Mimetic desire, social contagion, and the fight for your true self View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Mimetic desire, social contagion, and the fight for your true self Luke Burgis explains how anxiety and opinion spread through groups by contagion, and what it takes to build a solid self that can stand apart from the crowd. Mimetic desire, social contagion, and the fight for your true self Luke Burgis is a veteran entrepreneur and author. He’s the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship in Washington, DC, and the founder of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator[…] Mimetic desire, social contagion, and the fight for your true self Luke Burgis is a veteran entrepreneur and author.
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Drawing on psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s distinction between the solid self and the pseudo self, Burgis shows how anxiety and opinion pass through groups by contagion, and how our screens have multiplied the crowds we have to stand within. **Solid Self vs. Pseudo Self: How to Belong Without Losing Yourself** I’m Luke Burgis. I’m the founder and director of the Cluny Institute and the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life and The One in the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.
Today on Big Think, we’re going to be looking at the two levels of the self, the solid self and the pseudo self. The three temptations of the screen and then courage and specifically the four forms of courage that allow us to live well in the modern world. **Chapter 1: Distinguishing a solid self and a pseudo self** So it seems like every year 10 books get written on how to find your tribe. Um, so it seems to be something that, you know, people want to understand how to do, how to find your people, how to find people that you can be comfortable with.
But it seems to me that we live in a world where finding tribes is easier than it’s ever been, especially with the internet. We’re immersed in tribes all of the time. And the big question is, well, what do you do once you’ve actually found your tribe?
How do you exist within the tribe in a healthy way so that you don’t lose yourself within it? And that to me is the most important question of our time in an age of social contagion where we’re finding our tribes uh sometimes we’re finding tribes on a daily basis, right? Different tribes to to validate what we think and what we feel.
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