Luke Burgis and Angela Duckworth are watching the same traffic move in opposite directions, and this hour is the first time they’ve worked it out in the same room.
Burgis, founder of the Cluny Institute, author of Wanting, and a teacher at Catholic University’s Ciocca Center, has spent years tracing how mimetic desire pulls us into borrowed identities. How much of what we take to be our own wanting was simply handed to us by someone we were watching. Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who wrote the bestselling book Grit, comes at it from the other side: how the people, places, and situations around us draw out capacities we didn’t know were there, or quietly bury them.
Between them they take up the difference between a solid self and a pseudo self; what the parable of the lost sheep understands about individuation that our therapeutic vocabulary does not; the “hard thing rule” for raising children who can grit and quit well; and whether any of our institutions still think in terms of formation at all … or have simply outsourced it and hoped for the best.
Recorded live at Comment’s inaugural Understory festival, with introductory reflections from editor in chief Anne Snyder.
How Does a Person Become Real?
