Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis

Three Point Summary | Notes on big ideas from intriguing books

Apr 02, 2023

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life was written by Luke Burgis and published in 2021. It explores why we want what we want, and offers a toolkit for freeing ourselves from chasing unfulfilling desires.

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.

—Luke Burgis

I. Mimesis

Needs vs. Wants

Mimetic desire is part of the human condition. It can lurk under the surface of our lives acting as our unrecognized leader, but there are ways to recognize it, confront it, and make more intentional choices that lead to a more satisfying life—far more satisfying than one in which were totally consumed by mimetic desire without knowing it.

Desire as René Girard used the word does not mean the drive for food or sex or shelter or security. These things are better called needs that are hardwired into our bodies. Biological needs don’t rely on imitation. If I'm dying of thirst in the desert I don’t need anyone to show me that water is desirable.
After meeting our basic needs as creatures we enter into the human universe of desire, and knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what’s to need.

Models of Desire

There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life. You may be wondering then: if desire is generated and shapes my models, then where do models get their desires? The answer: from other models.

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. With these models people engage in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation.

We don’t want things that are too easily possessed, or that are readily within reach. Desire leads us beyond where we currently are. Models are like people standing 100 yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see. So the way that a model describes or suggests something to us makes all the difference…We are attracted to things when they are modeled to us in an attractive way, by the right model.

The danger is not recognizing models for what they are. When we don’t recognize them, we are easily drawn into unhealthy relationships with them. They begin to exert an outside influence on us. We often become fixated on them without realizing it. Models are, and many cases, a person’s secret idol.

II. Mimesis Affects Everyone

The pride that makes a person believe they are un-affected by or inoculated against biases, weaknesses, or mimesis blinds them to their complicity in the game.
When people deny that they are affected by what other people around them want, they are most susceptible to getting drawn into an unhealthy cycle of desire that they don’t even know to resist.

The Human Tendency to Desire a Scapegoat

The scapegoating mechanism does not hinge on the guilt or innocence of the scapegoat. It hinges on the ability of a community to use a scapegoat to accomplish their desired outcome: unification, healing, purgation, expiation. The scapegoat serves a religious function.

Scapegoats are often insiders who are perceived to violate the groups orthodoxy or taboos. Their behavior makes them appear as a threat to the group's unity. They come to be seen as cancers are 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.

Substitute sacrifice permeates our culture. They have seeped into sports, organizational life, universities, and literature.

Consider how ingrained sacrificial thinking is in our psyche. If only we could destroy that other political party, that other company, those terrorists, the troublemaker, that fast food joint next-door that has caused me to gain 10 pounds, everything would be better. The sacrifice always seems right and proper. Our violence is good violence; the violence of the other side is always bad.

Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat, wrote René Girard. “I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers.

III. Being Intelligent about Desire

Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals. The more we bring that system to light, the less likely it is that we’ll pick and pursue the wrong goals.

The ultimate way to test desires— especially major life choices…the death bed is where unfulfilling desires are exposed. Transport yourself there now rather than waiting until later, when it might be too late.

Thin vs. Thick Desires

Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives. Thin desires, on the other hand, are highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow.
The tension between thick and thin always remains. Every artist has experienced it; they may have had a lifelong desire to tell the truth, to make art that expresses something important. Yet they have a competing desire to sell their work in the marketplace, to be accepted, to be praised, to get reviews, to stay on top of trends that can change from year to year, month to month, day to day. The ladder are superficial desires that, if allowed to accumulate, can completely obscure the thick ones.

Features of Fulfilling Desires

Fulfillment story as I call it has three essential elements: it’s an action, you believe you did it well, and it brought you a sense of fulfillment—you woke up the next morning and felt a sense of satisfaction about it. You still do. Just thinking about it brings some of it back.
(Thick desires come from) Core motivational drives:
explore (different places, cultures, languages)
master (skills)
comprehend and express (ideas and concepts).

Pay attention to the interior, movements of the heart, when contemplating different desires—which gives a fleeting feeling of satisfaction, and which gives satisfaction that endures? Ask yourself, which desire is more generous and loving; Put yourself on your deathbed and your mind's eye, and ask yourself which desire you would be more at peace with having followed; Finally, and most importantly, ask yourself where a given desire comes from.

Perspective

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s OK to suffer over that one”, Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan's podcast “other desires must be let go of”.

In the end, wanting is another word for loving.
Our choice is to yield to the mimetic forces, making claims on our desires every moment, or to yield to the freedom of our single greatest desire: doing the one thing that we were made to do, all of the time, over and over and over again, until we’ve developed a desire thick enough to stake our life on. In the meantime, and probably at all times, we have something warm to sink our teeth into: wanting what we already have.