How mimdic are you? It's one more thing.
I'm what was that word, mimedicmdic, mimedic, mimedic, mimetic with an eye medic.
I'm very frustrated with myself because, uh, you know that quote. I'm always thrown around about how I'm still looking.
For it as I speak at Do you think you're better than me? Yeah?
That quote guys, You guys are children.
No, that's your quote.
So, uh, the quote had to do with how women in large part and low testosterone males filter information, not through Is this true?
But more?
Is agreeing with this going to make me safer? In other words, people who can't defend themselves physically need more consensus because they need more tesperately to be part of a group to protect themselves physically.
It's an adaptive mechanism.
So that is one of the reasons why young women in particular m M it's such a priority for them to form alliances and to be seen as part of the group. And you see that in peer pressure, you see that in universities, screaming and screeching slogans that don't make any sense whatsoever, but it's and I can't remember the specific term for it. But again, it's not like rugged individual appraisal of truth. It's like if I go along with this, will that make my life better?
Anyway?
Okay, you're talking about like generally, Like if I'm in a like standing around with a group of people, somebody could say something completely stupid, whack job. I know is not true. I hate politically, but I'm not gonna say anything. I don't think it's because I got low t I just don't want to argue with them in that setting. But it doesn't change my beliefs an me. You mean like you actually like.
Go along with it, Yes, or at least you pretend to, much more actively than you're talking about. And if you're younger and more impressionable, And this is what we're going to get into with mimetic thinking, it tends to kind of seep into you and it becomes what you believe. I thought it was interesting on this topic. I was
reading Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal. He's talking about the whole Jake Tapper book and Joe Biden's senility and all that stuff, and he mentions all through this period The Times New York Times, Thomas Edsull wrote countless three thousand word pieces citing academics on mister Trump's incipient Hitlerism.
His constant subject was voter attitudes. Yet not once did the ancient and esteemed mister Edsull acknowledge that the three year long Russia fraud even happened or had any role in causing one hundred and fifty two million Americans in twenty twenty and twenty twenty four to repudiate the Establishment in favor of mister Trump and know this isn't strange.
Are intensely social animals.
Our psychology and behaviors are rooted in evolved obsession with status, i e.
Are standing with others.
According to a Population Reference Bureau, one hundred and seventeen billion humans have existed since our species emerged two hundred thousand years ago. How many of these humans ever used their brains for any purpose other than servicing their need to be in accord with those around them. Yet, had journalists been honest in the expected journalistic way acknowledging what was in front of their faces, the past ten years
would have been completely different. So anyway, he's talking about the fact that we just we want to be esteemed.
By our peers.
We want to be raised up in the tribe, and so we go along to get along, as they say. And one of our brilliant observant listeners sent along this essay by a fellow by the name of Luke Burgess.
What is mimetic desire?
And he says, nearly everyone unconsciously assume there's a straight line between them and the things they want. I wake up one day and suddenly realize that I want to run a marathon. Amazingly, all my friends had a similar
realization when they hit their mid thirties. Two or I get the brilliant idea that substack is objectively the best publishing platform for my long form essay writing based on all the data, right around the time that everyone else in their mother seems to be arriving at the same conclusion. And he says, I decided to get a dog during COVID because well, I've been wanting a dog for a long time, and now seems like as good a time as ever. Never mind that I'm the only one in
my friend group who hasn't. And these guys share pictures of their puppies on Instagram along with the rest of the world.
On a nearly daily basis.
In each of these cases, I've convinced myself that my desire is independent and autonomous. I want to pursue things just because it makes sense, or it's the right thing to do, or it's what I authentically want or need to be happy.
I decide that I want to wear this color shirt has nothing to do with the fact that it has become popular, Right, Yeah, I just like the color. This all happens beneath my conscious awareness. Very few people question why they want the things they want at all. This assumption that my desires are all my own, this story that I tell myself is what the French social scientist
Drenage Gerard called the romantic lie. The lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some kind of some kind of secret desire chamber in my heart, that I know a good thing when when I see it, that I know what's desirable and what's not unaided.
Then he goes into the.
Example of Julius Caesar. He was an excellent romantic liar. So this is this is a distraction. Well, No, the Julius Caesar examples specifically.
Right, Yeah, is somebody suggesting that this is bad though, that we should fight against this, or is this okay? This is just playing out this part of human nature.
I think what they're pointing out is you'd be better off if you better understood what's going on in your own head.
Oh that's scary, because I don't know if I want to wear unpopular clothes, get dogs at the wrong time, you know, have a haircut that nobody else likes.
Or whatever. Just start reading some stack. Yeah, right, having iguana instead of a dog. Yeah.
The truth between us and the things we want is never straight. It's always curved. It goes through or around models. Here's one called mediated desire. Models are people, groups are things that help us know what we want. And then he quotes Hermi and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is one of Shakespeare's more entertaining places. Oh, hell, to choose love by another's eyes, the plot being that this one guy decided everybody was hot for this check, so
he was too. That's that is a horrible summary.
Please don't write an angry email. I just want to keep moving.
That does happen?
I remember that from high school, which I didn't realize at the time that was a weird thing that happened a few times, a couple of times, and the rehearse also, and then with a distance of hindsight, it was like, how did she be him become I mean, not to sound crueler, but she wasn't that great? I mean, why was everybody thinking she was the person and then that other person super attractive?
Why was nobody interested in her? And sweet and kind and the rest of it. But yeah, you kind of didn't notice till your buddy was hot for her. Anyway, he says. It's hell to know we've chosen anything by another's eyes, but we do it all the time. We choose brands, schools, and dishes at a restaurant by them.
Humans have a built in instinctual radar for most of our basic needs, like animals do for trapped outside in the cold, freezing, Nobody needs to tell us to seek warmth, basic survival sustenance.
Not true.
Animals need radio weather people and TV radio.
Stay in the shade today it's hot, yeah, exactly. Basic survival sustenance, sex, warmth. These are all instinctual needs for which we have biological mechanisms to guide us. If I'm starving and see a juicy steak and a piece of wood in front of me, I don't need much help to determine which one I should eat. My body tells me what to choose. But these things are not desires per se. It's more important appropriate to call them needs.
A desire, on the other hand, is an object that we pursue for which there's no purely instinctual basis.
I don't want to think about this too much so because then you start getting into so I'm not.
The unique human being I think I am.
I bought this car, these shoes, watching this show, live in this all because of some sort of wanting to fit in fit in.
Yeah, I don't want to think about that.
Maybe it's the benefit of the fact that this is the second time I've approached this, because I've gotten past.
Your animal like reaction to this wisdom.
Oh, by the way, if you'd like to sign up for my how to be Condescending workshops, we've got openings next Tuesday. No, so, I've had a chance of noutilists through a little bit, and this is a very long essay.
I don't think it's Paywaald.
We'll we'll post it under May twenty seconds hot links at Armstrong and getty dot com. I'll getty you guys in a few minutes. But in digesting this, and I tell you what, do I read one more part? No, I'll just get to the punchline.
Maybe if you hadn't skipped the Caesar part, I would understand it.
It's the I came, I saw I conquered thing. But he was just he was deluding himself anyway. I think what it boils down to is we're made over. You know, even before Homo sapiens were in control, we had you know, predecessors, so we've been around for long term time. As an animal, we're made to say, huh, they may have a point, or wait a minute, we're all a tribe here and and my friends who protect me and love me or whatever,
and we eat together, and they think this thing. I need to take it seriously or I think that's a flaw or demeaning at all.
Really we're insulting a lot of what is.
Evolutionary is pretty easily explained.
It just I don't like to think about it because I would like to think I'm more you know, not just doing that, but yeah, it makes sense. You look at that family over there, they're surviving. I should probably pay attention to what they're doing because they're surviving.
Yeah.
It gets interesting when it extends to things that are completely abstract, like what color pants or how high your genes should rise. Of course, some of that's just social acceptance.
Yeah, I think it all fits together.
Or oh, sure, is the wood in the house dark now?
I thought it was light. No, it's back to dark now. Okay, so it's going to become light again in like fifteen years, yes.
Okay, yeah, and then he gets into the concept of desire. Desire always needs something to latch onto. It can't stay free floating. In this sense, it operates like a bicuspid that has to be attached to a substrate, a rock, or.
Some other surface that's like a clam or a muscle or whatever.
As soon as it becomes detached from one thing and immediately attaches itself to something else, another model, there is no end to desire because there are always more models. The overnight bitcoin millionaire doesn't start wanting less or even simpler things. He starts taking an interest in rare fish aquariums, Nordic cooking, and traveling to obscure places he reads about in his Monocle magazines.
I don't know what that is.
Desire.
According to Renege, your art is always for something we think we lack, or else it wouldn't be desired at all. Desire is not object oriented, as we commonly assume. Desire needs to find fulfillment in never finds fulfillment in any particular thing.
It just goes from one thing to another, to another to another.
That has certainly been my experience in something I've talked to my specifically my youngest son about always always wanting something that is gonna make.
Him happy, and obviously it never works.
Yeah.
I was visiting my parents' church years and years and years ago, and I wish I had gotten or kept a written copy of the sermon. They ended up leaving the church because the guy was the minister was a bit of an egotistic dick, or at least so they said, and my parents would never be harsh about that sort
of thing unless it was true. But the guy was a hell of a good speaker, and his sermon was about lust and not sexual lust, although he touched on that but he was talking about how exactly what this is about, how your desire will move from one thing to another to another if you let it run wild and you're not aware of what it's doing. It's like, I've become acutely aware that I like to look at real estate porn, as I've called it through the years.
I just I'm really interested in real estate in general as a market, but I will look at like, really nice houses for sale four weeks after I've bought a house, and I've realized it's a lust, like it gives me a shot of endorphins, and how it would be cool to own that house or to live there or whatever. And now I've intellectualized it because I try to be aware of this stuff. Am I emotionally attracted to this? Why do I want that? Why am I going along
with that? And I've realized the minute you buy that house, you'll be doing this again, hawk to trot for another one. It's a desire that always wants to latch onto something new.
I laughed in agreement, because I was thinking about that. I go on Zillow and Redfinn and all of those real estate websites all the time. Just look yeah, And I'm not on the market. I just moved, you know, I'm I and I love my home. But I have so much fun looking at these homes and going, oh my god, if I could, if you know, if I could live there, that would be pretty and cool. But you're right, if I moved there, I would still be doing this.
Yeah.
And so the point of the sermon was that recognize lust in all of its forms. You know, you move from for dudes, woman to woman to woman straight dudes.
Do you have to say that these days?
I guess anyway, because he keeps lusting for something new and different, and you're never gonna satisfy it.
You're just gonna keep doing it.
And you ought to be aware of that and be more disciplined as a Christian or you know, just whatever sort of person you want to be.
Giggley giggity giggity giggity. All right, do you want to hear the Caesar stuff? No, I don't good. I don't want to tell you. I think we rolled enough tape. I feel like that was asking if we wanted homework.
Yeah, that's funny, you.
Know, Joe.
I also lest for real estate.
I find myself I was squat in one house, and then I get to see the other house and I go squat over there. I think, why am I squatting in this stump? I'd be happy if I was squatting over there.
When you get there, you squat, and what happens, Well, I guess that's it.
That's a good ending. Michael, You're a treasure.