Alexander Douglas — Hayek was wrong because Girard was right

Weekend reading.

Girard’s starting point was an understanding of human desire. To understand it, he turned to the best possible sources – the great stories around which human civilizations have been organized. He wrote studies of Proust, Dostoevsky, the Greek myths, the Brahmanas of Vedic India, Shakespeare, and the Book of Job.

Girard understood that, other than the desire for basic necessities, human desire is almost entirely mimetic. One person wants X because somebody else – a mimetic model – wants X. It is entirely irrelevant that there is as much and as good outside the scope of the model’s desire. What the desiring subject wants is what the model wants, not something else equivalent in terms of utility.

It is not hard to see that this leads inevitably to violence. Desires of different subjects are determined to fix upon the same rivalrous goods. Worse, there is a mechanism that exacerbates desires past the point where reasonable agreement remains an option.…
The inevitable convergence of human desires on rivalrous goods explains the prevalence of what economists call ‘shortages’. Economists explain shortages by the failure of prices to adjust to the point where supply equals demand. But their explanations assume that human desires are fixed. Girard shows that, on the contrary, desires increase exponentially in intensity, until shortage is converted into violent, obsessive rivalry.…

It was well known to some of the earliest Western social scientists that desire is mimetic. Mimetic desire plays a crucial role in Hobbes’s explanation of the ruthless violence of the ‘state of nature’. …

If desire is, through the mechanism of mimesis, so inexorably geared towards violence, how has society survived at all? Certainly Hobbes’s theory of the transition from the state of nature into civil society does not provide an adequate reply; Spinoza gave powerful arguments against the idea that civil society brings an end to the violent condition of rivalry that defines the state of nature.

Girard discovered the answer. Society has survived because it has developed a mechanism for concentrating violence on a limited number of victims. This he called the “scapegoating mechanism”. In fact the scapegoating mechanism exploits the very mimetic mechanisms that render it necessary for society’s survival.…

A very interesting piece that I suggest reading in full.

Origin of Specious
Hayek was wrong because Girard was right
Alexander Douglas | Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, London

In conjunction with this, I would recommend also reading Bertrand Russell's Nobel lecture, What Desires Are Politically Important? Russell mentions "four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power." Alternatively they can be called "greed," "covetousness," "egotism or pride," and "lust for power." They can be reduced to self-interest and self-importance — "me and mine."

These are natural dispositions of human beings in that they are artifacts of evolution. Ancient sages knew this. Perennial wisdom is about sublimating the evolutionary residual and transforming them into fully human desires. We are able to work with what we have been given and improve upon it.

Humans are capable of appreciating universality. This manifests as knowledge of universals as the basis of "science, which just means "true knowledge.

Universality also manifests as universal unconditional appreciation for that which is universal — love. "True love" as universal and unconditional is love of being as such that manifests as unconditional love for all beings.

The ancients distinguished between sense appetite, which is lust (conditional) for the particular, and rational appetite, which is love (unconditional) for the universal — being as such. Being is said to be "true" in that it is intelligible and "good" is that it is appetible. Reason is capable of knowing being as universal, and the rational appetite is capable of loving being as universal. In knowing being as universal one knows one's true nature and in loving being as universal one appreciates one's true nature.

The process of self-realization involves the deepening of this knowledge and love until they converge as one, for being is one. These are not just words or abstractions. The sages emphasized on the basis of their own experience that this can be experienced. It can be experienced by anyone since it is universal and undifferentiated.

Initially this process manifests biologically as the urge to survive as an organism and reproduce. That urge leads to the development of different types of response from the most primitive through tropism at the vegetative level to the more complex affect at the animal level. The most advanced state is the human level with the variegated web of human desire over a range from very particular to highly universal.

The goal is full appreciation of unity in diversity expressed in total living that transcends living in a state of separation. To be separated is to be alienated from one's own nature, which is universal. To love truly is to appreciate the unity of being.

Evolution to the human level involved a progressive development of the individual capacity to appreciate universality and to scale it socially. This is the history of the development of the level of collective consciousness.

The level of individual consciousness scaled up socially determines the level of collective consciousness. This manifests in types and patterns of social behavior, institutional arrangements, cultures and civilizations.

If development of the level of individual consciousness can be scaled socially, then social behavior can become more universal and less determined by self-interest and self-importance — "me and mine" — egoism that involves alienation. Egoism involves alienation that also involves dissatisfaction and frustration. This impels those experiencing separation and alienation to selfish behavior, which if not satisfied, manifests as anger and leads to violence.

One solution is to discourage negative social behavior, for example, through customs, moral codes and positive law that bridle egoism. Disincentives are required in proportion to how base the level of consciousness may be.

Conversely, incentives are based on improving the level of consciousness. The positive solution is to raise the level of individual consciousness sufficiently to transform the level of collective consciousness.

This is the basis of the perennial wisdom. The positive incentives are peace and fulfillment. The process involves increasing appreciating greater universality by attenuating the obstacles to its realization, since nothing needs to be added.

This is an outcome of what psychology now calls "self-actualization." Maslow put self-actualization at the apex of a pyramid of needs, suggesting a ladder to be mounted. I would approach needs in terms of a constellation rather than a ladder. All needs are can be integrated into total living simultaneously through a holistic approach. History shows that this can be accomplished individually and in limited groups, often closed. What remains is scaling it up socially.

So while I would agree with the analysis of Girard and Russell regarding politically important desires, neither humans as individuals nor humanity as a social species are stuck there.