Culture War as Imitation Game
The French social theorist René Girard, born in 1923, is not quite yet a household name, but his work does occasionally make it into popular culture. Take the second season of the hit HBO show The White Lotus, where one main character suggests that his friend and former romantic rival has “a bad case of mimetic desire.” This would have made Girard laugh, since his theory partly explains how ideas become fashionable.
Mimetic desire was Girard’s central idea. It is the notion that humans don’t generate their own desires but rather mimic the desires of others — and that this is at the root of human conflict. Mimetic desire formed the basis for a theory of history and culture that captivated his students and thousands of scholars across disciplines as diverse as literature, sociology, philosophy, theology, and history. One of his most famous students, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, has said, “I suspect that when the history of the twentieth century is written circa 2100, he will be seen as truly one of the great intellectuals, but it may still be a long time till it’s fully understood.”
Girard passed away in 2015, after a long career as a professor of French language, literature, and civilization at Stanford. In 2005, he was inducted into the Académie Française, at which point his fellow member and Stanford colleague Michel Serres called him the “new Darwin of the human sciences.” The year 2023 is the centennial of René Girard’s birth, and since interest in his work continues to grow due to its explanatory power — for everything from makeup trends to love triangles — you should expect to hear more about Girard in the coming months. (I am hosting an anniversary celebration for him in Washington, D.C. in November.)
Once you see mimetic desire in everyday life, it’s hard to unsee. It helps to explain competition in college admissions, stock market bubbles, and why romantic attraction is often attached to social cues that signal desirability. But I also believe that Girard’s work can help us make better sense of the dynamics gripping American politics today, and might even offer a way out of our crippling polarization.
Originally published Summer 2023 at The New Atlantis.
The Promise of Entrepreneurial Education
With school-choice initiatives proliferating, students struggling to make up for lost Covid time, and Americans pessimistic about the direction of the country, K–12 education is ripe for reform. But a national recommitment to educational basics should extend beyond the fundamentals of reading, writing, and STEM subjects. A key aim of school reformers should be to pursue what I call “entrepreneurial education”—helping students see themselves not as passive recipients of information but as creators, with the agency to shape the world around them. More than the acquisition of facts or the practice of solipsistic self-expression, such creativity is vital to individual and social flourishing.
Today’s students are hungry for this kind of educational experience. Eighty-six percent of young Americans say that they want to experiment with being a social-media influencer. Some invest more time in learning content creation than in the content of the classroom. But before labeling the trend toward social-media entrepreneurship superficial, consider why it has such a hold on young imaginations: it represents an opportunity to exercise creativity and make something that others want to connect with. Young people, this suggests, have entrepreneurial spirits that need to be exercised; our current education model gives them few opportunities to do so.
The word “entrepreneurship” usually denotes business ownership. But construed more broadly, it describes the contributory creativity that is less a commercial mind-set than a national identity. Scout troops, book clubs, and local churches—to say nothing of the enterprising spirit needed in a marriage and building a household—are every bit as entrepreneurial as businesses startups. This is the kind of entrepreneurship that helps people see problems as opportunities, exercise their gifts and talents in service of others, and gain rewards for doing so.
But this mind-set does not usually come naturally. It must be taught. And the nation faces a particular challenge today in forming entrepreneurs: the fragmentation of our society into discrete groups that don’t talk, or work, with one another.
Originally published Autumn 2023 at City Journal.
How to know what you really want
Need to know
Claire, a smart, ambitious student at Tulane University in Louisiana, was on track to have her pick of law schools, but she decided she’d like to get some real-world experience – and have some fun – in New Orleans first. She landed a job as a paralegal, spending her days researching expert witnesses to defend Big Pharma cases, and that’s when the crisis came. Claire had always loved cooking and learning about humanity through cuisine. She was like a female Anthony Bourdain trapped inside an overworked paralegal, and it was slowly making her life miserable.
She began to entertain thoughts of leaving the law firm and working in a kitchen or a coffee shop until she could figure out how to make a career out of her lifelong interest in food. But doubts haunted her. What would other people think? Maybe she’s not that driven. Maybe she’s not that smart, after all. Maybe she’s lazy. What other people expected her to want to do – and her ability to meet those expectations – began to determine her self-worth.
Many people face dilemmas like Claire’s. Each of us is occasionally overwhelmed by a multitude of competing desires: pursue job offer A or B? Start a new relationship or stay single? Sign up to run a marathon, or enjoy not getting up early to train? But life is full of marathons, and they don’t necessarily involve running. It’s good to know which desires to pursue and which ones to leave behind – to know which marathons are worth running. In this Guide, I aim to show you how.
Originally published on 15 December 2021 at PSYCHE.
The Three-City Problem of Modern Life
What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem—and what do either have to do with Silicon Valley?
NASA can land a probe on Saturn’s largest moon, 764 million miles from Earth—yet no one has been able to mathematically demonstrate the exact positions of the Earth, sun, and our own moon at a given point in the future. Scientists can make estimates, but these all rely on simplifications.
Two-body problems, like mapping the movement of one planet around one star, are solvable. These binary orbits are easy to predict. But a serious complication arises if a third body is introduced. Our moon, which has the gravitational forces of both the sun and the Earth acting upon it simultaneously, is part of an infamous three-body problem.
Trying to solve for the movement of three large bodies in one another’s orbit creates a circular logic. The calculations rely on the initial positions of the three bodies, but these initial positions are unknowable over time because the bodies always affect one another in unpredictable ways. In the 300 years since Isaac Newton outlined the dilemma in his Principia, diligent physicists have only been able to offer special-case solutions for restricted versions of the problem. “In a nonlinear system like the chaotic three-body problem,” writes Caroline Delbert for Popular Mechanics, “all bets are off, and our intuitions are scrambled.”
The three-body problem is the best metaphor I’ve found for a social complexity that affects us all today—a problem resulting from the interaction of three major centers of gravity. This dynamic is scrambling our intuitions and making us long for order in what feels like an increasingly chaotic world. We’re caught on the inside of a three-city problem.
Originally published on 28 August 2022 at Wired.
Mimetic Desire 101
What is Mimetic Desire?
Nearly everyone (unconsciously) assumes there’s a straight line between them and the things they want.
>> I wake up one day and “suddenly” decide that I want to run a marathon—amazingly, all of my friends had a similar realization when they hit their mid-thirties, too.
>>I get the brilliant idea that Substack is objectively the best publishing platform for my long-form essay writing, based on all the “data”—right around the time that everyone else and their mother seems to be arriving at the same conclusion.
>> I decide to get a dog during Covid because, well, I’ve been wanting a dog for a long time and now seems like as good a time as ever. (Nevermind that I’m the only one in my friend group who hasn’t, yet, and these guys share pictures of their puppies on Instagram along with the rest of the world on nearly a daily basis.)
In each of these cases, I’ve convinced myself that my desire is independent and autonomous. I want to pursue something because it “just makes sense,” or it’s the right thing to do, or it’s what I “authentically” want or need to be happy.
(This all happens beneath my conscious awareness. Very few people question why they want the things they want at all.)
This assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some kind of secret desire chamber in my heart— that I know a good thing when I see it; that I know what’s desirable and what’s not, unaided.
All illustrations by Liana Finck.
Julius Caesar was an excellent Romantic liar. When he won the battle of Zela, he famously declared: “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). If we translate these words into the language of desire, we see what he is really claiming: “I came, I desired, I conquered.”
Caesar would like all of us to believe he needs only to lay eyes on something to know whether it’s worth wanting. But Caesar is lying. He’s like the rest of us. The desirability of the particular land on which the battle of Zela was fought had nothing to do with the land itself and everything to do with the value that his rival, the Persian king Pharnaces II, had put on it—simply by being there.1
The value of objects is not objective—it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: we assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want.
Models of desire—those people who we look to for guidance about what to want (usually without knowing it)—literally transfigure objects before our eyes. Say 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 now the shirt that your friend Molly chose—the Molly who, by the way, is an assistant costume designer on the sets of major films. The moment she starts ogling one shirt, she sets it apart. It’s a different shirt than it was five seconds ago, before she started wanting it.
And it doesn’t have to be a shirt. It can be anything.
The path between us and the thing we want is never straight. It’s always curved. It goes through, or around, models.
Mediated Desire
Models are people, groups, or things that help us know what to want.
“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 by another’s eyes. But we do it all the time: we choose brands, schools, and dishes at a restaurant by them.
The art of Phillip Guston.
Humans have a built-in, instinctual radar for our most basic needs—just like animals do. If we’re trapped outside in the cold freezing, we instinctively seek shelter in the warmth.
Basic survival, sustenance, sex, warmth: these are all instinctual needs for which we have biological mechanisms to help guide us. If I’m starving and I see a juicy steak and a piece of wood in front of me, I don’t need much help to determine which one I should eat. My body tells me what to choose.
These things are not desires per se. It’s more appropriate to call them “needs.”
A desire, on the other hand, is an object that we pursue for which there is no purely instinctual basis. When it comes to desire, we don’t have a built-in mechanism (like instincts) to help guide us toward wanting one thing more than another. Which new model of car should we buy? What should we major in at college? What style of clothes should we wear? The more abstract the thing is, the more mimetic desire usually comes into play. Our central nervous system certainly isn’t going to give us any clear or intelligible answers.
But models can. Models are people who show us what is worth wanting.
Rather than an internal (biological) homing device that helps us make choices, models are external signposts that steer us toward the pursuit of certain people, places, things, even lifestyles.
Models are like people who seem farther up ahead on the path we’re on; they can see around a corner that we can’t see around. We assume that they have some insight into which direction to go that we do not. In short, we assume they have something that we do not—that they possess some quality of being that we do not. And so we follow them.
Mimetic desire means that we make many of our choices according to the desires of others—our models.
The Mimetic Martini
If we choose something that nobody else seems to want, we begin to doubt that we made the right choice. If a high school student starts dating a classmate that none of her friends express even the slightest bit of interest in, she grows insecure. She begins to wonder whether she made the right choice. We seek validation in our desires. We look for social proof.
Desire always needs something to latch onto; it can’t stay free-floating. In this sense, it operates like a bicuspid that has to be attached to a substrate (a rock, or some other surface). As soon as it becomes detached from one thing, it immediately attaches itself to something else: another model.
There is no end to desire because there are always more models. The overnight Bitcoin millionaire doesn’t start wanting less, or even simpler things; he starts taking an interest in rare fish aquariums, Nordic cooking, and traveling to obscure places he reads about in his Monocle magazines.
Desire, according to René Girard, is always for something we think we lack—or else it wouldn’t be desire at all. Desire is not object-oriented, as we commonly assume. Desire never finds fulfillment in any particular “thing.” There is literally no object or achievement or person that would ever satiate our desire. If anything, we dream up new and strange things to want the more that we have.
Desire is unique to humans in this sense. Animals don’t have abilities of abstraction, which means they can’t want things beyond their immediate worlds. Humans, on the other hand, have learned to want the most obscure and trivial things. And our mimetic nature has made us a target of manipulation by those who understand how this mechanism works.
This continuum is an oversimplification. In reality, the lines are blurry. Our most basic needs are also driven largely by mimesis.
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). 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.
It’s revealing to think of mimetic desire along a continuum. Certain people and organizational cultures are more prone to mimesis than others. And one thing is clear, on a societal level: any society in which people are no longer struggling with scarcity but coping with abundance will undergo an explosion of mimetic desire.
In this universe of desire that we find ourselves in, there is no stable hierarchy. Since desires are determined by models and not by instincts, we can begin to want something new at any given time if the right model comes along. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman referred to this kind of situation as “liquid modernity”—almost nothing is stable. Not least of all our desires.
None of this is to say that our evaluation of people and things is merely subjective. It is (hopefully) formed in part by the objective qualities of the thing itself. A baby banging on pots and pans, a high school punk band, and Mozart have different levels of musicality. Beauty is objective, but we perceive it subjectively—that is, mimetically. We perceive it through the lens of models who distort reality. The more we want to be like a model, the more we lose sight of the objective qualities of the things they have.
The things themselves don’t matter much when it comes to desire. We care about people (models), not things. They represent some quality of being that we think we lack.
This is what Girard calls metaphysical desire: desire of another’s desire—not of any particular object. One way to think about the word metaphysical is “after the physical.” Metaphysical desire is not concerned with physical things. It is concerned with being a certain way. It is concerned with identity.
A chef who lusts for the elusive Michelin Guide stars does not want the silly red star that appears next to the name of his restaurant (like a blue verified mark on Twitter…)—he wants the prestige that comes with it. The credentials of universities, having bylines in certain publications, getting named to certain “lists”, or simply just being thought of as an “expert” by others are all forms of this mimetically-driven sense of identity.
I’ll re-iterate in slightly different terms: a model is someone, real or fictional, who mediates desire to us. We already call people who mediate desire for certain clothes or styles by their true name: “models.” Their purpose is not to model the physical articles of clothing but the desire to wear the clothes. Their purpose is to make us want what they have.
What you actually want is their face, their body, their withering stare—which don’t come with the clothes.
Two Types of Models
There are two major types of models with whom we have different kinds of relationships. Mimetic desire works differently in each of the two situations.
If the model stands at a great distance—not physically, but socially and existentially—then the model is an external mediator of desire. The model is external to the subject’s world. This means that no serious competition with the model is possible.
I like to call the world in which these types of models live Celebristan for short.
There is a barrier between the models in Celebristan and the people who take them as models. That barrier can be death, or time, or space, or simply status.
While everybody likes a feel-good story of a movie star or singer taking a high schooler to the prom, we all know that the high schooler isn’t on a real date—he or she has no chance of competing with the movie star’s real suitors. They live in Celebristan.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that a person literally has to be a celebrity to exist in this world. I am referring to situations where a person is simply an external mediator of desire—their desires cannot be directly challenged by their imitator because they seem to occupy a different plane of existence. Even the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States can put neighbors in the awkward situation of one person living in Celebristan while the other does not. (And that’s a recipe for resentment—and more.)
In the greatest novel ever written—Cervantes’ Don Quixote—the protagonist Don Quixote has his desire inflamed to be a knight (more specifically: a “knight errant”) merely by reading about the adventures of the famous knight Amadís de Gaula. The chivalrous knight, Amadís, was completely external to Don Quixote’s world. He existed in Celebristan.
Don Quixote sets out on his crazy adventure with his trusty sidekick, Sancho Panza. But even though they are side-by-side through much of the book, Don Quixote is still an external mediator of desire for Sancho Panza. They are separated by social class and their sense of identity. At no point in the novel does Sancho believe he is a serious competitor to Don Quixote—he doesn’t even dream about wanting or achieving the same things that Don Quixote does—even though they occupy the same physical space and time.
We all have people who are in Celebristan from our perspective. A Managing Director at an investment bank lives in Celebristan to an Analyst (an entry-level position); NBA players do to college players (college athletes can’t compete for the same championship and trophy); even a much older brother can seem to be in Celebristan to his younger brother. At least until they both make it through adolescence and the older brother doesn’t seem more like a man than a peer in the younger boy’s eyes.
It’s worth asking ourselves, honestly: Who in my life do I look at as if they live in Celebristan?
Freshmanistan
The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.
Remember what it’s like to be a freshman in high school or college? Despite the “great differences” between the jocks and the nerds and the Thespians, they’re all far more alike than they are different: they sit next to one another in the same classes, they’re all roughly the same age, and they’re all vying to carve out an adult identity. None of them have that much power or money (I’m not counting mommy and daddy’s). They’re all, so to speak, in the same boat—as much as they try to deny it.
Most importantly, there is no barrier separating them from one another. They are in a situation where competition over anything and everything is possible.
[Note: a model’s location in either Celebristan or Freshmanistan is always relative to the other person. The rapper Kanye West is in Celebristan to me—but he’s not to Jay-Z. The two of them exist in Freshmanistan together because they have a relationship in which real competition is possible.]
If you lived in 1954 and had 100 students in your class, that would be your Freshmenistan. In 2021, if you’re in a class with 100 students, your Freshmenistan is those 100 kids plus every other freshman you follow on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. That’s a lot of modeling, comparing, and desire-shifting.
In Freshmanistan, things can get messy very fast. And all social media is Freshmanistan—we are surrounded by models of desire at all times.
In a way, we’re all Freshmen again. Freshmanistan is characterized by a dangerous level of sameness, which leads to a crisis of undifferentiation—even as everyone is imitating their secret models, whom they profess to love (but secretly hate), they are desperately trying to carve out their own identities on a tiny raft, in the middle of stormy waters that threaten to swallow them up in a sea of sameness.
Go ahead, differentiate yourself. You have 180 characters.
Stay tuned and sign-up for the Anti-Mimetic newsletter to make sure you don’t miss the next installment in this Mimetic Desire 101 series.
1 The example of Julius Caesar as an excellent Romantic Liar is inspired by work of James Warren, who includes this ancedote in his excellent book, Compassion or Apocalypse: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of René Girard.
The Wonder of Collaboration: Finding a New Spark of Creativity with Liana Finck
I reached out to Liana Finck during the early, dark days of the pandemic in April 2020. My fiancé, Claire, insisted that I do.
I had realized that my nonfiction book, Wanting—a book about a social phenomenon called mimetic desire—needed simple illustrations to reinforce its ideas. I’m such a visual thinker that I knew I would benefit from someone who could help me “see” the ideas in new ways. And I was betting that my readers would benefit from it, too.
The drawings needed to be no-frills, witty, biting, and thought-provoking to balance out the sometimes heavily philosophical nature of the text. I wanted art that would complement the writing, not just supplement it—art that didn’t seem like a business class diagram or an unnecessary appendage.
Claire—along with hundreds of thousands of others—followed Liana on Instagram. Her work regularly appeared in the New Yorker, and she had just drawn the cover of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande’s new single, “Alone Together.” More importantly, Claire said, it was like her drawings seemed to be winking about the very thing my book was about: mimetic, or imitative desire: the idea that our desires and identities are shaped by what other people want, the hidden dance of desire that influences our choices. When I first laid eyes on Liana’s drawings, I felt deeply understood—which is odd, considering that I’d never even met Liana or seen her work before. But there was something foundational to human experience that her art and my writing was trying to capture.
Originally published on 28 August 2022 at Literary Hub.
