myth / mimesis / contrarianism

myth as world constitution

When someone hands you a $100 bill, your immediate experience is not that of holding a rectangular piece of green linen-cotton paper. You experience purchasing power (or scarcity, or relief). If the shared myth of fiat currency disappears tomorrow, the physical atoms don’t change at all, yet the object in front of you literally ceases to be money.

The grammar of experience is myth–myth is to experience as grammar is to speech. You cannot separate an experience from the concepts (cause and effect, value, danger, utility) that make it intelligible. Whether modern people prefer to call their frameworks “science,” “economics,” or “common sense,” at the level of society and epistemics, myth is simply the socially shared version of the narratives that constitute our reality.

Why do we build these myths? For survival and stability. Time is just the rate at which things change, and humans cannot compound or survive in pure chaos–we rely on the sun rising and the river staying in its bed. Therefore, we organize our myths hierarchically. The transient, everyday particulars of life are the profane (in Mircea Eliade’s terms), and we anchor them to a few core myths that we treat as eternal, unchanging, and resting on nothing further: the sacred.

No object or myth is perfectly stable, just as the experience it constitutes is not. Every concept only gets its meaning by differing from and deferring to other concepts [0]. Our collective knowledge (the episteme) isn’t a monolith with all parts organized in some self-consistent way. It is highly dynamic and decentralized, especially in the age of the internet and algorithms. What is considered “the sacred” is a place where the process of deferral has stopped creating new knowledge–where there is a mutual agreement to suspend disbelief.

girard, mimesis, and the scapegoat

How do myths and desires propagate across societies? Girard’s point is that our desires are mimetic: we imitate models. And we don’t simply want what the model has (our object of desire), but rather their Being (their apparent self-sufficiency and fullness of reality).

This is primarily a consequence of the social nature of mythology. Not only are desires socially shared for the sake of Being, but all of our mythology–our very understanding of the object–comes socially. It is not just a point of desire. Our copying does not end with what others want (or even their Being); we copy how others constitute the world.

Girard further develops what happens in rivalry. When everyone imitates the same models, rivalry and “undifferentiation” (chaos) erupt. To resolve the crisis, the crowd mimetically converges on a single scapegoat, sacrifices them, and institutionalizes the resulting peace as a sacred myth.

On the level of prehistoric societies–and even modern ones up to the 1960s through the 1980s–this could have worked. The epistemic fabric was highly centralized within societies. The same shows came on TV, and the same actors appeared in all the movies; there was a unified culture, a monoculture. The existence of this monoculture was best exemplified by there even being an identifiable, single counterculture.

Today, algorithmic feeds and media bubbles have turned the episteme into a decentralized rhizome. There is no central consensus, no central culture. There are no “uncontacted tribes” by which to treat micro-cosmically. A scapegoat in one subculture is irrelevant to another.

the fallacy of contrarianism

Because Silicon Valley thinkers read Girard, they try to hack the consensus by taking extreme, edgy, or “politically incorrect” positions to yank the Overton window toward themselves.

The fallacy in this assumption is that there is no single Overton window to shift. In a decentralized episteme, going extreme doesn’t shift the median; it radicalizes your loyalists while alienating every other cluster, manufacturing pure polarization instead of consensus.

From this, a mental hazard arises: the belief that contrarianism is simply negating the norm or becoming the radical cluster. The true spirit of contrarianism is being orthogonal to the consensus. Because of their inability to make non-consensus ideas legible, these thinkers take the path of naive contrarianism. It used to be the case that inverting the norm was a good way to pique people’s interest and develop interesting ideas, but our understanding has been totally politicized. It is no longer possible for substance alone to override an initial reaction.

aesthetics, compression, and post-irony

It is still possible to bring contrarian ideas into the mainstream. Another place where Girard went wrong is the idea that once the scapegoat mechanism was revealed, the chaos itself would end.

Instead, once the extent of a form’s construction (hyperreality) is revealed, we get post-irony. Awareness that the form is constructed becomes part of the form itself, laundering our participation.

Furthermore, humans are creatures of compression and illogic. It is impossible–and bad for survival–for a single human to think purely logically about all things. Humanity’s intelligence is much more collective than one might believe. Irrationality on a local level allows for deep exploration before pruning, since the search space of all knowledge is so vast. The heuristic for this search on an individual level is aesthetics. Ideas very rarely propagate purely on substance; instead, they spread through politicized derivations and aesthetic shorthands. Your idea has to be desirable and communicable to the lowest common denominator [1].

Our vocabulary has been highly politicized. Two ideas identical in substance but communicated in different political dialects can provoke entirely different reactions. You can often convey contrarian ideas by translating them into specific dialects.

The naive contrarian thinks substance will eventually override the initial aesthetic reaction. This will never work; you must first make the idea legible and feel native to the clusters that never would have produced it. It’s not enough to make a pocket computer; you have to craft an iPhone.

[0] Derrida’s différance.

[1] I think it’s critical not to underweight how these “illogical” heuristics have aided collective human intelligence in navigating the search space. There is something fundamental about the value of widely accepted, reality-bending ideas–even more so than ones that seem highly effective and rational–mostly because of the limits of individual human rationality..