Anorexia and Mimetic Desire
In 1995, televisions were introduced to a corner of the Fiji islands that had never had television before. Fijian culture has traditionally viewed a strong appetite and a strong, “full” body as positive qualities. But within only three years after the introduction of T.V.’s, 74% of the girls there reported feeling “too fat.” A full […]
A TL;DR Summary of Alex Danco’s Introduction to Girard’s Mimetic Theory
Alex Danco lives in Toronto, works at Shopify, and writes an excellent blog and newsletter on Substack. In April 2019, he posted a summary of Girard’s mimetic theory that is so good we thought it was worth giving a TL;DR version. Here it is. TRIANGULAR DESIRE Humans are imitative creatures. We are evolutionarily programmed to […]
Casting the First Stone – by René Girard
This piece is about the phenomenon of casting the first stone and its cultural relevance. The following essay compares two texts that revolve around the same unpleasant but highly significant subject, collective stoning. The first one, located in the Gospel of John, is the famous episode of an adulterous woman whose stoning is prevented by […]
Freud and Jung: Mimetic Rivals
By Mark Anspach Did a woman come between Freud and Jung? That was the irresistible pitch for the 2011 David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method. Following the lead of a provocative book by John Kerr, the movie zooms in on Carl Jung’s fling with a female patient. It’s an absorbing side story, but it doesn’t […]
Economics of Mimetic Desire
The ideas that form the basis for the free market economy—ideas like “freedom” and “justice”—are at the heart of the market’s sacred aura. And few ideas have shaped Western economies like the notion of “enlightened self-interest.” Enlightened self-interest is the idea that people will naturally gravitate toward activities that further the interests of others in […]
Mimetic Desire Examples
Mimetic desire can be understood as an abstract concept, but it doesn’t really hit home until we see it in concrete events in the world around us—and in our own life. A young girl posts a selfie to Instagram. She’s beaming next to her new boyfriend at a sushi restaurant. Her ex, who she hasn’t […]
Stoicism and Mimetic Desire
American cultural lumineers like Tim Ferriss (stoicism is “an ideal operating system for thriving in high-stress environments”) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking”) have embraced and promoted the philosophy in their work. Ryan Holiday built a brand around […]
Memetic Theory versus Mimetic Theory
Anthropologists have spent decades trying to explain the enormous diversity between different groups of people. How did tipping twenty percent become the norm in the U.S. but not in Europe? Why do Japanese business people greet one another with bows instead of handshakes? Why do some organizations have cultural “lingo” and others don’t? (And why […]
Mimesis and Economics: Self-Interest
The ideas that form the basis for the free market economy—ideas like “freedom” and “justice”—are at the heart of the market’s sacred aura. Few ideas have shaped Western economies like the notion of enlightened self-interest. Enlightened self-interest is the idea that people will naturally gravitate toward activities that further the interests of others in order […]
Mimetic Desire
Mimetic desire is desire according to another, or desire according to a model. Imitation is the force that shapes human desire. People desire things because someone else—a model—did first. When he was in early twenties, René Girard got his first glimpse into the structure of desire. During his university studies in France, he fell in […]