Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vat, the senior publishing director at Word on Fire.

Today we share with you a recent Bishop Barron Presents discussion. This is our series of dialogues where Bishop Barron interacts with major cultural influencers and thinkers.

Today he sits down with best-selling author Luke Burgess to discuss his new book, Wanting, The Power of Mamedic Desire in Everyday Life.

Why do we want what we want? And how do our desires shape us as people? And how are those desires related to our freedom?

Well in their conversation Bishop Barron and Luke Burgess discuss these topics and more including Renas Gerard, Mamedic Desire, Social Media, The Scapegoat Mechanism, and several others.

So sit back and enjoy this Bishop Barron Presents discussion with Luke Burgess. Enjoy.

I'm here with Luke Burgess who's the author of this wonderful book. It's called Wanting, The Power of Mamedic Desire in Everyday Life.

And what this book is is an application I say to everyday life of the theorizing of Renas Gerard. And Renas Gerard is someone who's influenced my thinking a lot.

He's not a household name, the way let's say Heidegger or Sardir, Kamu would be, but I think he ranks with those figures as a seminal thinker of the 20th century.

I wonder maybe we'd start with just a little bit about him. So who was Renas Gerard?

Renas Gerard was a Frenchman who came to the US shortly after World War II, landed at Indiana University, bounced around to different universities, and spent the last roughly 15 years of his life at Stanford University.

And he's famous for really articulating an insight into the very fundamental nature of human desire.

And he did it across studying the literature, anthropology, theology, sociology, just a very broad understanding of human reason.

And his insight was that the nature of human desire is mediated. It's fundamentally mediated. And this was an insight that nobody had quite put their finger on before.

Let me get to that just in a second, because that's I think at the heart of the theory. Let me just tell you, I had a chance to meet him, always got us maybe 25 years ago.

He was giving the Meyer lecture, which is a lecture series at Mundlein Seminary, where I was teaching. And Gerard would have been, I guess in his high 70s, maybe early 80s at that point.

I mean the most remarkable thing about him was his head. He had this enormously big impressive head. And when I met him, he's an old man, he had a shock of gray hair, but still black eyebrows in this big, impressive head.

So he was a remarkable figure, a physically remarkable. And then his theory got the attention of a lot of people. I first heard about it from a colleague of mine. And once he explained the basics of it, it's one of those theories where you start seeing it everywhere.

But you can't unsee it. And at the heart of it as you were suggesting is this idea, I think of Mamesis, or an imitative quality toward his eye, or tell me about that a little bit.

Yeah. So memetic is a word that comes from the Greek word that simply means to imitate. So Gerard's insight was that desire is not, as we normally think of it, generated ex nihilo.

We don't generate our own desires. We imitate the desires of other people or social creatures. So we have models or mediators of desire from the time that we're babies, our first model of desire or mediator is probably our mother. And as we go through life, we adopt different models of desire that help to show us what to want.

And most people don't realize this is happening. We like to think of our desire as autonomous as something that's completely our own. But Gerard said from the beginning, that's not the nature of desire.

...