Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

We want what other people want because other people want it, and it’s penciled-in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again. —Dayna Tortorici

Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.

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.

But after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.

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”).

As humans have evolved, people have spent less time concerned about surviving and more time striving for things—less time in the world of needs and more time in the world of desire.

Mimetic desire draws people toward things.4 “This draw,” writes Girard scholar James Alison, “this movement … [is] mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to physics.”5

Gravity causes people to fall physically to the ground. Mimetic desire causes people to fall in or out of love, or debt, or friendships, or business partnerships.

“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.”

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.

Mimesis can hijack our noblest ambitions. We live at a time of hyper-imitation. Fascination with what is trending and going viral is symptomatic of our predicament. So is political polarization. It stems in part from mimetic behavior that destroys nuance and poisons even our most honorable goals: to develop friendships, to fight for important causes, to build healthy communities. When mimesis takes over, we become obsessed with vanquishing some Other, and we measure ourselves according to them. When a person’s identity becomes completely tied to a mimetic model, they can never truly escape that model because doing so would mean destroying their own reason for being.13 Homogenizing forces are creating a crisis of desire. Equality is good. Sameness is generally not—unless we’re talking about cars on an assembly line or the consistency of your favorite brand of coffee. The more that people are forced to be the same—the more pressure they feel to think and feel and want the same things—the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves. And this is dangerous. Many cultures have had a myth in which twins commit violence against each other. There are at least five separate stories of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis alone: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Stories of sibling rivalry are universal because they’re true—the more people are alike, the more likely they are to feel threatened. While technology is b...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. —Milan Kundera

There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life.

The danger is not recognizing models for what they are. When we don’t recognize them, we are easily drawn into unhealthy relationships with them. They begin to exert an outsize influence on us. We often become fixated on them without realizing it. Models are, in many cases, a person’s secret idol.

Desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it. The motivational speaker Simon Sinek advises organizations and people to “start with why” (the title of one of his books), finding and communicating one’s purpose before anything else. But that is usually a post hoc rationalization of whatever it is we already wanted. Desire is the better place to start.

We’re so sensitive to imitation that we notice the slightest deviance from what we could call acceptable imitation. If we receive a response to an email or text that doesn’t sufficiently tone-match, we can go into a mini-crisis (Does she not like me? Does he think he’s superior to me? Did I do something wrong?). Communication practically runs on mimesis.

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 story of Shader and Hornik serves as a warning to stand on guard against mimetic valuations. It’s the Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily—they seem like gifts—while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.

The cult of saints has become the cult of experts. That doesn’t mean we no longer rely on models to figure out what to want. It means that in a post-Enlightenment world, the preferred models are often those who seem most enlightened: the experts.

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.

People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do; this increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion.

In Freshmanistan, a mimetic rivalry is like two people trying to race each other inside of the same car: Nobody gets ahead, and eventually they crash.

Everyone has a toxic relationship to a model. The second half of this book is about the transformation of desire, which is the long-term cure. The short-term cure is to shield ourselves from infection.

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.

Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media. Social media is social mediation—and it now brings nearly all of our models inside our personal world.

We’ll see in this chapter that mimetic conflict is contagious. It can lead to a social environment in which everyone is reacting mimetically to everyone else. This dynamic keeps people locked in cycles of endless conflict, bound to one another through mimesis, unable to go anywhere.

Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy. It passes from person to person like the energy between people at a concert or political rally. This energy can lead to a cycle of positive desire, in which healthy desires gain momentum and lead to other healthy desires, uniting people in positive ways; or it can become a cycle of negative desire, in which mimetic rivalries lead to conflict and discord.

Lamborghini seemed to view competition as an occupational hazard for an entrepreneur—something good up to a certain point, but which devolves into rivalry if it’s not kept in check.

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 of both their desires and ours. It comes from a mindset of scarcity, of fear, of anger.

Cycle 2 is the positive cycle in which mimetic desire unites people in a shared desire for some common good. It comes from a mindset of abundance and mutual giving. This type of cycle transforms the world. People want something that they couldn’t imagine wanting before—and they help others go further, too.

The fitness flywheel is hard to turn in the beginning. You feel like crap. Going to the gym seems daunting. And when you first start working out, it’s painful. Change is imperceptible. But you keep pushing, and eventually the wheel starts turning. One day you wake up and look forward to your workout. The momentum has taken hold.

If you pick a spot on the outer edge of the flywheel and trace its movement from stage to stage, you are naturally pulled around the loop. Each step isn’t merely the next step in a sequence; it’s the logical consequence of the step that came before it. According to Collins, the movement of a flywheel works due to a cannot help but logic: you can’t help but take the next step.

A human-centered approach to business involves grappling with the messiness of human interactions—with human nature. To introduce something foreign to human nature, which doesn’t complement it—like an organizational “operating system” that doesn’t account for mimetic desire—is to open up a Pandora’s box.

It’s presumptuous for anyone to think that they can “deliver happiness” to anyone else—even their own spouse. It’s not our job. It’s certainly not the job of a company.

Some people wake up one day after twenty years and wonder how they ever got into their career and why they are still there. You can influence behavior with financial incentives, no doubt—but economic incentives alone don’t explain why people are captivated by certain models. You can’t buy desire. When we subsidize risk, we are left with a distorted view of who wants what. Sometimes, that person is us.

Values and desires are not the same thing. Values act to order desires the way they do a diet. If a person who loves meat realizes that their values are such that they no longer wish to eat meat, there comes a time—after they’ve lived out their values long enough—when they no longer even want meat. You could put the juiciest burger imaginable in front of them and they wouldn’t be tempted to eat it.

Most companies have a mission statement. Many of them have core values or some equivalent. Few make explicit—either to themselves or to the outside world—their hierarchy of values.

A hierarchy of values is an antidote to mimetic conformity. If all values are treated as equal, then the one that wins out—especially at a time of crisis—is the one that is most mimetic.

Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference. If everything is equally good or important, the propensity for conflict is higher. Don’t contribute to the tyranny of relativism. It has too many tyrants as it is.

Value systems with a clear hierarchy are more effective during crises than systems of values that lack a hierarchy.

Each of us has desires that, if followed to the end, are dangerous to ourselves and to others. The same is true at the societal level: out-of-control mimesis makes desires spread and collide violently.

Steve knew that if we got to run around and shoot each other with pellets of paint for a couple of hours, we’d be less likely to shoot barbs and insults at each other around the office. Every company needs its own form of cathartic rituals—something more effective than drunken holiday parties.

If you’re in the ocean when lightning strikes, you have little to fear. But if you’re in a pool and lightning strikes it, you have a lot to fear. Celebristan is like the ocean. Freshmanistan is like a pool.

The English word “contagion” comes from the Latin word contāgiō, meaning “with touch.” In a mob, contagion happens imperceptibly. As during the community spread of an infectious disease, nobody in a crowd knows who is a superspreader. It’s impossible to identify the exact moment when the invisible enemy infiltrates a person’s defenses. In the case of mimesis, nobody suspects that their desires are being infected.

The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color. Nothing is sacred anymore, and more important, nothing is legitimate—least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice. And so, justice is seized by the crowd. This is suboptimal. The choice now would seem to be between building egalitarian institutions capable of withstanding public scrutiny, or further retreat into a dissembling fog.

A mob is a hyper-mimetic organism in which individual members can easily lose personal agency. Mimetic contagion destroys the distinctions between people—especially the differences in their desires. You can show up to a rally wanting one thing and leave wanting something else entirely.

The scapegoating mechanism does not hinge on the guilt or innocence of the scapegoat. It hinges on the ability of a community to use a scapegoat to accomplish their desired outcome: unification, healing, purgation, expiation. The scapegoat serves a religious function.

Crises always seem to sneak up on and shock people. With all our modern technology and intelligence, we can’t predict them or prevent them. We keep running into crises of our own making. That’s because few people realize when they are caught up in a mimetic process. Most people maintain the illusion of independent desire—the Romantic Lie. But as the world’s financial and technological systems become more complex, so do our systems of desire.

Nearly all people are religious in the sense that they subconsciously believe that sacrifice brings peace.