College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang

Why college is a Girardian nightmare; *Big Little Lies* on HBO; Proust; memes; why America's greatest feature is both tolerance and rejection of mimesis.

I’ve written about René Girard’s ideas once before , to try my hand at identifying mimetic crises in the world of George R. R. Martin. Today I’d like to apply Girard’s ideas to another world in which people are driven to conflict over small differences and personal slights. (Rather than attempting to explain Girard’s ideas in depth, I leave concessions to the reader, and point instead to discussions from the Raven Foundation and the IEP . If you’re looking for a quick introduction to the life of Girard, take a look at his obituary in the Times .) Girard presents a model of human conflict

saved by

• Svitlana Midianko
• Benjamin Laufer
• Grace Nguyen
• Kaylee George
• Sydney Filler
• Varun Shenoy
• Claire Wang
• Gabby Chan
• Ratan Kaliani
• Eli Qian
• Aryan Naik
• Karthik Suresh

related reading

• Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard – Alex Danco's Newsletteralexdanco.com
• Diversifying mimicrysungjoo.substack.com
• The Prophet of Envynybooks.com
• Mimetic theory - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
• Peter Thiel's Religion - David Perellperell.com
• School, Homenotes.ekzhang.com
• Mimetic Contagionmimetictheory.com
• The Elite Overproduction Hypothesisnoahpinion.blog
• Girard, Rene | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophyiep.utm.edu
• graduate school is just a metaphorordinaryinstants.substack.com
• René Girard - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
• it's time to start bullying young Palantir employeesmalavika.substack.com