Mimetic rivalries don't end well unless one of the two parties involved renounces the rivalry.

In the passage from childhood to adulthood, the open imitation of the infant becomes the hidden mimesis of adults. We’re secretly on the lookout for models while simultaneously denying that we need any. Mimetic desire operates in the dark. Those who can see in the dark take full advantage.

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

A Fulfillment Story, as I call it, has three essential elements: It’s an action. You took some concrete action and you were the main protagonist, as opposed to passively taking in an experience. As life-changing as a Springsteen concert at the Stone Pony might have been for you, it’s not a Fulfillment Story. It might be for Bruce, but not for you.

At the end of my life, I believe the primary thing I’ll fear having missed out on is the pursuit of thick desires. Desires that I’ll feel satisfied about having poured myself out for. If I’m going to die of exhaustion—and, eventually, all of us will—it’s not going to be from chasing thin desires.

Everyone is taking mimetic cues from everyone else, but almost nobody knows it. An unspoken battle of differentiation occurs as each person tries to carve out an identity over and against the rest.

Mimetic desire draws people toward things.4 “This draw,” writes Girard scholar James Alison, “this movement … [is] mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to physics.”5

To paraphrase Shakespeare: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their investment philosophies.

In a 2018 study, Meltzoff and his team found that a child’s brain maps onto actions they see in the world around them. “We discovered that when a child sees an adult being touched by an object while the child is in the MEG, the MEG shows the same part of the brain activate in the child as if the child was being touched themselves.”