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

by Luke Burgis

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.

Equality is good. Sameness is generally not

We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.

Each one of us has a responsibility to shape the desires of others, just as they shape ours. Each encounter we have with another person enables them, and us, to want more, to want less, or to want differently.

It’s necessary to visit hell so we never become permanent residents.

After all, each of us is a highly developed baby.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference. If everything is equally good or important, the propensity for conflict is higher.

Scapegoats are often insiders who are perceived to violate the group’s orthodoxy or taboos. Their behavior makes them appear as a threat to the group’s unity. They come to be seen as cancers or monstrous outsiders who have violated or destroyed the social bonds that hold the group together. Eliminating the scapegoat is the act through which the group becomes unified again.

People use mythological language to describe something when they have no idea how it works. That’s what myths are for. We need stories to explain the unexplainable.

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

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.

We lack the humility to see that we are all caught up in mimetic processes.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

“The goal of early childhood education should be to cultivate the child’s own desire to learn,”

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.

People come from all over the world to walk the Way of Saint James (known in Spanish as the Camino de Santiago), the approximately 490-mile pilgrimage from Saint-Jean-Piedde-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela near the western coast of Spain. Many walk it in silence.

uncanny valley, a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. Mori discovered that people find robots more aesthetically appealing the more they physically resemble humans, but only up to a certain point. Once a robot appears too similar to a human, like figures in a wax museum, they become creepy, unsettling, repulsive.3 The uncanny valley fits with mimetic theory: it is not difference, but sameness, that terrifies us.

“But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires, too, the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.”

“When all conditions are unequal, there is no equality great enough to offend the eye,” Tocqueville wrote, “whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete.”13

Transforming desire happens through relationships. Engineering desire happens in labs, with cold, lifeless instruments.

Authoritarian regimes can only stay in existence so long as they can control what people want. We normally think of these regimes as controlling what people can and cannot do through laws, regulations, policing, and penalties. But their real victory comes not when they have authority over people’s actions; rather, their victory comes when they have authority over their desires. They don’t want to keep prisoners in cells; they want those prisoners to learn to love their cells. When there is no desire for change, their authority is complete.

an ideology keeps a group “safe” from intruders who might bring with them an infectious strain of thought. There is no room for opposition. Girard once defined ideology as “the idea that everything is either good or bad.”

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.

three places where most of us spend the majority of our time: our family, our imagination, and our work.

We should be mindful of who our children learn to love and hate.

Employers have a responsibility to think about this subjective dimension of work. How does the company and the nature of the work within it contribute to the overall flourishing of the person?

Every business should think seriously about how its mission is aligned with models of desire.

At the end of my life, I believe the primary thing I’ll fear having missed out on is the pursuit of thick desires. Desires that I’ll feel satisfied about having poured myself out for. If I’m going to die of exhaustion—and, eventually, all of us will—it’s not going to be from chasing thin desires. It’s going to be from grabbing hold of a thick one and holding on until there’s nothing left.

The simplest definition of love is wanting what’s good for another. Italians have a way of saying “I love you” that is particularly instructive: Ti voglio bene, they say. It means “I want your good”—I want what’s best for you.

Through our relationships, we help other people with their wants in one of three ways: we help them want more, we help them want less, or we help them want differently.

Living with an awareness of mimetic desire brings with it the responsibility to defuse rivalry and to model positive desires in small ways daily.

The transformation of desire happens when we become less concerned about the fulfillment of our own desires and more concerned about the fulfillment of others. We find, paradoxically, that it is the very pathway to fulfilling our own.