Wanting E-Book

Luke Burgis

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 482

Beschreibung

A groundbreaking exploration of why we want what we want, and a toolkit for freeing ourselves from chasing unfulfilling desires. Humans don't desire anything independently. Human desire is mimetic – we imitate what other people want. This affects the way we choose partners, friends, careers, clothes and travel destinations. Mimetic desire is responsible for the formation of our very identities. It explains the enduring relevancy of Shakespeare's plays, why Peter Thiel decided to be the first investor in Facebook, and why our world is growing more divided as it becomes more connected. Drawing on his experience as an entrepreneur, teacher and student of classical philosophy, Luke Burgis shares tactics that help turn blind wanting into intentional wanting – to be more in control of the things we want, and to find more meaning in our work and lives.

Leseprobe

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by St. Martin’s Press 2021

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2021

Copyright © Luke Burgis 2021

The right of Luke Burgis to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Jenny Holzer quote, page 99, © 2020 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Design by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Illustrations by Liana Finck

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-056-2

eISBN: 978-1-80075-057-9

To Claire and Hope

CONTENTS

Note to Reader

Prologue: Unexpected Relief

Introduction: Social Gravity

PART I: THE POWER OF MIMETIC DESIRE

1. Hidden Models—Romantic Lies, Infant Truth

Secrets Babies Keep

The Martini Is a Gateway Drug

Torches of Freedom

Mimetic Games

Models That Move Markets

2. Distorted Reality—We’re All Freshmen Again

Two Kinds of Models

Celebristan

Freshmanistan

Distortion 1: The Misappropriation of Wonder

Distortion 2: The Cult of Experts

Distortion 3: Reflexivity

Social Mediation

3. Social Contagion—Cycles of Desire

Lamborghini versus Ferrari

Memes and Mimetic Theory

The Flywheel Effect

The Creative Cycle

The Destructive Cycle

Hierarchical Values

The Collapse of Desire

4. The Invention of Blame—An Underrated Social Discovery

Sacred Violence

The Danger of Purity

Saving People from Themselves

The Path of Least Resistance

The Dancing Mania of 1518

Safety in Judgment

The Joy of Hate Watching

The Scapegoat Wins

Self-Awareness, Self-Hatred

Signs of Contradiction

PART II: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DESIRE

5. Anti-Mimetic—Feeding the People, Not the System

Moving Goalposts

Mimetic Systems

Being Watched and Rated

The Tra-La-La and the Chichi

The One Less Traveled By

Modeling a New Mindset

6. Disruptive Empathy—Breaking Through Thin Desires

The Problem with Sympathy

Thick Desires

Shaking the Dust

Fulfillment Stories

Motivational Patterns

7. Transcendent Leadership—How Great Leaders Inspire and Shape Desire

Immanent Desire

Transcendent Desire

Skill 1: Shift Gravity

Skill 2: The Speed of Truth

Skill 3: Discernment

Skill 4: Sit Quietly in a Room

Skill 5: Filter Feedback

8. The Mimetic Future—What We Will Want Tomorrow

Cultural Quicksand

Instruments versus Relationships

Engineering Desire

Transforming Desire

Pivotal Spaces

The Three Inventions

Single Greatest Desire

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Glossary

Appendix B: Mimetic Theory Reading List

Appendix C: Motivational Themes

Notes and Sources

TACTICS

TACTIC 1 / Name your models

TACTIC 2 / Find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis

TACTIC 3 / Create boundaries with unhealthy models

TACTIC 4 / Use imitation to drive innovation

TACTIC 5 / Start positive flywheels of desire

TACTIC 6 / Establish and communicate a clear hierarchy of values

TACTIC 7 / Arrive at judgments in anti-mimetic ways

TACTIC 8 / Map out the systems of desire in your world

TACTIC 9 / Put desires to the test

TACTIC 10 / Share stories of deeply fulfilling action

TACTIC 11 / Increase the speed of truth

TACTIC 12 / Invest in deep silence

TACTIC 13 / Look for the coexistence of opposites

TACTIC 14 / Practice meditative thought

TACTIC 15 / Live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want

Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world.

—Aristotle

We want what other people want because other people want it, and it’s penciled-in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again.

—Dayna Tortorici

NOTE TO READER

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

Each of us spends every moment of our life, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, wanting something. We even want in our sleep. Yet few people ever take the time to understand how they come to want things in the first place.

Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn. Due to one powerful yet little-known feature of human desire, that freedom is hard-won.

I spent my twenties starting companies, chasing the entrepreneurial dream that Silicon Valley had enshrined in me. I was searching for financial freedom, I thought, and the recognition and respect that come with it.

Then something odd happened: when I walked away from one of the companies that I had founded, I experienced intense relief.

That’s when I realized I hadn’t found anything at all. My previous successes had felt like failures, and now failure felt like success. What was the force behind my tenacious and never-satisfied striving?

This crisis of meaning led me to spend a lot of time in libraries and bars. Sometimes I brought the library to the bar. (I’m not kidding. Once I brought a backpack full of books to a sports bar during the World Series and tried to read with Phillies fans celebrating all around me.) I traveled to Thailand and Tahiti. I worked out like a maniac.

But it all seemed like palliative care, not the treatment of the underlying condition. While this period helped me think more seriously about my choices, it didn’t help me understand the desires that had led me to those choices in the first place—the navigation system behind my ambition.

One day a mentor suggested I look into a set of ideas that would, he told me, explain why I had come to want the things I wanted, and how my desires entrapped me in cycles of passion followed by disillusionment.

The source of those ideas was a fairly obscure but influential academic. Before he died on November 4, 2015, at ninety-one, René Girard was named an immortal of the Académie Française and called “the new Darwin of the social sciences.” As a professor at Stanford in the 1980s through the mid-1990s, he inspired a small group of followers. Some of them believed that his ideas would be the key to understanding the twenty-first century—and that when the history of the twentieth century is written, circa 2100, he would be seen as the most important thinker of his generation.1

And you have probably never heard of him.

René Girard’s mind drew other people to him from every direction. To begin with, he had an uncanny ability to notice things that explained mysterious human behavior. He was a Sherlock Holmes of history and literature, putting his finger on overlooked clues while everyone else was busy following the usual suspects.

He was playing a different game than other academics. He was like the only person at a poker table who has identified the tell of the dominant player. While other players are calculating the mathematical odds of having the winning hand, he’s staring into faces. He’s watching his rival to see how many times he blinks and whether he picks the cuticle of his left index finger.

Girard identified a fundamental truth about desire that connected the seemingly unconnected: linking biblical stories with volatility in the stock market, the collapse of ancient civilizations with workplace dysfunction, career paths with diet trends. He explained, well before they existed, why Facebook, Instagram, and their progeny have been so wildly popular and effective in selling people both stuff and dreams.

Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.

Our power of imitation dwarfs that of any other animal. It allows us to build sophisticated culture and technology. At the same time, it has a dark side. Imitation leads people to pursue things that seem desirable at first but ultimately leave them unfulfilled. It locks them into cycles of desire and rivalry that are difficult, practically impossible, to escape.

But Girard offered his students hope. It was possible to transcend the cycles of frustrated desire. It was possible to have more agency in shaping the life we want.

My introduction to Girard took me from Oh, shit to Holy shit. Mimetic theory would help me recognize patterns in the behavior of people and in current events. That was the easy part. Later, after seeing mimetic desire everywhere except in my own life, I saw it in myself—my Holy shit moment. Mimetic theory would eventually help me uncover and declutter my own messy world of desires. And that process was hard.

I’m now convinced that understanding mimetic desire is the key to understanding, at a deeply human level, business, politics, economics, sports, art, even love. It can help you make money, if that is your primary driver. Or it may help you avoid waiting until middle age or later to learn that money or prestige or a comfortable life is not primarily what you want.

Mimetic theory sheds light on what motivates economic and political and personal tensions, and also shows the way out of them. For those with a creative spirit, it can guide their creativity to projects that create real human and economic value and not just wealth transfers.

I don’t claim that overcoming mimetic desire is possible, or even desirable. This book is primarily about growing more aware of its presence so that we can navigate it better. Mimetic desire is like gravity—it just is. Gravity is always at work. It causes some people to live in constant pain when they don’t develop the muscles in their core and around their spine to be able to stand up straight and face the world, to resist the downward pull. Others experience that same gravity and find ways to go to the moon.

Mimetic desire is like that. If we’re not aware of it, it will take us places we don’t want to go. But if we develop the right social and emotional muscles in response to it, mimetic desire becomes a a way to effect positive change.

The change you make is up to you—or at least it will be by the end of this book.

There is a growing community of people interested in mimetic theory that spans the political left and right, cuts across siloed disciplines, and stretches across many countries where the divides are different but the theory’s explanatory power is the same. The diversity of perspectives suggests that perhaps there is a profound truth about humanity at its core.

Scholars interested in Girard’s work have made important contributions on topics ranging from the hermeneutics of mimesis in Shakespeare to the sexual violence against women in war zones to the scapegoating process that happened in the Rwandan genocide. Suffice it to say that people who associate mimetic theory only with Girard’s former student, Peter Thiel, and link it with libertarianism or Thiel’s politics have an incomplete picture. I wrote this book in part to break up the monopoly that he has in some people’s minds as the interpreter of Girard’s thought. He would be the first to tell you that’s a good thing. Ideological monopolies are the worst monopolies.

Mimetic desire transcends the political. It is in some sense pre-political, kind of like comedy. When something is funny, it’s funny. But even humor can become tainted and bound up with agendas and rivalries. If any reader finishes this book and uses insights that might be found in it to attack their enemies, they will have missed a key point.

At a time of rising tension in the United States and many other parts of the world—at least while I was writing this—I wanted to offer something that might encourage more reflection and restraint, a recognition of our rivalries, and a hope that we can live with neighbors who want different things than we do.

These days I spend part of my time mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs. Their ambition to build a better world and live full, meaningful lives inspires me. But I worry that if they don’t understand how desire works, they’ll wind up disappointed.

The idea of being an entrepreneur has high mimetic value these days. Nearly every budding entrepreneur I know is motivated to achieve some form of freedom. But running your own company does not automatically lead to more freedom. Sometimes it leads to the opposite. We think of entrepreneurs as the ultimate renegades, not bound to a 9-to-5 desk job or serving as a middle-management cog in a sclerotic machine. Yet thinking that you don’t have a traditional boss might just mean that mimetic desire is your tyrant. I push my students to look deeper.

I can’t guarantee them success in business, but I can guarantee that by the time they leave my class they will not be wanting naively. They will move forward choosing majors, starting companies, finding partners, and reading the news with a better awareness of what’s happening inside them. That awareness is the precondition for change.

There are certain insights that, once you see them, begin to seep into your experience of daily living. An understanding of mimetic desire is one of them. Once you know how it works, you will start to see how it explains much of the world around you. And that will include not just the family member whose weird lifestyle you would never choose, or the politics in your workplace, or the friend who cares about social media too much, or the colleague who brags about their kid who got into Harvard. It will include you. You will see it in yourself.

PROLOGUEUNEXPECTED RELIEF

In the summer of 2008, I experienced the moment many start-up founders live for: I learned that I would be able to cash out on my company’s success. After an intense period of courtship spanning several months, I was on my way to have celebratory drinks with the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Zappos was going to acquire my e-commerce company for wellness products, FitFuel.com.

About an hour earlier, Tony had sent me a direct message on Twitter (his preferred form of communication at the time) asking me to meet him at the Foundation Room, a bar on the sixty-third floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. I knew that he had attended a board meeting earlier that day and that one of the agenda items was the acquisition. He wouldn’t be inviting me to the Strip if the news was not good.

I’d been pacing around my house all day. I needed the deal to go through. Fit Fuel was burning through cash. Despite our rapid growth over the past two years, the coming months looked ominous. The Federal Reserve had gone into bailout mode and held an emergency meeting to keep the giant investment bank Bear Stearns from going under. The housing market was crashing. I needed to raise a round of investment, but investors were spooked. All of them told me to come back in a year—but I didn’t have a year.

Neither Tony nor I knew at the time how volatile 2008 would turn out to be. At the start of the year, Zappos had exceeded its operating profit goals and decided to award all of its employees generous bonuses. By the end of the year—only eight months after the bonuses were doled out—Zappos would have to lay off 8 percent of its workforce. Already that summer, Zappos’s board members and experienced investors, led by Sequoia Capital, were tightening their belts.1

When I got the invitation from Tony, I sped from my home in Henderson, Nevada, to the Strip, blasting old-school hip-hop and letting out intermittent yelps of relief and excitement through the sunroof so that by the time I got there I might seem calm.

In those days Zappos was a nine-year-old company that had recently surpassed $1 billion in sales. Tony conducted unorthodox social experiments, such as offering new hires up to $2,000 to leave the company after their orientation (the idea was that this would separate out employees who were not passionate enough about working there from those who were). The company was well known for its idiosyncratic culture.

Culture is what Tony seemed to like best about Fit Fuel. When he and the other Zappos top brass came to visit our offices and warehouse, they told me how much they liked what they saw: we were scrappy (because understaffed), zany (because everyone at the company was a character), and just the right amount of weird (because we had the trappings of a start-up, like hookah pipes and beanbag chairs).

Tony told me that he wanted me to run the operation as a new division within Zappos. I would build the company’s next billion-dollar vertical. Shoes had been the first. Wellness would be the second.

In addition to life-changing money and Zappos equity, I’d be part of a respected leadership team and get paid a nice salary. (I hadn’t drawn a regular salary from my companies, ever, and I craved that stability.)

I was not what anyone would call a Zappos “culture fit.” But since we were talking about joining forces, I started conforming myself more to the mold of the Zappos culture to make things work.

In my desperation to sell the company, I told Tony everything that I thought he wanted to hear. I had heterodox views about the Zappos culture, out of step with the media’s portrayal—but I buried them. It’s easy to be an armchair contrarian. It’s hard to take contrarian action: to question the dominant narrative, to be honest with yourself, to tell the truth even when the immediate outcome is pain—like losing the chance to sell my company, and instead getting buried under an avalanche of debt.

I try to have skin in the game. This time I had too much.2

I’d spent the last few months getting to know Tony. We met after I sent him a cold email and he invited me to lunch at Claim Jumper, a restaurant near the Zappos HQ in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas. When I showed up for what I thought was a casual get-to-know-you lunch with him, at least six senior executives were sitting around the table waiting for me. It was an interview. I never had time to touch my clam chowder.

After lunch, Tony and I walked back to his office together. He stopped along the way and put his hands in his pockets as if he was fumbling for change. “So I wouldn’t be doing my job,” he said, “if I didn’t ask you if you’d be open to joining forces.” I said yes, and the next few months seemed like a wild engagement period. I was invited to Zappos happy hours, parties at Tony’s house, and early morning hikes up Black Mountain.

Tony didn’t look like a guy who had millions. He had sold the first company he co-founded, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998 at the age of twenty-four. But he dressed in plain jeans and a Zappos T-shirt and drove a dirty Mazda 6. Within a few weeks of hanging out with him, I ditched my True Religions (I know) and started shopping at the Gap. I began to wonder if I should drive an older and dirtier car.

I had co-founded Fit Fuel about three years before I met Tony, in 2005. We had a grandiose mission statement to make healthier foods more accessible for everyone in the world. I chipped away, day after day, making steady progress and learning how to lead a growing company. But even as our sales increased and accolades rolled in, I experienced a declining desire to go into the office every day.

Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich hit shelves while I was struggling to figure things out. If I’m working more than four hours a week, I must be doing something wrong, I thought. I began frantically looking around for better models of entrepreneurship, but I couldn’t be sure who was telling the truth.

Meeting Tony only amplified my despair. I was shooting for $10 million in sales. Zappos was doing $1 billion. From my perspective, Tony occupied an alternate reality—the one in which unicorn founders live. I couldn’t seem to break in.

I experienced a sort of existential vertigo, like I was jumping off the top of a skyscraper onto a giant trampoline that catapulted me back to the top before I plunged back down again. 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. Where did it go? Where had it come from in the first place? My desires felt like rom-com love—things I fell into rather than things I chose. (By the way, did you know that in almost every language in the world, people fall in love? Nobody rises up into it.3)

Meanwhile, the internal conflict between my co-founder and me got worse until we agreed to go our separate ways. I took over as sole leader of the company at the very time I had lost the desire to lead.

It was clear that there were mysterious forces outside myself that affected what I wanted and how intensely I wanted it. I couldn’t make any serious decisions until I knew more about them. I couldn’t start another company. I was even hesitant about the thought of getting married someday, knowing that my desire for something (or someone) one day might be gone the next. Discovering what those forces were seemed like a responsibility.

The day after my celebration drinks with Tony on the Vegas Strip, I took a friend on a tour of the Zappos headquarters, excited to show him my future home. As we walked by Monkey Row (Zappos jargon for the place where the executives sit), I noticed that the execs’ faces looked like they’d seen a ghost. We had an awkward exchange.

It was the bad feeling before a breakup.

My friend and I went out for dinner later that night. In the middle of our pastas I received a call from Alfred Lin, who between 2005 and 2010 was the CFO, COO, and chairman of Zappos.

Alfred sounded somber. Then he told me why.

After the official board meeting, the Zappos board of directors had had a second meeting on the plane back to San Francisco and decided to put any immediate plans on hold. There would be no acquisition. “They changed their minds,” he said.

“They changed their minds?” I asked.

“Yeah. I don’t know what more to say,” Alfred said. “I’m sorry.”

“They changed their minds?” I kept asking the same question, and Alfred kept telling me the same thing. I kept mouthing the words after I hung up the phone, but this time as a statement, not a question. “They changed . . . their minds.” I repeated it as I walked back to the table, sat down, and stared into my bowl of bad spaghetti, prodding and twirling it endlessly, making perfect bites only to unravel them and start all over again.

There would be no life-changing exit, no windfall, no second home in Sicily. Worse, my company was on the rocks. Without the Zappos deal, I’d be bankrupt within six months. As the full import of how my life was about to change sank in and I drained my Chianti, something changed.

I was relieved.

INTRODUCTIONSOCIAL GRAVITY

On the far wall hangs a photograph—a single black-and-white eyeball looking out, cropped close, no bigger than a coaster, matted in a twenty-two-inch frame.

I’m sitting in the home of Peter Thiel above the Sunset Strip. Thiel is known for being the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, for being the first outside investor in Facebook, for his contrarian views on business, and for taking down Gawker and publicly challenging Google. But I’m not here to talk to him about any of those things.

A few minutes pass, and the assistant who showed me in returns to check on me. “Peter will be with you shortly. Anything else I can bring you, sir? More coffee?”

“Oh, no, thanks,” I say. I’m embarrassed that I’ve chugged my entire cup. He smiles and exits.

This two-story living room would be at home in any midcentury Architectural Digest spread. Floor-to-ceiling paneled windows open onto an infinity pool overlooking Sunset Boulevard. It’s homey but still grandiose.

The focal piece of the spacious room is a wet bar built into an oakpaneled gallery wall featuring artwork in cool hues: black-and-white photos, deep indigo prints, gray etchings. Among them are an inkblot, maybe a Rorschach, shaped like a crab; a large print that contains abstract circles and rods, possibly molecular geometry; and a triptych of a man standing waist-deep in what looks like icy mountain lake water.

Elsewhere in the room, starker elements are set off by soft velvet couches and armchairs. In the center of the six-inch-thick wood coffee table in front of me, a silver teardrop-shaped metallic sculpture balances defiantly on its point. Twenty-foot-high double doors—the likes of which I’ve only seen in cathedrals—lead into the next room. Near the door is a chess table waiting for a worthy challenger. (It won’t be me.) A telescope points out a window next to a Greek bust. Everything hangs together. If the movie Clue had been directed by Ray Eames, it would look like Peter Thiel’s house.

A man appears on a second-story exposed walkway on the far side of the room. “Be with you in a minute,” Peter Thiel says.

He waves his hand and smiles, then disappears through a door. I hear running water. Ten minutes later, he reemerges in a baseball tee, shorts, and running shoes. He descends the spiral staircase.

“Hi, I’m Peter,” he says, extending his hand. “So you’re here to talk about Girard’s ideas.”

A Dangerous Mind

René Girard, a Frenchman who was a professor of literature and history in the United States, had his first insight about the nature of desire in the late 1950s. It would change his life. Three decades later, when Peter Thiel was an undergraduate philosophy major at Stanford, the professor would alter his life, too.

The discovery that changed Girard’s life in the 1950s and Thiel’s in the 1980s (and mine in the 2000s) is mimetic desire. It’s what’s brought me to Thiel’s home. I was drawn to mimetic theory, quite simply, because I’m mimetic. We all are.

Mimetic theory isn’t like learning some impersonal law of physics, which you can study from a distance. It means learning something new about your own past that explains how your identity has been shaped and why certain people and things have exerted more influence over you than others. It means coming to grips with a force that permeates human relationships—relationships which you are, at this moment, involved in. You can never be a neutral observer of mimetic desire.

Thiel and I have both experienced the disconcerting moment when we discovered that force at work in our lives. It’s so personal that I hesitated to write a book about it. To write about mimetic desire is to reveal a bit of your own.

I ask him why he didn’t explicitly mention Girard in his popular business book Zero to One, even though it was packed with insights from his mentor.1 “There’s something dangerous about Girard’s ideas,” Thiel says. “I think people have self-defense mechanisms against some of this stuff.” He wanted people to see that Girard’s insights contain important truths and that they explain what is going on in the world around them, but he didn’t want to take his readers all the way through the looking-glass.

An idea that challenges commonly held assumptions can feel threatening—and that’s all the more reason to look more closely at it: to understand why.

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand.

By embracing the lie of my independent desires, I deceive only myself. But by rejecting the truth, I deny the consequences that my desires have for other people and theirs for me.

It turns out the things we want matter far more than we know.

Like Henry Ford seeing the assembly line in a slaughterhouse, or like psychologist Daniel Kahneman shaping the new field of behavioral economics, Girard’s breakthrough came when he was outside his main area of expertise, history. It happened when he was forced to apply his thinking to classic novels.

Early in his academic career in the United States, Girard was asked to teach literature courses covering books that he hadn’t yet read. Reluctant to turn down work, he agreed. Often he would read the novels in the syllabus just in time to turn around and teach them. He read and taught Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and more.

With his lack of formal training and the need to read quickly, he started to look for patterns in the texts. He uncovered something perplexing, something which seemed to be present in nearly all of the most compelling novels ever written: characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior—most of all, their desires.

Girard’s discovery was like the Newtonian revolution in physics, in which the forces governing the movement of objects can only be understood in a relational context. Desire, like gravity, does not reside autonomously in any one thing or person. It lives in the space between them.2

The novels Girard taught are not primarily plot-driven or character-driven. They are desire-driven. A character’s actions are a reflection of their desires, which are shaped in relationship to the desires of others. The plots unfold according to who is in a mimetic relationship with whom and how their desires interact and play out.

The two characters don’t even have to meet for this relationship to happen. Don Quixote, alone in his room, reads about the adventures of the famous knight Amadís de Gaula. He is inflamed with a desire to emulate him and become a knight-errant, wandering the countryside in search of opportunities to prove the virtues of chivalry.

In all of the books Girard taught, desire always involved an imitator and a model. Other readers had not noticed it, or they had overlooked it by discounting the possibility of such a pervasive theme.

Girard’s distance from the subject matter, combined with his penetrating intellect, enabled him to recognize the pattern. The characters in the great novels are so realistic because they want things the way that we do—not spontaneously, not out of an inner chamber of authentic desire, not randomly, but through the imitation of someone else: their secret model.

Messing Up Maslow

Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.

That idea was unpalatable to me the first time I heard it. Are we all just imitation machines? No. Mimetic desire is only one piece of a comprehensive vision of human ecology, which also includes freedom and a relational understanding of personhood. The imitation of desire has to do with our profound openness to other people’s interior lives—something that sets us apart as humans.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is too neat. After a person has fulfilled their basic needs, they enter a universe of desires that does not have a stable hierarchy.

Desire, as Girard used the word, does not mean the drive for food or sex or shelter or security. Those things are better called needs—they’re 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.

But 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 to need.

Girard was interested in how we come to want things when there is no clear instinctual basis for it.3 Out of the billions of potential objects of desire in the world, from friends to careers to lifestyles, how do people come to desire some more than others? And why do the objects and intensity of our desire seem to fluctuate constantly, lacking any real stability?

In the universe of desire, there is no clear hierarchy. People don’t choose objects of desire the way they choose to wear a coat in the winter. Instead of internal biological signals, we have a different kind of external signal that motivates these choices: 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 that Girard termed mimesis (mi-mee-sis), from the Greek word mimesthai (meaning “to imitate”).

Models are the gravitational centers around which our social lives turn. It’s more important to understand this now than at any other time in history.

As humans have evolved, people have spent less time concerned about surviving and more time striving for things—less time in the world of needs and more time in the world of desire.

Even water has transitioned from the world of needs to the world of desires. Imagine you came here from another planet that was still in the pre-bottled-water stage of evolution (a critical stage), and I asked you whether you preferred Aquafina, Voss, or San Pellegrino. Which would you choose? Sure, I could present you with the minerality breakdown and pH levels of each, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we think that’s how you will make your choice. I tell you I drink San Pellegrino. And if you’re an imitative creature like me, or if you just think I’m a more highly developed being than you—because you come from a pre-Pellegrino people—you’re going to choose San Pellegrino.

If you look hard enough, you will find a model (or a set of models) for almost everything—your personal style, the way you speak, the look and feel of your home. But the models that most of us overlook are models of desire. It’s deceivingly difficult to figure out why you bought certain things; it’s extraordinarily hard to understand why you strive toward certain achievements. So hard that few people dare to ask.

Mimetic desire draws people toward things.4 “This draw,” writes Girard scholar James Alison, “this movement . . . [is] mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to physics.”5

Gravity causes people to fall physically to the ground. Mimetic desire causes people to fall in or out of love, or debt, or friendships, or business partnerships. Or it may subject them to the degrading slavery of being merely a product of their milieu.

The Evolution of Desire

Back in Peter Thiel’s home, Thiel tells me that he’s more prone to mimetic behavior than most people. Though he is known by many as a contrarian thinker, he hasn’t always been that way.

Like a lot of high school students, he strived to gain admission to a prestigious university (in his case, Stanford) without questioning why he wanted to go there in the first place. It’s just what people with his background did.

Once there, the striving continued—for grades, internships, and other totems of success. He noticed that there was a decent degree of diversity among the career goals of newly arrived freshmen. But over the next few years, the goals seemed to converge: finance, law, medicine, or consulting. Thiel had a nagging sense that something was off.

He would gain some insight into the problem when he learned about Professor Girard through a small group of students who were fascinated with his thought. In his junior year, he started attending lunches and gatherings at which he knew the professor would be in attendance.

Girard challenged students to understand both the how and the why behind current events. He could move systematically through human history, showing layer upon layer of meaning, sometimes quoting entire passages of Shakespeare from memory to illustrate his point.

He gave accounts of ancient texts and classic literature with such penetrating insight that his students felt an adrenaline rush, as if they’d set foot in a new universe. One of his earlier students, Sandor Goodhart, now a professor at Purdue University, remembers Girard opening the very first session of his class Literature, Myth, and Prophecy with these words: “Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.”6 A far cry from the more typical “Okay, welcome to the class, let’s go over the syllabus.”

After living in France under German occupation during World War II, Girard came to the United States in September 1947 to teach French and work toward a PhD in history at Indiana University. He stood out on the campus in Bloomington: he had a big head and big ideas, and he could be intimidating to the uninitiated.

Girard met his future wife there, an American from Indiana named Martha McCullough. He couldn’t pronounce her last name during roll call. They met again about a year later, when Martha was no longer his student. They eventually married.7

Girard failed to get tenure at Indiana because he didn’t publish enough of his work. He was dismissed. He went on to teach at Duke University, Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, and SUNY Buffalo. Finally, in 1981, he became the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he stayed for the rest of his career until his official retirement in 1995.8

To many students and faculty at Stanford, Girard exuded Old World charisma. Cynthia Haven, a writer and scholar long affiliated with the university, remembers a remarkable-looking man with a “totemic” head walking around the campus before she knew who he was. They eventually became friends, and she wrote a biography of him titled Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. “He had the sort of face a film director might typecast in a movie to play one of the greatest thinkers of all times,” she wrote, “a Plato or a Copernicus.”9

Girard was an autodidact with wide range. He studied anthropology, philosophy, theology, and literature, integrating them into an original and sophisticated view of the world. He found that mimetic desire was closely related to violence, especially the idea of sacrifice. The biblical story of Cain and Abel is about Cain killing his brother, Abel, after his ritual sacrifice pleased God less than Abel’s. They both wanted the same thing—to win favor with God—which brought them into direct conflict with each other. In Girard’s view, the root of most violence is mimetic desire.

In a French television show from the 1970s, Girard explains mimetic theory to a panel of interviewers, casually ashing his cigarette as he talks. “What has fascinated me for a very long time is sacrifice,” he tells the panelists, “the fact that men, for religious reasons, kill animal and often human victims in almost all human societies.”10 He burned to understand the problem of violence and the religious fascination with sacrifice that extends to nearly every part of human culture.

(Indeed, one of his more controversial claims is that the domestication of cats and dogs could not have come about intentionally. People did not originally intend to live with cats and dogs the way we do today, integrating them peacefully into our families for as long as they live. That process would have taken generations of coordinated effort. The reason we domesticated animals was far more practical, he argued: communities integrated the animals into their lives in order to sacrifice them. Sacrifices are more effective when they come from within a community—when the victim has something in common with the sacrificers. We’ll discuss why in Chapter 4.11)

René Girard at a SUNY Buffalo arts faculty meeting, July 1971. (All photos courtesy of Bruce Jackson.)

Girard at the opening of his seminar in spring 1971 that would form the basis of his book Violence and the Sacred.

Girard conversing with Diane Christian, a longtime Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Buffalo.

Girard in spring 1971 with French literary theorist Gérard Bucher.

The consequences of mimetic desire play out in strange ways across many different domains. Most of the drama happens behind the scenes.

* * *

Peter Thiel’s exposure to Girard did not immediately divert him from the course he was on. He took a job in finance and went to law school. But he felt lost. “I had this core life crisis when I realized that all these hyper-track competitive things I was after were for these bad social reasons,” he told me.

Meeting Girard at Stanford had introduced Thiel to the idea of mimesis, but an intellectual understanding didn’t immediately translate to changed behavior. “You find yourself trapped in all these bad mimetic cycles,” he says. “And there was a lot of resistance—a doctrinaire libertarian resistance—from me. Mimetic theory pushes against the idea that we’re all these atomistic individuals.” The flattery of self-sufficiency is powerful. “That took me a while to overcome,” Thiel says.

He describes a transformation that was both intellectual and existential. Once he learned about mimetic desire, he could identify it when he saw it—in everybody but himself.

“The intellectual transformation was quick because that was something I was looking for,” he says. But he continued to struggle after graduation because he didn’t see the extent to which he was embroiled in the very things Girard had been talking about. “The existential dimension took me a while to percolate though.”

Thiel left the corporate world and co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin in 1998. He began to use his knowledge of mimetic theory to help him manage both the business and his life. When competitive rivalries flared up within his company, he gave each employee clearly defined and independent tasks so they didn’t compete with one another for the same responsibilities. This is important in a start-up environment where roles are often fluid. A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives—not their performance relative to one another—minimizes mimetic rivalries.

When there was risk of an all-out war with Elon Musk’s rival company, X.com, Thiel merged with him to form PayPal. He knew from Girard that when two people (or two companies) take each other as mimetic models, they enter into a rivalry for which there is no end but destruction—unless they are somehow able to see beyond the rivalry.12

Thiel took mimesis into account when evaluating investment decisions, too. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, had introduced him to Mark Zuckerberg. Thiel saw clearly that Facebook was not merely another MySpace or SocialNet (Hoffman’s first start-up). Facebook was built around identity—that is to say, desires. It helps people see what other people have and want. It is a platform for finding, following, and differentiating oneself from models.

Models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drug. Before Facebook, 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.

Facebook isn’t filled with just any kind of model—most people we follow aren’t movie stars, pro athletes, or celebrities. Facebook is full of models who are inside our world, socially speaking. They are close enough for us to compare ourselves to them. They are the most influential models of all, and there are billions of them.

Thiel quickly grasped Facebook’s potential power and became its first outside investor. “I bet on mimesis,” he told me. His $500,000 investment eventually yielded him over $1 billion.

What’s at Stake

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.

This book will explore these two cycles. They’re fundamental to human behavior. Because they are so close to us—because they operate within us—we tend to look past them. Yet these cycles are at work constantly.

Movements of desire are what define our world. Economists measure them, politicians poll them, businesses feed them. History is the story of human desire. Yet the origin and evolution of desire are mysterious. Girard titled his 1978 magnum opus Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It was a nod to the lengths that humans have gone to hide the true nature of their desires and their consequences. This book is about those hidden things and how they play out in the world today. We can’t afford to ignore them because:

1.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.13

2.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 Isaac, 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 closer 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.

3.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.

4.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.14 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 should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.

But even more is at stake. 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.

In the final analysis, two questions are critical. What do you want? What have you helped others want? One question helps answer the other.

And if you’re not satisfied with the answers you find today, that’s okay. The most important questions concern what we will want tomorrow.

What Will You Want Tomorrow?

By the end of this book you will have a new understanding of desire—what you want, what others want, and how to live and lead from a model in which desire is an expression of love. To help you get there, this book is a two-part journey.

Part I, “The Power of Mimetic Desire,” is about the hidden forces that influence why people want the things they want. It’s Mimetic Theory 101. In Chapter 1, I’ll start by explaining the origins of mimetic desire in infancy and show how it evolves into a sophisticated form of adult imitation. In Chapter 2, we’ll see how mimetic desire works differently depending on a person’s relationship with a model. Starting in Chapter 3, I’ll explain how mimetic desire works in groups, which is key to understanding some of our most persistent and perplexing societal conflicts. In Chapter 4, we reach the culmination of mimetic conflict: the scapegoat mechanism. The first half of the book focuses on the destructive, or default, cycle of desire: Cycle 1.

Part II, “The Transformation of Desire,” outlines a process for breaking free from Cycle 1 in order to manage our desires in a healthier way. The second half of the book shows how we have the freedom to put in motion a creative cycle of desire: Cycle 2. In Chapter 5, we meet a three-Michelinstar chef who stepped outside the system of desire that he was born into and recovered the freedom to create. Chapter 6 shows how disruptive empathy breaks the bonds that keep most of us from discovering and building thick desires that make for a good life. Chapter 7 applies the laws of desire to leadership. Finally, Chapter 8 is about the future of desire.

Part I feels like a descent. It’s necessary to visit hell so we never become permanent residents. Part II is the way out.

Throughout this book I’ll highlight fifteen tactics that I’ve developed to deal positively with mimetic desire. My goal in sharing them is to help you think practically about these ideas and ultimately to develop your own tactics, which may be very different from mine.

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 we’re totally consumed by mimetic desire without knowing it.

By the end of this book, you’ll have a simple framework for understanding how desire works in your life and in our culture. You’ll have a better idea of what you’re imitating and how you’re imitating it. Knowing whether you respond more or less mimetically in a given situation and in specific relationships is an important step toward self-mastery.

We’re becoming more aware of how fragile and interconnected the world’s systems are. Political and economic systems that once seemed stable have been shaken. Public health has been challenged because even the best policies have to contend with groups of people who want different things. The poverty that endures alongside mega-wealth is a scandal. All of these things have a basis in the fundamental system of desire that I’m attempting to describe. This system of desire is to the world’s organs what the circulatory system is to the body. When the cardiovascular system isn’t working properly, organs suffer and eventually shut down. The same is true of desire.

Our fractured relationships with other humans and with the entire ecosystem reveal that what we want, individually and collectively, has consequences. If we understand the mimetic nature of desire, though, we can play our part in building a better world. The greatest developments in history are the result of someone wanting something that did not yet exist—and helping others to want more than they thought was wantable.

Your new or deepened awareness of mimetic desire will make you see the world differently. If you’re like me, it will haunt you to the point that you start seeing it everywhere—maybe even in your own life. What you choose to do about it is up to you.

Chapter 1

HIDDEN MODELSROMANTIC LIES, INFANT TRUTH

Caesar’s Self-Deception . . . Love by Another’s Eyes . . . The Invention of PR . . . Why Playing Hard to Get Works

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

—Milan Kundera

When people tell you what they want, they tell a version of the Romantic Lie. It goes something like this:

I just realized that I want to run a marathon. (Like all my friends when they turn thirty-five.)

’Cause I saw a tiger, now I understand . . . (From the song “I Saw a Tiger,” written by Vince Johnson for Joe Exotic, the Tiger King, for whom seeing a tiger seems to have been a mystical experience that made him want to start a big-cat zoo.)

I want Christian Grey. I want him badly. Simple fact. (From Fifty Shades of Grey, which is full of these simplicities.)

Julius Caesar was an excellent Romantic liar. After his victory at the battle of Zela, he declared, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). The line has been quoted thousands of times by people taking Caesar at his word: that he saw the place and decided to conquer it. Magician James Warren suggests that we reframe Caesar’s words in the language of desire so we see what he’s truly claiming: I came, I saw, I desired. And therefore he conquered.1

Caesar wants us to think that he needs only to lay eyes on something to know whether it’s desirable. But Caesar flatters himself.

The truth is more complex. First, Caesar revered Alexander the Great, the Macedonian military genius who conquered nearly all of the known world in the third century BCE. Second, at the battle of Zela, Caesar’s rival, Pharnaces II, had attacked Caesar first. Caesar didn’t just come and see. He had long desired to conquer like his model, Alexander, and he was responding to his rival, Pharnaces.

The Romantic Lie is self-delusion, the story people tell about why they make certain choices: because it fits their personal preferences, or because they see its objective qualities, or because they simply saw it and therefore wanted it.

They believe that there is a straight line between them and the things they want. That’s a lie. The truth is that the line is always curved.

Buried in a deeper layer of our psychology is the person or thing that caused us to want something in the first place. Desire requires models—people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.

Models transfigure objects before our eyes. You walk into a consignment store with a friend and see racks filled with hundreds of shirts. Nothing jumps out at you. But the moment your friend becomes enamored with one specific shirt, it’s no longer a shirt on a rack. It’s the shirt that your friend Molly chose—the Molly who, by the way, is an assistant costume designer on major films. The moment she starts ogling the shirt, she sets it apart. It’s a different shirt than it was five seconds ago, before she started wanting it.

“O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes!” says Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hell to know we have chosen anything