Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

“Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.”

“And there was a lot of resistance—a doctrinaire libertarian resistance—from me. Mimetic theory pushes against the idea that we’re all these atomistic individuals.”

that I’ve developed to deal positively with mimetic desire. My goal in sharing them is to help you think practically about these ideas and ultimately to develop your own tactics, which may be very different from mine.

So the way that a model describes something or suggests something to us makes all the difference. We never see the things we want directly; we see them indirectly, like refracted light. We

People are desperate to find something solid to hold on to in today’s “liquid modernity” (to borrow a term from sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman). Liquid modernity is a chaotic phase of history in which there are no culturally agreed-upon models to follow, no fixed points of reference. They have melted like glaciers and plunged us into a stormy sea with limited visibility.

Scientism fools people because it is a mimetic game dressed up as science.

People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.

Even clothes are reflexive, according to the author Virginia Woolf: “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”13 Winston Churchill spoke about the reflexivity of architecture when he said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”14

and destructive cycles of desire, which are responsible for the rise and fall of cultures. They can’t be captured in a meme. The Flywheel Effect Mimetic desire tends to move in one of two cycles. Cycle 1 is the negative cycle, in which mimetic desire leads to rivalry and conflict. This cycle runs on the false belief that other people have something that we don’t have and that there isn’t room for fulfillment

lead to failure. A doom loop might work like this: An e-commerce company

flywheels come from people who know themselves well. You probably already have a tacit knowledge of what things increase and decrease the likelihood that you’re going to want to do something in the future. The key is to make the cycle explicit, and then to put

for you. Start with a core desire. It might be spending more time with your kids, having more leisure time, or writing a book. Then map out a system of desire that makes it easier to bring that core desire to fulfillment. Write it out. I suggest that each step in the flywheel be one sentence, contain the word “want” (or “desire”), and link to the next step in the process with a connector like so that, or which leads to, or which makes. Here’s an example from an e-commerce company that put a positive flywheel in motion for its customer service team, which had become complacent and unmotivated: 1. We want our customer service team to feel empowered to take ownership of decisions; so that 2. Customers feel they are speaking to someone with authority and therefore want to interact with them rather than asking for a manager;

DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES. SPECTATORS GET CHILLS BY IDENTIFYING WITH THE VICTIMS, FEELING IMMUNE ALL THE WHILE! THIS IS A PARTICULARLY UNATTRACTIVE FORM OF VOYEURISM.

“The guiltier he is, the more convincingly he can stand in for all other guilty parties and be sacrificed in their stead.”

In real life, scapegoats are usually singled out due to some combination of the following: they have extreme personalities or neurodiversity (such as autism) or physical abnormalities that make them noticeable; they’re on the margins of society in terms of status or markets (they are outside the system, like the Amish or people who have chosen to live off the grid);

Sympathy starts with sym-, meaning “together.” Sympathy means “feeling together.” Our emotions fuse with those of the person

to rescue a trapped soccer team. They entered that cave of their own volition. They were in control of themselves as they made their way to the trapped children, hyperaware of their surroundings and their responses in order not to get lost or perish. 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