Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.

The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us unfettered access to, is the metaphysical threat.

Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy.

Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference. If everything is equally good or important, the propensity for conflict is higher.

he was checking his desires against a clear hierarchy of values, which prevented them from spinning out of control.

“We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches,”

I told the story as someone who was aware of the scapegoating mechanism. This is how the gospels worked. For the first time in history, the story was told from the standpoint of the victim.

Those of us who grew up in cultures that have been touched by this history have been so inculcated with the concern for innocent victims that it’s easy to forget how some of our deeply held convictions may have been formed in the first place. Some things, once they have been seen, can never be unseen.

An anti-mimetic action—or person—is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream.

Empathy is the ability to share in another person’s experience—but without imitating them (their speech, their beliefs, their actions, their feelings) and without identifying with them to the point that one’s own individuality and self-possession are lost.

desires don’t magically and spontaneously happen. They are generated and shaped in the dynamic world of human interaction. Someone has to supply a model.

A business doesn’t simply “meet demand” for products and services that people want. Instead, it plays a critical role in generating and shaping desires.

The Montessori teacher models the desire for an object and then withdraws as a mediator of desire so the child can interact directly.

The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it.11

Real truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature—it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is. The quick and easy diffusion of truth combats destructive mimesis and rivalry. Mimesis bends, disguises, and distorts the truth. When the truth moves slowly in an organization—or when it is constantly bent to the will of certain people—mimesis dominates.12

Here’s a simple experiment. Identify a key executive or employee in your organization who is a need-to-know person, and explain what you’ll be doing; nobody else should know the experiment is taking place. Then have an outside person anonymously plant a few pieces of important information at various levels of the organization. Measure precisely how long it takes to reach the people whom it should reach from various starting points.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote the seventeenth-century physicist, writer, inventor, and mathematician Blaise Pascal.

Toni Morrison has described how reliant her writing students were on the opinions of others even to form a critical judgment on their own. In an interview she mused: “One thing that has interested me is how enormously timid the students are about risking any criticism on things where there are only primary sources. They talk an awful lot about pioneering criticism, but they are really unwilling to pass judgment on paper about a book that has only a few little reviews to examine. They don’t mind having a body of work that they can respond to: secondary sources, criticism, a teacher’s evaluation. But I was astounded that it took so long for them to feel willing to take risks in evaluating a book that they loved but hadn’t heard anybody pass judgment on.”19 Their judgments were mimetic. They weren’t willing to take a stand on anything.

Big Data is the place where the entrepreneurial spirit goes to die.

Kirzner: “An economics which seeks to grapple with the real-world circumstance of open-endedness must transcend an analytical framework which cannot accommodate genuine surprise.”21

The real danger of AI is not robots that might one day be smarter than us but that might want the same things that we want: our job, our spouse, our dreams.

What would happen in a society that was increasingly liberal and individualistic, with a high degree of equality, but in which differences between people were noticeable? It would run the risk of having an even greater degree of enmity between people than a society with less equality. “When all conditions are unequal, there is no equality great enough to offend the eye,” Tocqueville wrote, “whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete.”13

I sometimes wonder how top-down company culture cults are any different than the phenomenon of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, whose religion) of the Holy Roman Empire, in which different princes or rulers had the right to enforce their preferred religious beliefs on the population.

The value of work cannot be measured by the objective output of a job alone; it must take into account the subjective transformation of the person who is working.

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want,” he said.36 Ravikant

“Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one,” Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Other desires must be let go of.37 Letting go of lesser desires is a kind of death.

Taking hold of your greatest desire necessarily means taking hold of models. We can’t access our desires without models.

But that model will not be the end. Because it’s exterior, it can’t automatically effect the inner transformation that needs to happen in order for you to transcend the model. If the inner transformation doesn’t happen, we get stuck playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole when it comes to our models and desires. When the inner transformation happens, there’s a reflexive process that helps the thin desires fade away and the thick ones take root.

The positive cycle of desire works because the primary thing being imitated is the gift of self.

In the meantime, and probably at all times, we have something warm to sink our teeth into: wanting what we already have.