Mark Gagnon

Founder of memes.

found her memes in a way.

Yeah.

In a way.

Mimetic desire.

He worked at Stanford and then that was like his last thing.

He was a devout Catholic intellectual and he, you know, would work with like a bunch of different scholars and like publish his ideas.

Basically, the idea behind mimetic theory is that from Rene Girard's perspective, that basically humans have desires that are imitated, right?

So everything is imitation.

So we don't organically come up with desires just like one person might have a desire organically and then the other people mimic that desire.

Or there's some type of like cohabitational force where two people are desiring the same thing simultaneously and then everyone else mimics that.

So you basically just create this convergence of desire where people want stuff.

And wanting of those things creates rivalry.

And from that rivalry creates violence.

Now, Rene Girard has a theological component to this where he's like, the way that you absolve that violence is through the revelation of the gospels.

So the power of Jesus Christ.

Right.

Peter Thiel has kind of co-opted this whole idea to say there's intrinsic rivalry and competition and violence, and the way to solve that is with Palantir technologies.

I mean, sort of, I'm taking a leap here, but he kind of is saying like, he's building on this idea and this like Catholic intellectual framework to be like, we need a way to stop this violence.

And how do you stop it?