BONUS： Why Do We Want What We Want？ ｜ Guest： Luke Burgis
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Summary
Where do our desires come from? Do we genuinely want the things that we want, or do we just want them because other people want them? In this episode, Allie interviews Luke Burgess about his new book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.
Transcript
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Where do our desires come from? Do we genuinely organically want the things that we want or do
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we just want them because other people want them? I've been asking this question a lot over the past
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few months since I heard about the book that we are going to talk about today and it's called
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Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgess. I found him on Twitter
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and I found the things that he was talking about, the questions that he was answering,
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so interesting and it's really made me think about why I want the things that I do and really
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analyze my desires through the prism of my values and that is what we are going to discuss with this
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author. I know that you are going to find this conversation fascinating and hopefully get a lot
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out of it. We're also doing a giveaway with his books which we will talk about at the end of this
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conversation but no more introduction. I want you to hear this. This episode is brought to you by
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our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com slash Allie. That's goodranchers.com slash Allie.
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All right, now without further ado, here's our new friend Luke Burgess.
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Luke, thanks so much for joining us. Can you first tell everyone who may not know who you are and what
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you do? Hey Allie, good to be with you. Sure. I'm entrepreneur in residence at the Catholic
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University of America in Washington, D.C. and I spent my 20s in sort of in Silicon Valley. I was
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never actually in the valley. I was in Southern California founding companies and it was kind of
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the trendy narcissism of my day to be an entrepreneur and to look for quick exits to make as much money as
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possible rather than being an Instagram influencer or a TikTok influencer. That was it for me.
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Yeah. And I did that throughout my 20s. I had some successes and some failures but I got to the end
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where I had a blown up business deal and I realized that I was really craving something that I wasn't
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able to find in that culture, right? There weren't any people around me that had sort of any kind of
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spiritual desires and those things were bubbling up in me. I was really dissatisfied and I was looking
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for more and I ended up stepping away from everything that I was doing for a while just to take some time
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to reflect on what it is that I really was looking for, what I was searching for, why it never sort
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of seemed to be enough. And that led me down a path for pretty much the next decade of my life
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where I explored the question of human desire, why I want the things that I want, what are the
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motivations behind those things. And eventually this led me to really coming back to the faith of my
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childhood and thinking of entrepreneurship, thinking of myself in a very different way.
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And that is really kind of the basis or one of the basis of your book, which we will talk about
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a little bit later in this interview, why we want the things that we want. And I found that really
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interesting. But to kind of jump off what you said about your faith, I want to talk about a recent
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article that you just wrote called The Three-City Problem of Modern Life in Wired. And actually,
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before I get into that, you said a phrase that immediately got my attention when you were talking.
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You said trendy narcissism, which is funny that you said that because I write about that concept and
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use that exact phrase in my book that I wrote a few years ago, this idea of trendy narcissism,
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which is kind of what has become the popular, I don't know, in the self-love, self-help world,
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the world in which women are kind of like manifesting their inner goddesses. They kind of
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say that it's all about self-care and self-improvement and self-empowerment, but really it is just a form
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of trendy narcissism. So you and I are on the same wavelength there. I just wanted to point that
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out. But to talk about your article in Wired, The Three-City Problem of Modern Life, you talk about
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the three cities, Athens, Jerusalem, Silicon Valley. Most people are familiar with the quote that you
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included. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Of course, what does Jerusalem have to do with
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Athens? That's kind of how people have said it over the years. And so you're talking about that it's not
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just these two cities now that are either in competition or correlated. It is also Silicon Valley. So this
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is the problem of our modern era. Tell us what you mean by that. Yeah, Athens stands for reason.
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Rationality in Jerusalem is the world of faith, religion. So the question, what does Jerusalem have to do
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with Athens or Athens have to do with Jerusalem was posed by Tertullian in the third century?
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And in Tertullian's world, he didn't have to contend with the force that we know as Silicon Valley,
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which represents the human urge to create, right? Which is a beautiful thing. It's a good thing. We
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participate in the creation of God. And Silicon Valley, though, is we've never sort of seen
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anything like the amount of capital, the amount of pure ambition, and searching for technological
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process divorced from the world of faith, divorced from Jerusalem, in other words. And it can even be
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divorced from Athens. It can even be divorced for rationality, because the driving force in Silicon Valley
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is creating value, creating utility, which is part of value, things that are useful, without
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necessarily accounting for what they do to the soul, or even whether or not they're reasonable,
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quite frankly. So I'm trying to make the case that Silicon Valley has sort of changed our relationship
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to reason and to faith. So a couple of examples of how I think that's happening. So think about
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how Twitter is changing our relationship with rationality, right? 280-character Twitter debates.
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It is warping. It's very hard to have a rational argument on Twitter. And then with religion
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itself, right? Silicon Valley, during the pandemic, many people went to online church services. You had
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apps that give people ways to pray that were raising tens of millions of dollars and blowing up. Some
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people are still on them and not going back to regular church services. So Silicon Valley is
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dramatically affecting reason, Athens, and faith, Jerusalem. And my point is, we have to come to
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grips with how these three forces are interacting with each other and affecting the others.
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One thing that you talk about is how different religions have tried to deal with maybe what
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is considered the problem of Athens, the secular philosophers trying to, in some theologians'
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mind, kind of replace Christian thinking with secular thinking, with philosophical thinking.
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And that, in some ways, is truly opposed to Christian theology. And one thing that you talk
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about, you talk about Catholics trying to kind of use both, use the rationality, the reasonableness,
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the philosophy that comes out of Athens and kind of wet it with or pair it with Christian theology.
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And then you say others are more skeptical. One of Martin Luther's fundamental tenets was sola fides
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or faith alone. Now, I'm guessing, and I know this is not the point of your piece, but I think it's
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interesting because I'm a Reformed Protestant. You're a Catholic. And I would argue that, of course,
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that is not what sola fide means. That's not what Martin Luther means when he says by faith alone.
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He does not mean to the exclusion of intellect or to the exclusion of reason or to the exclusion
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of Athens. He is talking about salvation. That is also the difference between Catholics and Protestants
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is faith alone when it comes to salvation. Martin Luther said in his famous speech in front of the
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Deet of Worms is that unless I'm convicted by Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the
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authority of popes and councils. And so he actually depended on reason in his resistance to the
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Catholic Church. So when I was reading this, even though I think it's so fascinating and there's more
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that I want to talk about, that is one issue that I had, that sola fide is not an example of Protestants
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abandoning, you know, good and sound philosophy and critical thinking in favor of Jerusalem.
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No, you're absolutely right. So throughout history, though, both Catholics and Protestants,
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there's a spectrum, right? And sometimes we've swung too far in one direction. And that's actually
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the point of my piece is that you have some, and by the way, I think Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon
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Valley cut across political divides. I think there are people on both the right and the left that live
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in one of these three cities. And my point is that any, and we're sort of clustering sometimes in one
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of the three cities. And, you know, you have like the scientism, I think of COVID was an example of
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sort of Athens and Jerusalem clashing, right? People that sort of spent more time in one city
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didn't really understand where people in the other city were coming from, right? Like, what do you
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mean? I can't see my loved one in the hospital and visit them. There's different hierarchies of
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values in the different cities. And I think the problem is like not having the integration between
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the three. So I sometimes get the impression that each city wants its own ruler. So those that are in
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Athens, right, the strict pure rationalist would love to just, you know, elect a scientist as president
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of the universe. Those that are sort of in Jerusalem, maybe it would be a pastor. And those that are in
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Silicon Valley might as well want Elon Musk to be, you know, the governor of everything, using the sort
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of guiding force of that city, right? Reason, faith, or utility, or the creation of value. So my point is
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that we're integrated people. We're religious beings, we're rational beings, and we're beings
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that do get joy in creating value. And by creating value, I don't just mean businesses and companies,
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I mean, creating families, self-expression, all of those things. And that the healthiest way to think
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about this is we need to reintegrate ourselves as human beings. Because if one city is dominating
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the discussion, we end up warped without the ability to even speak to people that are spending most
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of their time in other cities, and we can't become isolationists.
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Yeah. So how I kind of see it, and I'm interested to know, like, what exactly you think integration
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looks like. So as a Christian, I have a Christian worldview. Everyone has a worldview. And so everything
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that someone thinks is colored by their worldview. And so how I see it is that rationality is going to
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be upstream from productivity, Silicon Valley. But upstream of both of those things is going to
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be religion, theology, what people think about God, or don't think about God. Both of those things,
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I think, have to be influenced by what we think about who is in charge, why we're here, what human
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beings are, what right and wrong is. That cannot really be reasoned through rationally. And that
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certainly is not going to, there's no conclusion that technology can come to when it comes to
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morality and why we're here. Technology only asks can, not should. And so when I think about like
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integrating these things, I think, okay, well, we have to get the top city right first. Like,
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we have to get the religion, the theology right first, and then everything else is downstream from
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that. Obviously, though, we all really disagree. A lot of us really disagree on that theological piece
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on what Jerusalem is. So what does it look like to then integrate these things in a healthy way among
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people in a pluralistic society, people who really disagree on the thing that I think is upstream
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from rationality and technology? I mean, I think we have to be able to have discussions about basic
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fundamental anthropology. What does it mean to be human? It seems to me like we're creating things
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without asking those fundamental questions about what it means to be a human person. And you're
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absolutely right. We start with different presuppositions. And I do think that the big
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questions, right, the question of God is the fundamental question. But it seems like we've
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abandoned even asking the question, right? You've just got people that consider themselves secular,
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that don't even want to have the conversation. And my point in that piece is that if we're not
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talking about like a teleology, the end of all of this, what is life about? What is this all for at
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the end of the day, we're going to be creating things for what I call in the piece an unknowable
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X, right? Like, humans are just this unknowable X. We're just, you know, a bundle of atoms and cells.
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And we're creating things that are essentially doing violence to what it means to be human.
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So the thing that I've noticed, even with with my book, talking about desire, I've done so many
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podcasts, and many of them are with people that are secular. And they're like, well, where does desire
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come from? And they want the self-help answer, I think. And my answer is, well, desire comes from
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God, right? Like we were created by the desire of God and sort of an exitus retitus. And I've
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realized over the last 18 months, really, how hard it is to have discussions about something as
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fundamental as why we want what we want, if you don't agree on the question of where it comes from
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in the first place. Yeah, it really all does go back to that. And I think that I've realized that
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more than ever over the past few years, is that especially when we're asking such fundamental
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questions that really, we haven't asked before, like, what is a man? What is a woman? What is a
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human being? Like, why do human beings matter? Why aren't we just clumps of cells? Like, what is beauty?
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Of course, people have been asking these questions for a long time. But some of these things we've
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considered settled, and now we're re-asking them, re-exploring them, redefining them. Well, at the
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end of the day, it all goes back to who you think created us, and how you think we got here, and who
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is in charge, and what are we? I find it really hard, honestly, to talk about anything cultural or
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political, social, without going back to Genesis 1. So I'm curious, does that count as me kind of like
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clustering as kind of what you're talking about in this piece? Or is that just, you know, the way
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that a believer has to think about things? I honestly feel like it's inescapable for someone
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who does believe that we come from God. I mean, I don't think that's clustering at all. That's just,
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you know, I think you're a rational person, and we're having this conversation, you know,
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through using technology and, you know, very much with things that Silicon Valley created. So
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we're very much living in all three at the intersection. And that conversation, I think
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that Jerusalem is extremely underrepresented in national discourse and in dialogue. I don't know
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if I said that explicitly in the Wired article, but it certainly is. I mean, I've lived in all three
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places, you know, my days as starting technology companies. It's pretty much non-existent. It's
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extremely difficult to find people that are willing to have those kinds of conversations.
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And I think if you have no transcendent purpose, something that goes beyond this world,
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then what are we doing here, right? What's the purpose? I think this is why people are
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rudderless and purposeless. And I've just, when I asked the question, right, like what are we
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building here and why are we building it? Is it just to extend our lives as long as we can? Like
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what's the, most people don't have any kind of teleology, right? Some kind of end game. What is
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this for? And what my book is all about is really summed up by, you know, Augustine, our hearts are
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restless until they rest in you. I could not find out why it was so restless. And it's because I did
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not have a desire that transcended this world, right? This world will never be able to satisfy all
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our desires. My wife can't satisfy all my desires. And when we begin to think that this world can,
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On that note, speaking about desire and the things that fulfill our desire and why we have the desires
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that we do. You said ultimately they come, our desire comes from God. We come from the desire of God.
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That makes sense to me. But I am curious more about the subject of your book, the mimetic desire
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in everyday life. And in reading it, I mean, it seemed like a concept that I understand that
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everyone kind of understands. You see something on Instagram that someone else wants. You don't
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even really think that you need it. But because other people want it and because their scarcity,
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you get it. I have a perfect example of this before we even get into your book,
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just to kind of set it up in a way that people understand when you're talking about
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mimetic desire. So there is this company called Stanley. I actually have like a mini one right
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there for anyone who is watching. And they sell these huge like 40 ounce mugs, jugs, kind of like
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a Yeti. I'm sure they would hate for me to compare it to another company. But it's got a straw. It's got a
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handle. I had never heard of this. I mean, this company has been around for 100 years. They've
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made this product for a really long time. But I started seeing it on Instagram. And then when you
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go to their website, you see that it's constantly sold out. I mean, you have to be on some kind of
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waiting list. You have to follow really closely these bloggers all of a sudden. And so I'm just
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admitting like I am. I am definitely part of this culture and like have these kinds of desires.
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I want one. I didn't want one before. I was fine with my, you know, knockoff. I was fine with my
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Yeti. But if everyone has one and if it's so scarce and it's hard to get, well, then maybe I
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want one. And I will just say I ordered one finally this morning after my friend texted me and was
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like, hey, this person has a code. You can get it and have it. So when I was reading your book, that's
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what I was thinking of, that we really do kind of want things because other people want them. And so
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is that kind of what set you up in writing this book? Yeah, it was the realization. I had this
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romantic idea that my desires are just a product of my autonomous self, that I'm the manufacturer
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and generator of all of my own desires. And the thinker that heavily influenced me, who I discovered
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in my late 20s, who really changed the course of my life, was a Christian named Rene Girard. And his
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insight was that we have this idea that our desires are just entirely our own. He said,
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that's absolutely wrong. We're human beings are social creatures, right? We rely on mediators of
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desire. We're not the generators of our own desire, right? It doesn't come ex nihilo out of nothing.
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Our desires are shaped and informed by other people. So the very idea, for instance, of self-love is
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wrong. It doesn't exist, right? The idea that love is just generated completely by the self
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is just fundamentally false, right? We're relational. Desire is relational. Love is something that happens
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in the context of a relationship. So a person that grows up who doesn't perceive that they're loved is
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going to find it pretty much impossible to love themselves, barring grace from God or a relationship
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with Christ. But our desire is a product of relationships, worldly relationships, and of
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course, relationship with God, which is very, very important. And when I look at my life in my 20s,
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I was surrounded by people that cared about very worldly things. So big surprise, so did I. I didn't
00:22:09.820
want anything outside of the very narrowly defined accolades that many startup entrepreneurs want.
00:22:16.380
So it was this realization that, wow, I am heavily affected by other people. My desire is very social.
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I went into college and right away I was affected by what everybody else was majoring in, where they
00:22:29.360
wanted to work, and I just followed them. I was all the while convincing myself that my desires were
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entirely my own. I had no way out. And that's why this idea of mimetic desire, which means imitative
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desire. Mimetic is a word that comes from the Greek word for imitation. Mimetic desire means
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that we imitate the desires of others. And that's not a bad thing. We talk about the imitation of
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Christ, but we have to be very careful and understand what we're imitating. Because we might
00:23:00.380
be imitating, I mean, this is the definition of sort of Satan, right? It's like, Satan sets himself up
00:23:06.700
as a rival with God and asks us to imitate him, right? So knowing who we're imitating, right,
00:23:12.500
is critical on a divine level and even on a worldly level.
00:23:16.940
Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about when mimetic desire gets to be a problem, like mimetic
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conflict. As you said, sometimes it can be good. You're following other people who have good desires.
00:23:28.620
Sometimes it can be bad. What are some examples of that today, how that manifests itself negatively?
00:23:32.760
I think one of the best examples is when we're in a mimetic relationship, we are looking into the
00:23:40.140
other person to consistently model desires back to us, right? And we become a reflection of them,
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even people that we consider our enemies. So, I mean, this happens in politics all the time,
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right? Like people become a reflection of the very thing or people that they hate because we imitate
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rhetoric, we imitate aggression, we imitate violence in this kind of never-ending game when
00:24:05.940
there's no model outside of that sort of one-to-one relationship, right? It could be between two
00:24:11.940
people or between two groups. And escaping that sort of rivalrous mimesis is really important. And if we
00:24:21.240
have no transcendent perspective, it's very difficult to do that because we become completely fixated on
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other people around enemies. And, you know, we, we end up becoming like them. We become like that,
00:24:33.620
which we imitate. We become like that, which we pay the most attention to. So, you know, this happens
00:24:39.100
with, it happens in, with, in school, with, in high school. I, I think of all the people that I've
00:24:45.900
talked about this idea with, it's high school students who it resonates with the most because
00:24:49.160
they realize how easy it is for them to be looking to their right and their left and become obsessed
00:24:54.100
with what their classmates want, with what they wear, with where they want to go to school,
00:24:58.000
with what their goals are. To the, to the point where they, they forget who they are. And, you know,
00:25:04.980
we live in a culture that makes it, it's, it's, it can take you down a path very quickly where you
00:25:10.760
don't want to go. And if you don't think seriously about your own desires, other people are going to
00:25:15.300
give them to you or tell you what they are. And before you know it, it's 10 years later, and you've
00:25:19.460
never seriously thought about how people are affecting what it is that you want.
00:25:25.780
Is this what a world ruled by Silicon Valley looks like? A world that just says, well,
00:25:33.300
what's most efficient? What's most fun? What feels the best? What can we do? But never asks,
00:25:40.500
hey, what are my values? Where does this desire come from? What direction should we be heading?
00:25:47.320
Do you think that those two things are linked to the technology that has been created by Silicon
00:25:53.940
Valley and this kind of memetic crisis, if you will? I mean, absolutely. I think consumerism is
00:26:02.480
fueled by people building things or telling us that the most important thing in life is satisfying our
00:26:08.640
every desire. And if we buy into that, it's never enough, right? It's absolutely never enough.
00:26:17.940
And the Christianity's idea, right? This idea is like, you know what, if we live in a world where
00:26:22.760
we all narcissistically pursue our own desires, those desires will inevitably clash. We will inevitably
00:26:29.580
just exacerbate more and more rivalry and competition for things that ultimately don't
00:26:35.440
matter, to impress people that don't even love us in status games. The idea is actually like
00:26:43.380
self-sacrifice. Maybe my desires are not the most important thing in the world, right? Maybe there
00:26:49.020
are other people that need me, need my help. And my desires, I mean, it's such a selfish thing. It's
00:26:55.320
what this whole self-help industry is built around, is that satisfying my desires are the most important
00:27:00.200
thing. They're simply not. They're not the most important thing. And there's this fundamental
00:27:04.660
Christian paradox that when I stop thinking so much about myself and my desires, and I serve other
00:27:10.760
people, it's tremendously fulfilling and satisfying. It's like the whole idea of, you know, you have to
00:27:15.420
die to yourself or lose yourself in order to find yourself. So the whole climax of the book and
00:27:21.900
everything that I've sort of been my work for the last 10 years has been getting out of ourselves and
00:27:29.100
serving other people, willing the good of another person, rather than willing what I think I want.
00:27:36.300
And in most cases, I don't even know what I want. And Italian, where I lived for several years when I
00:27:40.360
was in seminary, has a beautiful phrase, ti voglio bene, which is the way that they say I love you.
00:27:45.920
But it literally means, I want your good. I want what's good for you. And that's very different than me
00:27:53.180
just constantly being obsessed with what I want and my goals. And when you make that flip,
00:27:59.240
the paradox is you end up learning that what you really want is to be in loving relationships.
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It's also very different than the world's definition of love today, which is unconditional
00:29:50.440
affirmation of someone's choices. How you just defined love, which is exactly how I define
00:29:56.060
it, is wanting what is best for the other person. And of course, as Christians, as God defines
00:30:02.100
best. That's why we don't celebrate sin. That's why we don't celebrate destructive behaviors.
00:30:07.380
Because love that means unconditional affirmation of someone's choices, even if they're wrong,
00:30:13.720
even if they're lies, even if they're unhealthy and hurtful to those around them is not what's
00:30:19.520
wanting and what is it's not what is in their best interest. And so it actually is ultimately
00:30:25.440
selfish because really what you're doing is you're making it easy on yourself. The hard thing to do is
00:30:31.860
to actually love someone and to tell them the truth. I mean, that puts you in an awkward position,
00:30:36.880
not puts you in a self-denying position because it's uncomfortable. It's inconvenient.
00:30:41.420
And so I think part of this memetic crisis that you're talking about is very flimsy definitions
00:30:50.400
of what love looks like because it is ultimately selfish and ultimately just about what feels good
00:30:57.920
to you. If you love somebody, you need to be willing to tell them the truth. And if you truly care about
00:31:04.440
what's good for them and what's best for them. And I think we live in a world where our desires are far
00:31:10.040
too small, right? As C.S. Lewis said, right? The problem is not that our desires are too great.
00:31:14.420
It's that our desires are too small. And we satisfy ourselves with these petty little things,
00:31:19.680
right? We satisfy cravings by going on a new diet or buying some new thing. There's things to make
00:31:25.360
yourself feel better. Love is not a feeling. It's not a feeling, right? Love happens in the context of
00:31:31.260
loving acts in relationships. One of my favorite parts or scenes in all of literature is in the
00:31:37.660
Brothers Dostoevsky, where this old widow comes to this old monk priest and says, I've lost my faith,
00:31:43.720
right? I'm depressed. I don't know. God has abandoned me. And he says, practice active love,
00:31:49.000
practice loving people in an active way, not loving dreams, not loving your imagination,
00:31:54.260
but active love, attending to the needs of the people around you. And you will regain your faith.
00:32:01.060
You will then understand, right? So in a sense, it was her telling her to get out of herself,
00:32:06.960
right? It's the opposite of what most people are counseled to do today, right? Acts of love.
00:32:13.420
Yeah. We're constantly told, even by professing Christian teachers, that you can't love other
00:32:18.100
people until you love yourself, which is a very privileged and sad way to think that you can't
00:32:25.540
go out and meet the needs of other people until what? You've accepted the cellulite on your thighs,
00:32:30.740
until you like the reflection in the mirror. I mean, that is a fundamentally wrong understanding
00:32:36.760
of not just love, but also what compels us to love, which is Christians. We believe that the love of
00:32:42.300
Christ compels us to love. And if we have that in abundance and unconditionally, then no matter how
00:32:48.280
we feel about ourselves in any given moment, we are empowered to love other people. And that is why
00:32:53.840
like constantly in this conversation, I'm thinking, wow, Christianity really is like the only rational
00:32:58.440
answer to so many of the problems that we have today. Can you talk a little bit about disruptive
00:33:11.300
Disruptive empathy is a word or a phrase that I heard from my friend, Gil Bailey,
00:33:16.740
who used it. And it basically it's the mimetic thing to do is when somebody hates us or when
00:33:23.700
somebody is aggressive or passive aggressive to us, it is to imitate them. It's almost instinctual,
00:33:29.480
right? To do that. That is extremely mimetic behavior. Antimimimetic behavior is something we
00:33:36.620
have the ability to do as humans, which is to rise above the instinctual response and to love
00:33:43.580
somebody, even if they don't love us. And empathy is one way of doing that, right? It's refusing to
00:33:49.760
play the mimetic game of sort of tit for tat and to respond to people with the love of Christ, even
00:33:57.000
if they've never experienced it before, and even if they're hostile towards us. And I tell a story in
00:34:02.380
the book of where I sort of learned this lesson in a very scary way. When I had a guy who was essentially
00:34:08.680
a hitman show up at my door in Las Vegas to collect some money. And he and I engaged in roughly a week
00:34:18.680
long standoff with this. And one day, he found out that I was having a company party at my house in
00:34:25.880
Henderson. And he invited himself over to the party. And he showed up. And by the end of the night,
00:34:32.420
he decided that he just wanted to have like a human conversation with me. He ended up sort of
00:34:38.480
crying in my arms, I essentially practically cried in his arms. And he disrupted the sort of cycle of
00:34:45.500
animosity that the two of us had between us. And we realized that there was there was a misunderstanding.
00:34:52.160
Like within one second, the entire relationship was changed because he stepped out of the mimetic
00:34:57.700
sort of role that that he was playing. And that sort of, you know, is something that I've realized
00:35:03.440
that I have the power to do in any relationship in my life. I'm not a slave to the behaviors that
00:35:10.400
other people are displaying to me, I can choose to respond, right? I'm free to respond in it, not in
00:35:17.140
kind, but when the situation calls for it, it always calls for it in a loving way, right? I don't need to
00:35:23.040
just enter into the logic of, of the, of the, of the form or the way that other people love me. But it's,
00:35:28.800
it's tempting to do that. It's almost instinctual to treat other people the way that they treat us.
00:35:33.480
Yeah, that's interesting. And there is, I mean, there are toxic forms of fake empathy. It almost seems
00:35:41.160
like the idea of empathy is weaponized today, that if you don't agree with me on this political issue, then that
00:35:47.180
means that you are unempathetic. Again, kind of going back to what I think is the wrong definition of love,
00:35:52.800
that if you're not unconditionally affirming someone's choices or identity or whatever,
00:35:57.080
that means you are being unempathetic. Empathy is sometimes used, or at least the word empathy is
00:36:02.360
sometimes used is like a way to just like bludgeon and manipulate and extort your political enemies
00:36:10.500
into believing what you believe. But what you're talking about is a true loving other people as
00:36:18.200
Christ loved us, forgiving other people when it's hard to forgive them, loving other people when they
00:36:23.300
are unlovable, stepping out of your own selfish desires in order to be compassionate towards
00:36:30.700
someone else. It reminds me of your conversation or your interaction with the hitman, which by the way,
00:36:35.320
I feel like there's a lot more to that story. Crazy story.
00:36:37.620
There is. Proverbs 15.1, a soft answer turns away wrath. And that is kind of the Christian life is
00:36:47.160
responding to hostility and vitriol and anger with kindness and love.
00:36:54.440
Yeah. I mean, we need to be able to enter into another person's experience
00:37:00.460
and understand it without necessarily having to say that we agree with all of it. And it seems like,
00:37:11.320
you know, we're really confused, right? I think that sympathy literally means to see with the eyes
00:37:16.080
of another, to see things the same way. Empathy is a bit different, right? It means that I can enter
00:37:21.660
into the experience of another without losing my own self-possession, like losing my self-possession.
00:37:28.520
You know, I live in Washington, DC for most of the year. And in my younger days, especially when
00:37:35.400
somebody would sort of, you know, approach me on the street, right? Like pitching some hardcore
00:37:39.920
thing at me or asking me to sign something. I remember a couple of times I was sort of like
00:37:45.180
feigning agreement with them. And then I would get five minutes down the block and I'd be like,
00:37:49.120
wait a second. And I was like, it's so easy to lose our self-possession, right? We're scared to
00:37:56.580
speak the truth. We're scared to enter into those conversations, but real empathy, not the fake kind
00:38:01.320
of empathy where you just have to agree with everything that another person says or thinks
00:38:05.360
is being able to enter into the experience and say, you know what? I do understand what it's like
00:38:11.520
to be confused about who I am, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with the way that you're
00:38:17.400
going about this, this search or here. Like I want your good, right? So without, without abandoning
00:38:24.380
myself, my beliefs, my, my values without speaking the truth, that would not be loving another person.
00:38:32.480
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00:39:44.140
Tell me about the mimetic future, what we will want tomorrow.
00:39:51.200
Well, so this is where the three city problem really, I think, comes back into play,
00:39:54.780
where we have Silicon Valley, which again, stands in for a desire to innovate and create,
00:40:03.740
which is a good thing, right? As humans, we all have this desire to be co-creators,
00:40:09.620
co-creators with God. But when it becomes detached from teleology, when it becomes detached from
00:40:17.140
fundamental questions about who we are as humans and what we truly desire, then we risk building
00:40:25.400
things and creating a world in which we sort of just eliminate human desire altogether, right?
00:40:32.680
There are certain sort of like communist governments, right? Like desire is something
00:40:36.660
that they would prefer that people all desire the same thing or don't have any desires at all,
00:40:41.940
right? There's like an active effort. Desires are dangerous, right? So we can try to control other
00:40:47.580
people's desires and engineer other people's desires, build things that engineered and manipulate
00:40:54.340
desires, or we can do the hard work of transforming desires as a culture. So one is like sort of a
00:41:02.560
top-down approach, right? And then the other one is a bottom-up approach that depends on human
00:41:08.320
relationships and starts with those fundamental questions of if we as a culture completely reject
00:41:15.200
God, then our desires are going to be very, our desires can go no further than the things that
00:41:22.360
Silicon Valley creates, right? And we're always going to be, we'll be never satisfied, constantly
00:41:28.240
consuming, because that's, that's as big as our world, our universe of desire is. So again, it goes
00:41:33.740
back to that idea of, you know, C.S. Lewis, right? Like we, we don't desire enough. And I just wonder
00:41:38.920
what, what would happen in the world if we, if we thought of ourselves as, and the things that we're
00:41:44.440
building as affecting our desires. I don't think that almost anybody who's building things thinks
00:41:50.340
about the way that it's affecting human desires. Is this helping people want more? Is it helping them
00:41:54.980
want less? Is their desire moving horizontally? Or is it moving vertically? You know, we're not
00:42:01.440
building cathedrals anymore. We're not making beautiful art. And it seems to me like we're
00:42:05.700
sort of moving sideways. And I think the future of desire is going to depend on how we think about
00:42:10.260
that question. Yes. I want to just give kind of the practical advice that you tell people in your
00:42:17.480
book, just a few of them. There's really kind of 15 things that you tell people to do, but some of
00:42:22.600
that stuck out to me was find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis, create boundaries with
00:42:29.780
unhealthy models. So that means distancing yourselves from the people who function as unhealthy models of
00:42:36.420
desire, establishing, communicate a clear hierarchy of values, which of course is important for anyone,
00:42:42.380
but particularly Christians, map out the systems of desire in your world, put those desires to the
00:42:48.780
tasks. Just to kind of close this out, like, what does some of those things look like? What does
00:42:52.680
putting your desires to the tasks look like? And then living, as you say in your book, as if you have
00:42:57.160
a responsibility also for what other people want, not just what you want? Well, putting my desires to
00:43:03.680
the test or putting your desires to the test means not taking them, not taking them for granted and not
00:43:08.820
assuming that what you think you want is the most important thing in the world, right? Think reflecting on
00:43:14.520
where it's coming from. Is this a desire that's been generated by a social media app that I've been
00:43:19.900
scrolling, which I call a thin desire in the book? And a thin desire is the kind of desire that's kind
00:43:25.580
of here today, gone tomorrow. It's not grounded in anything real. It's just been, it just evaporates
00:43:32.220
like a pile of leaves that blows away as soon as there's a gust of wind, right? And we've all been
00:43:36.840
like that. We've all really wanted something and then we get it and we don't care about it and we throw it
00:43:42.380
away the very next day. That's a good indication that that desire is thin. Of course, thick desires,
00:43:47.960
right? These desires that are grounded in real things, in the love of God, right? And the desires
00:43:55.420
that ultimately, I would say, are the desires that are pointing us towards eternity, that are pointing
00:44:00.500
us beyond this world. Those are the desires that nobody can take away from us and that will never
00:44:04.300
disappoint us. And it's really important to test our desires up front, right? There are certain ways,
00:44:11.440
like, what does this do? Is this fruits of the spirit, right? I mean, the scripture tells us how
00:44:16.760
we can begin to test our desires, to understand if they're bringing us sort of the, you know, the
00:44:22.100
peace of God, if we're becoming more loving, if we're growing in faith, hope, and love, great
00:44:26.860
indication that that might be a non-memetic sort of a thick desire that's grounded in something beyond
00:44:32.920
the memetic moment, right? The current thing. So, testing desires is something that we can all learn
00:44:37.940
to do. It's a skill that we need to develop. It's a skill that school doesn't really teach us.
00:44:43.060
You know, school education really doesn't teach discernment. If you don't learn how to discern
00:44:48.360
in the family, they do the opposite, right? You're not going to learn it. So, you need to
00:44:53.100
realize that that skill of discerning your desires and where they come from and where they're going
00:44:57.600
is the most important skill that you can learn.
00:45:00.860
Awesome. Well, I really encourage people to get your book. You are sending us five books
00:45:06.260
for a giveaway, which I'm super excited about. We decided, okay, so the first five people
00:45:11.720
who haven't already subscribed to my YouTube channel, who do subscribe to my YouTube channel,
00:45:18.280
and then comment that you want the giveaway, we will send them a book and my team will reach out
00:45:24.880
to them and send them and get their information and all of that. Wanting the power of memetic desire
00:45:30.440
in everyday life. You can pick it up, I'm guessing, wherever books are sold online, probably, you know,
00:45:37.860
your brick and mortar bookstore as well. So, this was super interesting. I just recently started
00:45:42.960
following you on Twitter and I was like, I need to talk to this person. I've never really heard anyone
00:45:48.000
talk about it the way that you have. So, I just appreciate your thoughtfulness so much and the work
00:45:52.820
that you're doing in this arena. Where can people follow you? How can they support you?
00:45:58.100
Thanks so much, Allie. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm at LukeBurchase.com and I write
00:46:02.860
a weekly substack called Antimimetic, which is really all about trying to behave in
00:46:08.340
antimimetic ways, right? Just rejecting the negative forms of mimesis out there, right? Like all of these
00:46:15.420
illusions that are ultimately going to disappoint us. Yeah. Wow. So interesting. Thank you so much. I
00:46:20.160
really appreciate your time. Thanks so much, Allie.