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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

>Of course, none of these desires relate in any way to your personal happiness or true desires.

This is where it lost me. I can't agree with this statement.

Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them. The natural response, of course, is to choose the people in your life, as well as be aware of the pros and cons of having those people in your life.

Most people who have a big impact on the world don't do it alone. They surround themselves by people who help them make that impact. This can be done intentionally. You can choose the "social norms" in your life, simply by changing who you're surrounded by.

So, no, I can't agree with the statement quoted above, for the simple reason that I can (and do) choose the people who influence me. (As do most people, at least to a certain extent.)

Do people choose who they're surrounded by? Of course!

Should people make these choices more consciously? Of course!

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René Girard is the man who worked out the theory of mimetism a couple decades ago, but he's not even mentioned here. If you want a proper explanation of mimetic theory, you should read some of his books.

> Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them

Girard acknowledges that many people before him, e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Evangelists, were very aware of mimetic theory. You notice that when you read their works, as their characters behave in a way that is just too consistent with mimetism for it to be a coincidence. Girard was simply the first to explicitly explain the theory and work it out.

Lastly, although I, like so many others, discovered mimetism by myself when I was a teenager, Girards books were still very enlightening to me. He takes a pretty trivial theory, but works it out very thoroughly and draws a lot of insightful conclusions from it.

Hell yeah.

Conversations on this topic have gone off the rails, to the point of being flagged, with groups talking past each other, a set critiquing a cheesy blog post or Thiel and another group defending Girard's idea. I haven't read as much of Girard as my library fines for his books might suggest, but what I have read affected me deeply, it brought clarity to ideas I was perceiving in a muggy form that I couldn't quite communicate. If mimetic theory seems silly, I think it's worth reading it from Girard, rather than from primates such as myself, chattering incoherently about happened in their head when they read his ideas.

any book, or entry point you can recommend to start with?

Start with some online summaries. Girard's theories span multiple essays and books. Instead of jumping straight into one of his books, it will help to get some overall context.

I personally read "The Scapegoat" but Girard is doing literary critique which, like philosophy, can be dense and difficult to read if one isn't used to such texts. Personally, I would like to read "Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure" sometime in the future.

Diamond and black pearl are good example where "savvy" people want them because others do. Modern days, bitcoin and all those altcoins would be the same. One own happiness of these "savvy" people depends on how others perceive

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