Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - BONUS: Why Do We Want What We Want? | Guest: Luke Burgis

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Today we're joined by Luke Burgis, author of "Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life," to discuss where our desires come from and how we can better shape them. We discuss his article, "The Three City Problem of Modern Life," in which he expands on the idea, "What does Athens (reason) have to do with Jerusalem (faith)?" by adding a third city to the discussion: Silicon Valley (technology) and proposing that this Silicon Valley "city" has changed our relationships with reason and faith. Then, we talk about mimetic desire: what it is, why it's important, and how we can respond to our own desires based on where they come from. We define "disruptive empathy" and "trendy narcissism" and talk about how real love ties into all of this. WE'RE GIVING AWAY 5 SIGNED COPIES OF LUKE'S BOOK! To enter: Head to YouTube when this episode goes live there at 6pm ET Make sure you're subscribed Comment on this video that you want to enter the giveaway and your Instagram handle so we can DM you for your address --- Timecodes: [01:15] Intro [03:07] "The Three City Problem of Modern Life" [18:42] Mimetic desire [25:27] Does technology lead to mimetic desire? [29:47] Defining love [33:04] Disruptive empathy [39:44] Mimetic future & what we will want tomorrow [42:13] Advice from "Wanting" [45:03] Giveaway --- Today's Sponsors: Annie's Kit Clubs — all subscriptions are month-to-month, and you can cancel anytime! Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE and get your first month 75% off! CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. Good Ranchers — change the way you shop for meat today by visiting GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE and use promo code 'ALLIE' to save $30 off your order AND 2lbs of ground beef free (October-only special)! My Patriot Supply — prepare yourself for anything with long-term emergency food storage. Go to PrepareWithAllie.com to save 20% on your 3-Month Emergency Food Kit. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Where do our desires come from? Do we genuinely organically want the things that we want or do we just want them because other people want them? I've been asking this question a lot over the past few months since I heard about the book that we are going to talk about today and it's called wanting. The power of memetic desire in everyday life by Luke Burgess. I found him on Twitter and I found the things that he was talking about, the questions that he was answering. So interesting. It's really made me think about why I want the things that I do and really analyze my desires through

the prism of my values. And that is what we are going to discuss with this author. I know that you are going to find this conversation fascinating and hopefully get a lot out of it. We're also doing a giveaway with his books, which we will talk about at the end of this conversation. But no more introduction. I want you to hear this. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash All right. Now, without further ado, here's our new friend, Luke, Berges.

Luke, thanks so much for joining us. Can you first tell everyone who may not know who you are and what you do? Hey, Ali, good to be with you. Sure. I'm entrepreneur and residence at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. And I spent my 20s in sort of in Silicon Valley. I was never actually in the valley. I was in Southern California founding companies.

And it was kind of the trendy narcissism of my day to be an entrepreneur and to look for quick exits to make as much money as possible. Rather than being an Instagram influencer or a TikTok influencer, that was it for me. And I did that throughout my 20s. I had some successes and some failures. But I got to the end where I had a blown up business deal. And I realized that I was really... craving something that I wasn't able to find in that culture, right? There weren't any people around me that had sort of any kind of spiritual desires and those things were bubbling up in me. I was really

dissatisfied and I was looking for more and I ended up stepping away from everything that I was doing for a while just to take some time to reflect on what it is that I really was looking for, what I was searching for, why it never sort of seemed to be enough. And that led me down. a path for pretty much the next decade of my life where I explored the question of human desire, why I want the things that I want, what are the motivations behind those things? And eventually this led me to really coming back to the faith of my childhood and thinking of entrepreneurship, thinking of myself in a very different way. And that is really kind of the basis or one of the bases of your book, which we will talk

about a little bit later in this interview, why we want the things that we want. And I found that really interesting. But to kind of jump off what you said about your faith, I want to talk about a recent article that you just wrote called the three city problem of modern life in Wired. And actually, before I get into that, you said a phrase that immediately caught my attention when you were talking, you said trendy narcissism, which is funny that you said that because I write about that concept and use that exact phrase in my book that I wrote a few years ago, this idea of trendy narcissism, which is kind of what has become, what has become the popular, I don't know, self-love, self-help world, the world in which women are kind of like manifesting their inner

goddesses, they kind of say that it's all about self-care and self-improvement and self-empowerment, but really it is just a form of trendy narcissism. So you and I are on the same wavelength there. I just wanted to point that out. But to talk about your article in Wired, the three-city problem of modern life, you talk about the three cities, Athens, Jerusalem, Silicon Valley. Most people are familiar with the quote that you included. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

Of course, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? That's kind of how people have said it over the years. And so you're talking about that it's not just these two cities now that are either in competition or correlated. It is also Silicon Valley. So this is the problem of our modern era. Tell us what you mean by that. Yeah, Athens stands for reason. Rationality in Jerusalem is the world of faith, religion.

So the question, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens or Athens have to do with Jerusalem was posed by Tritullian in the third century. And in Tritulian's world, he didn't have to contend with the force that we know is Silicon Valley, which represents the human urge to create, right, which is a beautiful thing. It's a good thing. We participate in the creation of God. And Silicon Valley, though, is we've never sort of seen anything like that. the amount of capital, the amount of pure ambition, and searching for technological process

divorced from the world of faith, divorced from Jerusalem, in other words. And it can even be divorced from Athens. It can even be divorced for rationality because the driving force in Silicon Valley is creating value, creating utility, which is part of value, things that are useful without necessarily accounting for what they do to the soul or even whether or not they're reasonable, quite frankly. So I'm trying to make the case that Silicon Valley has sort of changed our relationship to reason and to faith. So a couple of examples of how I think that's happening. So think about how Twitter is changing like our relationship with rationality, right? 280 character Twitter debates.

it is warping. It's very hard to have a rational argument on Twitter. And then with religion itself, right? Silicon Valley, during the pandemic, many people went to online church services. You had apps that give people ways to pray that were raising tens of millions of dollars and blowing up. Some people are still on them and not going back to regular church services. So Silicon Valley is dramatically affecting reason, Athens, and faith, Jerusalem. And my, point is we have to come to grips with how these three forces are interacting with each other and affecting the others. All right, quick pause to tell you about my first sponsor for the day, and that is my Patriot Supply. I know that you like me have been hearing about possible food

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And you'll get 20% off. 20% off your order at prepare with alley.com. Preparewithallie.com. One thing that you talk about is how different religions have tried to deal with maybe what is considered the problem of Athens, the secular philosophers trying to, in some theologians' minds, kind of replace Christian thinking with secular thinking, with philosophical thinking. That in some ways is truly opposed to Christian theology. And one thing that you talk about, you talk about Catholics trying to kind of use both, use the rationality, the reasonableness, the philosophy that comes out of Athens and kind of wet it with or pair it with Christian theology. And then you and you say others are more skeptical, one of Martin Luther's fundamental tenets was

Sola Fides or faith alone. Now, I'm guessing, and I know this is not the point of your piece, but I think it's interesting because I'm a reformed Protestant, you're a Catholic. And I would argue that, of course, that is not what Sola Fide means. That's not what Martin Luther means when he says by faith alone. He does not mean to the exclusion of intellect or to the exclusion of reason or to the exclusion of Athens. He is talking about salvation. That is also the difference between Catholics and Protestants is faith alone when it comes to salvation. Martin Luther said in his famous speech in front of the Diet of Worms is that unless I'm convicted by scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of popes and councils. And so he actually depended on reason in his

resistance to the Catholic Church. So when I was reading this, even though I think it's so fascinating, and there's more that I want to talk about. That is one issue that I had, that Sola Fide is not an example of Protestants abandoning, you know, good and sound philosophy and critical thinking in favor of Jerusalem. No, you're absolutely right. So throughout history, though, both Catholics and Protestant, there's a spectrum, right? And sometimes we've swung too far in one direction. And that's actually the point of my piece is that you have some.

And by the way, I think Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley cut across. political divides. I think there are people on both the right and the left that live in one of these three cities. My point is that any, and we're sort of clustering sometimes in one of the three cities. And, you know, you have like the scientism. I think of COVID was an example of sort of Athens and Jerusalem clashing, right? People in that sort of spent more time in one city didn't really understand where people in the other city were coming from, right? Like, what do you mean? I can't see my loved one in the hospital and visit them. There's different hierarchies of values in the different cities. And I think the problem is, like, not having the integration

between the three. So I sometimes get the impression that each city wants its own ruler. So those that are in Athens, right, the strict, pure rationalist would love to just, you know, elect a scientist as, you know, president of the universe. Those that are sort of in Jerusalem, maybe it would be a pastor. And those that are in Silicon Valley might as well want Elon Musk to be, you know, the governor of everything, using the sort of guiding force of that city, right? Reason, faith, or utility, or the creation of value. So my point is that we're integrated people. We're religious beings or rational beings and we're beings that do get joy in creating value.

And by creating value, I don't just mean businesses and companies. I mean creating families, self-expression, all of those things. And that the healthiest way to think about this is we need to reintegrate ourselves as human beings, because if one city is dominating the discussion, we end up warped without the ability to even speak to people that are spending most of their time in other cities. And we can't become isolationist. Yeah. So how I kind of see it, and I'm interested to know like what exactly you think integration looks like. So as a Christian, I have a Christian worldview. Everyone has a worldview. And so everything that someone thinks is colored by their worldview. And so,

how I see it is that rationality is going to be upstream from productivity, Silicon Valley, but upstream of both of those things is going to be religion, theology, what people think about God or don't think about God. Both of those things, I think, have to be influenced by what we think about who is in charge, why we're here, what human beings are, what right and wrong is. that cannot really be reasoned through rationally. And that certainly is not going to, there's no conclusion that technology can come to when it comes to morality and why we're here. Technology only asks can, not should.

And so when I think about like integrating these things, I think, okay, well, we have to get the top city right first. Like we have to get the religion, the theology, right first. And then everything else is downstream from that. Obviously, though, we all really disagree. A lot of us really disagree on that theological piece on what Jerusalem is. So what does it look like to then integrate these things in a healthy way among people in a pluralistic society? People who really disagree on the thing that I think is upstream from rationality and technology.

I mean, I think we have to be able to have discussions about basic fundamental anthropology. What does it mean to be human? It seems to me like we're creating things without asking those fundamental questions about what it means to be a human person. And you're absolutely right. We start with different presuppositions. And I do think that the big questions, right, the question of God is the fundamental question. But it seems like we've abandoned even asking the question, right? You've just got people that consider themselves secular that don't even want to have the conversation.

And my point in that piece is that if we're not talking about the, like, at a teleology, the end of all of this, what is life about, what is this all for at the end of the day, we're going to be creating things for what I call in the piece an unknowable X, right? Like humans are just this unknowable X. We're just a bundle of atoms and cells and we're creating things that are essentially doing violence to what it means to be human. So the thing that I've noticed, even with my book, talking about desire, I've done so many podcasts and many of them are with people that are secular.

And they're like, well, where does desire come from? And they want the self-help answer, I think. And my answer is, well, desire comes from God, right? Like, we were created by the desire of God in sort of an exodus retitudes. And I've realized over the last 18 months, really, how hard it is to have discussions about something as fundamental as why we want what we want if you don't agree on the question of where it comes from in the first place. Yeah.

It really all does go back to that. And I think that I've realized that more than ever over the past. few years, is that especially when we're asking such fundamental questions that really we haven't asked before, like, what is a man, what is a woman, what is a human being? Like, why do human beings matter? Why aren't we just clumps of cells? Like, what is beauty? Of course, people have been asking these questions for a long time. But some of these things we've considered settled and now we're re-asking them, re-exploring them, redefining them. Well, at the end of the day, it all goes back to who you think created us and how you think we got here and who is in charge and what are we?

I find it really hard, honestly, to talk about anything cultural or political, social without going back to Genesis 1. So I'm curious, does that count as me kind of like clustering as kind of what you're talking about in this piece? Or is that just, you know, the way that a believer has to think about things. I honestly feel like it's inescapable for someone who does believe that we come from God. I mean, I don't think that's clustering at all. That's just, you know, I think you're a rational person and we're having this conversation, you know, through using technology and, you know, very much with things that Silicon Valley created. So we're very much living in all three at the intersection. And that conversation, I think that Jerusalem is extremely underrepresented in national discourse and

in dialogue. I don't know if I said that explicitly in the Wired article, but It certainly is. I mean, I've lived in all three places, you know, my days as starting technology companies. It's pretty much non-existence, extremely difficult to find people that are willing to have those kinds of conversations. And I think if you have no transcendent purpose, something that goes beyond this world, then where, like what are we doing here, right? What's the purpose? I think this is why people are rudderless and purposeless. And I've just, when I ask the question, right, like what are we building here and why are we building it? Is it just to extend our lives as long as we can?

Like what's the most people don't have any kind of teleology, right? Some kind of end game. What is this for? And what my book is all about is really summed up by, you know, Augustine, our hearts are restless until they rest in you. I could not find out why I was so restless. And it's because I did not have a desire that transcended this world. right? This world will never be able to satisfy all our desires. My wife can't satisfy all what is. And when we begin to think that this world can, it makes us absolutely miserable.

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That makes sense to me. But I am curious more about the subject of your book. the memetic desire in everyday life. And in reading it, I mean, it seemed like a concept that I understand that everyone kind of understands you see something on Instagram that someone else wants. You don't even really think that you need it. But because other people want it and because their scarcity, you get it. I have a perfect example of this before we even get into your book just to kind of set it up

in a way that people understand when you're talking about memetic desire. So there is this company called Stanley. I actually have like a mini one right there for anyone who is watching. And they sell these huge like 40 ounce mugs, jugs, kind of like a Yeti. I'm sure they would hate for me to compare it to another company. But it's got a straw and it's got a handle. I had never heard of this. I mean, this company has been around for 100 years.

They've made this product for a really long time. But I started seeing it on Instagram. And then when you go to their website, you see that it's constantly sold out. I mean, you have to be on some kind of waiting list. You have to follow really closely these blockers. All of a sudden, and so I'm just admitting, like, I am definitely part of this culture and like have these kinds of desires. I want one.

I didn't want one before. I was fine with my, you know, knockoff. I was fine with my Yeti. But if everyone has one and if it's so scarce, then it's hard to get, well, then maybe I want one. And I will just say I ordered one finally this morning after my friend texted me and was like, hey, this person has a code, you can get it and have it. So when I was reading your book, that's what I was thinking of, that we really do kind of want things because other people want

them. And so is that kind of what set you up in writing this book? Yeah, it was the realization. I had this romantic idea that my desires are just a product of my autonomous self, that I'm the manufacturer and generator of all of my own desires. And the thinker that heavily influenced me, who I discovered in my late 20s, who really changed. the course of my life was a Christian named Renee Gerard. And his insight was that we have this idea that our desires are just entirely our own. He said that's absolutely wrong. We're human beings are social creatures, right? We rely on mediators of desire. We're not the generators of our own desire, right? It doesn't calm ex and helo out of nothing. Our desires are shaped and informed

by other people. So the very idea, for instance, of self-love is wrong. It doesn't exist, right? The idea that love is just generated completely by the self is just fundamentally false, right? We're relational. Desire is relational. Love is something that happens in the context of a relationship. So a person that grows up who doesn't perceive that they're loved is going to find it pretty much impossible to love themselves, barring grace from God or a relationship with Christ. Right. But our desire is a product of relationships, worldly relationships, and of course, relationship with God, which is very, very important. And when I look at my life in my 20s, I was surrounded by people that cared about very worldly things. So big surprise. So did I.

I didn't want anything outside of the very narrowly defined accolades that many startup entrepreneurs want. So it was this realization that, wow, I am heavily affected by other people. my desire is very social. I look at, I went into college and right away, I was affected by what everybody else was majoring in, where they wanted to work, and I just followed them. I was all the while convincing myself that my desires were entirely my own. I had no way out, and that's why this idea of memetic desire, which means imitative desire, memetic is a word that comes from the Greek word for imitation. Mimetic desire means that we imitate the desires of others, and that's not a bad thing. We talk about the imitation of Christ, but we have to be very careful and understand

what we're imitating because we might be imitating. I mean, this is the definition of sort of Satan, right, is like Satan sets himself up as a rival with God and asks us to imitate him, right? So knowing who we're imitating, right, is critical on a divine level and even on a worldly level. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about when memetic desire gets to be. a problem, like memetic conflict. As you said, sometimes it can be good. You're following other people who have good desires. Sometimes it can be bad. What are some examples of that today, how that manifests itself negatively? I think one of the best examples is when we're in a memetic relationship, we are looking into the other person to consistently model desires back to us, right? And we become

a reflection of them, even people that we consider our enemy. So, I mean, this happens in politics all the time, right? Like, people become a reflection of the very thing or people that they hate because we imitate rhetoric, re-imitate aggression, we imitate violence in this kind of never-ending game when there's no, there's no model outside of that sort of one-to-one relationship, right? It could be between two people or between two groups. And escaping that sort of rivalrous Mimesis is really important. And if we have no transcendent perspective, it's very difficult to do that because we become completely fixated on other people around enemies. And we end up becoming like them. We become like that which we imitate.

We become like that which we pay the most attention to. So, you know, this happens with, it happens in school, in high school. I think of all the people that I've talked about this idea with, it's high school students who it resonates with the most because they realize how easy. it is for them to be looking to their right and their left and become obsessed with what their classmates want, with what they wear, with where they want to go to school, with what their goals are. To the point where they forget who they are. And, you know, we live in a culture that makes it, it's, it can take you down a path

very quickly where you don't want to go. And if you don't think seriously about your own desires, other people are going to give them to you or tell you what they are. And before you know it, it's 10 years later. and you've never seriously thought about how people are affecting what it is that you want. Is this what a world ruled by Silicon Valley looks like? A world that just says, well, what's most efficient? What's most fun?

What feels the best? What can we do? But never asks, hey, what are my values? Where does this desire come from? What direction should we be heading? Do you think that those two? things are linked, the technology that has been created by Silicon Valley and this kind of memetic crisis, if you will? I mean, absolutely. I think consumerism is fueled by people building

things are telling us that the most important thing in life is satisfying or every desire. And if we buy into that, it's never enough, right? It's absolutely never enough. And the Christian humanity's idea, right? Right. The idea is like, you know what? If we live in a world where we all narcissistically pursue our own desires, those desires will inevitably clash. We will inevitably just exacerbate more and more rivalry and competition for things that

ultimately don't matter to impress people that don't even love us in status games. The idea is actually like self-sacrifice. Maybe my desires are not the most important thing in the world, right? Maybe there are other people that need me, need my help, and my desires. I mean, it's such a selfish thing. It's what this whole self-help industry is built around, is that satisfying my desires are the most important thing. They're simply not.

They're not the most important thing. And there's this fundamental Christian paradox that when I stop thinking so much about myself and my desires and I serve other people, it's tremendously fulfilling and satisfying. It's the whole idea of, you know, you have to die to yourself or lose yourself in order to find yourself. So the whole climax of the book and everything that I've sort of been, my work for the last 10 years, has been getting out of ourselves and serving other people, willing the good of another person rather than willing what I think I want. In most cases,

I don't even know what I want. And Italian where I lived for several years when I was in seminary has a beautiful phrase, Tevolio Bene, which is the way that they say I love you. But it literally means I want your good. I want what's good for you. And that's very different than me just constantly being obsessed with what I want and my goals. And when you make that flip, the paradox is you end up learning that what you really want is to be in loving relationships. Okay, let me tell you about crowd health. If you are looking for an alternative, an affordable alternative to health insurance, then you need to try out crowd health. Unlike other health share companies, there's no maximum per incident.

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You already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you,

about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. It's also very different than the world's definition of love today, which is unconditional affirmation of someone's choices. How you just defined love, which is exactly how I define it, is wanting what is best for the other person. And of course, as Christians, as God defines best. That's why we don't celebrate sin. That's why we don't celebrate destructive behavior. years because love that means unconditional affirmation of someone's choices, even if they're wrong, even if they're lies, even if they're unhealthy and hurtful to those around them is not what's

wanting and it's not what is in their best interest. And so it actually is ultimately selfish because really what you're doing is you're making it easy on yourself. The hard thing to do is to actually love someone and to tell them the truth. I mean, that puts you in an awkward position. That puts you in a self-denying position because it's uncomfortable. It's inconvenient. And so I think part of this like memetic crisis and that you're talking about is like very flimsy definitions of what love looks like because it is ultimately selfish and ultimately just about what feels good to you.

If you love somebody, you need to be willing to tell them the truth. And if you really, if you truly care about what's good for them and what's best for them, And I think we live in a world where our desires are far too small, right? As CS Lewis said, right? The problem is not that our desires are too great. It's that our desires are too small. And we satisfy ourselves with these petty little things, right? We satisfy cravings by going on a new diet or buying some new thing.

There's things to make ourselves feel better. Love is not a feeling. It's not a feeling, right? Love happens in the context of loving acts in relationships. One of my favorite parts or scenes in all of literature is in the brothers Daskeski, where this old widow comes to this old monk priest and says, I've lost my faith, right? I'm depressed. I don't know God has abandoned me.

And he says, practice act of love. Practice loving people in an active way, not loving dreams, not loving your imagination, but act of love, attending to the needs of the people around you. And you will regain your faith. You will then understand. right so it was in a sense it was her telling her to get out of herself right it's the opposite of what most people are counseled to do today right acts acts of love yeah we're constantly told even by professing christian teachers that you can't love other people until you love yourself which is a very

privileged and sad way to think that you can't go out and meet the needs of other people until what you've accepted the cellulite on your thighs until you like the refuselyte in the mirror, I mean, that is a fundamentally wrong understanding of not just love, but also what compels us to love, which is Christians, we believe that the love of Christ compels us to love. And if we have that in abundance and unconditionally, then no matter how we feel about ourselves in any given moment, we are empowered to love other people. And that is why, like, constantly in this conversation, I'm thinking, wow, Christianity really is like the only rational answer to so many of the problems that we have today.

Can you talk a little bit about disruptive empathy? What do you mean by that? Disruptive empathy is a word or a phrase that I heard from my friend Gil Bailey who used it. And it basically, it's the memetic thing to do is when somebody hates us or when somebody is aggressive or passive aggressive to us, it is to imitate them. It's almost instinctual, right? to do that. That is extremely memetic behavior. Anti-mimetic behavior is something we have the ability to do as humans, which is to rise above the instinctual response and to love somebody even if they

don't love us. And empathy is one way of doing that, right? It's refusing to play the memetic game of sort of tit for tat and to respond to people with the love of Christ, even if they've never experienced it before, and even if they're hostile towards us. And I tell the story in the book of where I sort of learned this lesson in a very scary way when I had a guy who's essentially a hitman show up at my door in Las Vegas to collect some money. And he and I engaged in roughly a week-long standoff with this. And one day, he found out that I was having a company party at my house in Henderson. And he invited himself over to the party. And he showed up. And by the end of the night, he decided that he just wanted to have like a human conversation with me. He ended up

sort of crying in my arms. I essentially practically cried in his arms. And he disrupted the sort of cycle of animosity that the two of us had between us. And we realized that there was, there was a misunderstanding. Within one second, the entire relationship was changed. And changed because he stepped out of the memetic sort of role that he was playing. And that sort of, you know, is something that I've realized that I have the power to do in any relationship in my life. I'm not a slave to the behaviors that other people are displaying to me. I can choose to respond, right?

I'm free to respond in a, not in kind, but when the situation calls for it, it always calls for it in a loving way, right? I don't need to just enter into the logic of, of, of, the form of the way that other people love me. But it's it's tempting to do that. It's almost instinctual to treat other people the way that they treat us. Yeah, that's interesting. And there is, I mean, there are toxic forms of fake empathy. It almost seems like the idea of empathy is weaponized today that if you don't agree with me on this political issue, then that means that you are unempathetic. Again, kind of going back to what I think is the wrong definition of love, that if you're

not unconditionally affirming someone's choices or identity or whatever. That means you are being unempathetic. Empathy is sometimes used, or at least the word empathy is sometimes used, is like a way to just like bludgeon and manipulate and extort your political enemies into believing what you believe. But what you're talking about is a true loving other people as Christ loved us, forgiving other people when it's hard to forgive them, loving other people when they are unlovable, stepping out of your own selfish desires in order to be compassionate towards someone else. It reminds me your conversation or your interaction with the hip man, which, by the way,

I feel like there's a lot more to that story. Crazy story. Proverbs 151, a soft answer turns away wrath. And that is kind of the Christian life is responding to hostility and vitriol and anger with kindness and love. Yeah, I mean, we need to be able to enter into another person's experience and understand it without necessarily having to say that we agree with all of it. And it seems like, you know, we're really confused, right? I think that sympathy literally means to see with the eyes of another, to see things the same way.

Empathy is a bit different, right? it means that I can enter into the experience of another without losing my own self-possession, like losing my self-possession. You know, I live in Washington, D.C. for most of the year. And in my younger days, especially when somebody would sort of, you know, approach me on the street, right, like pitching some hardcore thing at me or asking me to sign something, I remember a couple of times, I was sort of like feigning agreement with them, and then I would get five minutes down the block, and I'd be like, wait a second.

And I was like, it's so easy to lose our self-possession, right? We're scared to speak the truth. We're scared to enter into those conversations. But real empathy, not the fake kind of empathy where you just have to agree with everything that another person says or thanks, is being able to enter into the experience and say, you know what? I do understand what it's like to be confused about who I am. But that doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with the way that you're going about

this search. I want your good, right? So without abandoning myself, my beliefs, my values, without speaking the truth, that would not be loving another person. Okay, last sponsor for the day. And that is, of course, Good Ranchers. Good Ranchers has an awesome deal on their meat right now when you use my link, good ranchers.com slash Alley to get your box of all American better than organic chicken and craft beef and even awesome seafood. You also get four free pounds of meat, two pounds of waggoog ground beef, which is what we use the most in our house and two pounds of our better than organic chicken breasts. I just love good ranchers. It makes my life so much easier. I use it every night

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Make sure you subscribe. That saves you a lot of money per box. You can cancel any time, but it shows up right to your front door on dry ice. Really awesome deal. Go to GoodRanchers.com slash Alley. That's good ranchers.com slash Alley. Tell me about the memetic future, what we will want tomorrow. Well, so this is where the three-city problem really, I think, comes back into play, where we have Silicon Valley, which, again, stands in for a desire to innovate and create, which is a good thing.

As humans, we all have this desire to be co-creators, co-creators with God. But when it becomes detached from teleology, when it becomes detached from fundamental questions about who we are as humans and what we truly desire, then we risk building things and creating a world in which we sort of just eliminate human desire altogether, right? There are certain sort of like communist governments, right? Like desire is something that they would prefer that people all desire the same thing or don't have any desires at all, right? There's like an active effort. Desires are dangerous, right? So we can try to control other people's desires and engineer other people's desires.

build things that engineered and manipulate desires, or we can do the hard work of transforming desires as a culture. So one is like sort of a top-down approach, right? And then the other one is a bottom-up approach that depends on human relationships and starts with those fundamental questions of if we as a culture completely reject God, then our desires are going to be very, our desires can go no further than the things that Silicon Valley creates, right? And we're always going to be, will be never satisfied, constantly consuming, because that's as big as our world, our universe of desire is. So again,

it goes back to that idea of, you know, CS Lewis, right? Like, we, we don't desire enough. And I just wonder what, what would happen in the world if we, if we thought of ourselves as, in the things that we're building, as affecting our desires. I don't think that almost anybody who's building things, thinks about the way that it's affecting human desires. Is this helping people want more? Is it helping them want less? Is their desire moving horizontally or is it moving vertically? You know, we're not building cathedrals anymore. We're not making beautiful art. And it seems to me like we're sort of moving sideways. And I think the future of desire is going to depend on how we think about that question. Yes. I want to just give kind of the practical advice that you tell people

in your book, just a few of them. There's really kind of of 15 things that you tell people to do. But some of them that stuck out to me was find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis, create boundaries with unhealthy models. So that means distancing yourselves from the people who function as unhealthy models of desire. Establishing communicate a clear hierarchy of values, which of course is important for anyone, but particularly Christians.

Map out the systems of desire in your world. Put those desires to the test. just to kind of close this out, like, what does some of those things look like? What does putting your desires to the tasks look like? And then living, as you say in your book, as if you have a responsibility also for what other people want, not just what you want. Well, putting my desires to the test or putting your desires to the test means not taking them, not taking them for granted and not assuming that what you think you want is the most important thing in the world, right? Reflecting on where it's coming from. Is this a desire that's been generated by a social media?

app that I've been scrolling, which I call a thin desire in the book. And a thin desire is the kind of desire that's kind of here today, gone tomorrow. It's not grounded in anything real. It's just been, it just evaporates like a pile of leaves that blows away as soon as there's a gust of wind, right? And we've all been like that. We've all really wanted something. And then we get it and we don't care about it and we throw it away the very next day. That's a good indication that that desire is thin. Of course, thick desires, right? These desires that are ground. in real things, in the love of God, right? And the desires that ultimately, I would say, are the desires that are pointing us towards

eternity, that are pointing us beyond this world. Those are the desires that nobody can take away from us and that will never disappoint us. And it's really important to test our desires up front, right? There are certain ways, like, what does this do? Is this fruits of the spirit, right? I mean, the scripture tells us how we can begin to test our desires to understand. if they're bringing us sort of the, you know, the peace of God. If we're becoming more loving, if we're growing in faith, hope, and love,

great indication that that might be a non-mimetic sort of a thick desire that's grounded in something beyond the memetic moment, right, the current thing. So testing desires is something that we can all learn to do. It's a skill that we need to develop. It's a skill that school doesn't really teach us. You know, school education really doesn't teach discernment. If you don't learn how to discern in the fan. family, they do the opposite, right? You're not going to learn it. So you need to realize that that skill

of discerning your desires and where they come from and where they're going is the most important skill that you can learn. Awesome. Well, I really encourage people to get your book. You are sending us five books for a giveaway, which I'm super excited about. We decided, okay, so the first five people who haven't already subscribed to my YouTube channel, who do subscribe to my YouTube channel, and then comment that you want the giveaway, we will send them a book and my team will reach out to them and send them and get their information and all of that. Wanting the power of memetic desire in everyday life, you can pick it up. I'm guessing wherever books are sold online, probably you know, your brick and mortar bookstore as well. So this was super interesting. I just recently

started following you on Twitter and I was like, I need to talk to this person. I've never really heard anyone talk about it the way that you have. So I just appreciate your thoughtfulness so much and the work that you're doing in this arena. Where can people follow you? How can they support you? Thanks so much, Ellie. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm at Luke Burgess.com and I write a weekly substack called antimimetic, which is really all about trying to behave in in antimimetic ways, right? It's just rejecting the negative forms of amnesis out there, right? Like all of these illusions that are ultimately going to disappoint us. Yeah, wow. So interesting. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much, Allie. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles,

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