Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to physics.”5

mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to physics.”5

Stories of sibling rivalry are universal because they’re true—the more people are alike, the more likely they are to feel threatened.

If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones.

The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.

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.

Tactic 1 NAME YOUR MODELS Naming anything—whether it’s emotions, problems, or talents—gives us more control. The same is true for models. Who are your models at work? At home? Who are the people influencing your buying decisions, your career path, your politics? Some models are easy to name. They are what we typically think of as “role models”—people or groups we find exemplary, people we want to emulate in a positive way. We’re not ashamed to acknowledge them. Others we don’t think of as models. Take fitness. A personal trainer is more than a coach—she is a model of desire. She wants something for you that you do not yet want for yourself enough to do what you need to do. The important shift is seeing people in more than their professional role but also in their role as an influencer of desire. This applies to your children’s teachers, your colleagues, and your friends. Harder to name are the people who come from inside our world and who might be modeling rivalrous or unhealthy behaviors—the people around whom we orbit without knowing it, who affect what we want. We’ll explore this type of less-acknowledged model in Chapter 2 because they have come to dominate our world. Here’s one way to identify them: think seriously about the people you least want to see succeed.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book The Eternal Husband shows the comedy and tragedy of mimetic romance.

A friend and collaborator of Girard’s, the psychoanalyst Jean-Michel Oughourlian, recommended a shocking tactic to people who came to him in his clinical practice complaining that their spouse no longer seemed interested in them: he would suggest they find someone to compete with the spouse for their time and attention. Even the remote suspicion that someone else might be competing for a spouse’s time can be enough to arouse and intensify desire. (I’m not suggesting that anyone intentionally try to make their spouse jealous—although it seems to be a tactic that many people already use, quite naturally.)

Interesting

Romance can feel like a roller-coaster ride because that’s how mimetic desire moves.

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 moment a person exempts themselves in their own mind from the very thing they see all around them is the moment when they are most vulnerable.

He taught Jobs that strange or shocking behavior mesmerizes people.

People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules. (Reality TV exploits this.)

We are generally fascinated with people who have a different relationship to desire, real or perceived.

When people don’t seem to care what other people want or don’t want the same things, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis—anti-mimetic, even. And that’s fascinating, because most of us aren’t.

Aristotle recognized nearly 2,500 years ago that humans possess advanced capabilities of imitation that allow us to create new things.

Our ability to imitate in complex ways is why we have language, recipes, and music.4

To make matters even more confusing, why is it that in most organizations imitation seems to be simultaneously encouraged and discouraged? Dress like someone in a position that you’d like to be in, but not too closely; imitate the cultural norms, but make sure you stand out; emulate key leaders in the organization, but don’t seem like you’re brown-nosing.

It’s as if everyone is saying, “Imitate me—but not too much,” because while everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.

rivalry is a function of proximity.

an important feature of Celebristan models: because there’s no threat of conflict, they are generally imitated freely and openly.

Freshmanistan is the world of models who mediate desire from inside our world, which is why Girard calls them internal mediators of desire. There are no barriers preventing people from competing directly with one another for the same things.

It might seem like these groups are very different. Don’t nerds look at jocks as if they exist in another world? Yes. But they are far more alike than different.

Everyone is taking mimetic cues from everyone else, but almost nobody knows it. An unspoken battle of differentiation occurs as each person tries to carve out an identity over and against the rest.

If someone falls under the influence of a model who mediates the desire for a handbag, it’s not the handbag they are after. It’s the imagined newness of being they think it will bring.

The metaphysical nature of desire leads to strange distortions in the way that we see other people.

We are witnessing an inversion of value.

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.

Everything boils down to choosing the right expert.”12 If my friend is more on top of global affairs, urbanism, culture, and design than I am, it’s because he has a Monocle subscription.

What is our basis for taking a source as authoritative? Is it because we checked all of the person’s credentials? Is it because the source was fact-checked by Peter Canby’s team at the New Yorker? Or is it because the person has the most followers on social media and a “Verified” sticker next to their name? Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.

it’s easy for someone to become an overnight expert on “productivity” merely because they got published in the right place. Scientism fools people because it is a mimetic game dressed up as science.

“In situations that have thinking participants, there is a two-way interaction between the participant’s thinking and the situation in which they operate,”