From “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis
Mimetic desire, because it is social, spreads from person to person and through a culture. It results in two different movements – two cycles – of desire. The first cycle leads to tension, conflict, and volatility, breaking down relationships and causing instability and confusion as competing desires interact in volatile ways. This is the default cycle that has been most prevalent in human history. It is accelerating today.
It’s possible to transcend that default cycle, though. It’s possible to initiate a different cycle that channels energy into creative and productive pursuits that serve the common good.
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- Mimesis can hijack our noblest ambitions.
We live at a time of hyper-imitation. Fascination with what is trending and going viral is symptomatic of our predicament. So is political polarization. It stems in part from mimetic behavior that destroys nuance and poisons even our most honorable goals: to develop friendships, to fight for important causes, to build healthy communities. When mimesis takes over, we become obsessed with vanquishing some Other, and we measure ourselves according to them. When a person’s identity becomes completely tied to a mimetic model, they can never truly escape that model because doing so would mean destroying their own reason for being.
- Homogenizing forces are creating a crisis of desire.
Equality is good. Sameness is generally not – unless we’re talking about cars on an assembly line or the consistency of your favorite brand of coffee. The more that people are forced to be the same – the more pressure they feel to think and feel and want the same things – the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves. And this is dangerous. Many cultures have had a myth in which twins commit violence against each other. There are at least five separate stories of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis alone: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Issac, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Stories of sibling rivalry are universal because they’re true – the more people are alike, the more likely they are to feel threatened. While technology is bringing the world close together (Facebook’s stated mission), it is bringing our desires closer together and amplifying conflict. We are free to resist, but the mimetic forces are accelerating so quickly that we are close to becoming shackled.
- Sustainability depends on desirability.
Decades of consumer culture have forged unsustainable desires. Many people know intellectually that they could do a better job taking care of the planet, for instance. But until eating a more sustainable diet or driving more fuel-efficient cars is far more attractive to the average consumer than the alternatives, the more sustainable options will not be widely adopted. It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive – in other words, desirable.
- If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones.
In the days before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hijacker Mohammed Atta and his companions were carousing in south Florida bars and binge-playing video games. “Who asks about the souls of these men?” wondered Girard in his last book, Battling to the End. The Manichean division of the world into “evil” and “not evil” people never satisfied him. He saw the dynamics of mimetic rivalry at work in the rise of terrorism and class conflict. People don’t fight because they want different things, they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things. The terrorists would not have been driven to destroy symbols of the West’s wealth and culture if, at some deep level, they had not secretly desired some of the same things. That’s why the Florida bars and video game-playing are an important piece of the puzzle. The mysterium iniquitatis (the mystery of evil) remains just that: mysterious. But mimetic theory reveals something important about it. The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.