{"id":4922,"date":"2012-12-09T19:23:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T01:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4922"},"modified":"2012-12-09T19:23:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T01:23:00","slug":"peter-thiel-and-rene-girard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4922","title":{"rendered":"Peter Thiel And Rene Girard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.nabeelqu.com\/blog\/peter-thiel-and-rene-girard\">Nabeel Qurishi<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>\u201cI suspect that when the history of the 21st century is written circa 2100, he [Girard] will be seen as one of the great intellectuals\u201d &#8211; Peter Thiel<\/p>\n<p>When Blake Masters was posting his great notes on Peter Thiel\u2019s lectures at Stanford, I found myself fascinated by the influence of <a href=\"http:\/\/clusty.com\/search?input-form=clusty-simple&#038;v%3Asources=webplus-ns-aaf&#038;v%3Aproject=clusty-original&#038;query=%22Rene+Girard%22\">Rene Girard<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Girard\u2019s an original thinker. I\u2019m not fully persuaded by his worldview: it explains a lot, but not everything. I\u2019ve summarized his views here.<\/p>\n<p>1. Mimesis determines what you want: In Girard\u2019s view, people have appetites, which are your basic evolutionary needs: e.g. hunger; and desires, which are all other wants, e.g. the desire for a diamond ring. Girard\u2019s belief is that people form desires based on what others around them want.<\/p>\n<p>This is known as the \u2018mimetic mechanism\u2019. People take their cues from the people around them. They use other people as \u2018models\u2019, and (subconsciously) want what other people want, while rationalizing the whole time. In the diamond ring example, companies like DeBeers create a want artificially, and it catches on like a virus. People want diamond rings because other people want them, but they rationalise it by saying \u201cit shows that my partner loves me\u201d.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nabeel Qurishi: \u201cI suspect that when the history of the 21st century is written circa 2100, he [Girard] will be seen as one of the great intellectuals\u201d &#8211; Peter Thiel When Blake Masters was posting his great notes on Peter Thiel\u2019s lectures at Stanford, I found myself fascinated by the influence of Rene Girard. Girard\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}