Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

by Luke Burgis

Girard identified a fundamental truth about desire that connected the seemingly unconnected: linking biblical stories with volatility in the stock market, the collapse of ancient civilizations with workplace dysfunction, career paths with diet trends.

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.

What I wanted seemed to change daily: more respect and status, less responsibility; more capital, fewer investors; more public speaking, more privacy; an intense lust for money followed by extreme bouts of virtue signaling involving the word social.

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie.

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.

The characters in the great novels are so realistic because they want things the way that we do—not spontaneously, not out of an inner chamber of authentic desire, not randomly, but through the imitation of someone else: their secret model.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is too neat. After a person has fulfilled their basic needs, they enter a universe of desires that does not have a stable hierarchy.

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.

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.