Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want,”

But running your own company does not automatically lead to more freedom. Sometimes it leads to the opposite. We think of entrepreneurs as the ultimate renegades, not bound to a 9-to-5 desk job or serving as a middle-management cog in a sclerotic machine. Yet thinking that you don’t have a traditional boss might just mean that mimetic desire is you

Following are three of the twenty-seven motivational themes, as defined in the MCODE, with examples that show how they play out.

Whether we recognize it or not, our minds think in hierarchies all of the time—whether it’s related to our daily to-do list, the priority of issues in an election, or even a glance at a menu in a restaurant (appetizers, main course, dessert). Without a hierarchy of values, which helps form and direct desires, we can’t even begin to think about what

Girard calls this striving not for any particular thing but for some new way of living or being metaphysical desire.

Most people aren’t fully responsible for choosing their own goals. People pursue the goals that are on offer to them in their system of desire. Goals are often chosen for us, by models. And that means the goalposts are always moving.

Previously, most victims were totally powerless to defend themselves. Today, nobody has more cultural influence than someone who has been recognized as a victim. It’s as if the poles of the earth’s magnetic fields changed places, the way they do every few hundred thousand years. The scapegoat mechanism has been so thoroughly subverted that there is

Models are most powerful when they are hidden. If you want to make someone passionate about something, they have to believe the desire is their own.

Buried in a deeper layer of our psychology is the person or thing that caused us to want something in the first place. Desire requires models—people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.