Barry Kort: Thinking About Violence In Our Schools, Workplace, and Culture at Large
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Further Reflections
As some of you may know, I fell into possession of an astounding new model of violence in our culture produced by Stanford University's Rene Girard.
It's actually quite an easy model to understand, once all the verbiage is stripped away and one gets down to the mechanism of the model.
That's what took me so long. I had to laboriously read some books. I hate that. Anyway, Nan Williams did some of the heavy lifting, getting most of the words out of the way until we got it down to the bare bones where I could finally see it for myself.
Then we wrote a 1-pager applying the model to the dynamic of violence in the schools. Knocked my sox off. The damn model works. It actually demonstrates what is happening and why. Talk about an eye opener. No wonder I never could make sense of the culture. When I learned to think, it never occured to me to think ass-backwards from the way I learned.
OK, so we put out the first application of the model in the paper some of you may have seen, "Thinking About Violence in Our Schools," which is up on the web at http://www.musenet.org/orenda/violence.html.
No sooner do we put it out then some clown writes a damn parody of it. "Thinking About Stupidity in Our Scholars." And he sends it to me and every one else. Nan Williams damn near dies of a broken heart when she sees that. I won't lie to you. It took me a coupla hours to get up the courage to actually read the parody. Boy was it vicious. But, you know, it didn't hurt that much. My emotions had been so numbed already that I read it as if I were grading just one more lame piece of student writing.
And then I became enlightened. The parodist was a fucking genius! He showed me that the model was completely general. You could plug in any feature of the culture that propagates by mimetic diffusion and the model will show what happens.
So the first thing I did was to retaliate against this joker by posting a link to his parody and mentioning in our original essay his mirroring of us. This model is so easy to understand and use, it diffuses through the culture just like another feature of the culture itself!
So we wrote a second essay, following the same Mimetic Model as the School Violence essay, only this time it was "Musing About Merriment in Our Mirth," at http://www.musenet.org/orenda/mirth.html
Mirror that! Ha! You get back more mirth! All of a sudden people are laughing their assess off. They get it. They get how Mimesis works. The Mimetic pump that's been pumping up violence and greed and injustice pumps up everything the same way. Well, it pumps it up if the retaliation is at par or better. If the retaliation is less than an eye for an eye, the feedback loop stops whistling and you get lovely chaotic humor that's really creative and funny and not vicious.
I was about to sit down and rest on my laurels to enjoy the Mirth Culture when something else showed up on my radar screen. You know those endless thrashes that occur on sites like Utne, especially in the Meta areas? Turns out they're mimetic, too. Only this time you can see each back and forth of a volley under the microscope.
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