The motivating question for NOVITATE 2023 (“Be Not Conformed”) is inspired by the apostle Paul’s exhortation in the twelfth chapter of the Letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” How might René Girard’s mimetic theory help us understand important problems in our contemporary world, and how might it point to a solution?
My response revolves around how conformity in the contemporary paradigm is the acceptance of fear. Understanding how Girard’s mimetic theory contributes to our belief system and using it to our advantage can help us renew our minds away from beliefs rooted in fear and towards those grounded in faith.
Introduction:
The apostle Paul wrote in the twelfth chapter of the Letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
Since the most oft-repeated phrase in the Bible is “Be not afraid,” the author is naively inclined to believe St Paul’s renewal of the mind refers to the release of worldly fears for faith - faith in God or for the less religious, faith in one’s purpose, that all will be better if we follow our mission and use our God-given gifts for the betterment of others. A mind gripped in fear cannot hear, let alone approve of God’s will because the noise of doubt drowns the clarity of His will. To approve His will, either the noise of fear must be removed through its vanquishment or the sound of faith must be amplified over fear.
This essay will not be an exposé on how to find faith, but rather, an exploration of the hidden mechanisms that allow for worldly fears to overtake our minds. C.G. Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” so we will begin with an attempt to bring light to the unconscious. Only by understanding these forces can we systematically prevent a fate of fear - to build faith via negativa.
Understanding Mechanisms of Fear (i.e. Our Belief System):
A disposition of faith or fear is governed by our belief system or perception of truth. There are a variety of paths an idea can take to become embedded within our belief system. The most common paths follow the laws of cybernetics, in which inputs and outputs automatically happen unless someone interferes with the mechanism. In other words, cybernetic mechanisms of truth follow simplistic cause-and-effect patterns (e.g. if x events happen to me, the downstream effect will be the harboring of y beliefs if I don’t interfere). Less commonly, we see acausal sources of truth in which God or another force outside of us inexplicably shows us the truth. Acausal truths defy causal explanation so they have a mystical nature for the Western mind. We will start by exploring the two primary inputs that precipitate our cybernetic mechanisms of truth: mimetic desire and programming.
Rene Girard’s mimetic desire is the theory that our desires originate from a desire to mimic others, particularly our inspiration and competition. To Girard, desire is extrinsic rather than intrinsic: we want something through external suggestion rather than internal projection. Those that imprint their desires on us the most are the people we look up to and those we compete with the most. For example, my desire for a promotion at my job does not originate from an intrinsic feeling of worthiness, it was born when I learned of my peer’s promotion. It’s worth noting that mimetic desire is not self-evident, it requires a deep look into the subconscious to unveil this ugly truth. In fact, this theory was not brought to the collective consciousness until Girard proposed it in 1959.
Mimetic models refer to the specific inspiration and competitors that point us to our desires. These include those you wish to emulate like celebrities and social media personalities, or they can be those similar to you - friends, colleagues, and family members. When we can draw a clear line between our desires and these mimetic models, we can trace their influence on our perception of truth and whether they generate a belief system of fear. Let’s explore three mechanisms in which fear can encroach, all originating from mimetic desire.
A logical consequence of our instinctual tendency to look to others on what to desire is that we pay attention to what our mimetic models show us. This extends beyond the simple view of what they explicitly show us, but it includes mimicking attention. We will call this phenomenon mimetic evidence, where the empirical evidence we see is downstream of who our mimetic models are and where their attention lies.
Empirical evidence contributes to our belief system directly when viewed in its specific, literal context. An example is the observation of a rabbit on your walking trail yesterday. Generally speaking, seeing is believing, so you accept your observation as truthful and you may even recall it as an interesting anecdote to your friends at the local watering hole. Seeing is not always believing though. When we find evidence that counteracts one of our mental models - our internal representations of the world around us - a filtering takes place. We either modify our mental models to accept the new evidence or more commonly, we reject the evidence to uphold our existing mental models. For example, we explain away why the evidence in front of us is false, whether that be optical illusion, sheer chance, or outright manipulation. This tendency to reject evidence in favor of existing mental models is dangerous because it transforms the belief of a mental model into a habit. Habitual thinking creates an uphill battle to change a belief, so a mental model that promotes fear requires additional effort to unravel.
The formation of new mental mental models or manipulation of existing ones to fit new evidence is called inductive reasoning - where we extrapolate general principles from specific observations. For example, I may observe a specific black swan which prompts me to believe generally that not all swans are white.
Danger lurks within inductive reasoning as well. Transform our example to this: observation of horrific violence in a city on your television while sitting in your rural living room fosters a belief that cities are dangerous places One can easily see how ideologies of fear are bred from such inductive reasoning. To state it another way, the world is filled with enough evidence that the wildest theories can be drawn from the right pairing of objective evidence. Like the rest of our mental faculties, inductive reasoning is a tool, and it can lead to productive or harmful conclusions. A more useful conclusion from our previous example may be that cities can be dangerous places. Such a belief fosters awareness without instilling fear.
Not only do mimetic models point us to new mental models through inductive reasoning, but we are exposed to the mental models they directly share. This can be incidental or intentional. Some popular mimetic models curate what they share to influence what their followers believe - this is commonly seen through the ask of leading questions. Mimetic expression of mental models is akin to pushing someone onto a path. The indirect use of mimetic evidence is like dangling a few carrots along a path to encourage someone to follow a path. Both lead to the same destination, but are slightly different approaches. For simplicity’s sake, we will lump both push and pull approaches into the category of mimetic gospel.
The effectiveness of these mechanisms depends on the recipient’s disposition. Perhaps the audience is quite independently minded or prides themselves on intelligence. The direct push of beliefs may be less effective than a cultivated use of mimetic evidence and allowing room for subsequent inductive reasoning.
Mimetic models can influence our perception of truth even more subtly if we consider how they pair with programming. Programming is the unconscious manipulation of mental models and habitual thinking. This can stem from biological principles, the content we consume, and our mimetic models who, wittingly or not, program us through the mechanism of subliminal messaging.
Subliminal messaging is the leakage of mental models through symbolism or linguistic means. Linguistics target the thinking left brain while symbolism bypasses the linguistic left brain. The most common form of subliminal messaging is through the content we consume, generally curated by our favorite mimetic models. Subliminal messaging could be through the telling of a story with a moral theme. For example, any of Aesop’s Fables could be considered subliminal messaging of certain morals. For most adults, the message of The Tortoise and the Hare is clear, so the messaging is overt, but for young children it could be considered subliminal. Whether the message is consciously recognized distinguishes whether the messaging is subliminal. If a subliminally proposed moral or mental model is accepted, our perception of truth is influenced through our natural use of deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning is the mechanism where you can draw specific conclusions about specific situations through an understanding of general principles. For example, if you believe wealth is morally bankrupt, and you notice so-and-so is wealthy, you’ll believe so-and-so is amoral. Our perception of truth can stem from models rather than empiricism via deductive reasoning. This is especially useful when we consider that senses can be duped, empiricism can be faked, appearances can be misleading, and we live among a sea of evidence that can support the wildest theories. For example, I can calculate the distance to the moon without dragging a tape measure off my rocket ship. Despite not having objective evidence of the distance to the moon, I can be quite confident in my assessment from my understanding of principles governing the physics of celestial bodies.
Our version of truth governs our sensory perceptions equally if not more than vice versa. This is because of an analogy proposed by Robert Anton Wilson that I frequently return to: Inside you there are two people, the Thinker and Prover. What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. The Thinker dreams up infinite possibilities while the Prover serves to find evidence that supports the Thinker. In other words, the Prover cherry picks evidence to support the Thinker’s beliefs - the Thinker does not even get to see evidence contrary to his grandiose beliefs. The Thinker is akin to the Freudian ego or the house of our mental models while the prover is akin to Napoleon Hill’s hypnotic rhythm or our subconscious deductive reasoning.
This explains why to some, there’s clear evidence of magic, others divine intervention, and still others, science beyond our current understanding. Changing the underlying principles you believe influences what you see - it all depends on your antecedent theory.
The danger in deductive reasoning lies in improper balance: an overreliance on theory can lead to the adoption of harmful beliefs that negatively distort your perception of truth. We become quick to discount evidence contrary to our mental models and readily lap up supporting evidence.
Conditioning is the form of programming where mental models are injected/accepted via intentional subliminal messages or unassuming expression of opinions. Conditioning differs from learning because learning is rooted in the conscious attainment of a goal or the chase of a curiosity. Conditioning is unconscious - meaning it stems from the unconscious or unquestioned acceptance of information. Think about conditioning and learning as the two pieces that establish our mental models or what the Thinker thinks - the difference is whether they are attained consciously or not.
Learnings are generally well thought out and nuanced while conditioning tends to manifest itself through contradictory beliefs and anger when questioned. This is largely because both learning and conditioning latch on to our ego since they contribute to our version of the truth. The Thinker/ego can feel threatened when it is questioned, and since conditioning is previously unquestioned by its subconscious nature, the ego naturally feels most threatened the first time the Thinker’s sheltered belief system is threatened. The questioning of learnings tends not to elicit such a response since by their nature, they have been previously questioned consciously, so they are more secure beliefs.
Conditioning can be uncovered through the monitoring and questioning of our behavior. Action stems from our beliefs, so we can trace our behavior back to our beliefs and question whether they serve us. Once this questioning occurs, conditioning can either be transformed into a learning if accepted or deprogrammed and discarded if rejected. We will explore deprogramming in more detail later.
As we previously discussed, mimetic models can be the sources of conditioning but our programming can also point us to different mimetic models. We will call this mechanism programmatic mimesis. Another way to describe programmatic mimesis is to say that our environment and the culture we live within, particularly at a young age, influences who appeals to us as inspiration and who we choose to compete with. For example, my father has a philosophy strongly embedded in Protestant work ethic. “Man is made to work” is a quote of his that stands out in my mind. Being raised in such an environment, this would explain why Gary Vaynerchuk, practitioner of our modern hustle culture, appealed to me as a mimetic model in my early twenties. If I was raised by a drifter, such a mimetic model would have never appealed to me.
Lastly, we see identity driven programming. This is exactly as it sounds, programming that originates from your belief of yourself. This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem since we are describing mechanisms that lead to your perception of truth; however, your belief of yourself governs your perception of the outside world. In other words, self-limiting and self-expanding beliefs impact your mental models of what’s possible, empirical evidence, and the mimetic models you are drawn to. What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. Identity is a belief that forms a feedback loop with these other mechanisms of truth.
Programming and mimesis are two powerful forces governed by causality and illustrated by rather simplistic diagrams of cause and effect. Forgive the author as we veer into the abstract and explore a type of truth that is difficult for the Western mind to comprehend: those governed by non-causality.
Acausal truths represent the portion of our belief system that does not arise from causal or cybernetic means. For example, a causal form of truth may look like this: a mimetic model introduces me to a new mental model which I accept. Acceptance of this mental model changes my belief system and manipulates my perception of incoming evidence to reinforce what my Thinker thinks. An acausal truth is associated with what some call divine intervention, others mere chance, and still others, the collective unconscious or Infinite Intelligence. Perhaps it stems from a highly complex chain of cause-and-effect beyond our ability to comprehend. Regardless, acausal truth is a transcendence of our concept of causality - we are smacked with a revelation seemingly out of nowhere.
One interpretation of acausal truth is a revelation from your right brain. As Iain McGilchrist posited, the Western world has become increasingly left brained - meaning we listen to the detail driven, logical, reductionist, vocal left brain more than our holistic, intuitive, mute right brain. Since the left brain is the chatterbox, it can be difficult to hear the insight of a mute intelligence, especially in a society that discourages introspection and solitude. Acausal truths can sneak out of this right brain through subtle winks like synchronicities or violently through aggressive revelations. Since the right brain sees the world differently and its way of thinking cannot be narrowly considered like left brain concepts, acausal truths may simply be the silent intelligence in you attempting to speak, offering a new perspective.
As previously stated, acausal truths may not originate from within, they could be from God or Jung’s collective unconscious. This could explain why cultures separated by space and time, totally unaware of each other, have reached similar conclusions. For example, The Golden Rule is common to all major religions. Another concept that is common across many religions: your actions and intentions are measured over the course of your life and judged - whether that’s the concept of karmic debt or sin. Perhaps these are acausal truths offered to humanity by something external.
Solutions: How Do We Remove Fear So We Can Find Faith?
As the reader may surmise, fear can sneak its way into our repertoire of beliefs through any of the aforementioned mechanisms. Conceptual understanding is important but our journey does not end here. Recognition of these principles within yourself can only be found through manipulation and application of such concepts. Context matters. How do we use these concepts to overcome a conformist worldview of fear? Once we reach such a state, how do we fight entropy to maintain a status quo of faith?
As we saw, mimesis governs a large portion of what we believe to be true. To avoid a conformist view, a healthy first step is to be selective with your mimetic models. Consciously choose to follow transcendental models like Jesus and reduce exposure to models that conform to worldly principles. Transcendental mimetic models differ from contrarian mimetic models - those that can be relied upon to challenge every mainstream belief without fail. Transcendental mimetic models empower you to think for yourself and live up to your fullest potential for the betterment of humanity. They encourage you to have faith in a cause bigger than yourself. Contrarian models prey on your fears and are governed by the same mainstream as conformists.
One could argue that in our interconnected world, it is difficult to control which mimetic models we are exposed to - especially if we consider the difficulty of discerning the origin of the ideas found on the internet. You may do everything in your power to limit your exposure to conformist mimetic models, but your desire to keep up with your friends or family on social media can create an unforeseen consequence. When they share an idea, it is difficult to know which ideas are theirs versus ones regurgitated from their favorite talk show host.
The logical conclusion is to simply isolate yourself from everyone and live in your own predictable bubble. The end! Of course not - filtering upstream mimetic models to its logical conclusion is no way to live, but we can keep this technique in our toolbox and use it to the level that works for us before considering the next tool: filtration of mental models.
When we come across a mental model, we have a choice: accept or reject it. Here we recognize how mimetic gospel works - the default is to accept what our inspiration and competition share with us. Or if we have the contrarian bug, our knee jerk reaction may be to reject any mental model that swims in the mainstream.
The natural solution to this predicament is to use your brain instead of letting your mimetic heroes and villains dictate your beliefs. This is a simple yet exhausting solution: question everything and critically consider your beliefs. The reason we default to accepting mimetic mental models is because it is biologically expensive to use your brain - it is much more efficient to simply accept your neighbor’s viewpoints.
A simple barometer for what designates a mental model that should be accepted vs rejected is lindy. The Lindy Effect is the observation that the longer an idea has survived, the longer it will survive. Hence, an older idea is more valuable than a newer one. Leveraging lindy means that what is tried and true can be accepted, anything else that is falsifiable can be discarded. Of course this a rule of thumb, closure to new ideas locks us into our existing mental models and stagnates a society. Perhaps it is worth tagging ideas as experimental until they are proven effective. Horses were lindy until the experimental automobile came along. Only after automobiles were proven to be an effective and affordable means of transportation, did they replace the previous paradigm.
A more preferable solution may be to add a layer to our decision tree. Rather than accept or reject a mental model, we can simply choose to ignore it, we can let it roll around in our skulls before allowing for a graceful exit. As Aristotle notoriously said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” These cliché but wise words ring true since it speaks to the wisdom of rejecting or ignoring mental models that lead to fear. To use this approach effectively, you must know what is most important to you.
Willful ignorance can be difficult since the desire to overly share our opinions is an oft-overlooked vice, especially in our brave new world of social media. In other words, it can be difficult to resist the urge to have a take on the current thing. A good rule of thumb, if the topic doesn’t prompt curiosity and long bouts of research, why would you have an opinion on it? You are clearly ignorant on the topic - why not accept this reality and use your precious energy elsewhere?
This approach is an effective means to block fearful ideologies while remaining biologically preferable.
Consciously filtering beliefs and pleading ignorance can be exhausting and a challenge since we are wired for self-delusion through our struggle to recognize our limitations, as evidenced by the Dunning-Kruger Effect. And as we previously shared, mimetic origin can be difficult to locate; hence, perpetual filtering of our mental and mimetic models cannot be the only tools in our arsenal against fear.
How about programming? That is much more difficult to recognize. And we have to be careful not to spot patterns that may not exist - what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. As we previously discussed, a general awareness and curation of your environment is the first step to excise unwanted mimetic models. This can be described as curating your consumption habits. As we discussed with programmatic mimesis, mimetic models can be downstream of the culture you live within. It may be an uphill battle to constantly sort out mimetic models when the embedded culture favors fear over faith. For example, a culture of obscenity will recycle obscene mimetic models as their celebrities. A culture filled with fear will continually promote fear mongers to their constituents. The easiest solution is to leave for greener pastures so you are not inundated with this programming and their mimetic models; however, fleeing is a defeatist approach. The next best solution is again awareness; a recognition of this mechanism so you can know when you are being influenced. The influence of programming and mimetic models resembles the influence of your emotions. When you bring them to light, their power diminishes. Try this the next time you are in the grip of your emotions - take a step back and ask yourself which emotion you are feeling and why that might be the case. You’ll notice your thinking clears up like a lens is removed. Recognizing your programming and mimetic models has a similar effect.
The best solution is to contribute to the counterculture or become anti-mimetic, and show others that there is a better way. In other words, fight against a culture inoculated with fear or hatred. Of course, being a freedom fighting influencer isn’t everyone’s life calling, but there are more subtle ways to dismantle a culture of fear. We can shape a culture through our example or by asking leading questions to our friends stuck in a pit of fear. As Douglas Rushkoff said in a separate context, “Program or be programmed.” It rings even truer in this case - join a community of faith or actively work towards building one in your community unless you wish to fall into fear.
Changing your environment is a useful way to eliminate your exposure to unwanted programmatic mimesis and subliminal messaging, but how can we address our conditioning? As we previously mentioned, it is quite similar to how we address unwanted learnings and mental models. By questioning our behavior, we can uncover unwanted conditioning. You’ll notice a recurrent theme in this essay - awareness is almost always step number one. Once unwanted conditioning is identified, there are a variety of tools at our disposal for deprogramming ourselves. We already discussed how we can simply manipulate the upstream influences responsible for our conditioning. A good example is to identify a model that embodies an ideal you wish to reach and program yourself with their beliefs by spending time with them, reading their biographies, and/or using visualization techniques.
Napoleon Hill took the latter to new heights through his “Roundtable of Invisible Counselors.” He meticulously studied his heroes throughout history to understand their background, mannerisms, motives, and voices. From his understanding of them, he could vividly create personas in his imagination and mentally simulate how they might respond to a given situation. Whenever he had a difficult problem to work through, he would consult with his invisible counselors. We can use this technique by selecting counselors that embodied lives of faith and listen to their counsel when we feel afraid or when we simply want the opinion of those we wish to emulate.
You might recognize a simplified version of this through the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bumper stickers that were popular in the ‘90s. This simple reminder is a great way to question whether your actions, which are downstream of your beliefs, align with how a transcendental mimetic model would behave.
Another tool for reprogramming your unconscious mental models is through Maxwell Maltz’s Theatre of the Mind. This is similar to Hill’s Roundtable of Invisible Counselors because it leverages your imagination. Entering Maltz’s Theatre of the Mind involves creating a clear picture of success and playing it over and over again in your head like a movie. In the context of this essay, this means visualizing yourself acting without fear and paying close attention to what it feels like as the protagonist in this mental movie.
Muhammad Ali famously leveraged The Theatre of the Mind under a synonymous name: The Future History Exercise. Mike Tyson had a similar regimen which included hypnosis and affirmations. Ali and Tyson employed these techniques to program themselves into the greatest fighters that ever existed. Such accomplishments are evidence of an ability to subdue fear and carry delusional levels of faith in themselves. In fact, every man-made accomplishment in existence was the product of either chance or someone’s imagination. Since entropy and sources of fear surround you, the odds stand against you if you relinquish your fate to chance.
The reader is free to explore and experiment with other tools like affirmations and hypnosis on their own time - the last tool we will explore to deprogram fear leverages identity. As we previously discussed, identity is a belief that loops back into our programming. Belief in one’s capabilities creates mental models of faith, morphs empirical evidence in the bearer’s favor, and orients its owner away from fear mongering mimetic models. One tool to manipulate your identity is The Identity Change Cycle.
The first step of this process is to have the courage to be vulnerable and honest with yourself about yourself. This requires observation of your emotional state to understand what you view as a threat to your identity. If you know what threatens you, you can deduce what you identify with and whether your identities program you with an ideology of fear or faith.
Once you recognize an identity that contributes to an ideology of fear, you can use your gift of reason to prove your harmful identity wrong - to wrack your brain for evidence contrary to your identity. Third, consider where your identity that promotes fear has led you. What undesirable impact has it had on your relationship with yourself and your loved ones? Then, dwell on these harmful results to the point of anger. Let yourself become mad over the ridiculousness of believing something that is harmful and simply not true Lastly, check in with yourself. Are the same insecurities still present? If yes, rinse and repeat this process. If not, congrats! Your ideology of fear no longer originates from this identity - your identity has been changed.
The author would argue that an ability to overcome fear is one of the greatest distinguishers between us and animals. Just observe any wild animal, fear frequently places them in a panicky state of fight or flight. Many humans get stuck in this dreadful position, which blocks critical thought and the fulfillment of potential. It requires constant effort and reorganization to fight this tendency to revert to a lower form of consciousness. In other words, entropy is the natural course of events - order only arises through consistent intervention. All cybernetic mechanisms of truth require a combination of self-reflection and environmental manipulation to combat this entropy - to eliminate existing and prevent future truth systems rooted in fear.
Manipulating our cybernetic sources of truth requires us to exercise our cognitive abilities by questioning and manipulating our beliefs and environment - in other words, the solutions are quite left brain dominant. To access the acausal truths that contribute to an ideology of faith, we must take different steps. We must quiet our left brain and its cognitive functions to listen to the wisdom of either God or the right brain - depending on your beliefs. This quieted state can be reached in a variety of ways, so we will split them into three categories:
Passive listening
Active listening
Flow
Passive listening looks like a casual walk in the park or mindfulness meditation: meditation with no intent except to observe passing thoughts. This is where stimulation is removed, so we can witness spontaneous thoughts that enter the mind. Some thoughts are brilliant while others mundane. When a brilliant thought strikes from the spontaneity, it creates the sensation that we have tapped into something outside of us. Is it the attention to the mundane that makes them brilliant or do we access an external creative well when we passively listen? Carl Jung and Greek tradition subscribe to the latter and refer to this as a personal daemon.
Active listening could simply be described as the active pursuit of wisdom, which takes various forms. This can look like prayers of petition or intercession - those that ask God to pass benefits along to ourselves or others. Such prayers can yield acausal truths because it is the active pursuit wisdom. Eastern traditions refer to this practice as contemplation - the act of meditating on a single question for a prolonged period of time. A more mild version of contemplation is the mere reflection on your experiences: asking yourself what you can learn from today, yesterday, last week, or last month. In contemporary secular culture, active listening is the practice of asking your subconscious a question and awaiting a response. Some visualize the subconscious as a friendly internal supercomputer. In principle, these Christian, secular, and Eastern practices are similar in nature: a question is asked to a higher power and the inquisitor awaits a response flowing with esoteric truth. Dream interpretation is another form of active listening in which a dreamer records their dreams and actively seeks out their meaning. If one subscribes to the belief that dreams are highly personal messages from a power higher than the conscious mind, it is a worthwhile source of acausal truth.
The last approach is through Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state. This is when the mind is quieted through focus. Flow state is an ironic state of being because it achieves a decommissioning of the conscious mind through intense focus. It is the opposite approach of passive listening where the mind is left to wander while the user acts as a detached observer. Flow is when the user becomes one with the task at hand; there is no room for wandering. Flow cannot be achieved in any circumstance - it requires the right balance of adversity. Too little challenge and we become unfocused. Too much challenge and we become overwhelmed and stressed. Flow requires relaxed focus, ideally towards a passion.
The author accesses the flow state when writing and words appear to flow without conscious thought, giving the sensation that the words and ideas did not originate from within. The same can be said of any physical or mental activity, the mind shuts off and the learning appears to originate from outside the conscious mind. Napoleon Hill would describe a flow state as the access of borrowed energy in which acausal truth is your reward for using your mind to its fullest potential. The more religious would call this divine inspiration as a reward for using your God-given gifts for the betterment of others.
Conclusion
In this essay we explored how our belief systems are shaped by causal and acausal mechanisms. Mimetic desire - a causal mechanism - can point us to new evidence and ideas which are more likely to be accepted compared to ideas presented by those that do not inspire nor compete with us. They can also indirectly influence our beliefs through subliminal messaging or inductive reasoning. Programming, the other key influential causal mechanism, can point us to new mimetic and mental models, and it is the vehicle through which identity shapes our beliefs. Lastly, acausal mechanisms show us new ideas seemingly out of nowhere - whether that is through divine or subconscious intervention.
In an environment where fear is paramount, knowledge of these mechanisms is crucial in the fight against fear and the path towards faith. Without their recognition, entropy takes its toll and your surroundings shape you into someone you don’t wish to become. Through some combination of introspection and environmental manipulation, we can ensure we don’t reach an entropic state of fear via causal mechanisms. To find faith derived from acausal mechanisms, we must take an antagonistic approach and quiet the mind to hear what God or our subconscious has to offer.
With so many mechanisms of ideological subversion, the fight against fear is a never-ending battle, particularly in an environment where the majority are inundated with worldly fears like the fears of poverty, sickness, death, and ridicule from colleagues. In such a lifestyle inundated with the noise of fear, it is impossible to find one’s purpose, or as St Paul would describe it: God’s will. Only through faith - in our capabilities, in our purpose, in a better future, or in God’s will - can we renew our minds and reject conformance to this world.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered sage advice during a time when faith was lost:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”
Perhaps this message had a greater influence on the American people’s escape from The Great Depression than one might expect.
A really thorough and interesting read, Victor.