The Raven Foundation

Many people are turning against Kim Kardashian and her family since her divorce last month from Kris Humphries.  According to the Washington Post, “More than 100,000 people are no longer interested in ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ and would like E! to stop airing the family’s reality show.”  Those 100,000 people have signed an online petition titled “No More Kardashian.”  Cyndy Snider, the petition organizer, justified the petition by claiming, “We feel these shows are mostly staged and place an emphasis on vanity, greed, promiscuity, vulgarity and over-the-top conspicuous consumption.”

I’m not a fan of Kim, but I’m not going to sign a petition to get her banned from television.  To the extent that I care, I’m disappointed that her marriage only lasted 72 days.  I’m disappointed, but of course I’m not surprised.  I’m not surprised because Kim has been set up.  And we set her up.

Kim is a product of our culture.  And we are partly responsible for her life.

Here’s what I mean.  In the United States someone can star in a reality show called “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”  This is a clear reference to the American phrase, “Keeping Up with the Joneses.”  This idiom is based purely on the anthropological phenomenon of mimetic imitation.  This imitation has two steps.  First, we unconsciously learn what to desire by observing what others desire. These “others” become our models for what to desire.  Second, we unconsciously want to outdo our models.  So, we see that a neighbor or a friend just bought a 42 inch flat screen television.  That stimulates our desire for a television, only we won’t be satisfied with a 42 inch television – we want a 55 inch flat screen.

The mimetic principle of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” reflects American consumerism.  It is an unconscious mentality that seeks to outdo our neighbors and it produces “vanity, greed, promiscuity, vulgarity and over-the-top conspicuous consumption.”  It leads to a disease of desire, where we gain a sense of satisfaction by out-consuming one another.  This mimetic competition of purchasing stuff becomes an addiction.  (Credit card debt, anyone?)  Even worse is that in the end, nobody can keep up with the Joneses.

Not even the Kardashians.

Nobody can keep up with the Joneses because once we have the disease of desire the object no longer matters.  In fact, once we acquire the object, we are instantly dissatisfied with it.  It’s not about the object; it’s about an addiction to desire that no object can satisfy.

And this is how we set up Kim and her family.  They are caught up in a mimetic mechanism that is bigger than they are, and they can’t keep up.  We wanted to see them live without the limits of desire the rest of us have.  (Or should have.)  In that sense they are our models for what our culture thinks is an ideal life.  For example, Kim’s fans love her because she does “krazy” things on massive scales.  Because objects can never satisfy her, she continuously purchases big, expensive things, she takes trips to exotic places, and she held a televised wedding that rivaled the Royal Wedding in viewership and in cost.  Nothing in Kim’s life is based on satisfaction; she is addicted to desire, and if that addiction continues she will never find satisfaction.  So, after acquiring the object of her desire (her husband Kris Humphries) she wasn’t satisfied.  She felt disappointed and let down after her wedding. And so she divorced her husband after 72 days.

And now many of us are turning against her. But what we don’t realize is that we are the ones who set her up.  We set her up to be addicted to desire.  The title “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” meant that we looked to her to mimetically keep up with herself – to never be satisfied with what she had and to outdo herself in each episode.  And we loved her for it.  We wanted her to become addicted to desire.  And we turned against her for doing just that.

Indeed, Kim and her family need to take responsibility for the position in which they find themselves.  I hope they do that.  But signing a petition to kick them off television won’t solve our cultural problem of diseased desire that leads to endless consumption and dissatisfaction.  Even if the petition is effective, more Kardashian-like shows will emerge.  The only way for the Kardashians to be cured of the mimetic disease of desire is the only way for us to be cured of the same disease that infects our whole culture.

About 1600 years ago there was a man named Augustine.  He also had the disease of desire, and he soon realized this was a spiritual disease.  The disease of desire is spiritual because it is fundamentally about idolatry.  Augustine lost perspective as he placed himself above God.  He soon realized he would only find satisfaction when his heart rested in something bigger than himself, bigger than the stuff he could acquire, and bigger than his sexual relationships.  In his autobiography called Confessions, Augustine referred to God when he claimed, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  The cure to the disease of desire is to realize that a fulfilled life doesn’t depend on acquiring more stuff in order to keep up with anyone.  Rather, a fulfilled life depends on the right perspective.  A fulfilled life depends on opening ourselves to the God who transforms our desires to competitively “keep up” with our neighbors into a desire to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

It seems to me that Augustine's wisdom from 1600 years ago is as relevant for Kim Kardashian as it is for all of us.

In her book How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, Laura Kipnis describes why we all like a good scandal.  The influence of Rene’ Girard and mimetic theory are apparent when she writes:

As scandal reveals, the social world is in an eternal search for scapegoats.  This makes it a brutal place, to be sure, but the scapegoat process is intrinsic to every social group.  Societies have always purified themselves through shows of moral indignation, dumping their burdens off onto designated candidates – all the abnormality and moral disability that threatens to poison the community.  Those cast in this unlucky role don’t have to be innocent victims either; a scapegoat’s crimes can be entirely real.  If it’s the scandalizer’s fate to enact the self-sabotaging tendencies that vex the human personality, then what better sacrificial figure? (196).

What makes Kipnis’s statement, and thus mimetic theory, so compelling is its universal nature.  Human cultures are in “an eternal search for scapegoats” so that we can purify ourselves through “moral indignation, dumping [our] burdens off onto designated candidates.”  Currently, the designated candidate in the sports world is LeBron James.

A few years ago, LeBron was one of the most liked NBA players.  Sports Illustrated bestowed upon him the moniker “The Chosen One” when he was a junior in high school.  The media and NBA fans loved him while he played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, quickly dubbing him “King James.”

But there’s an unfortunate reality to being king – kings make really good scapegoats.  We can all unite in mimetic admiration of the king.  But the same mimetic impulse allows us to quickly unite in condemnation against the king.  LeBron is now the now the scapegoat of the NBA.  One website claims, “But I’m sure that we can all say that LeBron James is hated by 90 percent of NBA fans.  (The other 10 percent being Heat fans.)”

And, as Kipnis claims, a scapegoat doesn’t have to be innocent.  Lebron is a scandal because he didn’t leave Cleveland on good terms.  He signed with the Miami Heat, where he would play with two other superstars: Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.  Most people expected (maybe “feared” is a better word) that the three would be unstoppable.  James, Wade, and Bosh expected that, too.  The Miami Heat organization held a party for the three, where Heat fans packed the American Airlines Arena in Miami and the three promised 7-8 championships before they were done.

Well, the first championship will have to wait.  The Miami Heat lost in 6 games to the Dallas Mavericks.  (Interestingly, Cavalier and Maverick fans found unity in their shared hatred for LeBron and the Heat as they facetiously called the Dallas Mavericks the “Mavaliers” during the championship series.  How’s that for unity against a common enemy?)  Then LeBron said this after game 6 when he was asked if he was upset “that so many people are happy to see [him] fail”:

Absolutely not.  Because at the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail … have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that.  They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point.

Well, that didn’t gain LeBron any friends.  It offended many people, and LeBron was forced to backtrack.  But here’s why the statement was so painful for many: Because there is a hint of truth in it.  As Kipnis points out, the reason we love a scandal is because it allows us to dump our burdens off onto another person.  In other words, our shared hatred of another allows us to project all our personal problems upon them.  In that sense, LeBron was absolutely right.

But LeBron was wrong in another sense.  Our culture is addicted to scandals.  Unfortunately, our scandals aren’t isolated to politicians, athletes, or celebrities.  Some of our worst scandals are against family members, co-workers, neighbors, and friends.  The sad thing is that scandals and scapegoating is our real world.  It’ll take us “a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be” and we will move on from LeBron.  But, unless we break the cycle by finding more creative and compassionate ways to form unity, we are destined to find for more scandals and scapegoats.

“Guiltiest guilty pleasure.  Reality T.V.”

So began last night’s episode of ABC’s “20/20” called “Reality Rules.”  Anchor Deborah Roberts continued by claiming “America’s appetite for reality TV is extreme.  In 1998 there were zero hours of reality tv in primetime on broadcast networks.  In 2011, there will be as many as 15 hours per week.  Meanwhile, reality has dominated the cable channels for nearly a decade.”

The second segment of “Reality Rules” focused on Bravo’s hit reality show The Real Housewives of New Jersey.  They showed a scene from this season’s premiere episode.  Melisa and Joe, a couple on the show, had their baby christened.  A brawl between Joe and his brother in law, who also happens to be named Joe, broke out at the after party.

“This is one of the hottest reality shows around and it’s changing the television landscape,” Roberts claimed.

Andy Cohen, the executive producer of the Real Housewives series, started out skeptical about the authenticity of the show.  But in filming the series, he found that when he “scratch[ed] below the surface, [these women] were somehow really human.”

And that anthropological statement is where I want to begin this examination of the reality show that is “changing the television landscape.”

Real Housewives New Jersey is full of drama and violence and it’s tempting for us to avoid discussing reality television.  We could easily view it as the lowest form of pop-culture. But maybe Cohen has a point.  As much as we may criticize reality television for being fake and constructed, there is something very real about it.  It is the reality behind these shows that make many of us uncomfortable with them; that, indeed, make us scapegoat them.  We want to believe that we are nothing like those fake and excessively dramatic people.  But maybe we are more like the stars of reality television than we want to admit. For example, I fear that 85% of family reunions fall into the same cycles of family drama.  Please, no cameras at my house during Thanksgiving.  Okay?  Thanks.

Instead of scapegoating these shows, maybe we could view them as a study in mimetic anthropology.  For example, the main stars of Real Housewives of New Jersey are Teresa Giudice and her husband Joe Giudice.  Teresa’s brother Joe Gorga and his wife Melissa Gorga are also stars in the show.  What makes the show so compelling is the mimetic rivalry between the couples. 

What is a mimetic rivalry?  When we are in a mimetic rivalry with someone, we want what our rival has.  Our rival is also our model for success.  Here’s a great example from the gossip magazine In Touch. (Have I hit a new low by quoting In Touch?”  Okay, let’s not scapegoat gossip magazines!)  The article “Fame Destroyed My Family" (June 6, 2011) starts, “There was a time when Teresa Giudice found strength in the love of her family – and knew that no matter what life handed her, she could count on their unwavering support.  But that was before Teresa became a star on The Real Housewives of New Jersey – and achieved the type of fame that her younger brother, Joe Gorga, and his wife, Melissa, desperately wanted for themselves.”

That’s the formula for mimetic rivalry.  We desperately want what our rival, who is also our model, has.  Joe and Melissa Gorga desperately want fame, not because they are necessarily bad and greedy people, but because their sister and brother-in-law has it.

When we are in a mimetic rivalry, we want what our rival has, but we also want to become our rival.  In other words, we want to possess the essence of our rival.  Joe Giudice points this out in the article.  The article claims that “Melissa and Joe Gorga love the cameras and wanted a taste of the spotlight badly.”  The next sentence quotes Joe Giudice as saying, “They want to be me and they obviously want to be Teresa …  Go find your own life!”  The drama continues in the same paragraph.  (Oh boy.)  Melissa “claims on her blog that Teresa tried to keep them off the show so that she could be the more successful sibling – which Teresa and Joe Giudice deny.”

So much drama.  But I do think there is an anthropological truth here.  In rivalry, we always want what the other has, and we always think that we deserve what the other has more than the other deserves it.  We blame and demonize our rival, while at the same time think we are the innocent one, the good one.  But the truth is, when it comes to rivalries, no one is innocent. 

So, we’re left asking, “What’s the way out of a mimetic rivalry?”

For the Giudices and for the Gorgas, the only way out of a mimetic rivalry is to let go of the shared desire. If they really want reconciliation, the Giudices and Gorgas need to release their shared desire for fame.  In order to do that, they need to find a new model that will lead them away from rivalry and toward compassion.  That’s a difficult and painful spiritual transformation, but that's the transformation they need. 

And, in a world that breeds rivalry, that's the transformation we all need – unless you happen to live in a monastary . . . a desert monastary.

I’ll be honest: I’m intrigued by The Donald.  He’s a mythological figure in the American pop-culture landscape.  The catchphrase he’s probably best known for, “You’re fired!” has inspired awe, fascination, and of course some animosity.  He is a bigger-than-life-arrogant-pompous-bombastic demigod.  His persona reminds me of Rudolf Otto’s account that at the heart of the religious experience is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  Yes.  The Donald is a fearful and fascinating mystery that paradoxically attracts and repels me.

Trump is a scandal to many.  What’s difficult for me to admit is that he is a scandal for me because he is the model of success.  During the last 30 years, we’ve learned a few things about Trump: He knows how to play the games of business and popular culture (that is, he knows how to get attention) and he knows how to succeed.  We’ll soon see if he knows how to play the game of politics.  He’s off to a surprisingly successful start, as the recent Newsweek/Daily Beast poll has him only three points behind President Obama in the 2012 election.

He is a model of success, and part of what makes him so fascinating is that he isn’t afraid to tell us about his success and his superiority.  He’s obnoxiously audacious and, thus, he is easy to hate.  David Brooks points this out in his article Why Trump Soars.  Brooks writes that in every society, there are those who are “so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude.  When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.”

But there is a dark side to my hatred of Trump.  It’s a self-righteous hatred that breeds resentment.  My hatred of him makes me feel good.  In fact, it makes me feel superior to him.  My friends and I can discuss our shared outrage over his hair and his megalomania.  (Can one write an article on The Donald and not reference to his hair?)  We can accuse him of being a pompous jerk.  We can ask what the hell he’s doing even thinking about running for president.

And we liberals can feel very good about being uniting against Trump.

Which makes him our scapegoat.  Unless you are a Saint, there’s a bit of The Donald’s persona in you.  I, at least, have a very hard time admitting that I admire his fame and his (over) confidence.  That admiration is the flip side of any hatred I feel for him.

So, what’s the way out?

I’d suggest this.  Assuming The Donald will run in 2012, we might remind ourselves of this statement in Brooks’s article.  Brooks asserts that Trump “emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy of life.”  Trump is not a self made man.  He emerged from our culture.  Even more than that, though, we might remind ourselves that we all have something of Trump’s persona in us.  What makes him such a scandal is that he has succeeded where we have failed, and that just isn’t fair.  

My wife doesn't know this, but ever since I saw the movie "Speed" in 1994 I've had the hots for Sandra Bullock.  (If my wife can have McDreamy, I can have Miss Congeniality.)  Yes.  The movie was barely tolerable.  And, while I'm comfortable enough in my (apparent) manhood to admit Keanu Reeves is a pretty good looking guy, he's arguably the worst actor of his generation.  But, hey, Speed began my 16 year-old crush on Sandra.  What can I say, I'm faithful. (You get where I'm going with this, right?)

                                  _{McDreamy                                               Miss Congeniality}

 How do I love thee, my dear Sandra?  Let me count the ways: She's a fairly attractive young lady.  More than that, she's downright quirky (again, Miss Congeniality was the perfect role for my beloved) – which only adds to her charm.  And she’s bubbly.  The website IMDb claims that her high school classmates voted her "Most likely to brighten up your day." Indeed, Sandra’s been brightening all of my days for the last 16 years.

So, back in 2005, when I heard Sandra was going to marry Jesse James I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance.  What was my dear, sweet, innocent Sandra doing with this guy – a former bodyguard of heavy metal bands?  She should marry someone much more like … well … me.  I hoped this wasn’t another case of the good girl going after the bad boy.   

But then it happened.  The whole thing is sad.  I mean, Michelle “Bombshell” McGee?!?  C’mon, dude.  And then I start thinking about their children and how difficult it must be for them to see their daddy’s infidelity play out on the public stage.