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.
The fact that social witch hunts are part of the human "code"... It explains too very well where mankind comes from. Every time you have something someone does not have, you roll the dices, incurring on the risk of becoming a scapegoat for someone else.
A simple random problem or misfortune could convey in an excuse to anyone to blatantly destroy someone else's life just because they can't deal with lose or something. With no reality based inputs required. You where there, you die and now I decide I am happy until next time.
So it proves that human culture is actually ready to fuck up those whom succeed simply because they have a higher chance of being targeted, and also targets those whom are different from the concurrence of scapegoating because they will get more numbers, upon disagreeing, for the next time someone wants a social scapegoat.
I almost didn't watch this because I find the guy annoying, but I'm glad I did. It really does make a lot of sense.