By Charles in Books — Apr 3, 2024

[WIP] Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (Luke Burgis)

A groundbreaking exploration of why we want what we want, and a toolkit for freeing ourselves from chasing unfulfilling desires.

Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there’s a psychological force just as powerful—yet almost nobody has heard of it. It’s responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.

These are my reading notes from this book, and are a work in progress. All errors, omissions, and misrepresentations are mine.

Prologue

This is a book about why people want what they want. Why you want what you want.

René Girard was a professor at Stanford who discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic – imitative not intrinsic. We learn to want the same things others want. This is necessary to build society and culture but can also lead to vicious cycles of desire and rivalry.

The author spent his 20's endlessly striving for the entrepreneurial dream in Silicon Valley, but was never happy – successes felt like failures. He struggled with what he called "existential vertigo":

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. I even vacillated between wanting to bulk up and trying to slim down. The most troubling thing to me was that the desire that led me to start and build my company was gone.

Once when he was moments away from a life-changing windfall (his startup acquired by Zappos), he inexplicably felt relieved when it never materialized. But why?

The author spends many pages talking about Peter Thiel's house in extreme detail ("twenty-foot-high double doors—the likes of which I've only seen in cathedrals...") – is he trying to evoke the same desire in his readers?

Peter Thiel was a student of René Girard who is commonly associated with Girard's ideas. One oft-cited example is his investment in Facebook as its first outside investor (from which he made over $1B from an initial investment of $500k) due to the social platform being what he saw as a tremendous avenue for evoking mimetic desire. Another example is his organization architecture at Confinity (eliminating overlapping scopes of responsibility) and later merging Confinity with Elon Musk's X.com to create PayPal, all to avoid the downward spiral of rivalry when opposing forces see each other as mimetic desires.

Girard discovered patterns of mimetic desire when teaching Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. Their novels are desire-driven – characters rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting, like Don Quixote reading about the adventures of a famous knight Amadis de Gaula – which could explain why they have become classics, speaking to us at a deeper level. In Proust, characters pay attention to others' eyes to read things about their intentions or desires.

Mimetic desire is closely associated with violence – both Cain and Abel wanted to win favor with God, which brought them into direct conflict leading to Cain killing Abel.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs (Physical → Safety → Love/Belonging → Esteem → Self-actualization) is too neat – after basic needs (Safety & Physical) are met, we enter a universe of desire without a fixed hierarchy. Both what we desire and the intensity of that desire seem to fluctuate constantly.

External signals – models – motivate how we choose objects of desire. Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting.

Mimetic desire is social, and spreads from person to person and throughout a culture. It can result in two cycles of desire – the most common one breaking down relationships and leading to tension, conflict, and volatility; the other more positive, channeling energy into creative and productive pursuits for the common good.

Why is studying mimetic desire important?

Mimesis can hijack our noblest ambitions: we can become obsessed with measuring ourselves according to some Other, tying our identity (and reason for being) to some mimetic model that becomes impossible to escape.
Homogenizing forces are creating a crisis of desire: Technology is bringing the world together but also brings our desires closer together – amplifying the spread and potency of mimetic desire.
Sustainability depends on desirability: Eating a more sustainable diet or driving more fuel-efficient cars needs to be attractive in order to become objects of desire – which is better in the long run.
If people don't find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones: Girard hypothesized the 9/11 hijackers wouldn't have wanted to destroy symbols of the West's wealth if they didn't, at some deep level, desire those same things – which is why the hijackers spent the days before the attack carousing in Florida bars and playing video games.

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

Each of us has a responsibility to shape the desires of others, just like they shape ours. Ask yourself: What do you want? What have you helped others want?

Chapter 1: Hidden Models – Romantic Lies, Infant Truth

The Romantic Lie is what we tell ourselves about why we make certain choices: because it fits our personal preferences, because we see its objective qualities, because we saw it and therefore wanted it. The line between us and what we want is never straight; it's curved, influenced by a model.

I just realized that I wanted to run a marathon. (like all my friends when they turn 35)
Caesar declaring "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered) – he's missing "I desired" after he saw.
Eve had no desire to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree until the serpent suggested a desire.
We order a martini when our friend does so, even if we originally wanted a beer.
Our friend tells us they're becoming managing director of something – immediately becoming a model of desire for us, causing us to want it too. (If that same friend then gets Delta SkyMiles Platinum status, guess what we start wanting?)

Models endow things with value, merely because they want those things. (Models in turn get their desires from other models.) As Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "O hell! to choose love by another's eyes!" Models are a person's secret idol.

Babies are brilliant imitators – their imitative powers even develop before birth, with babies born to Mandarin-speaking mothers crying with more complex intonations than babies born to German- or Swedish-speaking mothers. Andrew Meltzoff discovered in the 70's that newborns (mean age of 32 hours) could copy his funny faces with surprising accuracy.

When mothers look at something, babies take that as a signal that the mother desires that object (or at least that the object is important). The baby looks at the mother's face, then the object – trying to understand the relationship between mother and object.

Another of Meltzoff's experiments had an adult pretend to fail to take apart a toy in front of a baby – in almost all cases the baby would immediately pull the toy apart afterwards. They mimicked what the adult wanted to do, not just what they did. Later studies had 19-month-olds readily and rapidly helping adults obtain an out-of-reach piece of fruit – helping adults fulfill their desires, even when the babies were hungry themselves.

As adults (highly developed babies), this concern about what others want can morph into unhealthy behavior: rather than learning what others want so we can help them get it, we secretly compete with them to get it ourselves.

Edward Bernays was a brilliant advertiser (one of the "Mad Men") who created propaganda for the US government during World War I, then executed many successful campaigns for businesses after the war. He seemed to instinctually know that models influence desire, leveraging doctors, teachers, and others to support his message. His biggest "triumph" was for Lucky Strike cigarettes, orchestrating a show of women spontaneously lighting up cigarettes in the Easter Day parade in New York City, with a message that the cigarettes were "torches of freedom" lighting the way for liberty for women – breaking the taboo for women smoking in public and dramatically increasing sales of Lucky Strikes.

Tactic 1: Name Your Models

Name your models at work and at home: the people influencing your buying decisions, career path, and politics. Try to evaluate your children's teachers, your colleagues and friends, your fitness coaches more than in just their professional role, but also as an influencer of desire.

Then think of the people in your life who might be modeling rivalrous or unhealthy behaviors – think of the people you least want to see succeed.

Mimetic Games

People naturally play mimetic games including:

Romance: Girard himself realized he'd feel more attracted to a girlfriend after they broke up and she would start dating others – both her attractiveness to others and her lack of desire for him affected the strength of his desire for her.
Risky Business: Serial entrepreneur Danny Shader once rejected a VC's term sheet because that VC didn't put any pressure on him, give him an exploding offer – because the investors who modeled their own desirability, who acted selective and demanding, took on a higher value in his mind.

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.

Advertising Irony: Advertisers now know we respond negatively if we're sold something too hard – so they make fun of themselves to lower our defenses. News organizations attempt to convince us that they're neutral, and tech companies present their tech as agnostic (a "platform") to disable our defense mechanisms.

Models That Move Markets

In finance, a Romantic Lie is the "efficient market" hypothesis – where asset prices are functions of all available information. Everything is "priced in". So why did Tesla stock quadruple in price in early 2020? Millions of people were buying Tesla stock, propagating mimetic desire to wider and wider swaths of the population.

Models are multiplied in both bubbles and crashes.

Chapter 2: Distorted Reality – We're All Freshmen Again

Steve Jobs's "reality distortion field" is well-known – he was skilled at mesmerizing people, bending everyone in his orbit to his desire. He seemed to want things differently, and people like that – who don't seem to care what others want, or don't want the same things – seem otherworldly.

Two Kinds of Models

There are two kinds of models that affect us in different ways: those outside our immediate world and those inside of it.

Desire is effected differently by people at great social distance from us (celebrities, fictional characters, historical figures, even our boss) and those who are close (colleagues, friends, social media connections, neighbors, people we meet at parties).

Our ability to imitate is why we have language, music, culture – but no one wants to be known as an imitator. Organizations seem to both encourage and discourage imitation – imitate the cultural norms, but make sure you stand out; emulate key leaders, but don't brown-nose. How could we be flattered by imitation, but being copied too closely feels threatening?

We're more threatened by people who want the same things as us. Rivalry is a function of proximity – time, space, money, or status. We're less jealous of Jeff Bezos than of someone at work who does exactly what we do but is paid more.

Celebristan

Models at great social distance and with a large difference in status from us live in Celebristan – a different universe of desire, where it's unlikely their desires will come into contact with ours. There's always a barrier that separates these models from imitators – time (because dead), space (because they live somewhere else, or they hide their identities like Satoshi Nakamoto), or social status (billionaire, rock star, privileged class).

Because there's no threat of conflict, these models are imitated freely and openly. Celebristan is a relatively peaceful place.

Freshmanistan

Freshmanistan is where we live the majority of our lives. Like freshman year of high school, people are in close contact (especially because of social media), tiny differences are amplified, and unspoken rivalry is common. Models occupy the same space as their imitators, and fierce competition can arise between two people at any time.

Mimetic desire is both the bond and bane of friendships. One friend introduces another to baking, they begin sharing the desire to be a better baker and start spending more time together – but if mimetic rivalry takes hold, they could end up competing in not just baking but in relationships, career success, fitness, and more.

Comparison

Celebristan (World of External Mediation)	Freshmanistan (World of Internal Mediation)
Models are distant in time, space, or social status	Models are close in time, space, or social status
Difference	Sameness
Models are easy to identify	Models are hard to identify
Open imitation	Secret imitation
Models acknowledged	Models unrecognized
Relatively stable, fixed models	Unstable, constantly changing models
No possibility of conflict between models and imitators	Conflict between models and imitators is normal
Positive mimesis is possible	Negative mimesis is the norm

Distortions of Reality

Distortion 1: The Misappropriation of Wonder

People exaggerate the qualities of their models.

In Celebristan, models are openly gawked at and admired; in Freshmanistan, it's embarrassing to admit you want to be more like a colleague so it happens in secret.

Girard uses metaphysical desire to refer to this striving for a new way of living or being. For many, it can overpower even basic needs, but we all suffer from it in our own way.

We are more likely to take someone as a model if they don't seem to be suffering from desire like us – cats have allure because they don't seem to need us.

Distortion 2: The Cult of Experts

Due to the wide availability of and access to information, things like college degrees or PhDs no longer have the perceived value they used to have.

In today's world of liquid modernity, value is mimetically driven instead of attached to fixed, stable points (like college degrees). As people still need models to navigate through this ever-more-complex world, they now rely on experts – Tim Ferriss, Marie Kondo, etc. As Girard wrote, "The modern world is one of experts. They alone know what is to be done. Everything boils down to choosing the right expert."

But how does someone become an authoritative source of knowledge? It's mimetic – the fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.

We should deconstruct the mimetic layers behind someone's authority and think about how we chose our sources of knowledge.

Tactic 2: Find Sources of Wisdom that Withstand Mimesis

It's critical to cut through mimesis and find experts whose expertise isn't just a product of mimetic validation.

Typically these have stood the test of time and aren't solely self-proclaimed or crowd-proclaimed. The hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry) have fewer mimetically chosen experts since they have to show their work – but watch out for mimetic games pretending to be science, like "productivity science".

We need to curate our sources of knowledge to get to what is true, regardless of how many other people want to believe it – which means we have to put in the work.

Distortion 3: Reflexivity

George Soros wrote that financial markets behave according to the principle of reflexivity: "In situations that have thinking participants, there is a two-way interaction between the participant's thinking and the situation in which they operate." Investors perceive that there might be a market crash, so they behave in a way that actually causes a crash.

The same principle applies to desires: "In situations where desirous participants have the possibility of interacting with each other, there is a two-way interaction between the participants' desires." This interaction is often a cycle – investors putting money into Theranos, Theranos signing new contracts and paying for better PR, encouraging more investors to put in more money.

In rivalrous relationships, reflexivity is even more apparent – when a person is focused on what a rival model wants, neither can want anything without affecting the other's desire for it. Eventually what they're fighting for in the first place becomes irrelevant – they'll fight for anything, as long as their opponent wants it.

Mirrored imitation is another form of reflexivity where one does the opposite of whatever a rival does. For hipsters, the rival is popular culture, but it ends up with all hipsters looking alike – as Girard wrote, "the effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch."

Mimetic rivalries can only end if one side renounces the rivalry, and stops wanting the thing. (Winning doesn't work, since it just signals to us that we picked the wrong model in the first place.)

Tactic 3: Create Boundaries with Unhealthy Models

We probably follow some people who function as unhealthy models of desire for us. We need to know what they're up to, and care what they want.

We should distance ourselves from the force they exert on us by unfollowing them. We'll be happier once our rivalry runs out of oxygen and dies.

Smartphones are like slot machines – every time we refresh our Instagram feed, we get a highly variable reward which maximizes neurological addictiveness.

Smartphones are also "dream machines". Social media is mediation – thousands of people showing us what to want and coloring our perception of those things. We have unfettered access now to all our models, bringing their desires into our personal world.

If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities.

—René Girard

Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. Shakespeare thought exactly the opposite: people fight when they are similar, like the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet. The more people in a group are alike, the more vulnerable they are to a single tension affecting the whole, and to mimetic conflict spreading contagiously – aggression escalating into cycles of endless conflict.

In Freshmanistan, the proximity and similarity of people make the stakes of mimetic desire higher. This desire spreads like energy, which can lead to a positive cycle (healthy desires beget other healthy desires, uniting people productively), or a negative cycle (leading to conflict and discord).

Lamborghini versus Ferrari

Ferruccio Lamborghini initially became successful by building tractors, but he came in direct contact with Enzo Ferrari after buying, driving, then improving one of Ferrari's cars. Lamborghini felt insulted and disrespected by Ferrari after their meeting, so went ahead and started a competing supercar company, releasing a car just two years later that beat Ferrari's cars in almost every performance standard.

Tactic 4: Use Imitation to Drive Innovation

There's a false dichotomy between imitation and innovation – they're part of the same process of discovery. Use the great stuff that's out there as an example, then build something on top of that.

Don't end up in a mimetic rivalry where you're competing primarily on the basis of originality.

But Lamborghini wouldn't allow his engineers to build a true racing car and compete head to head with Ferrari on the racetrack. He refused to fight all the way to the end.

Being in a mimetic rivalry is like being the bull in a bullfight – your rival determines what you want next, what goals to pursue, what you think about at night – and it'll wear you down to the point of exhaustion or worse. People under this type of metaphysical desire will seek satisfaction under a never-ending series of obstacles with no end.

Competition is good up to a certain point - the key is knowing what that point is and having the wherewithal to pivot around it.

Memes and Mimetic Theory

Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene, to explain ideas, behaviors, and phrases spreading across time and space – cultural units of information that spread from person to person via imitation.

Memes, like viruses, evolve via random mutations and selections. The individuals who spread them are simply hosts or carriers of information.

In Girard's mimetic theory, culture is formed from the imitation of desires, not things, and people aren't insignificant hosts but are highly significant models of desire. Mimetic theory also goes deeper on mirrored (opposite) imitation and the negative consequences of imitating desire, leading to conflict.

The Flywheel Effect

Mimetic desire leads to one of two cycles:

Cycle 1, the negative cycle – starts with a mindset of scarcity, fear and anger; runs on the belief that other people have something we don't and there isn't room to fulfill both our desires; and leads to rivalry and conflict.
Cycle 2, the positive cycle – starts with a mindset of abundance and mutual giving; unites people in a shared desire for some common good.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins uses a giant flywheel as an analogy for a positive, self-fulfilling cycle in motion in great companies. It takes a lot of effort to start, but eventually momentum takes over and it begins to power itself.

Successful companies often have positive flywheels. Giro Sport Design invented a great new bicycle helmet, got elite athletes to use it, inspired Weekend Warriors who then attracted mainstream customers, built brand power with more athletes, set high prices to maintain the 'cool' factor, and finally channeled profits back into creating the next generation of great products that elite athletes wanted to use.

Momentum in flywheels becomes unstoppable because each step is the logical consequence of the step before it – the next step cannot help but happen, on and on.

Positive flywheels can be created in our own lives, maximizing the momentum of desire. Say our friend starts a new workout program and looks great, which triggers us to start working out – and soon we're eating better, drinking less alcohol, and doing more productive work, encouraging us to work out more. Making healthy choices becomes something we want to do instead of dread.

Everyone has to construct their own flywheels, and the most effective personal flywheels come from people who know themselves well. You know what will best encourage yourself to do something in the future, and codifying that in an explicit flywheel will help you put that in motion.

Tactic 5: Start Positive Flywheels of Desire

Desire is path-dependent – the choices we make today affect the things we'll want tomorrow. It's important to map out the consequences of our actions on our future desires.

To map out a positive flywheel, start with the core desire, then figure out the steps in the process – with each step inevitably leading to the next ({Step 1}, so that {Step 2}, so that...), and the last step linking back to the start.

There are also negative flywheels – "doom loops" – where negative forces build on one another and lead to failure. They are far more common than positive ones, especially in Freshmanistan.