Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

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...