an intellectual understanding didn’t immediately translate to changed behavior ... Thiel: the flattery of self-sufficiency is powerful, ... you find yourself trapped in all these bad mimetic cycles, a lot of resistance, ... mimetic theory pushes against the idea that we’re all these atomistic individuals
Equality is good. Sameness is generally not—unless we’re talking about cars on an assembly line or the consistency of your favorite brand of coffee. The more that people are forced to be the same—the more pressure they feel to think and feel and want the same things—the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves.
Animals imitate sounds, facial expressions, gestures, aggression, and other behaviors. Humans imitate all of those things and more: retirement planning, romantic ideals, sexual fantasies, food preparation, social norms, worship, gift-giving rituals, professional courtesies, and memes. We’re so sensitive to imitation that we notice the slightest deviance from what we could call acceptable imitation. If we receive a response to an email or text that doesn’t sufficiently tone-match, we can go into a mini-crisis. Communication practically runs on mimesis.
There’s a false dichotomy between imitation and innovation. They’re part of the same process of discovery. Some of history’s most creative geniuses started off by simply imitating the right model.
Being anti-mimetic is having the ability, the freedom, to counteract destructive forces of desire. Something mimetic is an accelerant; something anti-mimetic is a decelerant. An anti-mimetic action—or person—is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream
Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives. Thin desires, on the other hand, are highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow. Desires feel very strong when we’re young—to make a lot of money, date a person with certain physical attributes, or become famous. The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is. As we get older, many of our adolescent feelings of intense desire fade away. It’s not because we realise that some of the things we wanted are no longer attainable. It’s because we have more pattern recognition ability and so can recognise the kinds of desires that leave us unfulfilled. As a result, most people do learn to cultivate thicker desires as they age.
a fundamental truth about what it means to be human: we are not entirely our own, but exist in a web of relationships connected by desire
we find ourselves in a cycle of destructive desire ... it’s deadly because people don’t seem to think there’s any alternative ... society is decadent and stagnant because it lacks hope ... the soil in which thick desires grow ... the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (fourth critical) possible ... without the conviction that the fulfilment of a desire is possible, there is no hope ... for lack of vision the people perish
tacit knowledge—what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called “inarticulate rationality.” These are things we know but can’t explain intuition
metamorphosis - (Greek word for) a total transformation from within, one that isn’t wholly patterned on any one particular model, substantial transformation—which is, at root, a transformation of desire—is painful