Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

I’m now convinced that understanding mimetic desire is the key to understanding, at a deeply human level, business, politics, economics, sports, art, even love.

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand.

characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior—most of all, their desires.

Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models—not our “objective” analysis or central nervous system—that shape our desires. With these models, people engage in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis (mi-mee-sis), from the Greek word mimesthai (meaning “to imitate”).

“What has fascinated me for a very long time is sacrifice,” he tells the panelists, “the fact that men, for religious reasons, kill animal and often human victims in almost all human societies.”

A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives—not their performance relative to one another—minimizes mimetic rivalries.

Models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drug. Before Facebook, a person’s models came from a small set of people: friends, family, work, magazines, and maybe TV. After Facebook, everyone in the world is a potential model.

Buried in a deeper layer of our psychology is the person or thing that caused us to want something in the first place. Desire requires models—people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.

We don’t want things that are too easily possessed or that are readily within reach. Desire leads us beyond where we currently are. Models are like people standing a hundred yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see.

Communication practically runs on mimesis. In a study published in 2008 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, sixty-two students were assigned to negotiate with other students. Those who mirrored others’ posture and speech reached a settlement 67 percent of the time, while those who didn’t reached a settlement 12.5 percent of the time.

As I smile and tell him how exciting that is, I feel some anxiety. Shouldn’t I be making an extra $20,000, too? Will my friend and I still be able to plan vacations together if he gets twice as much paid time off as I do?

Bernays seemed to understand that models influence desire. Doctors were the “expert” models who recommended bacon and eggs. Teachers modeled soap carving. And when Mack Trucks hired Bernays to defend the company against attacks from railroads, Bernays rallied legions of enthusiastic motorists, from the members of men’s and women’s driving clubs to milk delivery drivers and tire workers, to support the building of more highways.

“I hope that we have started something,” Hunt told journalists, “and that these torches of freedom, with no particular brand favored, will smash the discriminatory taboo on cigarettes for women and that our sex will go on breaking down all discriminations.”19 What she failed to mention while being interviewed was that she was Bernays’s secretary and was reciting a carefully crafted statement.

Smart to not mention a brand

He gave the illusion of autonomy—because that’s how people think desire works. Models are most powerful when they are hidden. If you want to make someone passionate about something, they have to believe the desire is their own.

The goal is getting people to think, “Oh, those lemming-like, silly people in the commercial.” The moment a person exempts themselves in their own mind from the very thing they see all around them is the moment when they are most vulnerable. As David Foster Wallace pointed out, “Joe Briefcase,” sitting on his couch watching the Pepsi commercial alone, thinks he has transcended the mass of plebeians that Pepsi must be advertising to—and then he goes out and buys more Pepsi, for reasons that he thinks are different.

If a news organization can convince its viewers that its programming is neutral, it disables their defense mechanisms. Big Tech companies do something similar. They present their technology as agnostic—as just a “platform.” And that’s true, so long as we evaluate it in a materialistic way, as bits and bytes. Yet, on a human level, social media companies have built engines of desire.

The universe of desire is dotted with billions of stars who appear to shine brightest at the exact moment when we find it hardest to see.

He taught Jobs that strange or shocking behavior mesmerizes people. People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules. (Reality TV exploits this.)3

This brings us to an important feature of Celebristan models: because there’s no threat of conflict, they are generally imitated freely and openly.

In Greek, the word meta means “after.” Aristotle had studied the physical world and learned all that he could learn about it. Then he asked, “What now?” He applied himself to the study of what would later be called metaphysics, which literally means “after the physical.”

“Since modern man has no way of knowing what is going on beyond himself, since he cannot know everything, he would become lost in a world as vast and technically complex as ours, if he had really no one to guide him,” wrote Girard in his book Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. “He no longer relies on priests and philosophers, of course, but he must rely on people nevertheless, more than ever, as a matter of fact.” And who are these people? “They are the experts,” continues Girard, “the people more competent than we are in innumerable fields of endeavor.”

Experts play an increasingly prominent role in our society. But what makes an expert? A degree? A podcast? Increasingly, experts are crowned mimetically, like fashion. Because there is less and less agreement about cultural values and even about the value of science itself (consider the debates about climate change), people find “experts” whose expertise is largely a product of mimetic validation. It’s critical to cut through mimesis and find sources of knowledge that are less subject to mimesis.

Giro’s business flywheel, according to Collins, worked like this: “Invent great products; get elite athletes to use them; inspire Weekend Warriors to mimic their heroes; attract mainstream customers; and build brand power as more and more athletes use the products. But then, to maintain the ‘cool’ factor, set high prices and channel profits back into creating the next generation of great products that elite athletes want to use.”

Every community in a mimetic crisis—that is, every community that suffers a loss of difference, where there is no clear separation between models and imitators—has its own version of the Cycle 2 flywheel. In the Downtown Project, there was an intentional focus on making collisions of people happen. Without knowing it, they were exacerbating mimetic rivalry.

Most people gauge their happiness relative to other people. When the starting point of a flywheel is the delivery of happiness—both for customers and for a company culture—the system revolves around a vague notion of happiness that is rife with mimesis.

In his study of history, Girard found that humans time and time again turned to sacrifice in order to stop the spread of mimetic conflict.5 When societies were threatened with disorder, they used violence to drive out violence. They would expel or destroy a chosen person or group, and this action would have the effect of preventing more widespread violence. Girard called the process by which this happens the scapegoat mechanism.

anger spreads faster than other emotions, such as joy, because anger spreads easily when there are weak ties between people—as there often are online.25

After a dozen years of Trump cultivating and cementing his status as the “master” and everyone else as the “apprentice,” it’s not surprising that he became a cult-like figure. He single-handedly resolved a mimetic crisis by bringing order during each of the 192 episodes of The Apprentice

These rituals worked due to sacrificial substitution. Humans realized they could substitute an animal for a human. The sacrifice of animals has gradually been replaced by the termination of executives, mass incarceration, and social media cancellations. There seems to be no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to satiating our hunger for sacrifice.

Girard urged everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof), to pay attention to what happened at the crucifixion of Jesus. Girard read this story primarily as an anthropologist. What he found was human behavior operating differently than he had seen anywhere else in his reading of history.

According to Girard, our cultural awareness comes from the biblical stories. The awareness couldn’t have come about by thinking about it hard enough. We had a blind spot because we were part of the crime. The events recounted in the Bible showed us something that no amount of reasoning had arrived or could arrive at: the innocence of victims.

Western culture has developed strongly around the defense of victims. Over the past two thousand years, there have been dramatic advances in public and private law, economic policies, and penal legislation to protect the vulnerable.

If two people argue on a social media platform, drawing others into the feud, it’s not hard to see who wins: the platform.

Sébastien Bras’s restaurant, Le Suquet, occupies a picturesque hillside on the outskirts of Laguiole, France, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from each of the three major cities closest to it (Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, and Montpellier). Still, the restaurant never has an empty table for lunch or dinner—something that some three-Michelin-star restaurants in the middle of Paris can’t claim.

“You get stuck in a dreadful system,” Bras says. “If you don’t respect the official or unofficial codes and practices of the guide, you risk being downgraded. This is awful for the reputation of the restaurant, for the morale of the chefs, for the entire team. To be downgraded is to fail.”

“My objective back then was to help my father get the three Michelin stars and keep them,” he says. When Sébastien joined his father, Le Suquet had only two Michelin stars.

Sit with competing desires and project them into the future. Let’s say you have two competing job offers: Company A and Company B. If you have two days to make the final decision, spend one day with each company in your imagination. On the first day, imagine with as much detail as possible that you’re working at Company A and fulfilling the desires that come along with that position—maybe it’s living in a new city, interacting with smart people, and being closer to your family. Pay close attention to your emotions and what’s going on inside your gut. The next day, spend the entire day doing the same thing, except at Company B.

We’ve all met older people who realized too late that their desires were thin—for example, a person who looked forward to retirement for decades only to find out that attaining it left them unsatisfied.

The word “prestige” comes from the Latin praestigium, which means “illusion” or “conjurer’s trick.” (The 2006 movie The Prestige, which depicts the mimetic rivalry between two magicians, was well titled.)

The lifestyle in Silicon Valley, and in the start-up world in general, is largely a function of mimesis. Not everyone moved to Menlo Park and decided to wear logoed hoodies and Vans at the same time.

Third, I went from craving classical wisdom to consuming memes and tweets and tech news—which led to my imitating ideas without knowing it. I knew more about what blogger Gary Vaynerchuk had to say about happiness than Aristotle.

One approach I recommend for uncovering thick desires—the one I’ll focus on here—involves taking the time to listen to the most deeply fulfilling experiences of your colleagues’ (or partners’, or friends’, or classmates’) lives, and sharing your own with them. The more we understand one another’s stories of meaningful achievement, the more effectively we understand how to work with each other: what moves and motivates others, what gives them satisfaction in their work.

The storytelling process that I use involves sharing stories about times in your life when you took an action that ended up being deeply fulfilling. Today it’s one of the first questions that I ask in any job interview because it helps cut through the thin stuff and goes straight to the essence of the person. “Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment,” I ask.

Chef Sébastien Bras was inside one of these systems while he worked within the Michelin game. Many companies are Gravitrons, too. At their centers are leaders who, like the Gravitron operator, make everything revolve around them.

The Montessori teacher models the desire for an object and then withdraws as a mediator of desire so the child can interact directly. The duty of the teacher is “to give a ray of light and to go on our way,” she said.

Set aside at least three consecutive days every year for a personal silent retreat. No talking, no screens, no music. Only books. Deep silence is the kind of silence you enter into when the echoes and comforts of normal noise have completely receded and you are alone with yourself. A five-day retreat is ideal because often the noise of the world doesn’t fully recede from our minds until the end of the third day (and the major benefits of the silence flow once that has happened)—but three days is a good place to start.

the iPhone has been out since 2007, and while its hardware and software have changed, it still feels the same.

Disagree - recency bias

NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway thinks that each of the Big Four tech companies taps into a deep-seated need in humanity.8 Google is like a deity that answers our questions (read: prayers); Facebook satisfies our need for love and belonging; Amazon fulfills the need for security, allowing us instantaneous access to goods in abundance (the company was there for us during COVID-19) to ensure our survival; and Apple appeals to our sex drive and the associated need for status, signaling one’s attractiveness as a mate by associating with a brand that is innovative, forward-thinking, and costly to own.

Meditative thought, on the other hand, is patient thought. It is not the same thing as meditation. Meditative thought is simply slow, nonproductive thought. It’s not reactionary. It’s the kind of thought that, upon hearing news or experiencing something surprising, doesn’t immediately look for solutions. Instead, it asks a series of questions that help the asker sink down further into the reality: What is this new situation? What is behind it? Meditative thought is patient enough to allow the truth to reveal itself.

The best way to get started practicing meditative thought is to pour yourself a beverage and look at a tree for an hour. An entire hour. There is no goal in this exercise other than learning how not to have a goal. As you look at the tree, pay attention to everything you notice. You should find that your calculating thought slowly gives way to meditative thought. If not, repeat as necessary.