In an essay on Peter Thiel by David Perell.
Girard wrote that social differences and rigid hierarchies maintain peace. When those differences collapse, the infectious spread of violence accelerates. The fiercest rivalries emerge not between people who are different, but people who are the same. The more two people share the same desires, the greater the risk of Mimetic competition.
I arrived at this essay following a thread from a link posted by Tyler Cowen. You can tell that Tyler absorbed this idea long ago, because he has often argued that people in the middle of the income distribution are more fiercely jealous of their neighbors than they are of the very rich, who are remote.
Now, think of us in the past two decades being brought closer together by the Internet. What chaos might result?
This is an insight very much supported by biology. Rigid niche differentiation, even between extremely closely related, interbreeding populations (this generalizes down to bacteria, maybe viruses) promotes peace and productivity. Potential overlap and opportunity for redundancy either promotes or activates latent violence.
The question of whether humans are somehow special/exempt from this biological reality because they ‘can’ do all sorts of things and thus must be permitted to fulfill their own dreams is something that Girard has a unique perspective on – because he studied first how people came to have these dreams/visions of their own potential. He called it mimetic desires; and it is something like ameoba ball soccer with young children – they never play their own position, they chase the ball, the activity, the potential for glory with reckless abandon. They decide what to want not by a cold evaluation of what is good for themselves, nor by a careful adherence to the standard good of the team, but by quickly observing what other people appear to want.
This is not a biological evil – at the root, using others experiences and senses to quickly assess what is good or bad is a solid heuristic. But it quickly gets distorted; and further, to confuse it with anything more ethereal is foolishness. People decide that they, too, deserve to be … well, things that are glorious and popular, not things that are necessarily good for themselves nor for society.
The insight that “The fiercest rivalries emerge not between people who are different, but people who are the same” is one idea, and one most of us will agree with.
Then we are presented with a second, entirely separate idea:
“…social differences and rigid hierarchies maintain peace. When those differences collapse, the infectious spread of violence accelerates.”
Does this second idea stand up? For it to make any sense, it requires a repudiation of the first idea.
We create rigid social hierarchies to maintain peace, because we believe it helps to group people with those whom they are most prone to fierce rivalries???
Then, when these rigid hierarchies break down, it increases violence. Why? We just claimed we lack the same sense of mimetic competition from other classes. Why does less jealousy and a greater range of opportunity cause more violence?
Some of this can be explained by rapid change. When rigid hierarchies break down, by definition, a social order is undergoing rapid fundamental changes, and everyone starts to fight for their position. That is different from arguing that the rigid hierarchy was a better equilibrium to begin with.
There’s a good critique of Girard called “René Girard’s world of fantasy” by C. R. Hallpike (this is he: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robert_Hallpike):
http://www.hallpike.com/Rene%20Girard's%20world%20of%20fantasy.pdf
In the marginal squeeze for government money the broader group will have marginal trader who abandon the group to be first in line at the compromise. Like California, with limited tax money we have nurses unions and teaches unions fighting limited taxes. Then, on the margin, California gets engaged in long tax battles with their comrades in the Swamp.
Boundaries break pretty fast when resources are limited.
“a lot of Americans live very well, even if they don’t enjoy all of the benefits of the lifestyles of the very wealthy. It is quite possible that a person in the upper middle class is happier than a billionaire. Even the middle class has access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet, and cable TV, not to mention a heart bypass operation, if needed. [… .] In terms of income, the gap between rich and middle class is growing, but in terms of happiness it is relatively low by broader historical standards.
[… .] a lot of envy is local. People worry about how they are doing compared to their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, their co-workers, and the people they went to high school with. They don’t compare themselves to Michael Bloomberg, unless of course they are also billionaires. When the guy down the hall gets a bigger raise, perhaps by courting the boss, that’s what really bothers us. In other words, envy and resentment are not going away and they also do not stem fundamentally from the contrast between ordinary lives and the lives of the very wealthy.
[… .] A lot of wealth today hasn’t been earned fairly, but still a lot of it has been the result of hard work and creativity, even if mixed in with good luck. The United States is still a society of business and a lot of businessmen provide great value to our economy. The weight has not swung to the point where there is more unearned wealth than earned wealth and so Americans identify with business and a business ethic, especially compared to attitudes in Europe.”—Tyler Cowen, “Keeping Envy Local in Income Disparity,” The New York Times (April 18, 2011)
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/21/rising-wealth-inequality-should-we-care/keeping-envy-local-in-income-disparity
My Dad had heart bypass surgery when he was middle aged. He had a good union job that paid decent and had great health benefits. That union was busted within the last ten years and wages went down 50% and the health benefits were lost.
I’m fairly confident that under these new employment terms my Dad would not have survived the two years he was recovering from heart surgery. It was a near run thing with the best of care, and it was also a near run thing with us losing our house.
The stuff on Tyler’s list are all the things on the inflation chart that are down 90%. What about the stuff that is up 500% (healthcare, education, housing). When my parents wanted to save money, they could cut the cable bill. How exactly would they save money on those other things? Not buy my Dad treatments he needed? Move into a slum? As it stands they did hawk my piano for cash so I had to give up lessons (education).
I mean I guess medicaid would have covered him if we were completely broke, but that means being completely broke. It means losing our house and living hand to mouth in poverty before they will help. We promise to make sure people get care, but only after we completely and totally break them.
Steve Sailer put it right. The thing that the poor can’t afford isn’t flatscreens, its getting away from other poor people. Living away from them. Getting the education necessary to join another class. Etc. If you don’t want to live the underclass lifestyle (with flatscreens! so be grateful), all of these programs do jack to help you.
The scarcity in our society is not so much monetary but political. One person — one, gets to be president for four or eight years and to feel the aphrodisiac of manipulating a $4 Trillion budget, using it to exercise executive branch power over enemies, domestic and abroad. Likewise, 538 members of Congress. So it’s not surprising that mimetic rivalry is so fierce in our political competitions. Girard talked about mirroring. Watch the videos of the various congressional players who were talking about the Clinton impeachment in the ’90s and Trump today. They flip positions, precisely mirroring their opponents from two decades ago. They used the same words, phrases, and paragraphs today that their opponents used then. The only principle is power.
See also: the narcissism of small differences.
Orwell wrote of the “shabby genteel” in ch 8 of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.
“But it is quite different for the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what are virtually working-class incomes. These last are forced into close and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards ‘common’ people is derived.”
Today the Ivy grad whose major has proven unremunerative has painful awareness of the incomes of the “uneducated” HVAC tech, electrician, plumber, etc., via social media. Living in a urban environment filled with struggling college grads does not isolate one from the working man or woman with a suburban house and family anymore.