“What opportunities can’t I see because they’re not prestigious enough?”
“You don’t really outperform your peers with quality per se, you outperform your peers by finding underpriced quality that others don’t judge to be valuable.”
Girard’s philosophy teaches us that the world is filled with under-priced opportunities that are only available to people who are comfortable with promising, but low-status projects.
The modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soom emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything … More and more often they’re obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things …
– René Girard, When these things begin
What a bleaking future will bring to you? Nothing. Withdraw to our own bubbles? No. Only united and keep communicating for a fair and free world.
Hobbes: “if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.”
Spinoza: “By the very fact that we conceive a thing, which is like ourselves, and which we have not regarded with any emotion, to be affected with any emotion, we are ourselves affected with a like emotion. Proof… If we conceive anyone similar to ourselves as affected by any emotion, this conception will express a modification of our body similar to that emotion.”
“They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition; the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position.”
Not all desire is mimetic. But some desire is mimetic. Desire is as real as imaginary. It comes and goes. It creates and destroies.