty of self-help books say that fear runs our lives, which I would agree with. 

They say things like, stay out of your comfort zone, or do one thing a day that scares you. 

This is great advice, but it presupposes a critical detail: that we are aware of our fears.

This is important, I’m realizing, because some of my fears are subliminal. And how can I face a fear I don’t know I have?

Luckily, Epictetus has an answer.

If we implement the two rules above, if we keep our labeling of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to our own choices, if we align our will with nature, wouldn’t it follow that we would have no anxiety or fear to face in the first place?

Here’s a good recent example of how my fear went undetected:

I’ve been working with a writer/research assistant for about a year now. He’s a really cool guy who works with big-name authors, and I believe in his work and message. All of our correspondence has been through email, but I’ve been wanting to meet face to face to introduce myself and speak with him less formally. He lives in another state, so to meet him I would have to take time off work and travel. After some preliminary planning, I decided next year would be better. Next year I wouldn’t be as busy.

But after reading Discourses, and mulling over the above two rules, I had an enlightening revelation: I can just ask him to hop on a Zoom call with me.

I realized that my fear—fear of rejection, fear of annoying him, fear of saying something wrong, fear of being vulnerable—had kept me from seeing the obvious. At the time, however, I didn’t think that pushing a meeting to next year had anything to do with fear. My mind rationalized that next year would simply be a better time. (Like Steven Pressfield said, “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.'”)

And here’s the thing: I wouldn’t have had this fear in the first place if Epictetus’s two rules for eliminating anxiety and fear were more thoroughly embedded into my way of thinking. It’s probable I would have seen the obvious from the start. (It makes me wonder what other undetected fears are holding me back.)

My revelation came when I:

1. Limited my thinking to what I could control (ask him for 15 minutes of his time)
2. Shrugged off the “what-if” scenarios (he can say no and that’s perfectly fine because that is not in my control, and therefore, not my concern)
   
   

Here’s how I imagine a conversation with Epictetus about my concerns would go:

What if I ask him to meet on Zoom and he says no?

What concern is that of yours?

Yeah, true. Well what if he agrees to meet but he’s secretly annoyed with me?

Let me ask you, do you control how he feels?

No.

And if he declines your request or becomes annoyed, tell me, in what way does that harm you?

It doesn’t.

Correct. If another person’s actions or thoughts had the ability to harm you, you would be right to be fearful. But, as you know, harm is only found in your own actions and thoughts. Another person’s actions or thoughts cannot harm you. Even if they throw you in prison, even if they bind you in chains, they cannot touch the divinity that exists in you: your soul, your will. Your willingness to accept fate cannot be broken, only relinquished.

But what if I say something stupid?

If by ‘say something stupid’ you mean ‘make a mistake,’ I will ask, you are human, correct?

I am.

So it follows that you are liable to make mistakes?

It does.

You see, only plants and animals mindlessly obey. The gift that separates us humans is our ability to reflect and reason. Therefore, it’s our duty to use this gift by exerting ourselves and making mistakes. Otherwise, we’d be content grazing grass all day…

But what if it doesn’t go as planned?

Haven’t you reminded yourself to align your will with nature? If you wish for things to occur how they actually occur, in what way could they not go according to your plan? Besides, what is fated to happen has already been written in the stars the moment you were born. Everything has been decided. You do, however, have free will. You are free to will yourself to accept and make proper use of fate, of what’s already been decided. That is free will. Like a dog tied to a cart: we can be dragged by fate, or we can run along with it. We can graciously stay the course—or grudgingly be kept on it.

There’s nothing to fear, nothing to calculate, and no one who can cause me harm or anxiety as long as I remember the two rules: focus on my own actions, and willingly accept everything else.