Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

Consider how ingrained sacrificial thinking is in our psyche. If only we could destroy that other political party, that other company, those terrorists, that troublemaker, that fast-food joint next door that has caused me to gain ten pounds, everything would be better.32 The sacrifice always seems right and proper. Our violence is good violence; the violence of the other side is always bad.

The mob attempted to make Jesus their scapegoat. But the mechanism was subverted in a radical way—which is one of the reasons it has had such enduring cultural significance, even from a historical point of view alone. The crucifixion of Jesus failed to unite a community unanimously against a scapegoat. It did the opposite—it caused enormous division. For a short period of time, the crucifixion seemed to have the desired effect. The mob was quelled, and order was temporarily restored. But very shortly after Jesus’s death, a small number of people—those who knew Jesus intimately—came forward to proclaim his innocence and said that he was alive. A division opened up between those who wanted to preserve the old sacrificial order and those who saw the scapegoat mechanism for what it is: an unjust sacrificial mechanism.

If the modern world seems to be going crazy, it’s partly because we are hyperaware of the ways in which exploitation and violence against innocent victims occur, but we simply don’t know what to do about them. It’s like we’ve been told something terrible that we didn’t want to know, and which we’re powerless to fix entirely on our own. And that’s a recipe for collective madness.

“Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat,” wrote René Girard. “I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats.”44

What does this mean? It’s not that we should be (or can be) free of mimetic desire. Being anti-mimetic is not like Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “antifragile”—it’s not merely the opposite of mimetic. Being anti-mimetic is having the ability, the freedom, to counteract destructive forces of desire. Something mimetic is an accelerant; something anti-mimetic is a decelerant. An anti-mimetic action—or person—is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream.

“we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”1 From the standpoint of desire, our goals are the product of our systems. We can’t want something that is outside the system of desire we occupy.

The obsession with goal setting is misguided, even counterproductive. Setting goals isn’t bad. But when the focus is on how to set goals rather than how to choose them in the first place, goals can easily turn into instruments of self-flagellation.

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, noted, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” The deathbed is where unfulfilling desires are exposed. Transport yourself there now rather than waiting until later, when it might be too late.

The word “sympathy” shares the same root as “empathy”—they both come from the Greek word pathos, which roughly means “feeling” or something that appeals to the emotions (according to Aristotle’s use of the word). The difference between the two words is in the prefix. Sympathy starts with sym-, meaning “together.” Sympathy means “feeling together.” Our emotions fuse with those of the person we sympathize with. We see things from their perspective. A certain degree of agreement is implied.

Empathy feels different. The em- in empathy means “to go into.” It’s the ability to go into the experiences or feelings of another person—but without losing self-possession, or the ability to maintain control over our responses and to act freely, out of our own core.

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. In this sense, empathy is anti-mimetic.

Empathy could mean smiling and giving a cold bottle of water to people collecting signatures for a petition you would never sign—because it’s a sweltering day and you know what it’s like to be that hot, and you also know what it feels like to be that passionate about something you care about. It would not entail empty platitudes or white-lie niceties that we often say to people with whom we disagree; rather, it means finding a shared point of humanity through which to connect without sacrificing our integrity in the process.

Empathy disrupts negative cycles of mimesis. A person who is able to empathize can enter into the experience of another person and share her thoughts and feelings without necessarily sharing her desires. An empathetic person has the ability to understand why someone might want something that they don’t want for themselves. In short, e...

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. That’s because the desire to retire (not widely adopted until after World War II, by the way) is a thin desire, filled with mimetically derived ideas about the things one might do, or not do, in this ideal state. The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is a thick desire—and the proof is that a person can start to fulfill it today and continue to fulfill it into retirement. It grows with compound interest over many years. It has time to solidify.

Desires feel very strong when we’re young—to make a lot of money, date a person with certain physical attributes, or become famous. The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is. As we get older, many of our adolescent feelings of intense desire fade away. It’s not because we realize that some of the things we wanted are no longer attainable. It’s because we have more pattern recognition ability and so can recognize the kinds of desires that leave us unfulfilled. As a result, most people do learn to cultivate thicker desires as they age.

Core motivational drives are enduring, irresistible, and insatiable. They are probably explanatory of much of your behavior since the time you were a child. Think of them as your motivational energy—the reason you consistently gravitate toward certain types of projects (team versus individual, goal-oriented versus ideation) and activities (sports, arts, theater, forms of fitness) and not others.

“Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment,”

Imagine three artists standing shoulder to shoulder on a plateau in Zion National Park painting the same sunset. One wants to hone his painting skills for a competition; another wants to give the finished painting to her husband on their anniversary because they had their first date in the park; the last wants to preserve the sheer beauty of the landscape in her memory. From the outside, the artists appear to be doing exactly the same thing. From the inside, each artist is doing something very different.

We can mostly understand the actions of cats and dogs from the outside looking in. But people are different: knowing something about the interior life of a person is necessary to understand why they do what they do and what it means to them. Fulfillment Stories get at the heart of action by looking at it from the inside out. Fulfillment Stories ask, “But why did that action mean so much to you?”

If we ask people to tell us stories about actions that merely gave them pleasure, we get stories that are all over the spectrum. But when the question is about genuine fulfillment, we typically hear about people at their best.

The stories are almost always about actions that nearly anyone would consider inherently good: serving other people, contributing to the success of a team, fighting injustice, organizing an effort that serves the common good. Selfish pleasures might feel satisfying for a moment or even a day, but they are not the kind of things that anyone remembers years later.

Great leaders start and sustain positive cycles of desire. They empathize with others’ weaknesses; they want to know and be known by others, at all levels of an organization; they focus on cultivating thick desires. They transcend the destructive mimetic cycle, which opens up a new world of possibilities: the world beyond our immediate wanting.

Transcendent leaders see the economy as an open system. It’s possible to find new and untapped ways to create value for ourselves and for others—and those need not be different things. When the economy is viewed as an immanent system, on the other hand, it’s a zero-sum game. People are competing for the same things, and one person can only be successful at another person’s expense.

Transcendent leaders don’t insist on the primacy of their own desires. They don’t make them the center around which everyone and everything must revolve. Instead, they shift the center of gravity away from themselves and toward a transcendent goal, so that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with others.

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.

In times of crisis, the threat from inside a company is underestimated. People who don’t want to take responsibility find scapegoats. Blame is assigned. Meanwhile, the threat from the outside grows deadlier.

If truth is not confronted courageously, communicated effectively, and acted upon quickly, a company will never be able to adhere to reality and respond appropriately to it.

Companies must adapt in order to survive. If truth is distorted, withheld, or slowed, companies can’t adapt fast enough to changing circumstances. If you think of a company in evolutionary terms, only those with the fastest speed of truth are going to mutate fast enough to survive.

Observe two meetings, with and without a boss. Count the number of times someone says something challenging and true. Divide the number of hours by the number of truths: that’s the number of truths per hour, or tph. The speed of truth. Compare.

Many books have been written about improving one’s ability to discern well. Here is a distillation of some key points: (1) pay attention to the interior movements of the heart when contemplating different desires—which give a fleeting feeling of satisfaction and which give satisfaction that endures? (2) ask yourself which desire is more generous and loving; (3) put yourself on your deathbed in your mind’s eye and ask yourself which desire you would be more at peace with having followed; (4) finally, and most importantly, ask yourself where a given desire comes from.

Transcendent leaders are not excessively obsessed with the news cycle, market research, or early feedback. It’s not that these things don’t matter, or that transcendent leaders are not responsive. But they are responsive first and foremost to thick desires—their own, and those of others.

Transcendent leaders are not afraid to undertake a thick start-up—a project that is not predicated on feedback (which often consists of thin desires) but instead is built on the basis of thick desires and remains guided by them.

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

My definition of an entrepreneur is simple. One hundred people look at the same herd of goats. Ninety-nine see goats. One sees a cashmere sweater. And the alertness of the one isn’t due to data analytics. It stems from a willingness and ability to look beyond and to see something more than meets the eye, and then to do something about it.

Second, the present situation confronts us with a decision. We’re in a mimetic crisis. Desires have been turned inward, toward one another, and tensions are rising. As we’ve done in the past, we might seek a technological or practical solution—the scapegoat mechanism looms. We may treat the problem as something out there, a problem we can solve with ingenuity and engineering. Alternatively, we may recognize that mimetic desire is part of the human condition and do the hard work of transforming our relationships.

I love to cook, and I watch cooking shows on TV on rainy Saturday afternoons. But I can’t help but think that the proliferation of these shows—thousands of them, with cooking competitions looping nonstop on twenty-four-hour food channels—is symptomatic of our cultural stagnation and decadence. We can’t imagine transcendent things, so we look for new ways to slice an egg or watch David Chang eat noodles.

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. In many ways, the Big Four tech companies are serving people’s needs better than churches do.9

It’s as if everyone denies that the force of gravity exists and yet wonders why people keep falling.12 No one dares to call themselves mimetic, or to point out the mimesis driving their decisions or beliefs or the behavior of those in their group.

Gilkey was struck at the way the internment affected his desires: “I marveled at the way by which we can fool ourselves,” he wrote in his 1966 book Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure. “We don some professional or moral costume so as to hide from ourselves our real desires and wants. Then we present to the world a façade of objectivity and rectitude instead of the self-concern we really feel.”

It’s a sign of maturity to be able to hold on to two conflicting desires or two opposing ideas at the same time without immediately rejecting one or the other, before there has been time for a careful discernment. To live with desire is to live with tension.

To cut through ideology, it helps to pay attention to what in Latin are called coincidentia oppositorum—the coincidence, or coexistence, of opposites: paradoxical figures, walking contradictions. People who are both meek and bold at the same time, humble and confident, or who utterly confound expectations. People or things or experiences that make us scratch our head and say, “Wait, those things are not supposed to coexist.”

These coincidences of opposites point to something transcendent. The reason things seem like they shouldn’t coexist is that they don’t map onto how I experience the world. They don’t have a place on my map of meaning, my mental model of how the world works. They are a sign that I need to go further, to reevaluate, to press deeper. They point to something beyond where I’m currently at.

A monk in charge of training novices at a monastery told me that in recent years he has noticed that young postulants (men on their way to becoming monks) bring stacks of books with them when they pray in the chapel. They are habituated to think that without “input” there can be no “output.” The hypertrophy of calculating thought is a product of our technological development—humans imitating machines.

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.

He was calculating, and it caused him to miss what was right in front of his face. Meditative thought helps us sink down into reality and notice divergent possibilities rather than converging on one (“It’s a math problem”). Meditative thought is also essential to the process of discerning desires.

Meditative thought opens the door to transformation. When the calculating, processing part of our brain calms down, the meditative part—which takes in new experiences—is given the ability to work, integrating those new experiences into a new framework for reality.

The calculating brain is only able to fit new experiences into existing mental models. The meditative brain develops new models. If we spend all of our time in calculating mode, we spend our lives trying to fit every new encounter into boxes. And when it comes to desire, that’s deadly.

Both modes of thinking are useful in different circumstances. If I’m making moves in the stock market, I should exercise calculating thought. If I’m trying to make sense of a new and unexpected situation in the world, or the discovery of thick desires, I need meditative thought. Calculating thought simply doesn’t stay in the present long enough for anything thick to present itself. Meditative thinking is the antidote to a culture of hyperspeed mimesis because it allows time to develop thick desires. Transformation happens when I spend enough time with my desires to know them by name and know whether or not I want to live with them. Calculati...

Transforming desire involves changing the nature of our relationships.

Through it all, parents can help their children recognize which of their desires are thick and which of them are thin, and encourage them to cultivate the thick ones. They can do this by emphasizing things that might lead to fulfillment (for instance, pointing out that their child’s amazing piano concert from last year seems to have taken their love for music to another level) and deemphasizing those that don’t (such as putting the anxiety they feel about getting an A- because their best friend got an A into the proper perspective).