Boreas Podcast

Send us a textGregory Bateson's double bind as the cause of schizophreniaRené Girard on the double bind as a universal human experienceGirard's notion of the haunting double as the source of the double bind and central cause and symptom of schizophrenia

Last episode for the summer. Shakespeare snobbery. Two audiences of Shakespeare: the mob and the initiates. Two layers in Othello and Hamlet: romanticism and mimesis. Othello: thirst for the exotic and the death wish. Hamlet: disillusionment with the violent sacred. Shakespeare the man: relationship trauma and dramatic genius.

René Girard wrote a book of literary criticism of Shakespeare titled "Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare." The book makes centuries of Shakespeare critics look like fools while confirming the bard himself as a monumental literary figure. This podcast summarises some of the big points of Girard's analysis of Shakespeare.Shakespeare dramatised and reflected on what Girard calls the mimetic nature of desire ("love through others' eyes"), using it as a key plot device in many of his works. In this episode we talk about a few of them, including Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida.Furthermore, Girard analyses Shakespeare's depictions of what he calls mimetic crises and sacrificial murder. We discover these elements in Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar.This episode is Part 1 of 2 (for now) on the topic of Shakespeare interpreted by Girard.

Christ's admonitions to turn the other cheek, love thy enemy, etc., from the Sermon on the Mount unsettle many brave Christians. We interpret these admonitions conclusively with the help of René Girard's mimetic exegesis. Take courage soldier! – Jesus does not advocate cowardice or resignation. We also reference C.S. Lewis, and discuss how "love thy enemy" links to Sun Tzu's precepts in The Art of War.

Mexico: A Girardian analysis of Mel Gibson's movie ApocalyptoChina: Girardian notes on Terracotta Warriors and pandasRome: The Gladiator movie; the origin of gladiatorial gamesGreece: The origin of the ancient Olympic Games

L'appel du vide -- the call of the void; or as Nietzsche says, "If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you" A mimetic theory interpretation of the call of the void: inflamed (rather than mortified) desire leads to sadomasochism, leads to an urge to dash ourselves before the terrible and awesome model-obstacleCall of the void in romantic pursuit and poverty (forgot to discuss existentialism and atheism)Call of the void leading to  political and ethnic self-harm

René Girard's understanding of the symbiosis of imitation and innovation.In traditional societies, imitation was encouraged, innovation was discouraged; in modern society, it is the opposite; why?Imitation and innovation game in science, the arts, business, and geopoliticsBad imitation: resentment of the rival and cargo cults

Modernity is the precious product of Western Christian Tradition. It is good. You can't and you don't want to go back to some fanciful "trad" era. The aim should be to learn how to navigate the novel challenges of our exciting though perilous times, not give up on them.

An early reader of The Modern Malaise tunes into Boreas Podcast to talk about his personal journey through the shadowy valleys of male coming-of-age, one that included many – or rather all – of the challenges covered in the book: an obsession with Nietzsche, a body-building buddy group, online dating, and money Twitter. His impressions and advice on making it through.

Girardian takes on racismHow white racism is unique: blindness to violence and genteel insistence on "scientific objectivity"Racism as sadomasochism that ends up in self-destruction and/or mixing with the "inferior"You are whom you f*** so if you want to keep your race pure get used and comfortable with hating your own people.Scale back on globalisation.

"Eternal Recurrence" of Nietzsche and pre-Socratic philosophers, history repeating itself, and the victimary mechanism, or "Satan casting out Satan"; A big part of "trad Christian Twitter" as a swinging of the "infernal pendulum" from the heathen idols of wokism to a heathen interpretation of Christianity as a violent religion;Religious fear mongering as bottom-shelf cowardice and resentment, and as the way Satan gets his due in post-vengeance era;The impossibility of non-sacrificial space, manifested in the failure of modernity and in the repulsive and bloody sacralizations of postmodernism.

Keynes as prophet of mature capitalism, against its rival religion of communism. The arcane language of economics sages. Mythologies that economics/capitalism supplanted (and that's a good thing). Nature of mythologies old and new: how they make you feel good early on, and what happens when they run their course. 

What is it that makes us uniquely human? Thinking (homo sapiens)? Organizing (homo economicus)? Symbols (“the symbolic species”)?I propose that it is desire in Girardian sense — we are homo desiderans: the desiring humans.Artificial intelligence versus the desiring human.Wordcels, shape rotators, and a third way.

What is the one single basic principle of all war strategy?The answer is given from readings of René Girard's mimetic theory together with Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and the Bible.  I suggest how to apply it in modern life.Also, there is a discussion of military history and how war changed through to modern times. Were Sun Tzu and Machiavelli cynics? Were European aristocrats who shot each other in pistol duels idiots? How did Napoleon influence modern warfare?Are Gospels pacifist in the strict sense? Was René Girard a pacifist? Listen to find out.

A Girardian angle on the stock market. Yes, the market is irrational, and no, it's not because we have "herd instincts" and other traces of evolutionary survival instincts, but because we are mimetic. Investing is like romance. Girard's mimetic theory does not in any way, shape, or form support any Marxist or neo-Marxist attacks on the Western civilisation.

Conspiracy theories getting out of hand on the right.Separating sound skepticism from "esoteric" conspiracy theories.Esoteric conspiracy theories as leftover of archaic paganism.Conspiracy theorising is witch hunting in a secular age.CTs may be violent  polytheism, but the woke left is the Antichrist.

Girardian takes on addiction.Beyond the biochemistry, brain science, and environmental triggers.The pursuit of deviated transcendence.The tormenting obstacle; obsessive or repetitive stumbling.Addiction to pain as well as euphoria; sadomasochism. Escapism; addiction as medicine.Aggravated addiction and hallucinations, monsters, and demons.

Exploring the connection between the black pill (resigned mindset) and embracing or rejecting "the flesh." Why scientism is an embracing of the flesh. Why the black pill is a demonic lie that should be rejected and protected against.

Some personal background on how I ended up writing and talking so much about Christianity. Reading some of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" and discussing the big question of individual freedom versus belonging. 

Exploring Jews in the role of Girard's archaic scapegoats: magical outsiders who blend in and either bless the community with white magic or curse it with black magic, and how Jews react and act in this role.

George is back with Virgil for Season 3 of the enchanting, enlightening Boreas Podcast! The episode was recorded around Christmastime 2023. We discuss the katechon, one of the concluding topics in our new book, The Modern Malaise, available all over the internet February 7th, 2024.Katechon ("he who restraints / that which restrains") is a term from St. Paul's second letter to Thessalonians and a mysterious concept much discussed over the centuries. We talk about how the katechon may be getting permanently removed by our current culture, which may lead – finally! – to the Apocalypse.

George closes out the season with a meditation on low self-esteem. How can this increasingly common affliction be explained by a failure in the relationship with our mimetic models? And especially the most decisive mimetic models of our lives – our parents ? How is low self-esteem connected to things like homosexuality, transgenderism, transhumanism, and in general a desire to transcend and transgress everything? How is it related to "scientism" and even science itself? Tune in to find out.

George rushes were respectable scholars fear to tread: the mimetic-theory hypothesis on homosexuality. The idea is that homosexuality arises when the sexual attention and appetite shift from the instinctual object of desire – i.e. a person of the opposite sex – onto the rival. George elaborates on the theory and applies it to the next-level sexual nonconformity we're seeing today: gender fluidity, multiplying types of sexuality, gender transitioning, etc. The phenomenon is explained as resulting from hyper-sexualised culture, but also from individuals trying to differentiate through authentic desire.

Virgil is back to talk to George about living the good life. We've done a lot of critique on the frogs and the snowflakes. Now it's time to discuss how to tell the right path and pick role models that will lead us to a good place. It helps to learn what "deviated transcendence" means, as well as the difference between internal and external mediation. Virgil and Charlie touch on some famous names as examples of true heroic exceptions.

Charlie is out for this one and George has a head on reckoning with the whole culture of pickup artistry. How PUA doctrine stacks up against the mimetic understanding of desire, why PUA doesn't work, and why you should stay away from it.

Having laid out all that's wrong with the modern malaise, a debilitating mental illness suffered by both the new right and the new left, George and Virgil set out to discuss what is to be done about it.Conversation takes off with a discussion of desire: how in older times desire was feared as a disruptive force, how, on the contrary, in the modern times it is encouraged, and how that encouragement explains a lot of the uniquely modern social pathologies. It wasn't planned that way, but the conversation ends up deep-diving into the hopelessly misguided world of new-right dating advice.

George and Virgil are back on their project of subverting the twin neo-paganism of the new right and the postmodern left. These two take a lot of pride in themselves subverting "traditional morals." For the new right, it's Nietzschean revaluation of all values and ceasing to feel sorry for the "refuse" of humanity. For the postmodern left, it's subverting traditional power structures, all of which are oppressive.But the truth is, both of these would-be subversions are aping the one permanent subversion, which is the subversion of the sacrificial mechanism, or the scapegoating mindset brought about by the Old and New Testaments. Listen to this episode to hear it explained how one can tell good subversion from bad, and how and why paganism, both old and new, is beautiful lies hiding an ugly truth, while the Bible is the beautiful truth revealing the ugly lies, which we still try not to see.

George and Virgil have their take on a topic on which everyone has a take: WOKE CULTURE, or WOKISM. René Girard may be the first person to clearly foresee the ongoing obsession with victimhood, predicting it in his writings back in the 1970s. So wouldn't you want to know how the prophet saw it? In this episode we serve that to you as a centrepiece in a smorgasbord of other enlightening and empowering insights on the topic.The episode is part of a series on the new-right reaction to the modern malaise. Understanding the sworn enemies of the new right is part of understanding the new right themselves.

George and Virgil talk about the parallels between our 21-century times and Nietzsche's 19th century. Things have gotten worse: as society became more and more equal, we got more and more rivalry and competition. Youth of today are confronted by their own Wagners at every step. We then swerve into talking about the anthropology of mimetic crises and how the Bible irreversibly opened our eyes to how they work.

We explore the patron saint of Modern Malaise Martyrs: Friedrich Nietzsche. The famous 19th-century philosopher was an incel before there were incels, alt-right before there was alt-right, a sperger before there were spergers, a racist before ... never mind... ; the original ubermensch railing against the worms and slaves of this world (almost everyone other than himself)... We look for the motivations for Nietzsche's philosophy in the cultural background of Europe of his day and in his personal history, and especially his relationship with the composer Richard Wagner. Tracing René Girard's footsteps, we explain how Nietzsche's unhealthy views contributed to his ultimate madness. 

George's old friend Virgil joins the studio for the start of another season of George Boreas Podcast. This season is a project of about seven episodes that will be turned into a book. The goal is to study an increasingly influential internet subculture that goes by many different names (trad? vitalists? frogs? alt-right? etc.), but that involves the rejection of modern western "degeneracy" and a creation of its own vision based on a philosophy emphasising virility and mental and physical fitness. It proposes a 21st century version of Nietzsche's "revaluation of all values."In this first episode, Virgil and George try to map out what the subculture considers wrong with today's soft and degenerate Western society - the modern malaise.

How one goes from trying to conquer the universe with artificial intelligence to being fascinated with cute cats. Electronic omertà. Eight billion flawless AI robots. Being on spectrum as a free pass for being a prick. The perpetual orgasm of knowing the mathematical mysteries of the universe. Etc.

Is historical progress guaranteed? Is history moving definitively in one direction, or is there a chance that our civilisation might collapse and we go back to ground zero? If progress is definitive, what drives it? What is the motor and guarantor of that movement in one direction, rather than in a circle? George goes over the common philosophical perspectives and gets to the Girard's perspective: historical progress is real, and its motor from the beginning was and still is the gradual uncovering of the victimary mechanism, which amounts to the recession of the sacred. Tune in to hear where that came from and how it works.

"In reaction to the continuous humiliation that is poverty, the underprivileged enter a life of self-destructive sadomasochism, which according to René Girard is the final state of all frustrated desires."The poor aren't fine. They are possessed by demons, and the demons are the privileged. So they can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Neither can they be healed by money alone. What they need is an exorcism.

Seasteads: self-governing communities floating upon the ocean. Utopian communities  free from oppressive government, or super-villain lairs plotting their own takeover of the world? Charlie and George discuss this and other visions of libertarian dreams.

According to René Girard, sadomasochists have an obsessive yet accurate understanding that all desire feeds on obstacles placed between it and its goal. The obstacle, and the pain it creates, convince desire that transcendence is within reach. For sadomasochists, this pain is the sacrament through which they partake of that evasive transcendental being that is the goal of all desire.

Charlie and George tackle the controversies of immigration politics. The historical motives behind immigration and against it in the USA and elsewhere. Immigrants as assets in the progressive-conservative conflict of Western democracies. Discussion of the libertarian view of immigration. & more.

Total social equality is neither possible nor desirable. I explain why this is true with arguments from mimetic theory: desire is imitated, and so it always and everywhere creates celebrities and outcasts. On the other hand, I think it's true that "all men are created equal," as the Declaration of Independence proclaims. I explain how the sense of violent sacred allowed societies throughout history to hold to the idea of essential human equality while being highly stratified and practicing all forms of oppression. Finally, I discuss how the recession of violent sacred means that we no longer know how to establish peaceful differences. 

Charlie and George get into the rampant and much talked about phenomenon of declining testosterone levels in males. They discuss their personal experiences with health and fitness. Charlie shares from the extensive research and writing he's done on the topic. There's less direct reference to mimetic theory than usual, but we certainly explore the whys and wherefores.

We finally have a guest! George talks with Charlie Deist on the topics of self-help books and "success culture." The two friends share personal experiences. They discuss the historical and social causes that gave rise to the self-improvement mindset, and they refer to René Girard's theory to critique it. They talk about how obsession with success can damage an individual, and how one could avoid such damage.

Adversaries locked in violent conflict exchange acts of aggression. With each act, they attempt to end the fight, to have the "last word of violence." Yet, the exchanges only produce symmetry: as they go blow-for-blow, rather than establishing difference, they become more and more alike. This dynamic applies to all pursuits of desire, which are always pursuits of some transcendental difference, but it becomes the most manifest when a pursuit flares up into open conflict, or war. However, the pursuit never ends in transcendence, or "libidinal impregnability." It produces death as it chugs along, and it ends in sacrifice.

Narcissism is an ever-popular topic. There's a lot of speculation and fascination around it. In this episode, I attempt a mimetic theory breakdown of the phenomenon that simplifies it a great deal. The episode details the various aspects of narcissism and goes over its historical background. It then presents the Girardian idea of narcissism as a failed seduction strategy.

Humans are animals that desire. Unlike animal instinct, which is fixed on predetermined objects and cannot change, desire is always a desire for a higher being - for transcendence - and is determined for us by our models, or mediators, or idols, whom we believe to possess that higher, transcendental being. However, the truth is that no human being possesses transcendence. Our erroneous belief in its earthly existence causes all kinds of trouble by making us miserable, envious, greedy, etc. 

The victimary mechanism is foundational to human culture, but it already started with animals. For example, chimpanzees seem to hunt to create in-group cohesion. René Girard argued that the victimary mechanism was the motor of hominization, the process that produced humans from animals. By channeling violence outside the group, the mechanism created safe space inside the group where nurturing, cooperation, and intelligence could flourish. The intelligence in turn enhanced the ability to keep the inside and the outside separate and distinct. The positive feedback loop quickly generated a vast gulf between the new hyper-intelligent species and all other animal forms.

This longer-than-usual episode first goes over the origins of authority. It challenges conventional Marxist, Darwinian, and Hobbesian theories and their derivatives. It presents René Girard's theory of authority evolving out of the archaic role of the human sacrificial victim. Finally, it applies this insight to the modern era and explores its modern implications.

George reads his latest blog article / newsletter.

Test run with George talking to himself off-the-cuff about production of monsters.