I gave this talk the other night to a high school youth group and was asked to supply the notes or a recording. All I had were crib notes, so I committed to writing everything down while it was still reasonably fresh. Here it is.
Why do we want the things we want? We want food when we’re hungry and water when we’re thirsty. We want shelter from the weather and other things along those lines. The thing is, nobody needs to tell us that when we’re hungry, the right thing to want is food. We already know this. It’s built-in. Ditto for water, shelter, and the other essentials of life.
For nearly everything else, however, we have to learn what to want, and we learn this by watching other people. We see what they want, and then we learn to want it too. The Greeks called this mimesis, which is similar to mere imitation but conveys something deeper, more complete - something trying to be perfect. Mimesis is neither good nor bad. It’s just a description of how we tend to act and learn to do the things we do.
A French thinker named René Girard spent a lot of time studying literature and mythology and he began to discover some patterns that he put together into a theory. His theory turns out to be pretty useful in understanding the way people act today and as more people have begun to discover his work, his ideas are getting a lot of traction. I won’t go into all of them in this talk but will focus on two of them which, I believe, are important for the ways we approach technology generally, and social apps in particular.
His first idea is that human desire has three parts: me, another person, and the thing we both want. It may be that the other person already has this thing, or maybe we’re both competing for it. If you’ve ever watched toddlers playing, you’ve seen this level of desire in action. Everyone is occupied with various toys until one child reaches for something that no one else is playing with. All of a sudden, that particular toy is the center of attention. Everyone wants it, even if nobody noticed it before. The room erupts in noise. Girard says that this is mimetic desire at work. The moment I see you wanting something, I want it too.
If you think about it, this idea makes perfect sense. It’s the reason athletes get big endorsement deals and advertisers use celebrities or other aspirational figures to kindle our desires. It’s the basis for the entire influencer economy online.
But, like the crowded playroom, it doesn’t take long for tensions to start rising. People who desire the same thing begin mirroring each other. I begin modeling myself on you to get the thing you have. You, in turn, begin modeling yourself on me because of what I want. You’ve maybe seen this in friend groups, where two people are on the outs because “so and so does nothing but copy me!” These tensions continue to rise and spread through the entire group or community, and will come to a point of crisis where they threaten to tear everything apart.
Girard’s second idea concerns what happens next. In many cases, the group, without realizing it, makes use of a escape valve to let out the tension. He called this the scapegoat mechanism. During this period of crisis, someone - usually someone who is somehow set apart from the others - is identified as the cause for the crisis. Things were going along just fine, someone says until so-and-so came along. After that, everything went to pieces.
Then a second person agrees. You’re right, they say. Things were pretty good. Then a third person joins, and a fourth. Can you see what’s happening? A group of people who were all fighting with one another a little while ago…are all suddenly on the same side. The tension starts to vanish and people begin feeling better. The only thing left to do is get rid of the person somehow and finish the job. In the stories Girard studied, this usually meant killing the person, but at a minimum, it meant exiling them from the community. When it was done everyone was sure that they had done the right thing. The cause of the crisis had been identified and removed, and see? Everyone feels good again, and everything is fine now…or at least until tensions begin to rise again, and the cycle is repeated.
You now know everything you need to know about the way the social media economy works, so now we can talk about your phones.
Nearly all of you raised your hands when I asked about mobile phones and applications: TikTok, Clash of Clans, Spotify, Instagram, and so on. Let’s take Spotify for a minute. If you’re a subscriber, you’re paying so much per month. You can run some rough math and figure out, based on the number of subscribers, how much they might be making. In reality, it’s a little more complicated than that, but we’ll keep it easy and just stop there. What about the other apps that were mentioned? It’s safe to say, I bet, that you’re not paying anything for them. Yet these companies are worth billions and billions of dollars. How can this be?
The simplest reason is that you are not the customer, since you’re not the one paying them. You’re the product. You’re what the company is selling. Everything you do, see, pause over, like, comment on, and share. Everywhere you go, everyone you talk to, and everything they like and share. All of this information about you is worth more than gold, and it’s the reason these companies are making so much money. They only make money while you’re using the apps, so they have very smart people - some of the smartest in the world - making sure you keep using them. You should probably know that even if you’ve never heard of Girard, these folks have. They know his books very well, and they use his theory to make a lot of money off of you. Google “rene girard silicon valley” and see for yourself.
They do this by doing the two things we’ve already discussed: giving us more things to want, keeping us angry and in a state of memetic crisis, and making it easy to find a scapegoat to release the tension. Tech generally, and social media in particular, remove a lot of the friction that might otherwise slow down the scapegoat mechanism. It’s one thing to accuse someone face to face; it’s quite another to do it via a DM, tweet, or Insta comment. We’re embodied people - we exist in real life, and authentic communication and relationships require an embodied element. Absent that, and we’re very quick to say the worst of things, pile on someone else, and kick them out of a group. Look around online at large social media sites and suddenly, it’s all you can see: groups fighting with one another over fault, or destroying themselves by infighting. The memetic crisis is perpetual online.
To be clear, it’s perpetual offline as well, but it tended to move a bit slower because embodied relationships have a certain thickness to them.
So now what? As a father, I’d love nothing more than to dump the whole mess into the deepest part of the ocean, but it’s simply not practical. This is the water you swim in, so I have a responsibility to be in it with you. But if you know what’s driving the mechanics of this whole thing, you can use it a little more wisely. So here are a couple of tips:
First, choose your models carefully! Imitating a friend or co-worker because you’re competing for the same thing can - and often will - lead to tensions and hurt, but mimesis needn’t be a bad thing. If your friend is trying to be a saint, “copying” them is no threat at all! Why not? Because she can’t use up all of God’s grace and leave none for you! Competing for something inexhaustible is the way to go.
Second, keep an eye on the rush to find the scapegoat. Now that you know about this, don’t be surprised if you start seeing it in action everywhere. I’d wager it drives most (all?) online drama these days. We want to make sure we don’t habituate ourselves to it, and bring the worst of the online world into our real, human relationships.
Here is a list of resources for learning more about René Girard and his theories. His books are not very long but can be somewhat challenging to read. He was an academic writing for other academics and built his theories over time and not as one grand, unified system. The two collections below are a good way to get started. Luke Burgis has studied Girard extensively and writes very well about navigating the world in light of these theories. And nobody discusses these ideas better than Bishop Barron.
