Anne Snyder: From Comment Magazine, welcome to The Understory, where the future quietly takes root. I’m Anne Snyder.
Angela Duckworth: Nobody is born wanting to persevere through adversity and disappointment. Everyone needs some encouragement to do hard things. And it is so important for the desires themselves to be from within. For me, it’s necessary for the development of a solid self.
Luke Burgis: How do you become real? You know, you commune with what is real. The ability to sort of be part of something without being dissolved into it — that search for communion is the most important thing I think we’re lacking in the world today.
Anne Snyder: One of the questions quietly underlining the Understory Festival, in both substance and design, was arguably a strange one. Namely, how does a person become real?
Not accomplished, per se, not influential, but deeply rooted, interiorly free, discerning. The kind of person who can resist borrowed identities and indiscriminate crowds and yet interact with them as a solid self. Midway through crafting the festival program this past winter, it dawned on me that Cluny Institute founder Luke Burgis and Grit author Angela Duckworth were approaching this question in ways that seemed to need one another. Where Luke asks how our desires and identities are formed within the crowd, Angela asks how the people, places, and situations we inhabit awaken the capacities that make us who we become.
Long-time Comment readers may recognize some familiar terrain here. Last summer’s issue on discernment wrestled with many of these same questions at a moment in our political culture when the truly discerning person seemed to be becoming an endangered species. Where are the men and women whose interior lives have grown sturdy enough to resist imitation, remain open to the iconoclastic nature of reality, and choose wise paths?
In many ways, that issue was an early articulation of the Understory’s own purpose, and of the kind of person we hoped it might attract. Luke’s new book, The One and the 99, picks up that baton.
Luke, as many Understory friends will know, is a writer and entrepreneur who teaches business at the Catholic University of America. His earlier book, Wanting, introduced many contemporaries to René Girard’s insight that our desires are often borrowed from one another. Through the Cluny Institute, a remarkable community exploring the intersections of faith, reason, and technology, he has continued asking what it means to become fully human in an age increasingly shaped by imitation and social contagion.
Angela, meanwhile, is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of Grit, the book that put that word into all our vocabularies. Her forthcoming book, coming out this autumn, Situated, asks how the people, places, and situations we inhabit call forth capacities we didn’t know we possessed, or quietly bury them before they ever have the chance to emerge.
Taken together, their work presses toward the questions so many of us are wrestling with amid today’s complex, powerful forces. What are the conditions that actually make genuine personhood possible?
What follows is a gracious, refreshingly personal conversation between two thinkers who take big ideas seriously without taking themselves too seriously, and who, in the end, are as curious about how we become the people we are as they are about the ideas we hold.
Recorded live in the Great Choir of Washington National Cathedral on Friday, May 29th, here are Luke Burgis and Angela Duckworth.
Angela Duckworth: I want to say that we are in this beautiful space, and thanks to Anne, it makes me very nervous, because we have to have a conversation worthy of this space. So one of the things that Luke said in advance was that this should be a conversation, and I think we would like to be that in two ways. One is the back-and-forth, and we would invite you into the conversation — so hopefully we won’t get so carried away that we won’t spare a half hour or so at the end of our time together for you to interject, to comment.
But I get to begin, Luke. You said, “I love stories. I think stories are the most moving thing.” And I have to say, I wrote back to you and said there was much to love about your book, but for me, the stories are the things that will be indelible. So I wondered whether you might share something of the beginning story and the end story, because I think I will forget neither, many years from now.
Luke Burgis: Thanks, Angela. My book opens — you know, ostensibly this is a book about the relationship of the self to the crowd, or ourselves to the various communities of which we’re a part, and how that constitutes our understanding of who we are. But I knew that I couldn’t do that in the abstract, and I was going to have to be very vulnerable in this book and explain my own journey and relationship to various groups: as an only child, as somebody who has lived in a lot of places.
One of the salient features of my life, which you kind of have to know as context to understand the story, is that at the age of 29 I had started three companies in my twenties, and I walked away from all of them to enter Catholic seminary formation to discern becoming a priest. I’d been in seminary for four years at this point and was really struggling with my discernment. And I will say that at the age of 29, after having lived in my own house in Las Vegas and had a career in Silicon Valley, moving to a dorm room with 250 other men living in the same building was quite a shock to my system. We had a shared bathroom on every floor.
So this kind of made me grapple with questions about my own differentiation and who I was at a deep, deep level. I was discerning God’s will for my life. I was discerning whether I should stay or leave, as I was moving close to ordination and feeling myself becoming kind of abstracted from what used to be most important in my life — as weird as that sounds. I mean, being in seminary, I was immersing myself in books, and I didn’t feel as real, basically, as I felt before I entered.
My parents took a trip to visit me — they flew out from Michigan to Dublin. During the course of that trip, my dad basically told us to pull over the car on the Dingle Peninsula, got out of the car, and threw up. We thought he was having a heart attack, and I was in a place that had no cell phone service. I was going around, running to doors, knocking on people’s doors. The town seemed like it was abandoned. I couldn’t find anybody. I was panicking, and my mom and I were quite sure that he was probably having a heart attack. So — no cell phone service, I had no idea what to do. Finally a woman came along the way with a huge dog, and I ran up to her, panicked, and she told me where the nearest hospital was, which was about 40 minutes away in the town of Dingle.
So I got in this car — I’m on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car — trying to drive as fast as I possibly can down these very perilous roads, with stone walls about six inches from the sides and huge cliffs that drop off on the side of the road. I’m trying to get my dad to the nearest clinic. And as I did that, it was strange — I guess when you’re in a traumatic moment, you just start having thoughts and noticing things you maybe hadn’t noticed before, like a ticking sound. You just sort of go into a different place. And I noticed, as I was driving, all of the sheep wandering in the fields along the side of the road, and I was struck by the neon marks that they all had on their sides — like orange and green spray paint, triangles and circles and lines. I thought I was on some kind of psychedelic drug. I’d never seen anything like it. I was like, what is this? We had just gotten there — this happened to my dad right after we landed in Dublin. And that image stuck in my mind.
We finally made it to the hospital, and I was quite sure that I was going to lose my dad. But I had probably 45 minutes to kill between the time they brought us to a room and closed the curtain and when we finally got a doctor in the room — which is pretty scary, as I’m wondering if my dad is going to make it. And all I could think about were the sheep, for some reason.
I certainly didn’t have the idea of writing this book in any way at the time, but the thing that struck me about the sheep were their markings on their sides — that these markings were a sign of who they belonged to. They grazed together in the same pasture, and at the end of the day you needed to know which sheep belonged to whom, and the markings were the way to identify them. I started wondering: what markings do I have on myself, and who has placed those markings there? How have people situated me in the world, maybe without my knowledge? We situate people all the time. And some of the people I find to be the most interesting are the people who are hard to situate.
That was the moment I began to have some clarity about what I needed to do in my life at that time. Rather than lock myself in my room and read books and ruminate and go for runs, there was suddenly something — reality was calling to me in a way that it hadn’t in a long time. It got me thinking about questions of my own identity, what I might have to do for my parents now, as an only child who might have to become a caregiver to his elderly parents. I realized very clearly on that trip that they could no longer take care of themselves.
The thread of my relationship with my parents runs throughout the book, because the family is the first place where we’re formed — where we learn who we are, that we are loved, and how to relate to other people. So I couldn’t write the book without writing about my relationship with my own family, and the way I was being called out of myself to attend to something I certainly didn’t expect but had to respond to. I’ll save the ending for later in the conversation, but that is the impetus for the entire book. I thought: I’ve read the parable of the lost sheep and heard it hundreds of times in my life, but now that I’ve actually seen these sheep with markings on their sides, I’m thinking about it in completely different ways.
Angela Duckworth: In the very beginning pages, you have a quote from Charles Mackay:
Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly and one by one.
I’m in the same camp as you, which is that you cannot boil down a book to a quote, much as people try — I understand why people ask ChatGPT what this book is about so they don’t have to read it, and I think you and I would agree that almost everything is lost that way. Please don’t take this question the wrong way, but I wondered if you could help us understand your understanding of this parable, and the title of the book — why, of all the quotes you could have selected, you chose this one to begin.
Luke Burgis: So the parable of the lost sheep has always left me kind of unsatisfied when I hear it. I understand it’s a beautiful story about a sinner who has been brought back to the fold, but I’ve never understood how to apply it to my own life, or what it might have to say to us on a human, sociological, and anthropological level. We just hear this story — and for those who might not know it (one thing I’ve learned already in talking about the book is that I took it for granted that people knew the parable, and not everybody does) — in the Gospels, Jesus tells the parable of a sheep that wanders away from the flock. It’s the one sheep that wanders away from the other 99, and he says, which one of you would not go in search of the one sheep to bring it back to the flock? The shepherd finds the sheep and brings it back to the flock.
But why did it wander in the first place? Not all who wander are lost. What happened to it while it was lost? We don’t hear any of this in the parable. Was it changed? And what was its relationship to the rest of the sheep once it came back into the flock — what was its relationship to the community, to the group?
The book is called The One and the 99 because I’m interested in that relationship between how the self is formed in community, and why sometimes we feel tensions within community that can either — and this is the difficult question — be asking us to stand in the tension and grow, or sometimes to leave, because our time there has served its purpose and we’re called to go do something else.
That was a fundamental question at the heart of the book. I was wrestling with something that seemed a little bit off in the social fabric today, which I’ve experienced in my own life: we have a dual drive. We have a drive to be known as ourselves, to be known by our name — nobody really likes to be treated as a number, or just an instantiation of a political party or the company they work for. We have a deep desire to be known for who we are. And we also have a desire to be in communion, to be together with other people. We have those two drives simultaneously, and when we’re not able to hold them in tension, we can go to one extreme or the other.
You can almost think of four quadrants. On one axis you have extreme belonging on one side and less belonging on the other. On the vertical axis, you have somebody with a solid sense of themselves at the top, and somebody with less of a sense of themselves at the bottom — which I call in the book the solid self and the pseudo self. If you think about that: somebody with a strong sense of self but very little belonging is isolated — that’s the top-left quadrant. Somebody with not a strong sense of self and no belonging is just a drifter — they drift easily in and out of whatever group will have them. That’s the bottom-left quadrant. Then you have somebody who doesn’t have a strong sense of self but has a lot of belonging, and that leads to fusion, where people lose themselves inside of groups very easily — they get sucked up into it and lose their sense of who they are, their distinctiveness. And then in the upper-right quadrant, you have somebody who has a sense of who they are, a distinctiveness, and also has strong belonging — and that’s what I would call communion: the ability to be part of something without being dissolved into it. That search for communion is the most important thing I think we’re lacking in the world today. I see all of the other ones, especially the fusion and the isolation — we seem to be going back and forth between extremes without being able to find ways to be in healthy communion.
And that’s why that particular quote — like, we sort of have to come back to ourselves and recover our senses individually. And sometimes that means having some time away from a community or a group to gain perspective. That’s what my parents have done for me throughout my life, and that’s why I told that story in the book: it gave me a renewed perspective on the ways I was in relationship with various groups, including even my seminary community.
Angela Duckworth: One reason you actually do need to buy this book is that I could tell, even from the PDF, that this is an unusual book in its structure and layout — it is a truly beautiful book, and there are some photos throughout. I wanted you to tell the story of this photo here, which is opposite the chapter one title page, called “Tribes and Transcendence.” I think this will help — and this is a deeply selfish exercise, because I get to literally ask Luke questions about the solid self, a phrase that you intuitively get, and then you realize as you’re reading that you don’t get it — and then you’re like, oh no. I think it’s a concept that really does require a book, and more, to really understand. Could you begin to deepen our understanding of this solid self, and maybe share the story behind this photograph?
Luke Burgis: So the terms “solid self” and “pseudo self” I took from a family systems psychologist named Murray Bowen, who became very important to me while I was in seminary. He was very concerned with the family unit and the way individuals do or do not differentiate themselves within it — we either learn to do it or we don’t, and some people learn to do it better than others. The anxiety found in society, he argued, can be traced back to our inability to differentiate ourselves and learn how to be in relationship, going back to the family. So the entire book starts in the family and then continues to move outward to society, including my own family.
The solid self, he said, is the kind of self that is able to separate its own thoughts, ideas, and emotions from other people. It’s able to say, “My wife is mad, but I’m not mad, and that’s okay.” Whereas the pseudo self cannot distinguish its own thoughts, feelings, and emotions from the room it’s in, or from the other people around it. So the pseudo self goes through life constantly negotiating its convictions depending on the group it’s in — whether it’s its own family — to manage tension and anxiety. It will never stand for anything, never stake a claim, because that would invite disagreement and tension.
Bowen says this process of differentiation is what allows us to be a solid self who can be in relationship with others without losing our integrity, without just saying what we know they want to hear. A solid self is able to manage tension without just cutting people off — he calls that “emotional cutoff.” It’s the kind of person who can be at the Thanksgiving dinner table, or in a room, in ways where their nervous system isn’t going completely crazy at all times — they just have a sense of who they are.
So Bowen makes that distinction between the pseudo self and the solid self, which was very helpful for me in understanding why some communities and groups can be formative of solid selves, and others seem to incentivize, in fact, the formation of pseudo selves, because their spirit is one of coercion and conformity. This became a lens through which I started to look at different things happening — from politics to different workplaces, and even friend groups I’ve been part of. To what extent do they bring out my pseudo self, for instance? What does that say about me?
The picture you’re referring to, Angela, that opens the book is a picture of a man named August Landmesser, who was photographed at a Nazi rally as the only man in a crowd who was not saluting Hitler. He’s standing at this rally with his arms crossed. When I saw that picture for the first time, I wondered what gave him the courage to do that — what kind of self does it take to be in that situation and have the courage to be that differentiated?
Now, why did he join the Nazi party in the first place? He was looking for work, as far as I can understand it, and he thought he could be part of the party without losing himself. Then he quickly realized he was mistaken — he fell in love with a Jewish woman and was persecuted by the party, thrown in jail for that relationship. The more I learned about his life — there’s very little out there — but one thing we do know is that it was his relationship with his fiancée, soon to be his wife, that gave him the perspective not to salute that day, no matter what the consequences would be.
What I learned from that is that it took something transcendent to the crowd — something outside of the group he was responding to. Many communities can be very self-referential. The image I use is of people standing in a circle looking at one another, as opposed to standing shoulder to shoulder looking at something that is true, good, and beautiful together. I think C. S. Lewis uses that image. August Landmesser’s relationship was that transcendent thing in his life — it gave him perspective, and ultimately the courage to see what the spirit of the party was, and it woke him up. What is the transcendent object in the communities we’re part of? Because if we don’t have that, we’re caught in a self-referential loop — as healthy as it may seem — with nothing to anchor us to anything objective, and we can become caught up in a very subjective emotional contagion.
Angela Duckworth: You want to bring us to 2026 and maybe apply some of this perspective to a modern-day phenomenon — less dramatic and awful than the Holocaust, than what was happening those decades ago. For example, young people today, when they cut off ties from their family — tell us about that phenomenon, and refract it through this lens of how Luke Burgis thinks about cutoff.
Luke Burgis: This is a deeply complex issue. Apparently there’s widespread evidence that younger people, especially Gen Z, are cutting off their parents from their lives completely, as a kind of, “I do not want you in my life anymore.” There’s probably some mimesis even accelerating that, as a thing one can do if they’re experiencing anxiety, disappointment, or past trauma. This is a real phenomenon. First of all, there are certainly instances where we do need to have separation. But Bowen would just warn that that needs to be done through a process of discernment, because the goal of the solid self is to be able to be in communion with others without cutting them off.
If I get in an argument with my wife, one of the easiest things to do is just to storm off into another room and stew by myself for a while. Bowen would say that if that’s your knee-jerk reaction to dealing with anxiety, that could be a sign that you don’t have a very well-developed solid self, where you can stand in the tension and continue the conversation. These kinds of things happen all the time, and he would say the goal of the solid self is to be able to be in relationship with somebody through the tension and through the anxiety.
So it would make sense to me that in a world where — whether it’s our institutions or the breakdown of the family — the solid self is perhaps not being formed as well, it would make sense that emotional cutoff, or going to cutoff first, would be an instinctual reaction for somebody who does not have a more highly developed solid self. Now, the solid self is capable of change, but it understands where its ideas and beliefs actually came from, without just accepting their givenness to us, often in highly emotional ways. We borrow ideas from our parents and role models throughout our lives, and if we don’t actually examine them ourselves and form our own conscience around them, they can lead to a pseudo self that clings very strongly to various ideas and beliefs without actually understanding where they came from — they become part of our identity. That’s why we can’t tolerate disagreement. So Bowen would probably look at this phenomenon of cutoff and be concerned, but he would ask: what does this say about a society where we cannot tolerate dissent or disagreement anymore?
Angela Duckworth: Tell us more about how you came to be so impressed by family systems therapy.
Luke Burgis: I think I learned about it when I was in seminary, and I was suddenly thrust into a highly undifferentiated situation as an adult man — with 250 other guys who ostensibly had a lot in common with me. We dressed the same, we lived together, we were all on our way to becoming Catholic priests. In a situation like that, you notice the littlest things. You start getting irritated with the guy — we always had communal lunches with one bowl of pasta in the middle, and you start noticing who takes a little too much pasta and who doesn’t make the salad quite the right way. You start noticing the littlest, littlest things, looking to your right and your left, thinking of yourself only in this horizontal way of relating to the other seminarians. That guy stayed on his knees for the entire hour while we were in chapel praying, and my knees started to hurt after 30 minutes — maybe I should have just toughed it out. You start going down some rabbit holes through comparison.
What ends up happening is quite literally a mimetic cauldron, where everybody is imitating or trying to differentiate themselves from everybody else. You start to forget why you were there in the first place, why you were called there — it sure wasn’t the other guys, you didn’t even know them before you showed up. Seminary is a very unique place to be situated, because you’re called there, presumably because you think you have a calling from God to be there. And you show up and meet 250 other guys who said the same thing happened to them, and you’re like, we’re very different — different states, different backgrounds — guys from Louisiana, guys from Michigan like me. So we all had to learn how to get along.
That book — Murray Bowen — was very often prescribed reading for seminarians, as we were struggling to understand who we uniquely are and who we might be someday as priests, and to help us focus on why we were there in the first place, and maybe the vertical dimension and the vertical relationships in our life through prayer and relationship with God. But also, some of us were better differentiated than others when we showed up. I would say I was not very well differentiated when I showed up, which meant I noticed a lot of pseudo-self kind of behavior from myself. It took some trauma in my own family for me to pay attention to things and snap back to reality, and not get caught up in the minor, petty, abstract differences that — you know — never happen in academia or in a seminary.
Angela Duckworth: I want to ask you about leaving seminary. We have this picture of a serial entrepreneur, very successful, who does what most serial entrepreneurs do not do, which is enter seminary. But tell us what happens next.
Luke Burgis: Well, I am a high achiever, and I have been my entire life. If any of you have read Byung-Chul Han, he calls it the “achievement subject,” where life begins to take on the character of an entrepreneurial startup. Because I literally was an entrepreneur, I started applying the idea of the startup to my own life — I’ve got to build a billion-dollar one-person company; we’re hearing a lot about that these days. Everything is measured in what I achieve, and my very sense of identity is measured in what I achieve. If I stop achieving, it’s like I’m not real — like I don’t exist.
In seminary, there was not a lot of flashy things to achieve, to be quite honest with you. So one of the things I think about when I’m part of a community is: in which ways do I need to die to myself — some part of me, the “Adam One,” to use Anne’s words — and what are the things I need to feed that I’m not being asked to die to myself with?
I’ll give you an example. One of the successful companies I started before I entered seminary was a healthy vending machine business — we put health food into vending machines. That oddly had never been done before; it was like the Snickers bar and the vending machine go together in some kind of ontological way — there’s no way to decouple them, Frito-Lay chips and all. We put pita chips and healthy snacks in vending machines, and the company ended up being successful. I personally stocked the vending machines myself, and I hated doing that.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and I’m in seminary, and all of us get assigned a house job as part of our role there — this is given to us: clean the pews, clean the windows, direct the choir, set up the AV before events. I was waiting with bated breath for my house assignment. I finally get it in my mailbox — I find a piece of paper, and my house assignment was to be in charge of the cafeteria and stock the vending machines. They had no idea. They just knew I was an entrepreneur — nobody really knew that about me, certainly not the person who assigned me that job.
So I was literally on my hands and knees, late one night at midnight, stocking this vending machine, cursing to myself — like, what have I done with my life, this is ridiculous. Then I just stopped, and I laughed, and I quite literally cried. I realized, this, Luke, is very clearly a way in which you need to die to your ego — you need to stock this vending machine better than it’s ever been stocked. That was going to be my pathway through seminary.
But there were other things about it that were causing me to be less alive — I didn’t have the outlets for creativity, and there were these little things. It’s very difficult to tell the story of why one makes a big decision like entering or leaving seminary, because there are a thousand little moments that happen in the sacred, private space between a soul and God. I started to notice little things about the ways I was coming alive, and where I felt the most at peace. But there’s a tremendous amount of pressure, especially for somebody like me, not to leave, because — what do I do? I achieve, and I’m not a quitter. If I entered, I’m going to finish, and I’m going to be the best seminarian and priest that I possibly could, even despite evidence that I probably shouldn’t be there anymore. Even though I knew I was being called, I was so stubborn — I was wrestling with God, saying I’m going to stay here. It was like trying everything possible to help me be free to leave, quite honestly.
My parents were maybe the last thing that pulled me out. I said, I need to attend to my parents right now. It turned out my father was not having a heart attack — that hospital visit in Ireland was the slow process by which we learned that he actually had advanced Alzheimer’s disease. We didn’t know it, and my mother was completely overwhelmed. I decided to step away, finally, to attend to my parents. I felt very clearly that that was the reality I needed to attend to.
One of the lessons I learned in this is that when we attend to reality closely, differentiation just happens to us, because we are communing with what is real. How do you become real? You commune with what is real. And the realest thing to me in my life at that time was my father, and my mother’s terror at what was going to happen to her — she had no help, my parents didn’t even live next to family. I wasn’t sure at the time if it was going to be a permanent leave or not, but I left to do that, because I knew one thing: I needed to take care of them. I opened up Scripture one day and read, “Son, do not neglect your father, even when his mind fails.” It was very clear to me that that’s what I needed to do.
Angela Duckworth: I want to read to you a sentence:
In a dopamine-driven culture, you get dopamine-driven selves. Personalities are shaped by the applause of the crowd — likes, reshares, comments, engagement. What keeps us hooked is the mimetic pull of others: what they’re watching, buying, celebrating, canceling. The algorithms work because they amplify this social layer. We’re not addicted to our phones. We’re addicted to the people inside of the phones.
So I wanted to ask — could you elaborate a little on what you mean by dopamine culture?
Luke Burgis: Dopamine culture — I may have borrowed that phrase, and I think it’s footnoted — is from Ted Gioia, who has written quite a bit about this, a kind of jazz historian. Dopamine culture is, obviously, what our phones and quick hits do to us when we get quick hits of subjective satisfaction — a quick hit of, somebody liked my post, or somebody retweeted me. This has often been analyzed on a neurological level — what is social media doing to our brains? But for me, the more interesting question is what it’s doing to our relationships. I don’t think a smartphone, for instance, is quite like a slot machine in Vegas, because a slot machine in Vegas does not have other people’s lives inside of it that we can see. Sure, winning and hearing the sound makes dopamine fire in our brains because we’re winning, but it’s addictive in a different way, it seems to me — it’s not addictive in a social way. You can get addicted to it without any of your friends being addicted to it.
Social media, and the kind of dopamine culture that is mimetically driven, relies on other people showing us what they want, what their preferences and interests are — that is the biggest dopamine hit of all, because we’re more interested in persons than we are in things. We’re relational creatures; nothing is more interesting to us than another person. I think examining what the technology — and there’s a lot to be said about AI here — is doing to human relationships is far more interesting.
And the breakdown — we live in this very mediated culture. One of the things I’ve noticed, for instance, is that we don’t attend to what is real, because I think we even talk to people, even when we’re with them, the way we might talk online, or in a chat room, or something like that. I’ve literally noticed this — we’re migrating online behaviors into the flesh. One of the things I like to do most is take people I’m considering hiring out for a meal. I think it’s the most context-rich way to get to know another person, to share a meal with them. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that nobody ever talks about the food when I take them out to eat. I like to cook, I like food — I realize it can be bad etiquette to talk more about the food, and the most important thing at the meal is obviously the person across from you, I totally get that. But nobody ever talks about the food anymore. They just look at the menu and set it down. I’m like, this is like some dystopian, extended director’s cut of Babette’s Feast or something, where there’s never actually any breakthrough of grace. The food is a real thing, and it seems like we don’t care about it anymore. There’s a way to just be thoughtful, to honor the fact that you’re at a nice restaurant and the chef has prepared this, and to maybe comment on it. It’s just a funny little indicator to me that we’re operating in a world where we’re not even noticing the reality right in front of our face anymore.
Angela Duckworth: All right, well, we will turn to the audience. Raise your hand if you have a question, and we’ll start here. Thank you.
Greg Enos: Thank you. My name is Greg Enos, from Indianapolis. What are the implications of your work, Luke? We bandy about Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor.” We try to practice that, but he didn’t say that — he said, “love your neighbor as yourself.” What does the solid self and pseudo self have to say when we lose the potency of what Jesus really said?
Luke Burgis: Hmm. Well, I should first say that the solid self and the pseudo self are morally neutral terms — you can be a really evil solid self. You can have a solid sense of self and really not be a good person. So we have to combine that with the moral dimension, with the real.
Yeah, I mean, it is, I guess, very Dostoevsky — it’s very easy for me to love all humanity and to hate my neighbor. In a world of pseudo selves, where people don’t even truly know themselves or what they stand for, how can they love their neighbor as themselves if they haven’t experienced the love of God, for instance, or the love of a parent, and don’t have a sense of their own dignity? You simply cannot love another person that way. So that is, I think, really the challenge of our time.
That’s why the quote that opens the book is about coming back to our senses one by one, and understanding the importance of the word “I.” Now, I’m the biggest critic of individualism, but Thomas Merton once said the person must be rescued from the individual. The person is the one who is in relationship with other people — who can say “I” in all its richness and understand why they believe something, and not only talk in “we” language all the time, but can make something personal, make something their own, own it, and take responsibility for it.
I think there’s got to be a healthy way of forming persons — not individualists — that has this understanding of our responsibility to other people. And the way I would define freedom is our ability to do what is good, our ability to respond to what is good in the world.
Ari Shulman: Hi there, I’m Ari Shulman. I’m a writer and editor. Thanks very much for the talk, Luke. I have a big question and then a smaller question. The question is: we just went through a period where a lot of people were defining themselves as being “the one” against “the 99,” where you’re hearing a lot of people talk about being heterodox, anti-orthodox, ideological diversity — all of these kinds of terms. A lot of this came wrapped up in being anti-woke, but it wasn’t exclusively that. What you’re describing doesn’t sound to me, in spirit, like that at all — but on the surface, there are some similarities. I wonder how you would distinguish those two things. And then I also was just curious — did you stock the vending machines in the seminary with healthy food?
Luke Burgis: No, that was the worst part — I had to stock them with the junk food. I’m so glad you asked that. Yeah, I was stocking the Frito-Lays.
So it’s a great question, and there’s an interesting story that definitely went into the formation of the book. There’s an interesting story in a Gnostic gospel that sums up what I think our culture is like today — this is in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which isn’t in the canon for a reason. Jesus tells the same parable of the lost sheep, but it’s in the Gnostic gospel too. Instead of finding the sheep and bringing it back to the fold, Jesus finds the sheep, pats it on the head, and says, “Oh, you’re smarter than those other dumb sheep — you’re like the high-IQ sheep, you’re different than the rest of the sheep. You have some secret knowledge of who I am that the other sheep don’t have. You don’t even need to go back to the flock — or if you do go back to the flock, you’re just my special sheep.”
I thought, wow, that really does sum up this drive to be like the highly differentiated founder kind of person, or the person with the highly differentiated take. It’s a Gnostic gospel for a reason — that’s not what the parable is actually about. The whole goal of the process of differentiation is to allow us to be in communion with other people. I think the difference, then — it doesn’t end in how special you are. It ends with you having the ability to be in a deeper relationship with somebody else, without having to sacrifice your essence or your integrity.
Angela Duckworth: Can you — I think I learned about a hundred new vocabulary words actually reading this book — what does “mimetic” mean, really?
Luke Burgis: Mimetic is just a word from the Greek word that means “to imitate.” René Girard, who I wrote my first book, Wanting, about, said that human beings are highly imitative creatures, and that we even imitate the desires of other people. He didn’t call it imitative desire — he called it mimetic desire, because mimetic just kind of sounds… bad, doesn’t it? It means that it’s kind of an unconscious form of imitation — the kind of imitation we’re not proud of, that we probably don’t even know we’re doing. So mimesis usually has a negative connotation. We can speak about positive mimesis, but usually when Girard is talking about it, it’s in a pretty negative way.
Pam King: Thank you both. My name is Pam King. I’m from the Thrive Center at Fuller Seminary — big fans, thank you. Many of us are here because there’s an itch: we’re people of faith who are deeply dissatisfied with what our local congregations, schools, communities, and organizations are offering. What does this relational telos, this way of being that is so relational — both differentiated and communion — how would you recommend that congregations, schools, and organizations change to form people in these ways? Do institutions even think of themselves as forming people anymore?
Luke Burgis: I mean — not many. But I think that’s what institutions are meant to do. When we join an institution, shouldn’t we want to be formed by it? If I go to Penn, or I join the Wharton School, I want to be formed in a certain way. I raise my hand and say, I’m attaching myself to this process because I’m going to pour myself into the mold.
But I think people’s relationship with institutions is very different now — we join them and just use them for the credential, and we stand on them, we use them, we don’t want to be formed by them. There’s probably some good reasons for that — some institutions are not worthy of forming us, and people use institutions all the time. But I think it’s important for leaders of any institution, whether churches or workplaces, to not put self-preservation as the highest good, but the good of the person inside of it. Sometimes that might mean encouraging a person to take some time away. I can truly say that anytime I’ve had to let somebody go in one of my companies, I’ve done it for the good of that person — I truly think it’s the thing that’s best for them.
But when an institution becomes totally centered around its own preservation, really bad things can happen. We begin to demand certain types of conformity that don’t allow people to develop into who they’re called to be, and we put them in a situation where they lack freedom. I think, as a leader — you and I could probably talk about this for a long time, Angela — creating conditions in institutions where a person can say yes to something as a free person, and not because they think they have to in order to be welcomed or loved, is the work of any leader in any institution. How we do that is way above my pay grade, but I’m trying my best to model it in the institution I run.
Angela Duckworth: And there is one story I would love you to tell, just as an add-on to that. There’s a jazz musician — you’ll remember the name, but I do not.
Luke Burgis: Ornette Coleman.
Angela Duckworth: Okay, yes. I think that says a little bit about this — how do you create a place where people can be individuals but, of course, be in harmony with others? Would you mind sharing a little of that story?
Luke Burgis: Yeah. So I was looking for people who inspired me, who I thought encapsulated what I’m trying to say in this book. One of them was the jazz of Ornette Coleman, who is known as the founder of what’s known today as free jazz. He formed jazz bands that departed from the normal harmonic rhythms and matching that usually happens in jazz bands, where there’s typically one leader and it kind of goes back to the leader — there’s a call and response. In free jazz, everybody is truly a leader, and you never quite know where the song is going to go.
When he first came out with this new style of jazz, people were highly uncomfortable — he got booed off stages for well over a decade. But it’s a very situational mode of playing jazz, to the extent that when he went and played at a very famous psychiatric hospital in Trieste, Italy, a woman who was a patient at the asylum walked onto the stage, unprompted, with a harmonica and just started to play. Rather than stop what he was doing or tell her to get off the stage, he just jammed with her for the next hour and made her a central part of the band that day. Everybody was kind of mortified and nervous about what he was doing, but he learned to play jazz with her.
In a sense, that’s an analogy I have for being in relationship with other people. I think we can learn a lot from jazz — how can we learn to play jazz for a while, as a way to be in relationship with another person, and use the situation we’re in to try to create something new and beautiful, rather than running away from the first sign of tension?
Laura Leonhardt: Hi. Laura Leonhardt, from Washington, D.C. I wanted to ask you both a question about parenting. It seems as a society we’ve gone back and forth about the best way to raise a child who knows when to quit or when to grit — either you let them go out there and fail and learn from that experience, or, more recently I think, you tell them, “this is when you quit and this is when you grit,” as they grow up, and you hope they learn it from you telling them. I’m curious if either of you have new takes on that, or what your current thinking is about how to raise children so they can be a solid self who knows, for themselves, when they want to quit and when they want to grit. Thank you.
Luke Burgis: Angela’s been a parent longer than I have, so I’m going to let you go first.
Angela Duckworth: Do I go first?
But Luke has two daughters, as do I — I was like, oh, how old are your daughters? Two and a half and four months. I was like, oh, I’m just a little bit older than you. I have a 24-year-old and a 23-year-old, and I have to be careful what I say because my mother-in-law is in the front row, so I’ll try to be truthful.
When Amanda and Lucy were growing up, I was getting my PhD in psychology — so I was becoming a mom and becoming a psychologist at the same time. Put the key in the door, turn it, and then, you know, be a mom. But of course I had some of my psychology with me, and I was studying grit, which is passion and perseverance for long-term goals. As Sharon knows, Lucy is as lazy as the day is long — I was like, how, God, did you give me a child who absolutely lacks the very thing I am studying?
So I’ll just say that Lucy needed to learn when to grit, because her first instinct was to quit. My husband, Jason, who’s Sharon’s beloved son, and I developed — and I wonder what you’d think about it — we called it the “hard thing rule.” It did reflect my learnings as a psychologist. The hard thing rule had three parts, and it was a rule for raising kids.
If you are a Duckworth, you have a hard thing. That was defined as something that required deliberate practice — a kind of very goal-directed, focused practice with feedback that had been shown in research studies to be the most effective kind of practice. So not just going down to the mud room studio and throwing around mud and eating goldfish crackers — that does not qualify. But anything that was goal-directed, focused, and with feedback.
The second part of the hard thing rule was that you were not allowed to quit in the middle. So if you signed up for six weeks of soccer and didn’t like it on week one, that’s okay — only five weeks left. So Lucy, for example, as Sharon will attest, cycled through one hard thing after another, and that was okay, because that was within the rules. You just can’t quit in the middle. We thought that was the tutoring on the gritting and not quitting.
But the third thing was very important to all of this — and again, it’s something Luke and I are so aligned on, and could talk about for a long time — which is that nobody gets to choose your hard thing but you. It was multiple choice. One year Lucy filled in the blank with horseback riding — I was like, okay, no, that is not on the menu, that will not be your hard thing. But she could choose: did she want to go down to the local ballet studio? Did she want to play viola, like her dad? Did she want to try piano, like her sister? Did she want to try track? What did she want to do?
For me, this tension between gritting and quitting, and external forces and intrinsic motivation, is always hard to navigate. But as a parent, I thought it was a thing young people need to learn. Nobody is born wanting to persevere through adversity and disappointment. Everyone needs some modeling — mimetic, in a positive sense — and some encouragement to do hard things. It is so important for the desires themselves to be from within, because I think that is necessary — is it sufficient? No. But for me, it’s necessary for the development of a solid self. She’s now a hard worker, by the way, I’ll just say — she’s 23, and she works very hard.
Luke Burgis: Yeah, desires from within — we could talk about that for a long time, because Girard would say desires from within… I love that. I tell the story in the book — I especially like that it has to be their idea, the thing that they want to do. They can’t be told to do it, because you don’t know what’s hard for other people. One of the exercises I implemented a long time ago in one of my companies: we would go around at the start of the week, and I would say, “What is one courageous thing you’re going to do this week?” The first thing you learn is that for some people, things you think are easier — that you don’t think about at all — actually take a lot of courage for them. It might be picking up the phone and making a call. You never know what other people are going through, or when they have to muster courage for something you don’t think is hard. That seems to me to be very important, because that’s part of what gives things their meaning.
Angela Duckworth: And are you doing anything now, or planning to do things, for your still very young daughters?
Luke Burgis: It’s funny you ask — yeah, very young, two and a half. I went to my toddler daughter’s ballet practice, the last one of the year, yesterday. She fell and busted her lip in the very middle of practice — it was the only one I could go to all semester, and she busted her lip apparently 60 seconds before I walked in the door. She just came over and sat on my lap the whole time, and I was like — I can’t. I was like, do I tell her to get back in there and keep going, or do I just let her sit here on my lap, because I was really enjoying that? I made the decision not to say anything to her — I wanted her to decide on her own if she wanted to get back in and be part of the lesson again. Sure enough, with about five minutes left in class, she ran out there and dove right in.
Catherine: My name is Catherine, I live in Austin, Texas. As we talk about mimesis and imitation, my mind also goes to imagination. I think one thing a lot of us are gathered here to talk about is: what does it mean to have social imagination in this time? I think we can all probably name a lot of mimetic narratives that we feel are very widespread right now, across a lot of different vectors. I’m thinking about imagination as a potential way to intervene in some of the ways we imitate — maybe not, though. I’m curious about your thoughts on that. Who do you see, in this moment — whether an individual, a movement, or an institution — modeling social imagination well? And what do you think the relationship between imagination and imitation is?
Luke Burgis: Forming a moral imagination is, I think, the great task of our age. This gathering, Comment, is certainly doing it. I’ve spoken in a lot of places, but never a place this beautiful, and I think even the very choice of this place indicates the register of the kind of conversations we’re going to have here — it literally changes the way I think we’re communicating, just by being here. It forms our imagination.
Imagination forms love and attraction. There’s a kind of middle term between knowledge and reality that I think is being eroded right now in our culture — we can know things, we can interact with reality, but the middle term is kind of the affective sphere. When I say affective, I mean the way in which we’re moved — Augustine would call it love, the force of our love. He said, amor meus, pondus meum — my love is my weight. It literally moves me and binds me toward different things. We learn what to love, and we learn how to be moved, in part through our imagination.
We spend our summers in Michigan, and I’ve been getting my daughter all fired up about going to Michigan for the summer — we’re looking at pictures, I just read her a book about Michigan, and her imagination is going crazy right now. That girl loves Michigan, believe me — she really can’t wait to get to the lakeshore. That’s a little selfish on my part, too, because I want her to be a Detroit Lions fan and love Michigan.
But the imagination has everything to do with what we’re talking about, because it forms love and desire and movement in us even before we’ve had contact with certain things — Plato wrote extensively about this. We’re forming our ability to respond to reality from a very young age, so I think imagination is critical. I won’t name any other people or things I think are doing that — when I write a book, I try to only use people who are dead, because I don’t want anybody… it’s just too easy when people are alive, you never know what’s going to happen.
Angela Duckworth: We’re coming to the close of our time together. The end of your book, of course, is the acknowledgments — I wondered if you wanted to end this conversation with any thoughts of acknowledgment, or any last thoughts.
Luke Burgis: Angela, I hope we can have a whole other discussion about Situated and situations.
Angela Duckworth: You can do that. That can be arranged.
Luke Burgis: They’re so important to me that in the acknowledgments section of this book, I acknowledge like a dozen coffee shops and restaurants that I wrote this book in.
Angela Duckworth: I loved that — you saw that? Well, the acknowledgments is the first thing I ever read. I always turn to the back, read the acknowledgments, and then I start chapter one. I always read the dedication, and I read the acknowledgments.
Luke Burgis: And that’s because I write very, very well — I write my best when I’m out in environments with other people around me. I don’t know how to explain it, I’m observing, I’m picking up on their energy. So those situations matter a lot to me.
And, you know, choosing — I think that in a relatively artificial age, an age of AI, an age of abstractions, the real is really important — the question of the real and the unreal. I think maybe why I enjoy being out at coffee shops and bars writing is because I’m immersed, and I feel like I’m immersed in the real there. It’s harder for me to get inside my head and start thinking in abstractions. Sometimes if I’m stuck, I’ll stop and look into somebody else’s face, or watch what they’re doing. I don’t know, maybe it’s weird, but every once in a while I find one of the most creatively generative exercises for me is to eat alone, to taste the food, and to pay attention to the things going on around me. So I think that places, situations, being intentional, curating them, surrounding ourselves with people who encourage and support us, beautiful places — these are going to be very, very important to the future of our country and to humanity.
Angela Duckworth: So I want to say thank you to Luke for this gift, The One and the 99. And we want to say — Anne, thank you for not making this a Zoom webinar, because I think this is a much better situation. Could we give a warm round of applause for Luke Burgis? Thank you so much.
Anne Snyder: The Understory is an original podcast brought to you by Comment Magazine. I’m your host, Anne Snyder. Our producers are Tiffany Thompson and Evan Rosa, and our editor is Allie Crummy. To learn more about Comment, and to support the wider work of seeding a better, truer story to live and to tell, visit comment.org.
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