Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Psychologist Abraham Maslow first published his famous “Hierarchy of Needs” in 1943. He illustrated the way that he believed human motivation moves—from the fulfillment of basic physiological needs to the fulfillment of the self. Maslow’s hierarchy gives the appearance that “physiological” needs and “safety” needs make up the foundational and largest set of needs for a person. But this is a great deception. In reality, physiological and safety needs—the things we really need to survive—make up the smallest set of needs that people in modern societies spend their time pursuing. There are only so many calories to eat in a day, only so many sexual experiences, only so many different degrees of temperature that are comfortable, only so many styles of roof that can go over a person’s head. When it comes to true needs, we don’t need much. Our first brain is all we need to handle them. All of the “needs” above the first two levels—belonging and love, self esteem, and the fulfillment of creative activities, or self-fulfillment—belong to the world of desire. There are a finite number of things a person needs. But there are an infinite number of things to desire. Transforming Needs Into Desires One of the greatest tricks that the corporate world ever played is transforming needs into desires. Some people might ask: don’t we also have a ton of choices when it comes to physiological needs and safety? Take food. There are over 200 brands of cold breakfast cereal in the typical grocery store aisle, 50 different kinds of hot sauce at the Bloody Mary bar, and 100 different kinds of sneakers that I can choose from at the shoe store. At this moment, you probably have the option to choose from hundreds of restaurants spanning every major type of cuisine in the world on your phone. All can be delivered to your doorstep within 45 minutes. The transposition of basic needs into the world of desires has been going on since the early days of Eddie Bernays’ public relations coup after the first World War. Products used to be advertised based on their “usefulness” or the true need that they served around the house. Throughout the course of the 20’s, there was an explosion of consumer brands that began appealing directly to desire, linking products to identity. Paul Meazar, a banker at Lehman Brothers in the 1920’s, told a group of businesses that “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” The U.S. Department of Commerce secretary (later, President Herbert Hoover) told American corporations in 1928, that: “You have taken over the job of creating desire and transforming people into constantly moving happiness machines; machines which have become the key to economic progress.” If people could be convinced to operate according to the third brain alone, they could be turned into “constantly moving” happiness machines, moving from one desire to the next as different models of desires came into and out of their lives. Mimetic desire would reign. Because we live in a world where there is less and less need, there is more and more desire. For the first time in human history, we’re not struggling with scarcity but coping with abundance—and that means coping with mimetic desire. When a person has satisfied all of his basic needs and begins moving up the hierarchy of “needs,” he doesn’t typically narrow in on a limited set of needs that contribute to his fulfillment of self. Instead, he’s sucked into a universe of competing desires that is more likely to make him act schizophrenic than self-actualized. My friend who bought BitCoin in 2012 and sold at the top of the bubble didn’t narrow in on fulfilling a personal mission once he cashed out. He bought a kimono, moved into a yurt, adopted a new religion, and became a vegan who held legume-cooking contests with his rich new friends. And when all the best legume recipes had been tested, he moved on to wanting something else. A basic look at human experience shows something that looks like almost the opposite of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American. Jack Whittaker, who won $315 million in the West Virginia lottery in 2002, lost his daughter and granddaughter to drug overdoses after winning. His life began to unravel. “I just don’t like Jack Whittaker,” he told Time. “I don’t like the hard heart I’ve got. I don’t like what I’ve become.” But why? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests that these people should be moving up the pyramid, one step closer to becoming who they want to be. That isn’t what happens. In order to get a better picture of human needs and desires, we have to invert the pyramid. After a person has satisfied all of his basic needs, he looks up at a universe of possible things to want. And this universe of desire—the universe of the third brain—is infinite. There is never a point where we have satisfied all of our desires. There is always another model to imitate. Desires, unlike biological needs, don’t have a built-in homing mechanism. Instead of looking to physiological signals (the first brain) or logic (the second brain) to make choices, people look to other people.
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.
Compassion Or Apocalypse?: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard – by James Warren
Apocalyptic Future, Warren’s written a gem, a much-needed “comprehensive” guide to Girard’s thought. It does an excellent job of starting “in the beginning,” with Genesis, and moving all the way through what Girard worried would be a man-made apocalypse. The table of contents is sweeping: Part I: MIMESIS Chapter 1: Mimesis and DesireChapter 2: Mimesis in Genesis 2 and 3Chapter 3: Scandal and Desire in the Gospels Part II: THE SCAPEGOAT Chapter 4: Sacrifice, Founding Murder, and the Scapegoat MechanismChapter 5: Mimesis, Rivalry, and Rounding Murder in GenesisChapter 6: The Primitive Sacred and the Hebrew Scriptures in Travail Chapter 7: MythologyChapter 8: The Gospel Revelation of Myth and Murder Part III: Compassion of Apocalypse Chapter 9: The Gerasene DemoniacChapter 10: The Apostle PaulChapter 11: Paradigm for a New Humanity Chapter 12: Apocalyptic Future and the Contemporary Situation Check out Compassion or Apocalypse on Amazon.
The Fyre Festival and Violent Mimesis
On April 27, 2017, the first attendees of the now-infamous Fyre Festival landed in the Bahamas. They expected a weekend of luxury and pampering, and to potentially rub shoulders with Instagram influencers such as Kendall Jenner and Hailey Baldwin. Instead, they were met with chaos. There were no luxury hotels or gourmet meals, just Lord of the Flies-style chaos. The festival quickly became an online joke under the hashtag #dumpsterfyre. It has since been the subject of two documentaries and numerous columns. The crazy thing about the Fyre Festival is that it was never going to work. The organizers never had enough money, experience or time to pull off an event of the magnitude they had promised. Yet over 5,000 people signed up after seeing their favorite models and influencers post about it. Why would rational adults such a thing? The answer: Mimesis. What is mimesis? Mimesis comes from the Greek word mīmeisthai, “to imitate”. Mimetic theory is a theory that explains human desire, and ultimately human behavior, with a very simple and very paradigm breaking observation: desire may feel like it comes from some objective place deep inside of us- but that is actually not true. We desire what we desire because we are imitating someone else who desired that first. René Girard is the founder of mimetic theory. He made his breakthrough after a break-up, when he realized that the more his ex dated, the more he desired her. He realized that her desire for him affected his desire for her, as did her view of herself. When she viewed herself as someone desirable to date, he wanted to date her. And thus the mimetic theory was born. Where is mimesis in my life The short answer is: Everywhere. The longer answer is that you are born with certain biological urges, but not necessarily desire. You eat, drink, seek shelter, etc because your body tells you to. However, everything else you want, you’ve learned to want through a process that Girard named, “mimesis.” This started when you were a baby. You didn’t have a biological urge to develop language; you began to speak because you heard your parents speaking. In fact, you imitated everything they did, from facial expressions to eye movements to words they didn’t mean to teach you when they stubbed their toe. Babies are even more obvious. Pre-verbal children will spend the months before they begin speaking imitating others’ noises until they develop language. They also will imitate facial movements, and even follow their parent’s gaze. This is because we are hard-wired to learn what we want from others. Want to put this to the test? Anyone who has ever spent time with multiple children and singular toy should recognize mimesis at work. Say a doll with no clothes and ratty hair is lying on the ground, ignored. If a parent picks it up and begins to act as though they are having fun with it, the children are likely to drop whatever they are holding and demand a turn with the doll. Why should I care about this? Two reasons, really. The first is that it helps us to know ourselves. Mimesis helps us understand our moral stances, spousal requirements, dreams, and so much more. If we understand that our desires come from who we are imitating, we can influence our desires by choosing different models. This gives us self-knowledge and helps us become better versions of ourselves. But it also helps us with a darker, deeply urgent problem that we all face. Mimesis doesn’t just explain desire. It explains violence. Think about it. If you imitate other people’s desires, you are likely to be drawn into rivalries with them, the same way little children will fight for the same toy, even if there are plenty of other toys in the room. Humans are incredibly prone to violence, and this shows up in our personal lives just as much as it does in our political arena. If you want to stop fighting with your partner, or repair relationships with family, or find ways out of what might feel like impossible conflicts in business, the insights of Rene Girard about mimesis, scapegoating, and violence can help you negate the conflict. To learn more about how to click here to read more: Learn more about Mimesis
Triangular Desire
Mimetic desire involves a subject (the person desiring), an object (the thing being desired), and a mediator (the person modeling desire) between the two. These three points, when mapped, form a triangle. Hence triangular desire. Rene Girard’s insight into the shape of desire radically transformed the previously held assumption that desire is strictly horizontal, occurring like a straight line between subject and object. By studying the great works of literature, Girard discovered that human desire is fundamentally imitative: people learn how to desire through others. This discovery forms the basis of mimetic theory.
Mimetic Desire in the Art Market: Mona Lisa
What art feuds reveal about human desire The art world has a fetish for conspiracy. Take a casual sweep of the news over a given year and you will turn up any number of stories about stolen masterpieces, disputed provenances, and multi-million-dollar black-market auctions. Art itches for intrigue and the latest installment involve the Mona Lisa and a look-alike painting called the ‘Islesworth Mona Lisa.’ According to CNN, the ‘Islesworth Mona Lisa’, which experts have known about for years, had been quietly touring world galleries until an anonymous claimant made a ‘grab’ for quarter ownership, thus inciting a sudden, heated scrum for its possession. Reading the account of the ‘Islesworth’ is like reading the opening chapter of a mystery novel, with its multi-layered histories of buyers and sellers, claimants and counterclaimants, aristocrats and feuding experts. It’s quite racy stuff. But what is most fascinating about the whole account is that the ongoing debate not principally about the art, but the ownership of the art. That’s right: put aside questions about the canvas and the oil and sfumato. This feud is simply a human drama about human desire. And like all high stakes art conquests, this one follows the stages of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory like a script. In the first stage of mimetic theory, called mimetic desire, an object is desired not in and of itself (sorry, Leonardo), but because someone else wants it. Case in point: there was no quibble about the Islesworth Mona Lisa until the anonymous someone made a grab for it. The burst of desire triggered more desire. Then everyone was making a grab for it. In the second stage of mimetic theory, mimetic desire leads to mimetic rivalry, where two sides fight over the same thing. It’s an important distinction that the two sides fight over sameness, no difference because it is common for people locked in mimetic rivalry to think they actually want different things. For example, one side claims to want the Islesworth in order to share it more broadly with the world. The other side says they want it to prevent it from falling into the hands of hucksters. But regardless of motives, both sides really want the same thing: ownership. The second thing to note in mimetic rivalry is that the scarcer the object, the fiercer the rivalry – which in this situation (ownership of a single painting), increases the violence of the feud. Finally, mimetic rivalry gives way to scapegoating. Scapegoating is the process of unknowingly choosing something or someone (the scapegoat) to assume the blame for the contention. This scapegoating mechanism works by disabusing both sides of the rivalry and establishing a sense of stability, or quasi-peace. This raises an interesting question: who or what is the scapegoat in the Islesworth Mona Lisa trial? The claimant who made the first grab? Are the various experts yelling back and forth? The painting itself? To find a scapegoat, go to the center of the furnace, where the fire’s hottest. And what do we find: a legal ‘battle’ being ‘waged’. Could the law itself be the scapegoat? Or lawyers trying to appease their feuding clients? Maybe the Mona Lisa knows. Maybe that’s why she’s smiling.
Mimesis Versus Imitation
Mimesis is a funny word. It would make Strunk & White (who taught us never to use unnecessary or overly complicated words) cringe. So why use it? It turns out there’s a good reason Quite simply, mimesis is not the same as imitation. It refers to something far more common, far more powerful, and far more hidden. The Etymology of Mimesis Mimesis comes from the Greek word mīmeisthai, which means “to imitate.” But the reason that we use the fancy, Greek-derived word “mimesis” rather than “imitation”—and why it’s mimetic theory, and the Mimetic Summit, not imitation theory or the Imitation Summit (who would want to go to that?)—is because the English word “imitation” doesn’t capture the essence of one very strange aspect of human behavior. An Example of Mimesis Imagine you let twenty kindergartners loose in a classroom full of toys and tell them to go have at it. You tell them to play until their hearts are content. There are not only enough toys for every kid—there are 10 times the amount of times as there are kids. 200 toys. Duplicates of many. Scattered all over the room. What happens? Ask any teacher (or parent, for that matter). One child takes a casual interest in a toy. This arouses the interest of a second child. The second child’s interest in the toy awakens a stronger desire for it in the first child, which awakens a stronger desire for it in the second child as she sees how tightly he’s clinging to it. Meanwhile, three versions of the same toy lying on the floor beyond her. It’s not long before other kids begin to be interested in the toy. Soon three of them have their paws on it, trying to yank it away from the others and possess it for themselves. But ask any of the kids who wanted it first, and they will always tell you that it was them. “I had it first!” says the first kid. Sure, he had it. But did he really want it? “But I wanted to play with it first!” protests the second child, unaware that she wouldn’t have given it a second thought had she not noticed it in the hands of the first girl, with the pretty red bow in her hair. (If only she had that toy, maybe she’d look as cute and happy as that girl!) None of the kids—and none the adults in the room—will be able to locate the first moment of desire for the toy—because there is none. Desire, it turns out, is social. The toy that the kids were fighting over didn’t stir up any desire at all; it was the other children who did. And none of them, individually, generated this desire. It was the result of a complex process of imitation. Actually, of mimesis. The Relevance of Mimesis It was Girard who, beginning in the 1960s, began to see the importance of imitation to explain a much larger proportion of human behavior than was ever imagined. While Plato and Aristotle and their heirs confined imitation to behaviors and words and external “things”, Girard realized that human powers of imitation extend into the very core of our beings—to what we desire and to how we form our identities. Mimesis, then, is a constituent part of human nature. In a world in which the role of imitation has been downplayed and relegated to something that should be avoided at all cost (Silicon Valley exemplifies this attitude), Girard’s theory was radical, provocative, and dangerous. That’s because the very people who despise imitation and flee from it at all costs are themselves engaged in the deepest and most hidden forms of imitation—a kind of imitation that has been driven into the “underground,” where it is better known as mimesis. It’s an underground hell from which many people are trying to escape.
Profane
Rene Girard believed that at the heart of all human culture was the distinction between the profane and the sacred. Generally, these terms describe the two different kinds of violence that result from mimetic desire. Profane violence is arbitrary, disordered, and chaotic. On the contrary, sacred violence, such as sacrifices, rituals, and religion, attempt to stem profane violence from spreading. Sacred violence shapes and orders profane violence by establishing a founding myth and related rituals, thereby minimizing the adverse effects.
State of Chaos
Girardian chaos is the state of a society in which mimetic desire has created rivalries and tension that have disrupted the social fabric to the point of breaking. Societies in a state of chaos look for something to bring order, and that something is often the scapegoating mechanism. Humans always seek to bring order out of chaos, yet Girard’s theory posits that it is by their own mimetic desires leading to rivalries that create the chaos in the first place. The scapegoating mechanism works, in part, because people never attribute the cause of the chaos to themselves but rather to some entity in the group or outside of the group that they can pin the blame on. This allows them to avoid dealing with the problems of desire that are internal.
Obituary Tribute to René Girard – Stanford News Service
Cynthia Haven, author of Evolution of Desire, a biography of René Girard, begins this obituary tribute after the 2005 death of the founder of mimetic theory with these words: “René Girard was one of the leading thinkers of our era – a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies and “isms” to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history and human destiny.” It begins a beautifully written ode to one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. By the time Girard died at his home in Stanford on Nov. 4, 2005–just a short time before the terrorist attacks in Paris—he had been inducted as one of 40 immortals into the Académie Française and dubbed by his colleague Michael Serres, a fellow inductee, the “new Darwin of the social sciences.” Girard, always witty despite the seriousness of his thinking, remarked during his induction ceremony into the Académie how funny it was to be called an immortal when, looking around at all of the deceased former members and current elderly members, it was clear that of all the things you could say about members of the Académie, immortal should not be one of them! Click here to read Cynthia Haven’s beautiful piece: René Girard’s Obituary Tribute