The Moral Imagination Ep. 48 Jonathan Bi: Rene Girard - Social Pressure, True and False Desires, Sacrifice, and Belief
Startup Failure
- Jonathan Bi dropped out of Columbia, raised money, and started a company.
- The startup failed, not due to external factors, but because he lacked internal motivation.
Recognition Theory
- Two theoretical frameworks helped Jonathan Bi understand his startup's failure: Buddhist thought and recognition theory.
- Recognition theory emphasizes the interconnectedness of human subjects and their influence on each other.
Internal vs. External Failure
- Jonathan Bi explains that his failure wasn't external, but stemmed from a lack of genuine desire.
- He was pursuing external validation rather than intrinsic motivation.
In this episode I speak with Jonathan Bi about the ideas of Rene Girard, social pressure, authentic and false desires, victims and scapegoats, persecution, and Girardian theories on imitation and violence. We also discuss how Girard’s work sheds light on woke capitalism, right and left totalitarianism, Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, Alexis de Tocqueville, and more. We discuss many themes including:
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Christianity and Girard’s theory and the secularization and falsification of Christian values such as how humanitarianism and pacificism replace charity and peace and justice and more.
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Evangelical Counsels and The Rule of St. Benedict as a response to metaphysical desire
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Different views of the problem of evil: Hegel, Rousseau, Ratzinger, Solzhenitsyn, Girard
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Human Perfectibility and Utopianism
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Hope and Progress
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Benedict XVI Spe Salvi
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On the goodness of being in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and St. Augustine.
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There is no technical solution to the problems of evil, suffering, of death
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Embedded complexity, the dignity of labor, linear time, and how we live in a Christian civilization
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Girard’s explanation of how scapegoating others for their behavior reveals that we too would be guilty — and why it is folly to think with confidence that we would not go along with the crowd if we lived under the Nazis or a slaveholding society
We begin a discussion on the atonement, Girard’s views and how to think about sacrifice — that we’ll have to finish in more detail
We also have a discussion about Christianity and Buddhism and religious belief. I hope you enjoy.
Biography
Jonathan Bi is an entrepreneur working on a startup in FinTech and a philosopher focusing on Buddhist philosophy, Continental philosophy, and specifically the work of Rene Girard. Among his many projects he and David Perell have created a seven session video course on the ideas of Rene Girard. Originally from China, Jonathan also grew up in Canada, and studied computer science at Columbia.
Resources
Jonathan Bi and David Perell Lectures on Girard
On the Atonement — we just got into this briefly, but didn’t have enough time or preparation to address it sufficiently. I am going to have another episode on the atonement, and also on Girard and the atonement, but here are two links to Catholic resources view of the atonement
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