Dr. Seuss, Rene Girard, Miss Piggy and the White Lotus

Just came across this essay last week and it was the final nudge to stop, drop and write this thing on René Girard, Mimetic Desire, and Dr. Seuss.

But first, Miss Piggy.

That was the cover pic to this New York mag bit on how the cosmetic pendulum has swung, and now all of the Miss Piggy "pillow faces" who've been indulging in excessive fillers these past few years, in pursuit of what Jia Tolentino so memorably tagged as "Instagram Face" have now decided that too much puff is more than enough.

Madonna, has apparently yet to receive the memo. 

But for the rest of the cosmetic filler/digital filter crowd, the new aesthetique du jour is, apparently "snatched." Tight jawlines. Sculpted cheeks. Angles not pillows. 

Buccal fat removal, not Stay Puft puffery.

It's not just faces. Butts are shrinking too. The BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) has fallen out, in favor of more modest proportions. Implants are now ex-plants. Fashion is tacking hard in the au naturel direction.

Were it not for the tragic and at times disfiguring results of all of the fiddling, we could just laugh at this ludicrous turn of events. 

It might seem loopy and a sign of the confused times we're in. But really, its roots go back much farther than that.

Among The Stars 🌟

René Girard, the French theorist and philosopher (and onetime professor of Peter Thiel at Stanford) was famous for two things: his notion of how we need to scapegoat martyrs from time to time to purge the sins of our flock, and the concept of mimetic desire.

If you're scratching your head and thinking "hmm, now where have I heard that phrase recently?"

It was on the White Lotus. 

When the one tech bro millionaire says to the other tech bro, “You have a bad case of something called mimetic desire. If someone with higher status than you wants something, it means it’s more likely you’ll want it too.” 

As they proceed to hook up with each others' wives, punch each other out, and make plans to come back next season in the Maldives. 

(See the clip here)

That's what mimetic desire is really all about, Charlie Brown.

Wanting shit that ain't yours more than appreciating the shit that is yours.

Keeping up with, (or hooking up with) the Joneses.

But if you're still scratching your heads about that opening New York Mag story, of folks filling, then draining their faces and booties, while plastic surgeons get paid coming and going? If you're dimly remembering something far older than the last season of White Lotus, you wouldn't be wrong.

You'd have to go back to 1961 when Dr. Seuss came out with his book The Sneetches and Other Stories.

In it, the Big Bird like Sneetches live segregated between the high class ones with green stars upon thar bellies, and the unadorned ones without. 

Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches Had bellies with stars. 

The Plain-Belly Sneetches Had none upon thars. 

Those stars weren't so big. 

They were really so small You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all. 

But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches Would brag, 

"We're the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches." 

With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they'd snort 

“We'll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!" 

And whenever they met some, when they were out walking, 

They'd hike right on past them without even talking. 

Apartheid rules the day until one Sylvester McMonkey McBean (calling himself the Fix-It-Up Chappie) comes to town with a fancy machine that offers to put those coveted green stars upon anyone's belly who has three bucks to spare.

Until, the original blue check  green star Sneetches get so upset by their brand dilution that they are willing to pay Fix-it-up Chappie TEN dollars to have theirs removed.

This of course, sets off a frenzy of circular differentiation

"...until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew

whether this one was that one... or that one was this one...

or which one was what one... or what one was who".

The predictable result is that Fix It Up Chappie leaves town with fat stacks of Benjamins and the Sneetches are left to realize their shared Big Bird humanity. 

Flat-ass Broke.

If you read any biographies of Dr. Seuss you'll see him explain that the Sneetches were an allegory for anti-Semitism, and given the star symbols and the overt message of arbitrary signage-as-social-sorting that seems likely. 

#uncancelthegoodoctor

But here's a curious fact I only discovered today. 

René Girard published his first book Deceit, Desire and the Novel which floated his idea of memetic desire on January 1st,1961

Nine months later, Seuss released his Sneetches. 

What are the odds that Seuss had read Girard earlier in the year, and decided to create a cartoon version of the theory for the masses? Kids and parents alike.

So while the original thesis of this piece was going to be "Dr. Seuss beat Girard to the punch" a more likely statement is "Dr. Seuss popularized Girardian mimetic desire way before anyone really knew what it was."

So where does this leave us?

Well, for sure it lets you flex on your friends when they bring up seesawing beauty trends, or mention watercooler shows like White Lotus. You can nod knowingly, and murmur Girardian, as a sexyAF adjective. 

It goes with almost everything.

But really, Peter Thiel and his homeboy Elon are wrestling with it still.  

Twitter is a place to preen and display, and those blue checks once meant something before you could simply buy one for three eight bucks. It's a delicate balance to strike between pay to play and brand dilution.

Keeping Score 📝

And really, we're all wrestling with it.

Just yesterday I was listening to Eddie Vedder's theme song for the movie Into the Wild. (that's the one about the idealist Chris McCandless who died living in a school bus in Alaska).

I'd always enjoyed it as a mellow post Pearl Jam strum along, but had never properly listened to the words. 

Oh, it's a mystery to me

We have a greed, with which we have agreed

And you think you have to want more than you need

Until you have it all you won't be free

Society, you're a crazy breed

I hope you're not lonely without me

(and here's the most Girardian line of all)

There's those thinking, more or less, less is more

But if less is more, how you keeping score?

Means for every point you make, your level drops

Kinda like you're starting from the top

You can't do that

Watch Eddie strum the tune here 

I was struck by Vedder's words. It was Girardian mimetic desire all the way down. Even when we're trying to unplug from the very system that keeps score. We're socially penalized for slowing down, consuming less and coming to our senses.

That led me to think of something University of British Columbia ecologist Bill Rees said recently on a podcast. "Even the most dedicated environmental folks I know still live well above the carbon footprint they advocate for. We fly to conferences, we use AC, we have several cars in our households, and we continue to consume at First World levels, despite what we know."

Here's an example focusing on flights, but really, it extends to the massive consumption that Americans (and to a lesser but significant extent, Western Europeans enjoy). 

And that's really the rub for all of us: We know better. 

We understand at a deep and visceral level that overconsumption isn't good for the world, isn't good for our kids, and isn't even that good for us.

We've read all the studies on hedonic treadmills and how after median income needs are met, happiness doesn't increase. We get that lowering our consumptive habits is the only ethical conclusion when dealing with the disparities of the Global South and ecological viability.

We get it.

We really do.

But...

But if less is more, how you keeping score?

Means for every point you make, your level drops

Kinda like you're starting from the top

You can't do that

We seem unable to change it, because we're sort of waiting for someone else, anyone else to make the first move. To make downsizing our lives feel ok without losing status. Without becoming irrelevant. 

Hell, most people who make noisy shows of quitting social media platforms come quietly slinking back after six months in the digital wilderness. Changing our actual lives is infinitely harder than that.

Cuz here's another bit of social science we're all familiar with. The notion that when faced with the choice of earning a million bucks in a neighborhood of billionaires, or earning a hundred grand in a neighborhood of food stamps and school lunches, we willingly take lesser earnings to lord it over our poorer friends. Same with the square footage of our homes. A modest house in a field of cabin-shacks provides more of a Girardian kicker than a McMansion in a gated community of actual mansions.

Absolute numbers matter to us way less than relative status. We'd rather take less (stuff) to feel more (status).

Tribal primates to the core. Chaos monkeys to the end.

So, no tidy or pithy resolutions to this one. More of an ongoing thought experiment. 

How do we back off the arms races, of cars, houses, flights, and even hyper-managed-suburban-college-track-kid-wars, unless or until everyone else agrees to also back off?

Do we need to declare a Dumb Fat American General Amnesty so we can all come to our senses? Or will we cling to our relative indulgences and advantages until the currents of history rip them out of our grubby little paws?

Increasingly there are signs that folks are choosing to step off the hamster wheel of Late Stage Capitalism and to do it with some solidarity with others making the move too.  

The 2KW society is modeling voluntary step downs in consumption, as are Transition Towns.  Several principled colleagues of ours are massively reducing travel to conferences and speaking events, and doing more and more remotely. 

The FIRE (financial independence/retire early) movement is inspiring lots of folks to downsize and manage finances. Not to move to Florida to play golf, but simply to reclaim choices and options that feel simpler and richer.

Final Update: after writing this thing, and exploring the curious sequence of Girard and Seuss' 1961 publication history, I came across one more little factoid. While the Sneetches was in fact first published nine months after Girard's book on mimetic desire came out, the story first went into print in Redbook in 1953!

So how 'bout that? Turns out Dr. Seuss was ahead of Girard all along. His yellow bellied Sneetches, with "stars upon thars" was an allegory for our present moment, written exactly 70 years ago. Ahead of that fancy-pants French theorist.

We want what everyone else wants. 

Instead of making that about status and stuff, couldn't we make it about Buckminster Fuller's vision of "a future that works for all of humanity in the shortest possible time, without offense or exclusion of anyone?" 

What if that kind of self-imposed restraint became the new social status symbol? 

What if we could be a little less Yertle the Turtle seeking to be king of his pond, and a little more the Lorax speaking for the trees? 

Could we flip memetic desire on its head, and use it to goose us all towards better outcomes?

As Gary Snyder once wrote, "we shall see who knows how to be."

Cheers,

Jamie