
College as an incubator of Girardian terror - bookofjoe
https://danwang.co/college-girardian-terror/
======
ixtli
I went to a very large state school about 10 years ago, and was in school for
six years and got two degrees. I'm really confused at the picture of
university life this person is painting:

> nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high
> school at age 18

> It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than
> the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated
> from each other.

> Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes

I'm not sure where this author went to college, but outside of a major city
like London or NYC, you'd be hard pressed to find a more experientially
diverse place (in America, at least) even amongst freshmen. Sure, there is
class self-selection, but this seems like a really naive statement at best,
and propaganda at worst. There were dorms specifically for married students,
and the state gave tuition breaks to people older than 30. The only way you'd
meet people who'd taken your classes is if you hung out in your department
socially. There were many colleges in the university and hundreds of
undergraduate courses: if you wanted to meet people who had no idea about what
you were studying you just had to go to a different dining hall at a different
time.

To be honest it seems like this person is observing that, in a large group
small sub-groups will form based on all sorts of criteria like geographical
closeness and experiential background, and within those groups "memes" will
spread efficiently the more similar people are? This doesn't seem novel or the
basis on to which to extrapolate that somehow the result is negative or in any
way new in society.

Anyway,

> Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a
> knitting circle or hiking group instead.

now _that_ is some advice I can get behind.

EDIT: After finishing the article it strikes me that this person may have gone
to a school that would be in the set he describes as "elite." I think this
might have warped his worldview because they're the only places where people
can unironically imagine America as a "meritocracy" as described.

~~~
akhilcacharya
OP, like many people on HN when talking about college, is hilariously out of
touch.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I don't think it's about being out of touch. Even among the most out of touch
people at the most out of touch schools, college students just don't behave
like he's describing. Could you imagine the stereotypical prep school kid
claiming that they're _better_ than you, more valuable or higher status,
because they got higher grades in an introductory class?

~~~
lonelappde
Um, yes?

Kids compete at whatever they are good at, including the cohort who are good
at academics. Jocks think weaklings are losers, and nerds think dumbdumbs are
losers.

Not everyone does, but everyone knows one.

~~~
mcguire
Sure.

But in most cases, that first semester of college beats that out of them.

------
throwno
I was watching one of the lectures on "Power Politics" that got upload to the
Yale youtube recently. They cover this in one of the lectures. They show video
of two monkeys in cages. One if given cucumber. It's content. Then the
researcher gives the other monkey a grape. The monkey with the cucumber now
throws out its cucumber, and rattles the cage when it doesn't get grapes. The
Yale presenter as an interesting interpretation of it, that it's not a protest
against inequality. The monkey is not enraged that the research has a bowl
full of cucumbers and grapes, it's furious that another monkey in a cage just
like it, is getting grapes instead of cucumbers.

[https://youtu.be/q53DF6ySOZg?t=2341](https://youtu.be/q53DF6ySOZg?t=2341)

~~~
mrob
It's the only protest against inequality that has any realistic chance of
succeeding. A monkey isn't going to seize the means of grape production.

~~~
DataWorker
Put enough of them together in a room with typewriters and they just might.

------
teamwork007
Has anyone else noticed a trend where people who tend to have an affinity for
Peter Thiel tend to also profess having their mind blown by the ideas of
Girard, specifically mimetic theory? It seemed like shortly after it became
well known that Thiel liked Girard, many people who find his form of
contrarianism as gospel suddenly migrated to viewing nearly everything through
the prism of Girard. When Zero to One came out, it was certainly refreshing,
but much of what Thiel does/states publicly aside from that comes across as if
he's a rather dimwitted political hack. Not to mention that Girard's views on
mimetic theory aren't that new to anyone who has kids and wants them to learn
from others.

~~~
throwno
I think the people who get their mind blown by Girard never read any other
literary theory. Yes, my 10x Rockstar Ninja friend, Girard is from the
literature department! Horror! But wait, what other mind blowing insights on
life might those English majors know that you don't? Uh oh!

~~~
chadcmulligan
Who else is there to read? They didn't do to much literary theory in my
engineering courses :-). I am finding lately the humanities do have something
to offer after all.

~~~
teamwork007
I suppose it's highly personal, but I'd say Carl Jung is pretty good. Also
Schopenhauer, Tillich, Niebuhr, Emerson, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, St. Augustine,
Will Durant, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche.. Plato and Socrates are usually good
starting points in the 'Western tradition'.

------
motohagiography
The basic problem is colleges aren't producing people who are sufficiently
distant/different from the people who don't go, and many of the ones who
graduate have a seething hatred for those who didn't, because the education
they sincerely believed would elevate them so that they could never ever be
confused for the non-group - did not.

These days you need to complete a top PhD before you can really either carry
off the conceit or afford the magnanimity that the views of less educated
people are not a threat to your social station.

STEM doesn't have this as much because if you don't have the maths, you really
aren't part of the conversation and so there's no risk to your social status
in fraternizing with the less-educated. Or as we cringingly (if not
sickeningly) refer to them, "the left behind."

I'm of the view that the culture war is primarily an example of this
"Girardian Terror," where in our good intentions we used the college system to
create a whole new class of precarious and economically cornered ideologues
equipped with nothing but resentment, and we're about to unleash them into our
institutions.

This decade is going to be a trip. :)

~~~
sandworm101
Except that it is increasingly possible to tell grads from non-grads. If all
you are concerned with is coding, there isnt much different. But of you look
for writing ability, communication capacity, and cultural knowledge, those
with only highschool or a few years of online junk really do stand out, not in
a good way.

~~~
ksdale
I think this is a good point, but I'm not entirely sure that these skills
distinguishes grads from non-grads. I think grads are much more likely to
possess these skills for sure, but I would guess that a large percentage of
grads don't possess these skills either (at least in my experience).

I don't intend this as a criticism, but rather just an observation, that
someone could see writing ability and communication capacity and cultural
knowledge and assume a grad, and thus make these types of observations a self-
fulfilling prophecy.

~~~
networkimprov
Great writers and orators are born, not made. In just the same sense as
musicians and artists.

Naturally all of the above hone their skills with practice, but the great ones
started from a different baseline.

~~~
strken
How can we tell the difference between great writers who are born, great
writers who end up on the edge of the Bell curve through random decisions
during childhood, and great writers who are deliberately raised to greatness?

Taking you literally, I can't see any reason why greatness should be
determined solely at birth.

------
downut
Before one takes the ideas of Rene Girard as seriously as I did, for quite a
few years, it might help to read a careful critique[0].

[0] [https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-
literatur...](https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literature-
professor-why-girardians-exist)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That was a great refutation.

Allow me to add one piece: Girard comes close to refuting himself. Why?
Because, if Girard is correct, then why do people believe Girard? _Not_
because he is correct, but _only_ because they are memetically infected by
some model. And why did that model believe it? Same reason. Nobody believes it
(or anything) on the basis of the actual truthfulness of the idea.

And then, where did Girard get it? _Not_ from a careful examination of the
evidence, but because he was memetically infected by some model. So it's not
original, and it's not based on evidence.

So if it's true, it destroys our ability to know whether _anything_ is
actually true, including itself. That is pretty strong grounds to not believe
it, in my book.

------
swiley
Wow! was my college experience weird? The only thing that felt like a "zero
sum" competition for me was dating (and that, only if you restricted yourself
to the engineering school. The whole university had a gender ratio of
something like 3:1.) Most interactions I had with people where pleasant. One
of the first interactions I remember was comparing Mandelbrot viewers with
another person that taught themselves to program in their teens. Neither was
"better" IMO: his was faster but required a specific Nvidia card, mine was
slower but could run on nearly anything including my e-ink kindle. Most of my
other friendships where like this, we built things and did things together and
that doesn't take anything away from anyone. My learning math doesn't make you
worse at it and your understanding of chemistry won't make me worse at it. I
think people tend to naturally turn things into zero sum competitions when
they really don't need to be.

I think the author is right though, it's true zero sum competitions that make
enemies and the only person I've ever thought of as an enemy was a "friend"
that my ex constantly visited at night before breaking up with me.

~~~
mannykannot
Could it be that dating was the only situation where you experienced the
feeling of being on the losing side?

~~~
swiley
But the only way to lose in the situations in the first paragraph is by just
not doing anything! Literally show up and do _something_ and you make
everything better for everyone including yourself!

~~~
mannykannot
Dating is not actually a zero-sum game either; the issue here is more about
perceptions than things necessarily being so.

~~~
lonelappde
If you are heterosexual in a non 1:1 balanced environment, then romantic
partners are a rivalrous good.

~~~
mannykannot
Sure, if the count is just of how many people are dating, but any such model
grossly oversimplifies the complexity of human relationships - though, for the
subset of people who approach dating with this mindset, it might be accurate.
This could also be said for a number of other 'games' mentioned in the
article.

------
glangdale
Try as I might, I could not escape the feeling that this article was simply
pretentious gibberish. It seems to largely draw its facts from vague 'torn
from the headlines' ideas about colleges (which are, as any reading of Big
Thinkpieces About The Decline of Practically Everything, uniformly full of
snowflakes hysterical about triggers etc. etc.).

If I was interested in a psychological depiction of what it's like to be a
pretentious business major with a keen interest in analyzing Game of Thrones
and kissing Peter Thiel's ass, I think this might have a good deal of merit.

~~~
jgalt212
Yes, it seems that preponderance of snowflakes are the journalists writing
such articles and the squeaky wheels on twitter.

------
NPMaxwell
It looks like part of Girard's ideas is that when life purpose and sense of
value is based on social comparisons, and actual differences are very small,
people become very prone to thinking the worst of others. The idea is that
these conditions make it hard to assume good intent and avoid assuming malice.
And that harm follows the resulting judgments of evil and injustice.

~~~
lonelappde
This is what people say about academia, that the politics is most vicious
because the stakes are smallest.

------
duelingjello
This is true. The hardest people on the poor, who are in favor of cutting
welfare, are the almost poor. Which is why they shouldn’t be listened to and
why leaders need to lead.

Another motivating aspect is that it’s “easier” to attack and defeat a nearly
equal rival than it is to defeat a much stronger enemy. For example, people
attack the weaker and poorer than themselves much more readily than they
attack their actual common enemy: the very rich. Instead, most people are
bitterly divided-and-conquered, ensconced in their separate, partisan echo-
chambers, accomplishing nothing. This is not to say adversarial partisanship
doesn’t have its place: two or more strong parties function as countervailing
powers to prevent either from gaining an upper hand. These days however, when
corruption is too extreme and too hedged, the major parties become different
flavors of tools of the rich.

Furthermore, when the established order appears weak or imploding, people tend
to move more naturally to the extremes of right and left, seeking utopian
solutions and populist demagogues.

What’s this means is that Marx was, inconveniently, correct about reality of
concentrated wealth and greed’s externalities but subsequent splintering
factions that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t
necessarily correct about the prescriptions. These days people must realize
that “a house divided cannot stand” and that vampiric billionaires have bought
most governments and mass media to such an extent that they are extincting
species at an incredible rate, doubling-down on climate change and causing a
widening gulf of inequality that hasn’t been seen in a century. People who are
relatively comfortable or are in destructive industries will do everything to
reinforce their cognitive dissonance and destroy those who challenge them with
inconvenient reality.

------
mwcampbell
> Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other.

I wonder if this is just elitism looking down on the great unwashed masses. I
confess that my own initial reaction was to agree with the claim, then start
composing a comment about how I _was_ different from the others. But I, as
much as anyone else, need to be careful not to stereotype a whole group of
people.

~~~
pm90
People here are really taking offense to the characterization of 18 y/o this
way since the first thought is to see where they fit in this model of reality.
But the author isn't speaking about individuals but aggregates; on the
average, the 18 y/o American kid is most likely unsure about what they want to
do in their lives, and are thrust into an extremely competitive zero-sum
environment of college. All the author is saying is that this isn't
representative of the real world, but people that go through this trauma might
continue to think this way into adulthood, leading to a toxic culture and
paradigm of the world.

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"René Girard’s most famous student did not take the threat of mimetic
contagion lightly when he ran a company. When Peter Thiel was the CEO of
PayPal, he tried to minimize mimetic contagion, possibly because the company
was hiring a bunch of kids who’ve been socialized in elite colleges. Keith
Rabois has recounted that as a manager,

 _Thiel allowed everyone to work on one thing and one thing only._

Rabois couches in terms of ridding distractions, but it’s clear that this is
good Girardian practice. People will not feel mimetic envy if they cannot look
at the work of others.

And:

"Thiel’s comments on management more generally are worth reading. The
Girardian themes are clear if one looks for them: “If you were a sociopathic
boss who wanted to create trouble for your employees, the formula you would
follow would be to tell two people to do the exact same thing. That’s a
guaranteed formula for creating conflict. If you’re not a sociopath, you want
to be very careful to avoid this.”"

------
hirundo
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said,
"Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A
Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too!
Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said,
"Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern
Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist
Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region."
I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern
Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern
Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die,
heretic!" And I pushed him over.

[https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religion)

~~~
NotSammyHagar
I was going to say there are a lot more religious groups than c or j, your
joke goes back to the interesting thesis here. I call it keeping up with the
"Joneses".

It's definitely something I see in the world, in my own behavior at times. But
it's not my only motivation in life. I have things I like to do that no one
else around me does, internal motivation. I'm hopefully not doing them in some
subconscious comparison to others that exist a 1,000 miles away. My interest
in certain unproved math. problems, or space research, or porn, or skiing or
cats or whatever - I can have my own desires. I don't buy it that
intrinsically I am unlikely to have no uniqueness.

~~~
walshemj
Its more a dark joke about the large number of protestant splinter groups that
founded most of the colonies.

Some left the UK and the Netherlands as those countries where to liberal in
terms of freedom of religion.

------
javelinaway
Girard makes all the same mistakes as Freud, but his cult followers don't know
that, because they don't read! They don't think! They are less conscious than
they imagine themselves to be. They're setting up a ghoulish little charade -
hopefully it doesn't go anywhere.

~~~
Lammy
Please don’t generalize and dehumanize entire groups of people like this even
if you disagree with them on a fundamental world view.

~~~
javelinaway
How did I dehumanize them?

~~~
Lammy
By saying they don't read and don't think. Telling yourself things like that
about any group of people makes it easier and easier to disregard them as
fellow humans entirely.

