Tag: barry schwartz

  • Why We Refused to Believe Daenerys is a Tyrant

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  • The Scapegoat: Introducing Mimetic Theory (Part Two of Three)

    When René Girard understood that a copied desire for the same object could cause conflict between two people, he began to wonder why we have not all destroyed each other. This led him to his second of three discoveries that get grouped together under the rubric of mimetic theory, the first being borrowed or mimetic…

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  • Borrowed Desire: Introducing Mimetic Theory (Part One of Three)

    My previous post introduced René Girard’s thinking in very broad terms. I have a lot of things I want to talk about in light of his thought, but I also want to get the basics right. Because discovering Girard’s thought has been like a key that unlocks forgotten doors, or perhaps an ultraviolet light at…

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  • The Uncategorizable René Girard

    As I mentioned in my previous post, my current interest—perhaps single-minded obsession—is in my fairly recent discovery of the mimetic theory of René Girard. I just attempted and discarded perhaps dozens of ways to qualify and categorize that name, René Girard1. Trained as a medieval historian in his native France, he first developed an intuition…

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  • A Return, and a Beginning

    When I was an undergrad and both this blog and I were quite a bit younger, one of my professors asked me if I wasn’t nervous about putting myself out there in such a vulnerable way for the whole world to see. The world seemed younger then, not just me or this blog. I answered…

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  • Thus Ends the Streak

    If you’ve been reading here regularly, I’ve been writing a post per day since July 18th of this year, save my company meetup in October. This represents streaks of 86 and 50 days, good for 136 posts in 144 days. But I’m giving up on posting every day, now. The point was never to post…

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  • The Wolf at the Door

    Climate change is an emergency, but it’s a slow one. The amount of carbon we’ve released—and continue to release—into the atmosphere is wreaking untold changes on our planet. And yet years of prophesied doom has given the warnings a bit of a boy-who-cried wolf aspect. We’re supposed to be in danger, but things seem pretty…

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  • All About ISIS

    I’m pretty hesitant to link to anything about ISIS-related, since anything that perpetuates fear plays right into their hands, and into the hands of those who would exploit that fear to get us to agree to all kinds of curtailments of our rights and freedoms in the name of safety. But, one antidote to fear…

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  • Delightful Gimmick

    Yes, this is just a commercial for Volvo. Yes, it’s a gimmick to convert a real dump truck to an RC car. Yes, it’s a bit gross to use (exploit?) a four year old. But this is entirely delightful:

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  • The Source of Violence

    There’s been a lot of violence in the world lately, but most of it hasn’t been in Paris or Colorado Springs or San Bernadino. No group is better at inflicting violence than militaries, since that’s what they’re there for. The best possible outcome of a standing army is the threat of violence, but what good…

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