The Self, the Crowd, and Social Contagion (with Luke Burgis)

Luke Burgis: Good to be with you. Thanks, Russ.

Luke Burgis: The One is the self–the I, the subject, you and I as we exist as individuals. And the Ninety-nine you could think of as the crowd–the many, everybody else, the group that we’re a part of. So, this dichotomy between self and crowd has been something I’ve been thinking about for well over a decade.

The title comes most explicitly from the Parable of the Lost Sheep in the Bible, where Jesus tells a story that’s familiar to many people, but he says, strangely: ‘Which of you, having 100 sheep and losing one, would not go in search of the one–would not leave the ninety-nine and go in search of the one?’ And, I’ve heard it for almost my whole life. There’s always been something that has bothered me about it in some way.

From an economic standpoint, really we’re going to put the 99% at risk to preserve the 1%? It doesn’t make full sense.

There’s also something that–I’ve heard very reductionistic explanations of it, and I’ve wondered if it doesn’t have something to–even extracting from the biblical, theological meaning of it–if it doesn’t just have something very basic to teach us about what it’s like to exist in communities, to exist in groups and in tribes.

The sheep often gets a bad rap. He’s either the sinner–he’s lost, he needs to be saved. But, what happened to that sheep? Because that sheep could be all of us at some times, at some point. What happened while it was away? Was it changed? Why did it wander or leave in the first place? When it came back, was it different than it was when it left? Did it exist in the flock in a different way?

So, I wanted to get inside the head of the sheep because I’ve certainly felt like the sheep at many points in my life as I’ve moved into and out of groups and wandered from them and left them for various reasons. And the tension, I guess, between the One and the Ninety-Nine is what I was trying to examine. It seems like there’s a book about tribes and how to find your tribe that’s written every year–maybe every six months–in the United States. It’s a really popular topic.

But, in my life, the hard part has never been finding a tribe. It’s been when I find a group, a tribe, like-minded people, that’s when things really get difficult, where tension starts. And, I’ve had to struggle to differentiate myself, understand how to exist in a healthy way within it. And, that’s what I wanted to explore. So, the One and the Ninety-Nine is trying to get at the tension between the self and the crowd, the way that crowds or groups shape us, the way that we shape them, and how to exist within them in healthy ways where we don’t lose ourselves.

Luke Burgis: No, and the sheep in the parable is often described as lost. In my book, I don’t operate under the assumption that it’s lost: that maybe it intentionally wandered. Because I’m talking about people. And we leave groups and tribes for all kinds of reasons. So, the idea is not: leave the groups that you’re a part of to stake out some solitary existence as an individual–I don’t think that’s possible–but, what process of differentiation must a person go through so that we can exist in groups as differentiated individuals who are also in communion with other people, whether it’s families, various groups that we’re a part of?

So, it’s really about relationships, and the thesis of the book is a relational ontology. I firmly believe we can understand very few problems by looking at individuals’ behavior alone. We have to understand them in relationships with other people, whether we’re talking about our family or at work. Exploring the relationship between the self and various communities that we’re part of is the heart of the book, with the goal not to differentiate, but what’s the process of transformation that one goes through when they experience the tension of being in community and don’t run from the tension but allow it to shape who they become?

Luke Burgis: I exist in probably eight or nine or 10 groups that I would consider pretty core to my identity: my family, my church, the school that I teach at. None of them fully capture who I am. There’s been a lot of great books that have written about this. Christopher Lasch refers to the minimal self. Eric Hoffer–people often join groups in unhealthy ways; he’s talking about populism and mass movements, because they’re fleeing an unwanted self or a flimsy self that might not have a lot of moral convictions and hasn’t spent a lot of time understanding what that self is really willing to stand for.

And, I think there’s something about the modern world–and it could be technology removing as much friction as possible from modern life, politics, the messages to remove the friction, join the coalition where everybody is on the same page. First of all, it’s a fiction, right? If we’re honest with ourselves, there’s always tension even among the group that we think is the most like our tribe.

One of the points of the book is that our groups and communities will be healthier and stronger to the extent that people are exercising what I call a solid self, in the book–the kind of self that’s not renegotiating itself in real time. So that the group becomes like a flock of starlings. It’s just changing, and everybody changes with it, and there seems to be nobody in the group that is sort of a reference point for something that transcends the group itself. So, the inability to sit in tension is a big problem in our world. We’re offered so many ways to flee it. So, the tension is a big part of it.

And, I am fascinated by stories of people that are willing to–sometimes at great risk to themselves–seem to point beyond the logic of the group itself. There’s some fascinating connections. I listened to your podcast on Smith [Adam Smith–Econlib Ed.] on this with the impartial spectator. And, that is one example of having a transcendent reference point. But I think even the impartial spectator, to the extent that it is mediated and internalized only by the group, can also be a problem.

And then, what happens when the algorithm or AI [artificial intelligence] becomes the impartial spectator? It’s not really one. There’s all kinds of things built into it because it’s a mimetic machine. How do we exist in that kind of a world?

And, I propose some ideas like value response: like, there is such a thing as responding to objective things because they are good in themselves and not because my group says that they’re good, because they’re not socially mediated. Very few people seem to have the ability to do that, for whatever reason. I explore, from the realms of religion to politics to education, what is missing that would allow more people to have the courage to respond to, I guess, reality or to respond to things that have truth, good, and beauty in themselves that are not 100% socially mediated to us?

Luke Burgis: Yeah. I’m the father of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and a four-month-old daughter, and I’m thinking about this all the time. Part of my job, I feel, is to allow them to be differentiated people that have a sense of self and without being completely fused to me in the sense that they only want to make me happy, because I’m not a perfect person and I’m not a perfect role model for them. Right? I hope they don’t think I’m an anti-role model. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Every child strives for communion and differentiation at the same time. As do we adults; but it starts as a child. We want to be with and we want to be known as ourselves at the same time, and it’s the inability to hold these two things in tension where we often go astray.

The family is just such an incredible forge of identity, because we’re just immersed in it. We’re held in it–for most of us–the first 18 years of our life. That is usually where we either learn or don’t learn to see where our emotions end and my parents begin. We’re not just talking about ideas here: we’re talking actually about emotions and the sense of self. There’s literally a fusion that can happen if we don’t learn differentiation.

So, an example of this would be: Mom and Dad are really upset about something. Can I be in the room with them and acknowledge that that’s not upsetting to me? I don’t need to be upset. Or, am I instantly subsumed into their emotions?

Let’s say it’s politics. I grew up with my dad watching the news and commenting on politics and sometimes getting upset, and the instinct is kind of to mirror what you’re seeing, partly because you don’t know enough, but this kind of transference happens subtly, usually without us knowing it.

And, one of the ways that discomfort is usually dealt with, or anxiety in a family system, is through some form of triangulation. Now, so, one of the points that I make in the book is the smallest stable unit of relationships is not an individual or a relationship between two people. The smallest stable unit is three people. It’s a triad. Because if two people have a conflict, it’s very volatile, but as long as there’s a third person somewhere, either in the room or somebody that they can talk about or some–they have an outlet. They can offload some of the tension. This systemic dynamic within families–so, if it’s a two-parent home with one child, they’re the triangle. If there’s two children, there’s more triangles. And we sort of, like, learn to either stand as a differentiated self or move to the various positions within the family where we don’t have to do that.

This is a theory from Murray Bowen, who was a Georgetown psychologist, that I thought was really, really illustrative of what I also see in society. It’s, like, what he was observing in the family in terms of the way that we don’t deal with problems seems to be something that we take out with us into the world if we don’t learn to be a differentiated self in the family, and we just assume the role that we’re expected to play within the family.

Luke Burgis: Yeah. Before, in the story, as the dad sulks away and says, ‘Well, son, I’m trying to play catch with you. I thought I was doing a good thing,’ and he sulks away, you know, the mom walks in the room. And she doesn’t want to deal with a sulking husband all night long. So, she goes directly to her son and says, ‘You really should play catch with your dad. It’ll make him happy.’ So, she’s kind of coming in the picture telling her son to do something to just ease the anxiety and the tension in the family, because she doesn’t want to deal with her husband for the rest of the night complaining about why her son didn’t play catch. And then the son has a decision to make at that point.

So, there’s this enormous sort of coercion, frankly. And we don’t think of it–it seems like an innocent story. But the point of the story is that there is an amount of coercion–right?–to conform to the expectations or emotional needs of another person in the story.

It just happens. These innocent things just happen day after day after day. After 15, 16 years, it just shaped the way that our instinctual responses to what other people need from us.

This plays out, certainly in education, which I think has become incredibly conformist in many ways. We learn to play by the rules. We learn to make the teacher happy. We want to get along. We don’t learn to tolerate dissent and anxiety very well in the classroom.

Certainly in our politics: Parties or coalitions or groups, rather than deal with the tension of somebody that’s maybe they’re just not quite feeling right about a certain direction, it’s just much easier to tell them to get out of there; or that’s very much the message, rather than sit in the tension of resolving it and recognizing that maybe we don’t all feel the same way about this, that we have different convictions and we want to work through it.

So we very quickly sort of sort ourselves out into smaller and smaller units where we share, quote, “the same values.”

It sounds like a wonderful thing, but the point of the story and where it trickles into the broader society is that there are often these subtle, often emotional, reasons why we do it, because we’re fused in some way–we’re entangled in some mimetic way–with the groups that we’re a part of. And, untangling ourselves can be painful, and it can require us to have very difficult conversations, sometimes to be ostracized, to pay sacrifices. Sometimes those sacrifices are economic: sometimes they’re our job.

But who is actually willing to put in that work? It seems like I’m seeing it less and less. Even movements like the network state, right? The Internet gives us the ability to just look everywhere we can possibly find it throughout the entire world to just organize ourselves into smaller and smaller units of like-minded people, and we’ll write our own constitutions. Let’s see how long that lasts, because in my experience, when we sort ourselves into these small tribes, that’s when the hard work and the difficulty really begins.

Luke Burgis: Yes. And there are some times when you might have to leave, but what’s the process that we go through to even test and discern that? How many of us even really think or bring to conscious awareness the tensions that might exist? It seems like many times we don’t even want to acknowledge the tensions. But the tensions–if we’re being honest, there’s always some tension in any group, whether it’s a family or a workplace. I think the unhealthiest workplaces that I’ve ever been in never acknowledge it whatsoever. Everything’s always just great all of the time. To me, that’s a sign of either insecurity or weakness.

The book is really a call to the individual to be the one who can, not by being grumpy all the time, not by trying to be a contrarian, but by trying to be honest and sorting out the difference between who we are, what we believe, what we’re willing to stand for, and the dynamics that exist in the community. The community will be healthier to the extent that there can be differentiation while still being in good relationship with other people. And the healthiest relationships are ones where people can feel comfortable being who they are without sacrificing things that are essential.

Luke Burgis: Yeah, and there’s the court jester who is the only one that can tell the truth, and it comes in the form of humor.

But yeah, it is certainly–I had the very unique experience of living in a dormitory-like environment with 250 other men after the age of 30, which is a long story about why I was doing that. I think probably it was a difficult environment because we had so much alike; and sometimes the more that you share, the more the micro-differences matter–because the stakes are so small, as we sometimes say about academia. It was certainly like that in the seminary, but it was also one of the funniest, most hilarious places I’ve ever been, because I think when you’re in an environment like that, it just lends itself incredibly well to good jokes and humor.

Luke Burgis: I’ve been trying to write that screenplay to pitch to Netflix for the last 10 years.

Luke Burgis: I’m half-serious. I’ve actually thought about it.

Luke Burgis: No, because the education is content and knowledge transfer and not formation of the human person.

For me, education largely should be, if it’s done well in education, in desire, in what we want to pursue. And, that means forming people to be hunters more than gatherers. Also, that makes education a lot more exciting, when you’re a hunter and you have some agency and some responsibility to play in what you learn rather than just being fed passively.

The real message in the little passage that you just read is we–You know, Tocqueville said that the science of association is the mother science. The science of association. There’s no subject in any school that I’m aware of at any level that has a class called the Science of Association or the Art of Association. I think it’s just as much an art as it is a science, personally.

So we have to learn that on our own, usually, in the family, at work, in the classroom. When we associate with others, whether it’s a friend group or a club or a workplace, we are formed by that association whether we like it or not. We are formed if we have the humility to understand that. And we form it, and a process begins. And, I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on how the decisions that we make help us enter into a process.

We do, sort of–we hook ourselves to something when we make decisions. Let’s say it’s the first job that we take out of college.

Now that doesn’t mean that it’s deterministic and that some decisions are irrevocable–some are. But it does mean that we will be shaped by that, and understanding how and the process through which that happens is a big part of what adult life is like. Right? How does my decision to marry this person help me enter on a process for the rest of my life? Is this somebody that I want to go through life with and be transformed with and suffer with and cry with and laugh with? There is a process, and understanding how things play out beyond the first step to steps two and three and four, can’t predict the future entirely, but based on somebody’s character, we can have a pretty good idea of what that process might look like. That seems to me to be a really important part of what education is all about.

I am a mentor to about 30 students at any given time. I’m their academic faculty adviser. Many of them are trying to choose between two or three different jobs. And one of my favorite thought experiments to do with them is to say: Look, imagine that all of these options that you’re weighing right now, you do each of them for two years, and by all kind of performance metrics, they all just fail. It’s the kind of thing that you might not even want to put on your resumé. You’re going to just completely change paths after that. So, you can’t take into account income, prestige. None of that matters. Which one of those paths will help you embark on a process that will help you become more of the person that you think you want to become?

That is an incredibly clarifying question. I had one student trying to choose between a consulting job and trying to be a standup comic for a year. Those are two incredibly different things.

Luke Burgis: Standup comedy.

Luke Burgis: I really try not to push students on either path because I don’t want the responsibility, unless with some really rare cases I’ll step on the scale a little bit. But I did not encourage that.

Luke Burgis: My theory on this is that we’ve lost rites of passage from a young age. The most important ones in life being things like a bar mitzvah or a confirmation or getting married, having children. These are big rites of passage. We’re never the same after them.

If getting married is the first rite of passage–you never really had that experience before–I don’t know if that’s a good one to be the first one–if that makes sense. The definition of a rite of passage is it is a process of differentiation through which you are transformed in some way. The old van Gennep definition was there is separation from a group. You separate from the tribe for a period of time. You go through a liminal stage, which sometimes can be very scary where everything is in doubt, you might think you’re going to die, so on and so forth; and then there is a process of reintegration either with the group that you left in a different status perhaps or with a new group. Maybe you leave and you go and you move to a different city and you join a different group. Those have been disappearing.

Marriage is a very serious rite of passage. It’s a radical lifestyle change. If you’ve had no practice, I guess, in experiencing what it’s like to embark on one of these transformative experiences, then I think it can seem incredibly daunting, and people are looking for some kind of a utilitarian proof that it’s the right choice. I had a very good friend of mine who wanted me to explain in some kind of an empirical way why he would be happier if he got married. And, I couldn’t give him the proof that he was looking for. And he ended up not getting married. And at some point, that was a commitment that he was going to have to make.

I think we’re not looking early enough, in our society. There are all kinds of reasons. I’m not discounting the stability reasons, economic reasons. But if you don’t feel like you have a solid sense of self, you don’t have a certain sense of maturity, it’s particularly scary. One of the ways that you acquire a solid sense of self, a differentiated personhood, is by going through various rites of passage–some of them small, some of them larger. And we just don’t have it. The rites of passage that we have are online. They happen on the Internet often. And those are weak ones.

Luke Burgis: We’re not only told what to pay attention to, but certain things are given to us in mass amounts and we pay attention to them because a bunch of other people are paying attention to them, and especially our social feeds if you’re on social media. And it happens through this mimetic process, and untethered from reality or from what’s actually important.

In this kind of new media environment that we live in, it actually seems to be getting worse. I didn’t think it could get worse than it was five or six years ago, but it really seems to be worse in the sense that there are people explicitly saying what the media environment is and then doubling down on the mimetic nature of it.

So, training the senses–the sensory perception, what used to be called the sensus communis–does not mean common sense. The sensus communis is the point at which our senses–not just our five physical senses–but we have intellectual senses to perceive truth. I would say that we have spiritual senses so we can read things at different levels of meaning. There’s a literal sense, there’s an analogical sense, there’s an allegorical sense. We have various intellectual, physical, spiritual senses. The sensus communis is when they all cohere to give us a perception of reality–right?–so we’re not limiting ourselves to one sense.

And I’m a fan of Marshall McLuhan, so I fully believe when he says technology often extends one sense to the detriment of others. And that’s one of the ways that it’s causing us to lose the sensus communis–this cohesion of senses that allows us to see what’s real and what’s unreal, what matters and what doesn’t.

And, education should be, in my opinion–the future of education–is a training in recovering that sensus communis, right? The sensory perception to perceive the world and to cut through the noise. If education can’t do that, then it seems like it’s training us to just be responsive to the mimetic environment that we already live in.

Luke Burgis: For me, education was a very passive experience, almost like something that had become gamified. Grades are like levels, and the goal of second grade is to get to third grade, and the goal of third grade is to get to fourth grade. For whatever reason, I just thought it was something to endure rather than something to make my own. I’m sure, looking back, there may have been ways for me to–I don’t know, you hear stories these kids today are building computers and coding when they’re in fifth grade and taking matters into their own hands. But I think that’s incredibly important to feel like you’re a protagonist of your own education and to be the protagonist of your own existence is incredibly important. If that drive, if that passion to do that is beaten out of you consistently for 15 years or something like that, you will have lost some life, some vitality.

And, that was me. I ended up getting into a good school, getting a job on Wall Street, starting a few companies. But because I never took my education seriously, I woke up in my late 20s realizing that I sort of lacked the foundations. I majored in finance in undergrad, which is fine. But I lacked the foundations to understand the ideas that underlay–for me, I learned far more about markets by reading René Girard than I do by reading most finance blogs. And I started to realize that there was first principles in a world of ideas–many of them classical ideas, philosophical ideas–that I had just never got. And I was mad. I was really upset that I didn’t learn those ideas.

And, I was in a position in my late 20s, as you said, to step away. I took about a year off, and it happened to coincide for me with a religious experience and coming back to the religion I was raised with but had fallen away from–in my case, Catholicism–and took me on quite an odyssey where I discerned religious life for a while.

I went back to school and studied philosophy and theology, and then just did an awful lot of self-directed learning. I had the privilege to do that for about five years. I didn’t get any fancy degrees to show for it, but I don’t care. But it changed my life, because I felt like I now had the foundation to step back and try to look at what was really happening from a deeply kind of human, anthropological standpoint. I understood myself better. And I felt like the protagonist of my own existence at this point, which I think is what education should help people understand.

And if anything, I’m betting that AI, through some kind of a via negativa, is stripping away everything that is not human, and, if we’re lucky, it will show us what is most human. And it’s why I think that the humanities, probably–as maligned as they are and all of the things that went wrong in humanities’ education–I think that they probably have a pretty bright future, because if you embrace them and understand them and imbibe them well, they’re incredibly exciting.

Luke Burgis: Well, when I was running a company, I would go to a 24-hour Starbucks in Las Vegas almost every night and sit there until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning reading classical books and following the footnotes–

Luke Burgis: Such as The Odyssey, which came up earlier in the call, right? Homer, Plato, Dostoevsky, Adam Smith. I read the Bible front to back for the first time in my life. I went back to my bookshelf and picked up the books that I said I read in school and never did, for my Philosophy class–which did light something in me when I took it, but it took me about 10 years to go back to it. Socrates–just the very basic–the Great Books. Mostly the Great Books. I didn’t have a list that I was picking from, but it was basically the Great Books.

And I followed a lot of footnotes, which is to this day is one of the most exhilarating things for me, is–I mean, I can’t tell you the amount of gems that I’ve found in footnotes of books. And I hope that I’ve put some gems in this book, too, because I enjoy–I take them very, very seriously.

When I run across an idea, I know that authors don’t want to get into the weeds on it and they’ll just recommend another book to read. So, that led me down a wonderful path. Yes, of course, I had some mentors that came in my life; and then I joined seminary, so then I was just given a whole bunch of books to read. But, even then, I was very much reading things. I read David Foster Wallace for the first time, so kind of a mix of fiction and nonfiction.

Luke Burgis: Mimesis–mimetic desire is the key term–and it means that while thinking that our desires are fully our own–that they well up from some authentic self–that our desires are in fact borrowed or adopted from others. That desire is incredibly contagious, and mimesis is a fancy word for imitation from the Greek mimesti. So, mimetic desire is imitative desire. They’re the ways in which our desires are shaped and formed through other people who model desires to us.

At the most basic level, this happens in families where there could be admired parents who are both doctors or an older sibling that has a younger brother. He goes to medical school and the younger brother follows him to medical school because he’s a model of desire for him.

It also happens in a negative way where there’s kind of an unhealthy form of differentiation that happens. And because differentiation is a core idea in the One and the Ninety-Nine–and I usually talk about differentiation in a positive sense. Like, it’s a good thing to become a differentiated self and to know where you end and others begin or when the group begins. But there’s an unhealthy form of differentiation that is related to mimesis and mimetic desire. And that’s when we say, ‘Well, because this person thinks or likes X,’ because mimetic desire sort of naturally lends itself to rivalry–because we want to be like other people but not too much like them–so we say, ‘If this person believes X, I cannot believe X,’ or ‘If they like X, I must like Y.’

This happens in politics all the time. Right? An idea cannot be debated on its own merits. It’s: Because this party has embraced this policy, it would be mortifying for anybody in the other party to acknowledge anything good about it at all. Right? Your basis of differentiation is what another has chosen first, and colors–often through envy or insecurity or pride–colors the choice before it has actually been evaluated. And that operates at the level of ideas, and it also operates at the level of desires.

Luke Burgis: It’s interesting. If you take, not just what their parents believed, but if you take 10 hot-button political issues and make a list of 10–you pick the 10. Let’s say one of them is gun control. If I were just to ask a person, like, ‘Tell me what you believe about the Second Amendment, about gun control,’ based on their answer, there is a very high likelihood that I could predict what they would think or the position that they’ve arrived at on all 10, and I think I would probably be right about all 10, like, 90% of the time. Which is odd. What are the odds that they independently reasoned their way to all 10 of those positions aligning? So, this clustering of ideas and beliefs through family resemblance in a sense: ‘This is what people like us believe,’ right? This idea, it’s deeply related to identity.

I would add, yeah, we’re kind of ashamed of admitting our imitation or our mimesis as adults, which is very different than children. My daughter is very, very happy when she can imitate anything. But it’s not called imitation when we’re adults. It’s called mimesis because it’s underground, it’s hidden and subconscious, and we’re ashamed of it. Nobody wants to be known as an imitator.

But, it’s not just the crowd that we are mimetic with or influenced by. It’s more often individuals, very specific people. This is where I think Girard really hit on something. There are certain people that have an outsized influence on us that are usually far more important than the crowd as a whole, for whatever reason. We might have a particular hatred of them or we might admire them, but particular people come into our lives and shape our beliefs more than the crowd, usually.

Girard would argue this is because we have some fixation or fascination with them. We’re caught up in some kind of a mimetic entanglement with them. So, while the crowd is important, it’s usually important to narrow it down a bit and understand, well, who are the people that I pay the most attention to? You could start with your Twitter or X feed. Who are the people that I pay the most attention to? Because they do show up as individuals. They don’t show up as the hive, and that’s something that, if you can’t name any, they’re probably pretty powerful.

Luke Burgis: Maybe they’re not so insightful after all.

Luke Burgis: Yeah, this comes near the end as I’m thinking: Okay, so existing in community is really hard. There’s a lot of tensions. What are the kinds of communities that have been around for a very, very long time in a stable state? What can we look to? We need to have some model.

Monastic communities are a very obvious example in my mind. Right? Stable communities that have lived, many of them according to the same rule of life for well over a thousand years now. The Benedictine communities live by a Rule of Life written by Benedict of Nursia well over a thousand years ago, and they endure and are stable. Is there something to be learned from the Rule of Benedict? Is it the greatest organizational manual ever written, not just for monastic communities or religious communities, but is there something that we can learn from that? [More to come, 57:30]