Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

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

Eve originally had no desire to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree—until the serpent modeled it. The serpent suggested a desire. That’s what models do. Suddenly, a fruit that had not aroused any particular desire became the most desirable fruit in the universe.

The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.

The salient feature of any ideology is the violence that it both covers up and constrains. In other words, an ideology keeps a group “safe” from intruders who might bring with them an infectious strain of thought. There is no room for opposition. Girard once defined ideology as “the idea that everything is either good or bad.”

Core motivational drives are enduring, irresistible, and insatiable.

The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it.11 Real truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature—it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is.

René Girard calls models in Celebristan external mediators of desire. They influence desire from outside of a person’s immediate world. From the perspective of their imitators, these models possess a special quality of being.

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

First we’ll see how desire is affected differently by people who are at a great social distance from us (celebrities, fictional characters, historical figures, maybe even our boss) and those who are close (colleagues, friends, social media connections, neighbors, or people we meet at parties).

Students have lost sight of the teleology, or final purpose, of the education system.7 When you’re in fifth grade, you know clearly that your goal is to get to sixth grade—and it goes like that up through twelfth grade, at which point you’ve spent the past four years of your life preparing for something called “college” along carefully defined line