Why Everyone Wants the Same Things

It has some psychological ground, too: according to Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, we tend to want things simply because other people want them. Human desire is not an autonomous process but a collective one — this is how we decide what we care about.

The truth is that we want most things according to how other people model the value of those things to us. These people are models of desire.

This is why most of us spend our lives on a never-satisfied search for the next object of desire. There is always another model somewhere making us wonder if what they want, we should be what we want, too.

It’s revealing to think of mimetic desire along a continuum. Certain people and organizational cultures are more prone to mimesis than others. And one thing is clear, on a societal level: any society in which people are no longer struggling with scarcity but coping with abundance will undergo an explosion of mimetic desire. In this universe of desi... See more

“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 ackno... See more

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”