.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Monday, April 18, 2022

Welcome Back to Fight Club...?



From the mimetic theory perspective, freedom from oppression and equal opportunity among societal members increases conflict rather than solves societal problems because it promotes sameness rather than ordered differences. It should be noted that Girard is making a descriptive claim here rather than an ethical one:
Modern people still fondly imagine that their discomfort and unease is a product of the strait-jacket that religious taboos, cultural prohibitions and, in our day, even the legal forms of protection guaranteed by the judiciary system place upon desire. They think that once this confinement is over, desire will be able to blossom forth; it’s wonderful innocence will finally be able to bear fruit. None of this comes true.33

Source  h/t- Oaxaca Dave

---

Mimetic desire often operates rather peacefully among persons in relation-ship.21 Think of numerous scenarios involving humans in unequal power relation-ships (for example, parent-child, master-apprentice, and so on) who get along just fine so long as there is one of the pair who is viewed as having less power than the other. When distinctions or social differences between the two remain stable and easily identifiable, mimetic desire moves unidirectionally (from apprentice to master) and the system is considered ordered, stable, and cooperative. These clear hierarchical relationships involve a safe psychological distance between persons and represent non-competitive, learning interactions. Indeed, the suggestion is that mimesis operating in this way has been fundamental to ways in which humans, indeed cultures, have come into being and continue to evolve.

---

Mammals of all sorts contend with mimesis, as seen in their competition for food, mates, and territory, but non-human animals have a more well-defined hierarchical system of domination established that allows them only rarely to come to full blows when one animal desires what the other has.35 You see this with dogs moving toward food. Very quickly, each animal senses the dominance or submission of the other, and the submissive animal will quickly back away from the bowl. Monkeys whose amygdala are stimulated will automatically attack another monkey except if that other monkey is the more dominant one.36 Thus, in much of the non-human mammal kingdom, mimesis is present, but less likely to spiral out of control due to the smaller brains leading to the more ordered, established hierarchical systems of dominance and submission characteristic of their environments.
Notes:

21 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 283-291.

33 Girard, Things Hidden, 285.

35 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 100-103.

36 Hannes Rusch and Sergey Gavrilets, “The Logic of Animal Intergroup Conflict: A Review,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (May 2017).


For ultimately we are twins forever locked in a battle to the end...

9 comments:

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

Killing one bishop makes half the board safer for the king ;)

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

...and his army

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

Keep in mind that Clausewitz was writing lessons from the perspective of a defeated general ;)

Joe Conservative said...

Defeats offer many opportunities to learn.

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

If you can live through them..

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

What does it profit a man to gain his whole cannon battalion but lose his supply lines ;)

Joe Conservative said...

Depends upon when it enters the field, don't it? And the caissons, go rolling, along.

;P

Joe Conservative said...

:)

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

Nah, let's listen to some former KGB desk jockey that never fought a war much less won one :P