Vsauce!
Kevin here, and these three grains of rice help explain why you are you.
Also, the knife and jar represent a hypothesis for human sacrifice.
We’ll get to that later…
Let’s start with you.
You’ll be the green rice.
You desire things.
Love, respect, money, friends, wisdom, a cool haircut, fame, YouTube views, shoes, a robust
stamp collection.
Those ever-changing objects of desire are the red rice.
And you just want those things because you want them, right?
You know what you like!
It’s your free will to decide what it is you desire.
Maybe not.
Anthropological philosopher René Girard didn’t think so.
While survival depends on satisfying biological needs like hunger, desires are not innate.
We’re not born wanting a fancy car or the prettiest gown at the ball; desires manifest
from imitating other people.
The subject we imitate for any given desire is called a model.
That’s the blue rice.
Your mom is blue rice.
Your Dad.
Grandma Maggie.
Albert Einstein.
Harry Potter is blue rice.
A model can be a person close to you or just a person you’ve read about.
And a Triangular Desire Relationship flows from you imitating the model to receive the
desired object.
I want to be as wealthy as Bill Gates.
I want to be as funny as my Aunt Maureen.
I want to be as sexy as some sexy muscle-y hunk.
Why do I speak English?
Why do you speak your native language?
Because you imitated people who imitated people because, aside from crying, imitating people
was the first thing you ever did in your life.
Infants are able to imitate facial acts like sticking out their tongues immediately after
being born.
The youngest infant tested successfully imitated 42 minutes after leaving the womb.
According to psychologist and infant development researcher Andrew Meltzoff, that suggests
infants have “an inborn mapping between the perception and production of human acts.”
Becoming you starts by… becoming someone else.
But it’s not just, “monkey see, monkey do.”
Or conditioning a dog to dance for oranges.
We project our own internal experiences onto others to come to an understanding that, “Those
moving meat bags with eyeballs are ‘like me.’”
Gaze following is a non-verbal triangular communication between subject, model and object.
Infants are more likely to gaze follow mothers whose eyes are open rather than closed, leading
Meltzoff to hypothesize that an infant knows when it closes its eyes the world goes dark,
so it must go dark for mommy, too.
“No need to follow her closed eyes when I know she’s not actually looking at anything.”
Humans are born imitating and human culture evolved by imitating.
Neuroanthropologist Merlin Donald says our mimetic culture of imitation is the first
definitively human stage of development.
Non-human primates do learn in social settings, but it’s an “episodic culture,” meaning
they pay attention to the result of an action and then figure out the method for achieving
that through trial-and-error rather than duplicating the successful mannerisms they observed.
Imitation is humanity’s cultural zero point.
Long before we developed fancy words like, “cultural,” “zero,” or “point.”
According to Girard, human society developed as people copied one another’s desires to
the point of becoming rivals.
If the object of desire is in limited quantity, whether it’s territory or a girlfriend,
the rivalry to obtain it eventually leads to violence.
When the violence spread to a point where society was at risk of collapse, everyone
got together and sacrificed a goat.
More or less.
The Scapegoat Mechanism is the process by which group hostility is transferred onto
a single victim and banishing this victim restores unity to the group.
Illusionist James Warren visualizes this phenomenon using a jar, rice, and a knife.
Imagine that each grain of rice is an individual person.
As their matching desires, jobs, love, and wealth spread like a virus, they get closer
and closer until they’re packed so tightly that rivalries emerge and friends, families
and neighbors turn into enemies.
Violence is inevitable.
With society at risk of collapse, someone in the group is perceived as an outsider and
is chosen as the party responsible for the chaos.
All hostility is turned on the scapegoat and social order is restored by uniting around
the common cause of banishing it from the group or delivering the ultimate banishment
-- killing it.
Girard believes scapegoating explains how early human societies developed.
In “René Girard And Myth,” Richard Golsan details a myth from the Venda people of South
Africa.
The snake god Python had two wives.
During a drought, the second wife was seen as a major disruption and was blamed for the
drought and the suffering of the people, so she was killed.
Her death triggered a flood and the community was saved.
After successfully uniting the group, the scapegoat is sanctified.
From there, sacrifices honoring the event became a religious consecration.
Sacrificing humans and later animals, like goats - paid tribute to the Gods and the great
uniting scapegoat.
The word scapegoat means, “a symbolic bearer of the sins of the people.”
During the Salem Witch Trials, occult magic was used as an imagined differentiator to
single out women as witches who were then executed to restore peace to the village.
Foreign-born Queen of France Marie Antoinette was scapegoated as the cause of unrest during
the French Revolution and… off went her head.
Here’s the problem.
Scapegoating can only provide a temporary sense of contentment.
Soon enough, rivalries flare up, a new scapegoat is chosen and exiled, and the cycle begins
again.
People actually become dependent on this cycle as reflected in C.P.
Cavafy’s “Waiting For The Barbarians.”
In the poem, an entire city-state joins together in solidarity and bases their behaviors around
the impending danger posed by the barbarians, except… the barbarians never arrive.
It ends with confusion:
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Scapegoating happens at home, in school, in online communities, and on social media.
It’s an emergent property resulting from mimetic desire, leading to mimetic rivalry
and ending in mimetic violence -- and a scapegoat is chosen to quell the crowd.
You can see its underpinnings everywhere.
Even disco.
In 1977, Saturday Night Fever catapulted disco music into the mainstream and its soundtrack
became one of the top-selling albums of all time.
Within two years, cultural dynamics ranging from sexual and racial demographics to internal
strife among commercial artists led to disco becoming a scapegoat for eroding musical values
-- and baseball’s Chicago White Sox capitalized on the hysteria.
They promoted a Disco Demolition Night that featured crowd-supplied disco albums being
blown up during the middle of a doubleheader.
More people united to participate in the figurative death of disco than to watch the actual baseball
games.
Disco was symbolically banished to appease the crowd.
The effectiveness of the Scapegoat Mechanism is contingent upon the group being unaware
of its presence and being convinced the scapegoat is actually guilty.
By recognizing a group’s scapegoating, the power of the mechanism is diminished and the
violence is revealed.
However, because we’re mimetic creatures -- because we imitate each other to the point
of contagion -- it takes active defiance in the face of our very nature to step away from
the crowd and acknowledge the hidden force in play.
Which is really hard to do.
It’s hard to stand out because… it’s lonely.
As Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who himself was exiled from his society, wrote
in Notes From Underground, “I am alone and they are everyone.”
Dostoevsky’s books have been translated into 170 languages.
People all over the world can learn from his writings -- they can learn from him.
His mimetic influence spreads and survives in a way more powerful than a genetic influence
ever could.
He had four kids, but he has millions of grains of green rice.
By watching this video, part of you is now… me.
And if you consider that all of the information and imitation passed down from generations
has been absorbed and been ingrained in you throughout your life to develop you into you,
you realize that, in a general sense, Dostoevsky was wrong.
They aren’t everyone.
You are everyone.
And as always - thanks for watching.
The person who inspired me to make a YouTube channel was probably Tim Heidecker from Tim
& Eric Awesome Show Great Job.
His style was so accessible and it was just a guy being hilarious and being weird and
having his own unique sense of style and comedy.
And it spoke to me on such a personal level that it was the first time that I'd considered
to myself, "Hey!
I'd like to do this too."
Hey I'm Destin from Smarter Every Day.
Believe it or not, I'm inspired to make videos because of my children.
They're curious little people that like to learn and I want to be the exact same type
of person.
And I want to learn stuff so they can watch videos, in the future, of their dad learning
stuff.
I have looked up to Bret Michaels since I was 13 years old.
Just being a fellow type-1 diabetic and he influenced me just by inspiring me and I wanted
to take that and inspire others in the best that I knew how which was through my artwork
and through charity.
I even keep his guitar in the background of my videos.
For me, guys like Jon4Lakers and SoldierKnowsBest really showed that there was actually a future
in doing tech videos on YouTube.
The person who inspired me to start making YouTube videos is my friend and was my roommate
at the time.
NicePeter my his channel and it looked like a lot of fun so he helped me make my channel.
He gave me a leg up.
As well as that time I got locked out of the apartment - he gave me a leg up to get through
the window.
'Cause we can't do it alone.
My high school teacher definitely introduced me to science communication but I think it
was Derek Muller and Henry Reich and ViHart and Charlie McDonnell that were the ones that
inspired me to start my own YouTube channel.
Because I saw what they were doing with this new platform and I was like, "That's so cool!"
Like, they highjacked this platform for cat videos but are using it for science.
The person who inspired me to start a YouTube channel was Natalie Tran who makes Community
Channel.
She is hilarious, she's a YouTube O.G. and best of all, she is an awesome person.
And I'm please now to be able to call her a friend.
My inspiration, not just for making YouTube videos but for making videos in general comes
from being a kid.
As far back as I remember I've always wanted to make movies.
And the thing that inspired me the most was horror films, strangely enough.
When I was a kid, a young lad, my brother who is older would always show me slasher
films and horror movies like Friday The 13th, Halloween, Nightmare On Elm Street, Child's
Play, Sleepaway Camp, stuff like that.
And I loved them because they took you on an emotional journey.
It was spooky, it was scary but it was funny and there was all these different emotions
that you felt while watching and I loved the fact that something that I couldn't interact
with, something that was a passive experience, something that I was just watching could influence
my emotions that much.
And I wanted to be part of that.
I wanted to be able to do that to others.
And that's what inspired me to make movies.
To be able to take people on some sort of experience, some sort of emotional journey.
And it just landed on making them in a scientific, I guess, way.
And that becomes the motivation for why we're telling the story.
We're going on an informational journey.
And it just fit.
I was inspired to make my first YouTube channel by Eric Fensler.
I never met Eric Fensler but he is the guy who made the famous G.I.
Joe PSA parodies.
He took actual G.I.
Joe cartoon Public Service Announcements and overdubbed their voices with his own so that
they would say bizarre, surreal things.
And the strangeness of these clips made them viral.
I think they were actually, if not the first viral videos on the internet, they were certainly
in that first batch, that first generation that showed the power of the internet.
And I had to get involved.
It's seemed so subversive and punk to be able to take a thing and subvert what it meant
and not need to have the blessing of any gatekeepers.
It was just you.
And over time what I was putting out on the internet evolved into what it is today, science
communication.
It enabled me to marry my interest in performing and art with facts and knowledge and questions
and curiosity.
I think that line is always blurry.
But man, I really am thankful to Eric Fensler for making things that made me laugh and made
me want to aspire to make something similar.
My main influence has always been my dad.
He's a brilliant creator.
He builds guitars for a living and now I build videos.
So because of him I knew I always wanted to have a life driven by creativity.
And one of the creative projects I'm really proud of t is The Curiosity Box.
This is a subscription box filled with wondrous items hand-picked by Michael, Jake and I.
And it's like getting Vsauce delivered right to your door.
A portion of the proceeds goes to Alzheimer's Research so it's not only good for your brain,
getting The Curiosity Box is good for everyone's brains.
So check out CuriosityBox.com to subscribe and be a part of a growing community of the
hyper-curious.
Your support really means everything.
So thanks.