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 69% had already went on a diet. But the most astounding number of all: 11% reported self-induced vomiting. In 1995, the number was zero. Since 1995, diagnoses of anorexia nervosa have been dramatically on the rise worldwide. What’s going on? Anorexia is an extreme example of how a person may distort reality due to the force of their desire. But all of us, in some way or another, are subject to the same forces as those suffering from anorexia—we just don’t take our mimetic rivalry as far. The medical name for the disease, anorexia nervosa (literally, “nervous loss of appetite”) is a curious one. An anorexic person does not initially have a “loss of appetite”; rather, he has a mimetic appetite that is so strong that it overrides even the most basic bodily needs for nourishment and sustenance. Bulimia, a cousin of anorexia, is the same. A bulimic person alternates between fulfilling his desire to eat by gorging on food and his stronger desire to imitate his model…and so he purges. Both bulimia and anorexia, in Girardian terms, are diseases of desire. The anorexic’s needs are no match for his desires. When they come into conflict, the biological parts of the brain can’t overcome the enormous power of the mimetic brain. The need for basic goods like bodily nourishment can’t restrain the desire to conform to a mimetic model—as found on the pages of Men’s Health, or Teen Vogue, or his Instagram feed. The biological brain totally subordinates itself to the stronger command: to be like the model. His needs have been transformed into desires. The power of mimetic desire pulls him into a vicious cycle of imitation for a model that eludes his grasp the closer and closer he gets. To understand the distortions of mimetic desire and rivalry in the world of internal mediation, we have to see the person suffering from anorexia as someone extremely kindred to us who is a far greater warrior in the battle of desire. It’s enough to examine our own relationship to food to see why. If you’re like most people, you have had a topsy-turvy relationship to food. You struggle to align your desires with your needs. You struggle to navigate the mimetic universe surrounding you. “Since food is the least dangerous drug,” says Girard, “most of us resort to a mild form of bulimia.” We medicate with food when we’ve had a bad day, and we exert our control over it when it becomes a tyrant. “Feeling in control again, we experience a psychological lift not unlike the exhilaration of the true anorexic.” We all suffer from anorexia when it comes to our desires. It might be called Anorexia Universitaria or Anorexia Musculosa. The Harvard valedictorian has taken the same path, and so has the fitness model with six pack abs, two percent body fat, and veneers. They’ve simply chosen different models. The most tragic outcome of all is revealed when someone driven by mimetic desire, locked in a mimetic rivalry, finally achieves the goal that he set out to achieve: to possess the object of his desire. The moment when he finally possesses it is exactly the moment when it no longer has any value at all. Its value was entirely derived from the rivalry—from the fact that there was an obstacle in the way blocking the pathway to the object, mediating its value by making it difficult (or impossible) to possess. The subject who comes to possess an object comes to find out that he was wrong. The object must not be the one that he was looking for. He finds another model. He becomes convinced that the object he’s looking for is hidden under a rock too heavy to lift. This is why the anorexic can never be satisfied no matter how much weight he loses. The object of his desire has long since ceased to exist. But there always another model, another obstacle to overcome. And so it is with us. Anorexia praestigia is the Eternal Diet. To learn more about anorexia and mimetic desire, see the monograph by Rene Girard here
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 imitate—to learn and copy from other people, starting with adults (and, as we grow older, people we admire). Aside from the basic needs (the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), desire for any particular object or experience is not hard-coded into our DNA; we’ve learned to want it by watching other people. The center of gravity of all desire, according to Girard, is not the object or the experiences we pursue. It’s the other person from whom we’ve learned to them. Girard calls these people the mediators or models for our desire. We are not so much acquiring a desire for an object so much as learning to mimic a model and striving to become them or become like them. Girard calls this phenomenon mimetic desire. We don’t want objects; we want to be—like someone else. This desire for being itself is what Girard calls (adopting a philosophical category) metaphysical desire. MIMETIC RIVALRY Mimetic desire naturally leads to conflict. Here, Danco nails it. we frequently see a kind of Hero’s Journey narrative manifest itself as a sort of ’two-dimensional’ plot: the Hero (good!) wants the Goal (object), and there’s an Obstacle (bad!). In order to succeed, the Hero must overcome the Obstacle in order to reach their Goal. The central relationship in this story is between the Hero and the Object; she will fight through any kind of Obstacle in between. These storylines can be entertaining, but they’re not how human conflict usually presents itself in the world. Alex Danco (alexdanco.com) In reality, conflict is three-dimension. There is always a hidden model. The subject (hero) wants some ideal that the model represents, and desires to ultimately BE like the model—all the while, disguising from himself how much he wants this. PEOPLE DON’T FIGHT BECAUSE THEY’RE DIFFERENT BUT BECAUSE THEY ARE THE SAME Girard believes that the distance between subject and model matters. Models who are a great distance away from subjects are called external mediators of desire (who live in a world Luke Burgis calls Celebristan). Models who are close to the subject—who are in their world, and who they can come into contact with—are called internal mediators of desire (they live in a world Burgis calls Freshmanistan). Danco explains the different “laws” of these two worlds like this: When our role model is far away, we continually praise them and draw comparisons between ourselves and them whenever possible. But when our model is close – if they’re our peer, or coworker, our neighbour, or even a family member – we do the opposite. We desperately hide the fact that they are the model for our admiration and jealousy. As our mimicry intensifies, we will progressively go to greater lengths in order to disguise our feelings, and what initially was a feeling of admiration will mutate into envy that we desperately try to hide. We begin to do all sorts of things that seem out of character – attack our model for all various reasons; slander them, sabotage them, do our best to ruin them. (I had a boss once who compulsively took positions, both personally and professionally, that were the exact opposite of one of his peers that was seen in the community as more successful than he was.) Furthermore, because they’re our peer, odds are that they will symmetrically feel the same things towards us: an initial desire to imitate and impress, which yields to envy and descends into symmetric hostility that mirrors and amplifies itself. SCAPEGOATING (BLAME) A mimetic crisis arises when everyone starts imitating everyone else—especially in a situation of internal mediation. In these situations, there is what Girard calls a crisis of difference. And the way this crisis is resolved is the scapegoat mechanism. Once mimetic conflict has been seeded and starts to escalate, what are our options to stop it if there is no justice system? If de-escalation isn’t an option, you really have only one move left: to find a scapegoat. Scapegoating is when the community on both sides of the mimetic conflict collectively decides to find someone to blame for all of this violence. If they can come up with a surrogate victim who is “responsible” for the conflict in the eyes of the community, then they have a rare opportunity to escape the violence: they can end the fighting in one decisive stoke by stating, before everyone, that “the true source of this fighting has been found, and we will kill him.” The community comes together by murdering the scapegoat victim, and as they do so, the conflict resolves. Two immediate questions: who is the victim, and why does the conflict end? First of all, tragically, the victim should ideally be someone neutral to the conflict; therefore someone who is innocent of any real culpability. They have to be neutral, because if the victim were assignable to one side or the other in anybody’s mind, then this killing would simply be interpreted by the community as another salvo in the back-and-forth conflict, which would demand a response just like all the others. Second, by assigning responsibility for the conflict to the victim and then killing them, we do two important things. First, we channel all of the violence in the conflict into one person, who is now killed and cannot return violence. Second, we’ve now created credible grounds for violence to cease: “We found the cause of the conflict! And we have stamped it out.” Everyone can now get what they want, which is a peaceful exit while saving face. Except the poor victim, of course, but they can’t respond because they’re dead. Nowadays, we’ve fortunately moved on from human sacrifice – but the instinct remains. When all else fails, we turn to blame as
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 Jesus. The early manuscripts do not contain this text. Many observers find it is more Lucan than Johannine. Whatever the case may be, its content is so unquestionably Christian that its scriptural authenticity is never questioned: The scribes and Pharisees led forward a woman who had been caught in adultery, and made her stand there in front of everybody. “Teacher,” they said to him, “this woman has been caught in the very act of adultery. Now, in the Law Moses ordered such women to be stoned. But you–what do you say about it?” (They were posing this question to trap him so that they could have something to accuse him of.) But Jesus simply bent down and started drawing on the ground with his finger. When they persisted with their questioning, he straightened up and said to them, “The man among you who has no sin–let him be the first to cast a stone at her.” And he bent down again and started to write on the ground. But the audience went away one by one, starting with the elders; and he was left alone with the woman still there before him. So Jesus, straightening up, said to her, “Woman, where are they all? Hasn’t anyone condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she answered. Jesus said, “Nor do I condemn you. You may go. But from now on, avoid this sin.” (John 8.3-11) The prescription that makes adultery a capital crime applied only to women. At the time of Jesus, it had become controversial and was not always observed. Jesus is in a difficult position therefore. He cannot condone the stoning without betraying his own principles but, if he opposes it, he will be accused of contempt for the Law. The sentence he finally utters when his questioners insist, is one of the most famous in all four Gospels: If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him cast the first stone. In all languages of old Christendom, such expressions as “the first stone,” “to cast the first stone,” are very much alive. What can they mean in a world where the practice of stoning has been discontinued? Is the idea of the first stone really significant? If we pose this question to the language obsessed critics of our time, they will come up with their usual answer. “The first stone,” they will say, is a “rhetorical,” a “purely rhetorical” device. We all thirst for significance and these critics’ greatest pleasure is to disappoint us and make it clear that we, too, must be deconstructed. To them, even though language is everything, it is also nothing at all; it only gives “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” We cannot repeat “the first stone” nowadays, without remembering the innumerable repetitions behind us. Let us call this self-consciousness rhetorical, if we like the term but can we thus empty it of all significance? I do not think so. The first stone is still as powerful today, I believe, as when Jesus first used the expression. How can we show this effectively? However great the Gospel text is, it will not suffice. The reason is simple. Because the sentence we want to explore was too influential, the first stone was never cast. The stoning did not occur. In order to understand the role of the first stone, we need a second text, preferably independent from the Gospels and from Christianity itself, a text in which the first stone is actually cast and the consequences become visible. Such a text will teach us perhaps, why Jesus emphasized the first stone. The second text I want to discuss is exactly what we need. It is thoroughly pagan. It portrays the actual stoning of an old beggar in the city of Ephesus. This horrible deed is supposed to have been instigated by Apollonius of Tyana, a famous spiritual leader of the second century A.D., a kind of guru we might say. Pagan circles found his “miracles” superior to those of Jesus. The most spectacular of these, undoubtedly, is the Ephesus stoning. Whereas Jesus cured only one individual at a time, Apollonius is supposed to have cured the entire city with one single trick which turns out to be the stoning of that poor beggar. The account of this collective murder takes up a whole chapter in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a book authored by Philostratus, a third century Greek writer of some merit: When the plague began to rage in Ephesus, and no remedy sufficed to check it, they sent a deputation to Apollonius, asking him to become physician of their infirmity; and he thought that he ought not to postpone his journey, but said: “Let us go.” And forthwith he was in Ephesus,…. He … called together the Ephesians, and said: “Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.” And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the images of the Averting god had been set up. And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Ephesians around him and said: “Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged
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 explain the rift between Sigmund Freud and his star disciple. What really drove the two apart was the same thing that had drawn them together: Jung’s worshipful emulation of the master, which concealed a fateful urge to take the other man’s place. No woman needed to come between them; their friendship had been on thin ice from the start. This is the conclusion that emerges from a careful reading of Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method. “The devil made me do it” An early episode recorded by Kerr already foretells the way the relationship would end. In the period before he met Freud, Jung and a Zurich colleague conducted landmark word association tests that produced key experimental evidence for the existence of repressed sexual complexes. The tests were administered with a stopwatch in hand. A complex would betray itself through a delayed reaction to a certain stimulus word, as though the subject hesitated to tread on perilous ground. The association could not be haphazard. The same word would elicit the same response when the test was repeated. Yet, if asked to go through the list again and recall the responses previously given, the subject would draw a blank when faced with the complex-related word, thus confirming the existence of repression. In a majority of cases, the repressed complex had to do with sexuality. The test results had Freud’s name written all over them. But when they were published in successive issues of a prestigious psychology journal, Freud’s name was almost nowhere to be found. Many years later, Jung blamed the devil for his reluctance to give Freud proper credit: Once, while I was in my laboratory and reflecting again upon these questions, the devil whispered to me that I would be justified in publishing the results of my experiments and my conclusions without mentioning Freud. After all, I had worked out my experiments long before I understood his work. Despite repeating the word “my” like a mantra—my experiments, my conclusions—Jung does not claim to have reached his conclusions independently. He only says he didn’t understand Freud’s work at the time he designed the experiments, when the real point is that he used Freud to interpret the results. By Jung’s account, his better angel convinced him to ignore the devil’s blandishments: “If you do a thing like that, as if you had no knowledge of Freud, it would be a piece of trickery. You cannot build your life upon a lie.” With that, the question was settled. From then on I became an open partisan of Freud’s and fought for him. Jung did enlist under Freud’s banner, but not until after the 1904 publication of the word association experiments. The text “ran to nearly two hundred pages and four installments before Freud’s priority on the idea of repression was belatedly acknowledged in a footnote,” Kerr remarks. “The devil was doing more than whispering in Jung’s ear; he was guiding his pen.” A devil named mimetic desire Who is this devil that beguiled Jung into taking Freud’s ideas as his own? René Girard can help us make sense of Jung’s behavior without invoking supernatural forces. Behind talk about the devil, Girard finds something real. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, he suggests that the diabolical tempter of folklore and Scripture represents what he calls mimetic desire: a desire copied from a model who will soon be perceived as a rival and obstacle to the fulfillment of that same desire. At the deepest level, what the imitator wishes to appropriate is not just the model’s objects, but the model’s very being. Jung’s relationship to Freud is a case study in Girardian psychology. It wasn’t just Freud’s ideas that Jung copied, but the desire to be their author. Jung would dearly have liked to be the father of psychoanalysis himself. Freud had thwarted him by getting there first. The devil whispering in Jung’s ear was the voice of mimetic desire enticing him to usurp the position occupied by his model. Did Jung feel guilty about giving in to the devil? The next year he published a magazine article on the topic of unconscious plagiarism. Consciously or not, he had been repressing the source of his ideas on repression. His reluctance to cite Freud’s name was the symptom of an underlying condition that would soon explode into view. The diagnosis was clear: Jung had a Freud complex! When he finally made the pilgrimage to Vienna in 1907, Freud swept him off his feet. Jung found the master “extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable.” Of all the men he had yet met, “no one else could compare.” Not even in looks: years later, Jung still raved about how “handsome” Freud was. Six months after their first meeting, Jung screwed up his courage and wrote Freud to express “a long cherished and constantly repressed wish”: could he have a photo of the great man? To his delight, Freud obliged. Jung saw only one flaw in the portrait: it was too small! “I have a sin to confess,” he wrote Freud a few months later. “I have had your photograph enlarged.” Jung knew that his Freud obsession bordered on the pathological. It threatened to submerge his own identity. When Freud complained that Jung took too long to answer his letters, Jung invoked his instinct for self-preservation. Admitting “with a struggle” that his admiration for Freud was “boundless,” he stressed that he bore him “no conscious grudge”: So the self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my veneration for you has something of the character of a “religious” crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still
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 order to indirectly benefit themselves. For instance, people donate to the teachers union because they know the union will ultimately defend their rights in contract negotiations. They sell goods that other people want but which will also make them profit. Everyone wins. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith, “but from their regard to their own interest.” An invisible hand—the unseen forces that guide the market—inevitably fulfill the best interests of society when people are free to act as they wish. But the force that Adam Smith never mentioned explicitly—the real invisible hand that we’ve been exploring throughout this book—is mimetic desire. As we’ve seen, people locked in a mimetic rivalry may indeed act out of self-interest; but they can also act for the purpose of self-destruction. Modern economics has little to say about this. Rene Girard sees Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from the Underground as a devastating take down of the idea of enlightened self-interest. The main character, a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg, is a paragon of selfishness. He has rejected conventional morality and mocks the philosophies of utilitarianism and pragmatism popular at the time. “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man,” says the nameless protagonist. “I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” He explains why he refuses to see a doctor: spite. “I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else,” he says. He announces to the reader that he will be a sign of contradiction to the prevailing philosophies of the day—both the doctrine of laissez faire capitalism, which lacks any rules and regulations, and the idea of enlightened self-interest. In the second half of the book, the underground man causes carnage and misery to everyone he encounters and to himself. “The underground hero is as selfish as he can possibly be, and this is precisely where his trouble lies: he cannot be sufficiently selfish,” writes Girard. “His intense mimetic desire compels him to gravitate around human obstacles of the pettiest kind.” His obsession with his rivals becomes the axis around which his entire world turns. The underground man ends up in even worse shape than we find him. By the end, he is a caricature. The story reveals the illusory wall between the Self and Others. When the underground man intends to be as selfish as he can possibly be, he is as mimetic as ever. He replaces enlightened self-interest with unenlightened self-enslavement. At first, mimetic desire can rest on enlightened self-interest. But mimetic rivalry very often leads to self-destruction because the growing obsession to desire what others desire amounts to an increasingly strong concern with oneself, which eventually enslaves the person. Enlightened self-interest is not sustainable in the context where mimetic desire exists.
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 heard from in months, ex starts texting her the next day. A college guy with a new girlfriend introduces her to every guy he knows, secretly hoping that they’ll want her, too. When he senses that they don’t, he begins to doubt that he made the right choice. Five year-old Caleb finds a shiny red toy dump truck in the corner of his classroom that none of the other kids seemed to care about. As soon he expresses an interest in it, there’s an all-out war. Everyone wants to play with the cool new toy. A university freshman chooses to major in accounting because his friend (who seems like he has it all together) really wants to be an accountant. For the job security, of course.
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 it. The high priests of Silicon Valley like Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Kevin Rose (Digg), and Phil Libin (Evernote) promote Stoicism as a transformative wellness practice. So how does stoicism relate to mimetic theory? First, stoicism is a practical philosophy of desire. It equips followers to deal with unexpected events, people, and passions. Stoicism seems to grasp that desire is social in nature, but assumes that people can basically learn to become indifferent to desire through stoic practices. The first century Stoic philosopher Epictetus—arguably the most influential late Stoic, who is still influencing minds today as he did in the Roman empire—recommended indifference to desire as part of his practical guidance for life. “If you fail in your desire, you are unfortunate,” he wrote. “If you experience what you would rather avoid you are unhappy. As for desire, suspend it completely for now.” According to Epictetus, if desire causes you trouble (and it inevitably will), it’s better to do away with it than grapple with it. But doing away with desire is not an option. To suspend it would be to suspend a core constituent of the human soul. Epictetus is asking the impossible. We are homo desiderius—the creature who desires. We can desire not to desire, but the circularity would make us dizzy. The second way that stoicism related to mimetic theory is this: stoicism provides an incomplete answer to the question of desire which mimetic theory completes. The incompleteness of stoicism can be grasped by seeing that desire is mimetic and therefore not something that can be “thought” away. Even solitary hermit monks have desires because they are social beings in the world and are still in relationship with others, even if they are separated by physical distance. Stoicism does not address the fundamental question of what to do about mimetic desire—that is, about desires that are not able to be extinguished but must be grappled with as living, dynamic realities in human life. Third, and lastly, stoicism intuits the nature of rivalry and provides practical guidance to finding tranquility amidst a world constantly in flux. In our liquid modernity, stoic thinking offers some respite from the winds of change by allowing people to sink down into a deeper layer of psychology that is less mimetic and therefore less prone to disturbance. Stoicism counsels taking specific measures to decrease or even empty one’s self of desire. But the “emptying” of desire is never enough. Once we become aware of mimetic desire, we can channel it for good. Our ability to want things beyond our basic psychological drives, like meaningful work, is one of the most important things that differentiates us from animals. Intentional desire is what propels us to create a better world.
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 is there so much lingo in the business world, period?) One of the few things they agree on is this: imitation is the primary transmitter of culture. Two separate theories purport to explain the role of imitation in the development of culture. Meme theory (or memetic theory—with an “e”) explains the development of culture through the imitation of things: ideas, behaviors, and styles that are encoded as memes so they can be easily imitated. A meme is the cultural counterpart to a biological gene. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins first coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He wrote that meme is a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” It’s worth pausing for a moment to explore the difference between memetic theory and mimetic theory because they represent two different approaches to thinking about how non-material things—like ideas and desire—spread in groups. Dawkins intentionally named it meme to sound like gene. A meme is an element of a culture that gets passed on by non-genetic means—by way of something broadly called imitation. “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs,” wrote Dawkins, “so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” Musical tunes (Happy Birthday), catch-phrases (“studmuffin”), fashion (men wearing ties), and even religious dogmas (eternal life) are memes in Dawkins’ view. Memes spread because people imitate them as closely as possible. According to Dawkins, there’s no human creativity in the spread of a meme. It has a life of its own. If a meme undergoes slight changes, that happens like the mutation of a gene—part of a mysterious and hidden natural process—and not by human choice. Likewise memes seek their own survival as if they were a living organism. The people who transmit them are merely their vehicles, no more important than a particular body is to a virus. But experience shows the opposite is true: people are models that endow random objects with value and make them worthy of imitation. Would people have been belting out the song “Shallow” in bars in 2019 if they’d first heard it from some busker in Santa Monica instead of as a duet between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in the film A Star Is Born? The film’s premise revolves around the idea that Lady Gaga’s character isn’t a star until Bradley Cooper models her desirability as a singer. A more immediate example is this: why do some people wear MAGA hats and why would others not wear a MAGA hat if their lives depended on it? This is an example of negative imitation. The determination never to wear a hat that says “Make American Great Again” has nothing to do with the color red, nor a political critique of the idea of American greatness. It has to do with the person modeling the hat: Donald Trump. By ignoring negative imitation, Dawkins makes no account of the harmful effects of rivalrous, destructive imitative behaviors. In meme theory, imitation is a positive force: the best memes are propagated through imitation. In mimetic theory, imitation can have—and usually does have— negative consequences. Because the imitation of desire causes people to compete for the same things, it eventually leads to conflict and sometimes collisions.
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 to indirectly benefit themselves. For instance, people donate to the teachers union because they know the union will ultimately defend their rights in contract negotiations. They sell goods that other people want but which will also make them profit. Everyone wins. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith, “but from their regard to their own interest.” An invisible hand—the unseen forces that guide the market—inevitably fulfill the best interests of society when people are free to act as they wish. But the force that Adam Smith never mentioned explicitly—the real invisible hand that we’ve been exploring throughout this book—is mimetic desire. He talks about interdividual phenomena extensively in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but he never names the dynamic as Girard named it. The same truth is present in both thinkers, though: people locked in a mimetic rivalry may indeed act out of self-interest; but they can also act for the purpose of self-destruction. Modern economics has little to say about this. Rene Girard sees Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from the Underground as a takedown of the idea of enlightened self-interest. The main character, a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg, is a paragon of selfishness. He has rejected conventional morality and mocks the philosophies of utilitarianism and pragmatism popular at the time. “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man,” says the nameless protagonist. “I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” He explains why he refuses to see a doctor: spite. “I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else,” he says. He announces to the reader that he will be a sign of contradiction to the prevailing philosophies of the day—both the doctrine of laissez faire capitalism, which lacks any rules and regulations, and the idea of enlightened self-interest. In the second half of the book, the underground man causes carnage and misery to everyone he encounters and to himself. “The underground hero is as selfish as he can possibly be, and this is precisely where his trouble lies: he cannot be sufficiently selfish,” writes Girard. “His intense mimetic desire compels him to gravitate around human obstacles of the pettiest kind.” His obsession with his rivals becomes the axis around which his entire world turns. The underground man ends up in even worse shape than we find him. By the end, he is a caricature. The story reveals the illusory wall between the Self and Others. When the underground man intends to be as selfish as he can possibly be, he is as mimetic as ever. He replaces enlightened self-interest with unenlightened self-enslavement. At first, mimetic desire can rest on enlightened self-interest. But mimetic rivalry very often leads to self-destruction because the growing obsession to desire what others desire amounts to an increasingly strong concern with oneself, which eventually enslaves the person. Enlightened self-interest is not sustainable in the context where mimetic desire exists.
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 love. After a short and intense period of courtship, he settled down into a stable relationship with his girlfriend. Then things changed in an instant. His girlfriend asked him if he wanted to get married. Right away, he experienced a decrease in desire. He quickly backed off. It wasn’t long before he ended the relationship. She accepted it, went her own way, and began dating other men. Then, suddenly, he was drawn back to her again. He noticed something that he found curious—and troubling. The more she denied herself to him, the more he wanted her. It was as if her desire for him somehow affected his desire for her. “I suddenly realized that she was both object and mediator for me—some kind of model,” he said. He became reattracted to her not because he suddenly saw some new quality in her that he hadn’t seen in her before; he became reattracted to her because she denied herself to him. She was modeling to him what he should want. Girard wouldn’t fully grasp what was happening until many years later when he saw this same dynamic playing out through human history and in current events. But even then, in his short romance, he saw that there was more to desire than most people believe—especially the hidden role of a model. The advertising and fashion industries have known this for decades. The creative agencies behind Superbowl commercials don’t simply show us the things they want us to buy. They almost always show us other people wanting the things they want us to buy. Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial doesn’t tout the technical merits of the new Apple computer; it shows a beautiful blonde athlete throwing a sledgehammer through the face of a man representing conformity (“Big Brother”). The woman in the commercial is a model—she makes it more likely that viewers will now want to battle conformity, too. (Of course, buying an Apple computer is the best way to do that.) People choose computers, food, and fashion at least as much with their mimetic brains, or imitative brains, as with their rational brains. Consider craft beer: did millions of amateur beer drinkers decide, almost simultaneously, that I.P.A.’s are (obviously) better than good Belgian ales? Not only do I disagree, but I don’t buy their illusion of autonomy. But these are just things. Far more important are the deeper mimetic desires to be a certain way—the desire for moral positions, recognition, spouses, schools, job titles and dreams. We’re immersed in it. 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 heard from in months, starts texting her the next day. A college guy with a new girlfriend introduces her to every guy he knows, secretly hoping that they’ll want her, too. When he senses that they don’t, he begins to doubt that he made the right choice. Five-year old Caleb finds a shiny red toy dump truck in the corner of his classroom that none of the other kids seemed to care about. As soon he expresses an interest in it, there’s an all-out war. Everyone wants to play with the cool new toy. Tim, a university freshman chooses to major in accounting because his friend (who seems like he has it all together) wants to be an accounting major. When he realizes later in life that he is miserable doing other peoples’ taxes—long after his model is gone—the mimetic nature of his desire to be an accounting major is revealed. Imitating a model is not dangerous if the desire is for something that is abundant and sharable—drinking a mass-produced wine, watching Game of Thrones, or getting into a large state school with a 90% acceptance rate. But things get more complicated when we imitate the desire for objects that are scarce and can’t easily be shared. According to economists, that’s a lot of things. For more a detailed, illustrated guide visit the page on author Luke Burgis’s website on Mimetic Desire 101.