From “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis
Every industry, every school, every family has a particular system of desire that makes certain things more or less desirable. Know which systems of desire you’re living in. There’s probably more than one.
Entrepreneur and VC Marc Andreessen, in an April 2020 post on his company’s website titled “It’s Time to Build,” wonders how so many Western countries were unprepared – from a production standpoint – for the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. At one point, there were serious shortages of ventilators, test kits, cotton swabs, even hospital gowns. The complacency and malaise seemed to extend to many other domains, even before the pandemic – to education, manufacturing, transportation. Why were Americans no longer building the things of the future? He asked.
The problem is not capital or competence or even a lack of awareness of what’s needed. “The problem is desire,” Andreessen wrote. “We need to ‘want’ these things.” But he acknowledges that there are forces in place that prevent us from wanting to build the things we need: regulatory capture, industry incumbents, stalemate politics. “The problem is inertia,” he continued. “We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”
Crippled systems of desire, unable to adapt, have made it so that we gravitate toward the path of least resistance – monetizing YouTube videos of people reacting to other YouTube videos, for instance – and lack the will to build the essential tools needed for human survival and flourishing.
If you understand the systems of desire that color the choices of people around you, you’re more likely to see emergent possibilities by daring to look in different directions.
Make visible what is invisible. Mark the boundaries of your current world of wanting, and you’ll gain the ability – at least the possibility – to transcend it.