Wanting by Luke Bergis — Notes

Sohil Gupta

47 min readFeb 19, 2022

Top Quotes

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie.
Knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.
Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.
A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives — not their performance relative to one another — minimizes mimetic rivalries.
If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones: People don’t fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things.
The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.
It’s necessary to visit hell so we never become permanent residents.
Think seriously about the people you least want to see succeed. Those are your models.
The Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily — they seem like gifts — while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.
Our ability to imitate in complex ways is why we have language, recipes, and music
While everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.
We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t. That’s because rivalry is a function of proximity.
Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert. Experts are crowned mimetically, like fashion.
The effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch.
What we commonly call “social media” is more than media — it’s mediation: thousands of people showing us what to want and coloring our perception of those things.
Few things are more mimetic than aggression
Karl Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. People fight because they have different goals, desires, and ideas due to differences in the material goods they possess
Shakespeare thought people fight when they are similar. The more that people in a group are alike, the more vulnerable they are to a single tension affecting the whole.
Mimetic desire breeds rivalries, which breed collisions and conflict.
We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches. We used to blame droughts on witches; once we stopped blaming witches, we looked for scientific explanations for drought
We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems — James Clear
Empathy disrupts negative cycles of mimesis.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone — Blaise Pascal
When desires converge on the same object, conflict is inevitable. The real danger of AI is not robots that might one day be smarter than us but that might want the same things that we want: our job, our spouse, our dreams.
The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought. — Yuval Harari
Amazon mediates desire for things. Google mediates desire for information itself
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want — Naval Ravikant

PREFACE

Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world— Aristotle
We want what other people want because other people want it, and it’s penciled-in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again— Dayna Tortorici
Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn
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 acknowledged.
Mimetic desire is like gravity — it just is. Gravity is always at work.

INTRODUCTION

Social Gravity

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie.
Girard read literature from Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, etc. He discovered something striking: Characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior — most of all, their desires.
Girard’s discovery was like the Newtonian revolution in physics, in which the forces governing the movement of objects can only be understood in a relational context. Desire, like gravity, does not reside autonomously in any one thing or person. It lives in the space between them
The novels Girard taught are not primarily plot-driven or character-driven. They are desire-driven

Messing Up Maslow

Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.
Knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.
For Girard, desire is the most salient feature of the human condition and imitation the most fundamental feature of human behavior.
Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models — not our “objective” analysis or central nervous system — that shape our desires. With these models, people engage in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis.
As humans have evolved, people have spent less time concerned about surviving and more time striving for things — less time in the world of needs and more time in the world of desire.

The Evolution of Desire

Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence
Girard was an autodidact with wide range. He studied anthropology, philosophy, theology, and literature. He found that mimetic desire was closely related to violence, especially the idea of sacrifice
In Girard’s view, the root of most violence is mimetic desire.
The reason we domesticated animals according to Girard: communities integrated the animals into their lives in order to sacrifice them. Sacrifices are more effective when they come from within a community — when the victim has something in common with the sacrificers.
When competitive rivalries flared up within Peter Thiel’s company, he gave each employee clearly defined and independent tasks so they didn’t compete with one another for the same responsibilities
A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives — not their performance relative to one another — minimizes mimetic rivalries.
Facebook was built around identity — that is to say, desires. It helps people see what other people have and want. It is a platform for finding, following, and differentiating oneself from models.

What’s at Stake

Mimetic desire, because it is social, spreads from person to person and through a culture.
History is the story of human desire.
Mimesis can hijack our noblest ambitions
Homogenizing forces are creating a crisis of desire: Equality is good. Sameness is generally not — unless we’re talking about cars on an assembly line or the consistency of your favorite brand of coffee. The more that people are forced to be the same — the more pressure they feel to think and feel and want the same things — the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves.
Many cultures have had a myth in which twins commit violence against each other.
There are at least five separate stories of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis alone: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Stories of sibling rivalry are universal because they’re true — the more people are alike, the more likely they are to feel threatened. While technology is bringing the world closer together (Facebook’s stated mission), it is bringing our desires closer together and amplifying conflict
Sustainability depends on desirability: It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive — in other words, desirable.
If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones: People don’t fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things. The terrorists would not have been driven to destroy symbols of the West’s wealth and culture if, at some deep level, they had not secretly desired some of the same things.
The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.
It’s necessary to visit hell so we never become permanent residents.
The greatest developments in history are the result of someone wanting something that did not yet exist — and helping others to want more than they thought was wantable.

Part I: THE POWER OF MIMETIC DESIRE

Chapter 1: HIDDEN MODELS

Romantic Lies, Infant Truth

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come— Milan Kundera
Julius Caesar was an excellent Romantic liar. After his victory at the battle of Zela, he declared, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). Magician James Warren suggests that we reframe Caesar’s words in the language of desire so we see what he’s truly claiming: I came, I saw, I desired. And therefore he conquered.
Desire requires models — people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.

We are tantalized by models who suggest a desire for things that we don’t currently have, especially things that appear just out of reach. The greater the obstacle, the greater the attraction.
Models are like people standing a hundred yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see.
We never see the things we want directly; we see them indirectly, like refracted light. We are attracted to things when they are modeled to us in an attractive way, by the right model. Our universe of desire is as big or as small as our models.

Secrets Babies Keep

Desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it.
Mirror neuron

Torches of Freedom

Brill told Bernays that the cigarette is a phallic symbol that represents male sexual power. In order to turn cigarettes into an object important enough for women to fight for, Bernays would have to make smoking seem like a way for women to challenge male power. Cigarettes had to become, in Brill’s words, “torches of freedom.”
In order for that to happen, Bernays would have to give women a model.
Bernays gave the illusion of autonomy — because that’s how people think desire works. 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.

Mimetic Games

Think seriously about the people you least want to see succeed. Those are your models.
People don’t only model the desire for third parties or objects; they can also model the desire for themselves

RISKY BUSINESS

Elite colleges don’t keep their admissions rates low because they have to; they keep them low to protect the value of their brands.
It’s the Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily — they seem like gifts — while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.
Podcast Entitled Opinions with Robert Harrison

ADVERTISING IRONY

Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.
The pride that makes a person believe they are unaffected by or inoculated against biases, weaknesses, or mimesis blinds them to their complicity in the game.
On a human level, social media companies have built engines of desire.

Models That Move Markets

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their investment philosophies — Shakespeare
Millions of people were searching Google to find out whether they should buy Tesla based on whether other people wanted to buy Tesla. This, in my view, is not merely information. It’s mimetic desire.
Desire is not a function of data. It’s a function of other people’s desires. What stock market analysts referred to as “mass psychosis” was not so psychotic after all. It was the phenomenon of mimetic desire that Girard had discovered more than fifty years earlier.
In both bubbles and crashes, models are multiplied. Desire spreads at a speed so great we can’t wrap out rational brains around it. We might consider taking a different, more human, perspective.
“Conformity is a powerful force that can counteract gravity for longer than skeptics expect. Bubbles are neither rational nor irrational; they are profoundly human, and they will always be with us” — Jason Zweig

CHAPTER 2: DISTORTED REALITY

We’re All Freshmen Again

Friedland taught Jobs that strange or shocking behavior mesmerizes people. People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules. (Reality TV exploits this)
When people don’t seem to care what other people want or don’t want the same things, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis — anti-mimetic, even. And that’s fascinating, because most of us aren’t.
Our ability to imitate in complex ways is why we have language, recipes, and music
Models and mediators are the same thing. Mediation is what models do — they give their subjects new eyes to see and value things in a new light.
While everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.
Celebristan is where models live who mediate — or bring about changes in our desires — from somewhere outside our social sphere, and with whom we have no immediate and direct possibility of competing on the same basis.
We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t. That’s because rivalry is a function of proximity.
When people are separated from us by enough time, space, money, or status, there is no way to compete seriously with them for the same opportunities. We don’t view models in Celebristan as threatening because they probably don’t care enough about us to adopt our desires as their own.
People are in close contact and unspoken rivalry is common. Tiny differences are amplified. Models who live in Freshmanistan occupy the same social space as their imitators.
In Celebristan, there is always a barrier that separates the models from their imitators. They might be separated from us by time (because dead), space (because they live in a different country or aren’t on social media), or social status (a billionaire, rock star, or member of a privileged class).
Models and mediators are the same thing. Mediation is what models do — they give their subjects new eyes to see and value things in a new light.
Because there’s no threat of conflict, they are generally imitated freely and openly.
Mimetic desire is both the bond and the bane of many friendships.

DISTORTION 1: THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF WONDER

Desire is not of this world. It is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence. — Rene Girard
If someone falls under the influence of a model who mediates the desire for a handbag, it’s not the handbag they are after. It’s the imagined newness of being they think it will bring.
Don’t always try to pet a cat when you encounter one on the street, as popular psychologist Jordan Peterson advises in his 12 Rules for Life. Rather, make the cat want to get petted when it encounters you.

DISTORTION 2: THE CULT OF EXPERTS

Experts are the ones who help mediate desires, who tell us what is worth wanting and what is not.
There’s such demand for new models that we insert mediators of desire where they don’t belong — like Shark Tank–style business pitch competitions where experts, rather than the market, decide whether a business is valuable. We’re model addicts. Right now, the models we prefer are experts.
Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.
Experts are crowned mimetically, like fashion.
People find “experts” whose expertise is largely a product of mimetic validation
It’s less likely that experts will be mimetically chosen in the hard sciences (physics, math, chemistry) because people have to show their work
But it’s easy for someone to become an overnight expert on “productivity” merely because they got published in the right place. Scientism fools people because it is a mimetic game dressed up as science.
The key is carefully curating our sources of knowledge so that we are able to get down to what is true regardless of how many other people want to believe it. And that means doing the work.

DISTORTION 3: REFLEXIVITY

People worry about what other people will think before they say something — which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.
This principle affects public and personal discourse. The German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined the term “spiral of silence” in 1974 to refer to a phenomenon that we see often today: People’s willingness to speak freely depends upon their unconscious perceptions of how popular their opinions are. People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do; this increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion.
Reflexivity is everywhere, clothes, architecture, financial markets, etc.
In situations where desirous participants have the possibility of interacting with each other, there is a two-way interaction between the participants’ desires
The reflexivity of desire is most apparent in rivalrous relationships. When a person is focused on what a rival model wants, the desires of both individuals are reflexive. Neither can want anything without affecting the other’s desire for it.
In Freshmanistan, a mimetic rivalry is like two people trying to race each other inside of the same car: Nobody gets ahead, and eventually they crash.

SIGNIFIED RAPPERS

The mimetic rivalry between Tupac and Biggie ended with both of them dead.
When mimesis is strong enough, rivals forget about whatever objects they were fighting for in the first place. Objects become completely interchangeable — the rivals will fight for anything, so long as their opponent wants it. They become locked in a double bind — each reflexively bound to the desires of the other, unable to escape.

MIRRORED IMITATION

Mirrored imitation, then, is imitation that does the opposite of whatever a rival does. It is reflexive to a rival by doing something different from what the rival models.
The effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch. — Girard
The more accurately a work of art represents real human relations, the more it involves mimesis
I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members. — Groucho Marx
In a mimetic rivalry, objects take on value because the rival wants them.

Social Mediation

What we commonly call “social media” is more than media — it’s mediation: thousands of people showing us what to want and coloring our perception of those things.
Smartphones projects the desires of billions of people to us through social media, Google searches, and restaurant and hotel reviews. The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us unfettered access to, is the metaphysical threat.
Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media. Social media is social mediation — and it now brings nearly all of our models inside our personal world

Chapter 3 SOCIAL CONTAGION

Cycles of Desire

If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities — Rene Girard
Few things are more mimetic than aggression
Karl Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. People fight because they have different goals, desires, and ideas due to differences in the material goods they possess
Shakespeare thought people fight when they are similar. The more that people in a group are alike, the more vulnerable they are to a single tension affecting the whole.
Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy
In Freshmanistan, the proximity and similarity of people make the stakes of mimetic desire higher

Lamborghini versus Ferrari

It had taken Lamborghini ten years to become one of Italy’s most successful tractor makers. It would take only two years for him to become one of the most admired carmakers in the world

Memes and Mimetic Theory

Darwin was attempting to explain the spread across time and space of nonmaterial things such as ideas, behaviors, and phrases. He called these things memes: cultural units of information that spread from person to person through a process of imitation
Memes don’t spread through human intentionality or creativity. As in Darwinian evolution, they undergo a series of random mutations and selections.
The individuals who spread memes are simply carriers — hosts through whom the information passes.
According to Dawkins, memes work in a similar way to biological genes: their survival depends on their being passed on and replicated as perfectly as possible. They might mutate every once in a while. But in general, memes are discrete, static, and fixed.
According to meme theory, the spread of memes through imitation leads to the development and sustainability of culture. According to Girard’s mimetic theory, culture is formed primarily through the imitation of desires, not things. And desires are not discrete, static, and fixed; they are open-ended, dynamic, and volatile.
In Girard’s mimetic theory, the opposite is true. People are not insignificant carriers of information; they are highly significant models of desire.
We don’t care about what is being modeled as much as we care about who is modeling it. We imitate not for the sake of imitation itself but for the sake of differentiating ourselves — to try to forge an identity relative to other people.

The Flywheel Effect

Cycle 1 is the negative cycle, in which mimetic desire leads to rivalry and conflict. This cycle runs on the false belief that other people have something that we don’t have and that there isn’t room for fulfillment of both their desires and ours. It comes from a mindset of scarcity, of fear, of anger.
Cycle 2 is the positive cycle in which mimetic desire unites people in a shared desire for some common good. It comes from a mindset of abundance and mutual giving. This type of cycle transforms the world. People want something that they couldn’t imagine wanting before — and they help others go further, too.
There is not a linear process of continuous improvement but a critical transition point at which momentum takes over and the process begins to power itself. Mimesis, too, works like the flywheel. It accelerates in a nonlinear way — in both positive and negative cases.

The Creative Cycle

Fitness Flywheel:(1) I want to start working out, because my friend started a new workout program and looks great. (2) That makes me want to eat better, so that I don’t negate my hard work at the gym. (3) So I want to turn down social invites that involve booze and Buffalo wings. (4) The result is that I want to go to the gym in the morning rather than pop Advil, slam coffee, and eat pancakes. (5) And that means I want to spend more time doing productive work. Eventually, I make wellness a virtue — meaning it becomes easy. Making healthy choices becomes something that I want to do instead of something I dread.
According to Collins, the movement of a flywheel works due to a cannot help but logic: you can’t help but take the next step.
Giro Sport design followed this logic. If you make superior products, elite athletes can’t help but want to wear them. If you get elite athletes to use your product, you can’t help but attract the attention of mainstream consumers. And if you attract the attention of mainstream consumers, you can’t help but build brand power. And when you have brand power, you can’t help but increase your margins.
Regenerative farms use positive flywheels. The farms are built around the health of their soil. The flywheel works like this: Plants grow best in good soil, so you boost the biodiversity of the plants; which leads to healthier ruminants who eat the grass and the plants, and then poop; which leads to healthier soil; which means that water and beneficial microbes are retained better; which leads to even more nutrient-rich soil; which increases the vitality of the entire ecosystem.
There are also negative flywheels, or “doom loops,” where negative forces build on one another and lead to failure. A doom loop might work like this: An e-commerce company takes its focus off customer service to invest in other areas; which causes increased credit card chargebacks and bad website reviews; which leads to a decrease in order volume and returning customers; which causes a decrease in sales and inventory turnover; which forces the company to pay vendors late; which causes vendors to tighten credit terms and withhold inventory; which causes the company to focus even less on customer service because they are just trying to keep the lights on. Notice that the last of these stages leads right back to the first stage, amplifying the problem.
Negative flywheels are far more common than positive ones.

MOVING TO FRESHMANISTAN

He suggested that the illusion of freedom — the idea that every entrepreneur is a master of their own desire — is dangerous — Dr. Zubin Damania
Desire is part of the web of connectivity. When people deny that they are affected by what other people around them want, they are most susceptible to getting drawn into an unhealthy cycle of desire that they don’t even know to resist.
Mimetic desire breeds rivalries, which breed collisions and conflict.
Every community in a mimetic crisis — that is, every community that suffers a loss of difference, where there is no clear separation between models and imitators — has its own version of the Cycle 2 flywheel

RETURN ON COLLISIONS

UNDER THE ANTHILL

Zappos had eliminated the management hierarchy, but they couldn’t eliminate the network of desire and the need that people have to be in relationship to models. There is always a hierarchy of desire from the perspective of an individual: some models are worth following more than others, and some things are worth wanting more than others. We are hierarchical creatures. This is why we like listicles and ratings so much. We have a need to know how things stack up, how things fit together. To remove all semblance of hierarchy is detrimental to this fundamental need.
People always pursue happiness by looking for models of happiness — whether that is someone who has lived the American dream, a Silicon Valley CEO, or your next-door neighbor.

C. S. Lewis called this invisible system the inner ring. It means that no matter where a person is in life, no matter how wealthy or popular a person is, there is always a desire to be on the inside of a certain ring and a terror of being left on the outside of it. “This desire [to be in the inner ring] is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action,” Lewis said. “It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it — this whole pell-mell of struggle competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement.… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.

Hierarchical Values

A good leader needs to consider the impact of their decisions on human ecology — the web of relationships that affect human life and development. No aspect of human ecology is more overlooked than mimetic desire.
Leaders should also consider that economic incentives are always more than economic. If the signals are strong enough, they can distort desires and give people a “false north” on their career compass
You can influence behavior with financial incentives, no doubt — but economic incentives alone don’t explain why people are captivated by certain models. You can’t buy desire. When we subsidize risk, we are left with a distorted view of who wants what. Sometimes, that person is us.
Marketing, money, and models distort desire for people if there is no clear hierarchy of values.
Values and desires are not the same thing.
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 to pay attention to and to what degree.
A hierarchy of values is an antidote to mimetic conformity. If all values are treated as equal, then the one that wins out — especially at a time of crisis — is the one that is most mimetic.
Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference. If everything is equally good or important, the propensity for conflict is higher. Don’t contribute to the tyranny of relativism. It has too many tyrants as it is.

The Collapse of Desire

Value systems with a clear hierarchy are more effective during crises than systems of values that lack a hierarchy.

Chapter 4: THE INVENTION OF BLAME

An Underrated Social Discovery

I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.… What’s to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture?

— Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and philosopher

DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES.

SPECTATORS GET CHILLS BY IDENTIFYING

WITH THE VICTIMS, FEELING IMMUNE ALL

THE WHILE! THIS IS A PARTICULARLY

UNATTRACTIVE FORM OF VOYEURISM

— Jenny Holzer

Sacred Violence

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale — Carl Von Clausewitz
In his study of history, Girard found that humans time and time again turned to sacrifice in order to stop the spread of mimetic conflict.
When societies were threatened with disorder, they used violence to drive out violence. They would expel or destroy a chosen person or group, and this action would have the effect of preventing more widespread violence. Girard called the process by which this happens the scapegoat mechanism.
The scapegoat mechanism, turns a war of all against all into a war of all against one. It brings temporary peace as people forget their mimetic conflicts for a while, having just discharged all of their anger onto a scapegoat.
The institutions and cultural norms that we find around us, especially sacred rituals like elections and capital punishment, as well as many taboos, are mechanisms that were developed to contain violence

The Danger of Purity

Catharsis: the process of releasing strong emotions or impulses through participation in some external event. Aristotle thought catharsis was the purpose of tragic drama.
Because eliminating the pharmakós (poison) was a collective and anonymous process, the benefits flowed to everyone.
Unanimous violence is always anonymous violence.
Nobody is safe from being made into a scapegoat. During a mimetic crisis, perception is distorted. In Freshmanistan, where differences are minor, even the smallest differences are amplified. People project their worst fears onto a scapegoat rather than face the crisis head-on. Nobody wants to pay the price.

Saving People from Themselves

The pool is Freshmanistan; the people in the pool are caught in a mimetic crisis; the electricity represents the acute and serious danger that the group has brought on itself — the mimetic contagion that travels quickly from person to person and incapacitates them, making them incapable of solving the crisis on their own
We can’t predict when the wisdom of the crowd becomes the violence of the mob
Accusations are dangerously mimetic.
The first accusation is the hardest. Why? Because there’s no model for it. Only in the light of overwhelming evidence would most of us accuse a person of something truly terrible. But in a situation of extreme fear or confusion, the standards change. A person can take on the appearance of an evil perpetrator more easily in a war zone than in a well-run classroom.
The first accusation, even if it’s completely false, changes the perception of reality. It affects one’s memory and perception of new events. And with each new accusation, there are more models. The number of models is why the second accusation is easier than the first to make, the third accusation is easier than the second, the fourth easier than the third.
Models spur people to action. Sometimes they help lead to breakthrough performances
A mob is a hyper-mimetic organism in which individual members can easily lose personal agency. Mimetic contagion destroys the distinctions between people — especially the differences in their desires.
You can show up to a rally wanting one thing and leave wanting something else entirely.
Crowd psychology is different than individual psychology
The guiltier he is, the more convincingly he can stand in for all other guilty parties and be sacrificed in their stead
The scapegoating mechanism does not hinge on the guilt or innocence of the scapegoat. It hinges on the ability of a community to use a scapegoat to accomplish their desired outcome: unification, healing, purgation, expiation. The scapegoat serves a religious function.

The Path of Least Resistance

In real life, scapegoats are usually singled out due to some combination of the following: they have extreme personalities or neurodiversity (such as autism) or physical abnormalities that make them noticeable; they’re on the margins of society in terms of status or markets (they are outside the system, like the Amish or people who have chosen to live off the grid); they’re considered deviants in some way (their behavior falls outside societal norms, whether related to lifestyle, sexuality, or style of communication); they’re unable to fight back (this applies even to rulers or kings — when it is all against one, even the most powerful person is impotent); or they appear as if by magic without society knowing where they came from or how they got there, which makes them easy to blame as the cause of social unrest (climate change activist Greta Thunberg’s arrival in New York to speak at the United Nations on a zero-carbon yacht marks her as a potential scapegoat)
All scapegoats have the power to unite people and defuse mimetic conflict. A scapegoat doesn’t have traditional power; a scapegoat has unifying power. A prisoner on death row possesses power that not even the state governor has. For a family or community in crisis, it can seem like only the death of that prisoner will bring them the kind of healing they seek. The prisoner, then, possesses a quasi-supernatural quality that no one else can stand in for. Only he can heal.
Most scapegoats are only kings or beggars

The Dancing Mania of 1518

Tarantism was a religious ritual that had the effect of restoring order from social chaos. The spiders were scapegoated.

Safety in Judgment

Scapegoats are chosen through a mimetic process of judgment, not a rational one
It is always easier to desire something — even, and maybe even especially, violence — when it has been desired by someone else first.
The first stone thrower shows the way. The second reinforces the desire. Now the third person in the crowd is hit with the mimetic force of two mimetic models. They cast the third stone and become the third model. The fourth, fifth, and sixth stones are cast with relative ease compared to the first three. The seventh is effortless. Mimetic contagion has taken hold The stone throwers become unattached from any form of objective judgment because their desire for a scapegoat has overpowered their desire for truth.

Anger metastasizes and spreads easily.
In a research done on Weibo, a popular social media app in China, it was found that anger spreads faster than other emotions, such as joy, because anger spreads easily when there are weak ties between people , as there often are online.

The Joy of Hate Watching

There is probably no more effective thing that a politician — or potential politician — can do to gain popular support than resolving a mimetic crisis. Such a person mimics the role of the High Priest in ancient Israel.
Eventually, societies began ritually reenacting the process that led to the scapegoat mechanism — creating disorder, allowing mimetic tension to reach a peak, then expelling or sacrificing something symbolic. (This is the formula of reality television today.) They found that catharsis flowed to everyone.
Substitute sacrifices permeate our culture. They have seeped into sports, organizational life, universities, and literature.

Ritual sacrifices do not literally bring divine blessing on a harvest; they can, however, resolve mimetic tension between humans competing for scarce resources.
The Hunger Games series is a contemporary twist on ancient Rome’s “bread and circuses.” The Romans knew they needed to give the Roman people bread — food to eat — in order to placate them. But they also had to provide circuses, or entertainment. The ritual sacrifice of gladiators or animals protected Rome from its own violence, preventing violent uprisings and keeping its leaders safe.

The Scapegoat Wins

It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed — Caiaphas, crucifix of Jesus
A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt
Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one
In making his recommendation, Caiaphas was being utterly practical. He was recommending a ritual sacrifice (crucifixion) to achieve a specific outcome (increased unity and peace).
We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches. We used to blame droughts on witches; once we stopped blaming witches, we looked for scientific explanations for drought — Girard
Humanity still tends to revert to a primitive, sacrificial mindset that characterized our ancestors and kept them stuck in cycles of violence. From the perspective of the crowd, the scapegoat mechanism is entirely rational. So when the scapegoats become the sacred center around which a culture turns — when myth and superstition reemerge as dominant forces in a culture — actual rationality takes a back seat.
The Tenth Commandment forbids rivalrous desires. It prohibits them because they lead, as we’ve seen by now, to violence.

Self-Awareness, Self-Hatred

The development of human rights as we know it was born partly from the indirect acknowledgment that anyone can become a scapegoat under the right circumstances.
The original scapegoat mechanism brought order out of chaos — but the order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos is meant to shake up the “orderly” system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change it.

Part II: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DESIRE

Being anti-mimetic is having the ability, the freedom, to counteract destructive forces of desire.
Something mimetic is an accelerant; something anti-mimetic is a decelerant. An anti-mimetic action — or person — is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream.

Chapter 5: ANTI-MIMETIC

Moving Goalposts

We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems — James Clear
From the standpoint of desire, our goals are the product of our systems. We can’t want something that is outside the system of desire we occupy.
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.
Some trends in goal setting: don’t make goals vague, grandiose, or trivial; make sure they’re SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, relevant, and time-based); make them FAST (another acronym: frequent, ambitious, specific, and transparent); have good OKRs (objectives and key results); put them in writing; share them with others for accountability.
Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals.

Mimetic Systems

The U.S. education system, the venture capital industry, the publish or perish racket for academics, and social media are examples of mimetic systems: mimetic desire sustains them.
Traditional venture capital (VC) funds operate in a mimetic system. They need extraordinary returns on their investments to justify the risks they take. Many only fund companies that have the potential to return ten times the value of their investment within five to seven years. Because of their investment timeline, VCs favor technology companies that can scale quickly — not food service companies that might grow steadily but only incrementally over twenty or thirty years. They’re looking for instant ramen, not risotto.
The VC demand for quick-hitting investments increases the attractiveness of tech start-ups to entrepreneurs. A mimetic system takes shape. It is driven not only by economic incentives and financial returns — which no doubt factor in — but also the prestige and validation that come with being financed by the right VC. They award Michelin stars in the form of investment checks. And for VCs: the benefits of having invested in sexy companies and headline-grabbing CEOs.
Social media platforms thrive on mimesis. Twitter encourages and measures imitation by showing how many times each post has been retweeted. People are more likely to use Facebook the more they are engaged with mimetic models, rivals whose posts they can track and comment on.
The greater the mimetic forces on a social media platform, the more people want to use it. If social media companies were to build in more friction or braking mechanisms for mimetic behavior, they would decrease user engagement and ultimately revenue; they have strong financial incentives to accelerate mimetic behavior. If two people argue on a social media platform, drawing others into the feud, it’s not hard to see who wins: the platform.
Systems of desire, both positive and negative, are everywhere. Prisons, monasteries, families, schools, and friend groups operate as systems of desire. And when a strong mimetic system is in place, it remains in place until it’s disrupted by a stronger one

Tactic 8: MAP OUT THE SYSTEMS OF DESIRE IN YOUR WORLD

Every industry, every school, every family has a particular system of desire that makes certain things more or less desirable. Know which systems of desire you’re living in. There’s probably more than one.
Entrepreneur and VC Marc Andreessen, in an April 2020 post on his company’s website titled “It’s Time to Build,” wonders how so many Western countries were unprepared — from a production standpoint — for the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. At one point, there were serious shortages of ventilators, test kits, cotton swabs, even hospital gowns. The complacency and malaise seemed to extend to many other domains, even before the pandemic — to education, manufacturing, transportation. The problem is not capital or competence or even a lack of awareness of what’s needed. “The problem is desire,” Andreessen wrote. “We need to ‘want’ these things.” But he acknowledges that there are forces in place that prevent us from wanting to build the things we need: regulatory capture, industry incumbents, stalemate politics. “The problem is inertia,” he continued. “We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”
Crippled systems of desire, unable to adapt, have made it so that we gravitate toward the path of least resistance — monetizing YouTube videos of people reacting to other YouTube videos, for instance — and lack the will to build the essential tools needed for human survival and flourishing.
Make visible what is invisible. Mark the boundaries of your current world of wanting, and you’ll gain the ability — at least the possibility — to transcend it.

The Tra-La-La and the Chichi

The Michelin Guide is an intermediary, a mediator of desire, from which thousands of chefs seek an imprimatur. Since 1900, when the first Michelin Guide was published, the Michelin brothers have been turning a flywheel of desire.
Michelin employed mimetic marketing. If the company could position itself as a model of desire in regard to which restaurants one should want to go to, Michelin would go from being a company that sells tires to a company that sells desire. They would go from being Compaq to Apple.

Modeling a New Mindset

Ressentiment, in French, implies that one’s values or worldview become deeply deformed through resentment

Chapter 6: DISRUPTIVE EMPATHY

Breaking Through Thin Desires

A negative mimetic cycle is disrupted when two people, through empathy, stop seeing each other as rivals
We can imitate a management strategy, or we can imitate empathy. The first is a framework; the second is a process.

The Problem with Sympathy

Sympathy: Our emotions fuse with those of the person we sympathize with. We see things from their perspective. A certain degree of agreement is implied.
Sympathy can be easily hijacked by mimesis
Empathy is the ability to share in another person’s experience — but without imitating them (their speech, their beliefs, their actions, their feelings) and without identifying with them to the point that one’s own individuality and self-possession are lost. In this sense, empathy is anti-mimetic.
Empathy disrupts negative cycles of mimesis.
A person who is able to empathize can enter into the experience of another person and share her thoughts and feelings without necessarily sharing her desires.
An empathetic person has the ability to understand why someone might want something that they don’t want for themselves. In short, empathy allows us to connect deeply with other people without becoming like other people
Recall that in a mimetic crisis, everyone starts to become like everyone else. They lose self-possession and freedom.

Thick Desires

Discovering and developing thick desires protects against cheap mimetic desires — and ultimately leads to a more fulfilling life.
Thin desires are highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow.
Desires feel very strong when we’re young — to make a lot of money, date a person with certain physical attributes, or become famous. The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is.
Most people do learn to cultivate thicker desires as they age.

Shaking the Dust

Envy is an engine of destructive mimetic desire, and there are few things to stop it because it operates underground. Prestige is measured relative to what we perceive someone else has that we lack, so it’s a breeding ground for envy.
The imitation happens because people want a certain amount of status and respect from others. By imitating those who already seem to have it, the imitators hope that some kind of transformation will take place.

Fulfillment Stories

Spirituality is simply what happens when we open ourselves to something greater than ourselves. It could be described as a sense of connectedness to self and to others and to the universe. — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Desire is social. Desire is connectedness.
What it means to be human: we are not entirely our own, but exist in a web of relationships connected by desire.
A Fulfillment Story, has three essential elements:
It’s an action
You believe you did well: You did it with excellence, you did it well — by your own estimation, and nobody else’s. You are looking for an achievement that matters to you.
It brought you a sense of fulfillment.
Actions follow being — Aristotle

Motivational Patterns

Each person possesses a mix of core motivational drives. The key is learning how they work together and how some of them come into play more than others in certain situations.
Great leaders start and sustain positive cycles of desire. They empathize with others’ weaknesses; they want to know and be known by others, at all levels of an organization; they focus on cultivating thick desires. They transcend the destructive mimetic cycle, which opens up a new world of possibilities: the world beyond our immediate wanting.

Chapter 7: TRANSCENDENT LEADERSHIP

How Great Leaders Inspire and Shape Desire

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Pusillanimous, small-spirited leaders are driven by immanent desire — desire that is self-referential, circular, internal to the system it originates in because all models are internal mediators. It leads to rivalry and conflict.
Magnanimous, great-spirited leaders are driven by transcendent desire — desire that leads outward, beyond the existing paradigm, because the models are external mediators of desire. These leaders expand everyone’s universe of desire and help them explore it.

Immanent Desire

These are systems of immanent desire, in which there is no model outside the system — all the models are inside. (We could also call this systemic desire — that is, desire that is system-immanent.)

Transcendent Desire

Transcendent leadership does not limit itself to the immediate layer of reality but pushes beyond it to find something more meaningful.

Skill 1: Shift Gravity

Transcendent leaders don’t insist on the primacy of their own desires. They don’t make them the center around which everyone and everything must revolve. Instead, they shift the center of gravity away from themselves and toward a transcendent goal, so that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with others.

Skill 2: The Speed of Truth

The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it. Real truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature — it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is.
The quick and easy diffusion of truth combats destructive mimesis and rivalry. Mimesis bends, disguises, and distorts the truth. When the truth moves slowly in an organization — or when it is constantly bent to the will of certain people — mimesis dominates
In times of crisis, the threat from inside a company is underestimated. People who don’t want to take responsibility find scapegoats. Blame is assigned. Meanwhile, the threat from the outside grows deadlier.
If truth is not confronted courageously, communicated effectively, and acted upon quickly, a company will never be able to adhere to reality and respond appropriately to it. The health of any human project that relies on the ability to adapt depends on the speed at which truth travels. That holds for a classroom, a family, and a country.
Companies must adapt in order to survive. If truth is distorted, withheld, or slowed, companies can’t adapt fast enough to changing circumstances.
If you think of a company in evolutionary terms, only those with the fastest speed of truth are going to mutate fast enough to survive.
Rationality is critical to human flourishing, but our belief in its power has been greatly denigrated
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900, did more than anyone else in the past two hundred years to contribute to our devaluation of the intellect. He emphasized the power of the will and relegated the intellect to the realm of perspective and interpretation.
In classical philosophy — at least the Aristotelian tradition — the will and the intellect are not opposed to each other but work in conjunction. The intellect informs the will and helps direct actions; actions then influence the intellect’s ability to grasp the truth
If you come to embrace the reality of mimetic desire, you will have the ability to think intentionally about what actions you can take to counteract negative mimesis in your life, and by doing that, you will know something experiential about mimetic desire that goes far beyond anything this book can offer.
The passionate pursuit of truth is anti-mimetic because it strives to reach objective values, not mimetic values. Leaders who embrace and model the pursuit of truth — and who increase its speed within the organization — inoculate themselves from some of the more volatile movements of mimesis that masquerade as truth.

Skill 3: Discernment

The pursuit of truth is an important anti-mimetic tactic, but it has limitations.
Desires are discerned, not decided. Discernment exists in the liminal space between what’s now and what’s next. Transcendent leaders create that space in their own lives, and in the lives of the people around them.

Skill 4: Sit Quietly in a Room

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone — Blaise Pascal

Skill 5: Filter Feedback

Lean Startup Methodology: build things incrementally and take account of constant feedback along the way to validate and tweak what you’re doing.
The Lean Startup technique is a model of entrepreneurship fundamentally based on immanent desire. It’s politics by polling, in which a candidate does whatever the polls tell them to do. This is not leading, but following. Sometimes it’s plain cowardice.
Columnist Sam Walker thinks Musk is a dinosaur in the tech age. In his view, things have changed since Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. We have better analytics, more data, the world’s information at our fingertips.
When computers can sift through millions of pieces of data, market research wins the day.
Big Data is the place where the entrepreneurial spirit goes to die.
An economics which seeks to grapple with the real-world circumstance of open-endedness must transcend an analytical framework which cannot accommodate genuine surprise — Israel Kirzner
Definition of an entrepreneur is simple: One hundred people look at the same herd of goats. Ninety-nine see goats. One sees a cashmere sweater. And the alertness of the one isn’t due to data analytics. It stems from a willingness and ability to look beyond and to see something more than meets the eye, and then to do something about it.

Chapter 8: THE MIMETIC FUTURE

What We Will Want Tomorrow

I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created — Ray Kurzweil
Uncanny valley: A term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. Mori discovered that people find robots more aesthetically appealing the more they physically resemble humans, but only up to a certain point. Once a robot appears too similar to a human, like figures in a wax museum, they become creepy, unsettling, repulsive.
The uncanny valley of sex robots fits with mimetic theory: it is not difference, but sameness, that terrifies us.
No similarity is more dangerous than the similarity of desire. We are uncomfortable when robots have too many similarities to the human form — so imagine if their similarities encroached on our desires.
When desires converge on the same object, conflict is inevitable. The real danger of AI is not robots that might one day be smarter than us but that might want the same things that we want: our job, our spouse, our dreams.
The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought. — Yuval Harari
The question “What do we want to want?” is unsettling partly because, in a world of engineered desires, we have to wonder who is doing the engineering. But also because the question implies that it’s possible to want to want something, yet not be capable of wanting it.
We cannot want what we lack a model for. The model that we adopt for the future is critical to the formation of our desires.
What we’ll want in the future depends on three things: how desire was formed in the past, how it is formed in the present, and how it will be formed in the future.

Cultural Quicksand

Facebook is more than just a passive way of updating friends; it’s a tool for forging identities, real and desired. It provides an endless stream of models in the form of other people’s curated lives. That is the source of its seductive hold on us, as well as our ambivalent feelings about it. Facebook symbolizes the world’s entry into Freshmanistan, in which we spend most of our time looking down at our screens — which means simultaneously looking sideways at our neighbors.
Problems: There has been little improvement in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which affect nearly a third of all Americans over the age of eighty-five. There is still no cure for cancer. Life expectancy is declining in many parts of the world. So is quality of life. The Concorde made its last flight in 2003. Trains, planes, and automobiles move about as fast today as they did fifty years ago. Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated for most Americans since the early 1960s — while the absolute size of paychecks has grown, purchasing power has not.
Gresham’s law: an economic principle specifying that bad money drives out good.
Google is like a deity that answers our questions (read: prayers); Facebook satisfies our need for love and belonging; Amazon fulfills the need for security, allowing us instantaneous access to goods in abundance (the company was there for us during COVID-19) to ensure our survival; and Apple appeals to our sex drive and the associated need for status, signaling one’s attractiveness as a mate by associating with a brand that is innovative, forward-thinking, and costly to own. In many ways, the Big Four tech companies are serving people’s needs better than churches do. — Scott Galloway
They’re addressing desires better, too. The vast majority of people are not thinking about mere survival; they are trying to figure out what to want next and how they can get it. The Big Four tech companies supply answers to both.
Google Is God, Facebook Is Love and Uber Is ‘Frat Rock’. “Google is God. I think it’s replaced God for us. As societies become more wealthy, more educated, religious institutions tend to play a smaller role in their lives, yet our modern-day anxieties and questions grow. There’s an enormous spiritual void for a divine intervention.… One in five queries posed to Google have never been asked before in the history of humankind. Think of a cleric, a rabbi, a priest, a teacher, a coach that has so much credibility that one in five questions posed to that individual have never been asked before.”
“It’s not a coincidence that the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, an abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope” — Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
We’re mired in economic stagnation, political stalemates, and cultural exhaustion.
Decadence: moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.
We lack a transcendent reference point outside the system. Meanwhile, everyone is more or less imitating everyone else. Our culture is stuck because we’re fighting over space in a pool, next to the ocean. Yet nobody dares to talk openly about it, this mimesis. It’s the hidden force driving our cultural development, and yet it’s taboo to speak about, like envy.
What would happen in a society that was increasingly liberal and individualistic, with a high degree of equality, but in which differences between people were noticeable? It would run the risk of having an even greater degree of enmity between people than a society with less equality. “When all conditions are unequal, there is no equality great enough to offend the eye,” Tocqueville wrote, “whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
While we fight for equality in the areas that do matter — for fundamental human and civil rights, or for the freedom for each person to pursue their thick desires (in the United States, this is called the “the pursuit of happiness”) — we also begin fighting for equality in areas that do not matter, our thin desires: to make as much money as someone else, to have the same number of Instagram followers, to have the same amount of status or respect or professional prestige as any one of the nearly eight billion models on the planet.

The fight for things that do matter intersects and interacts with the fight for things that don’t matter because mimetic desire has the effect of blurring the lines. It turns our attention away from thick desires and onto thin ones. When the desire for equality is hijacked by mimetic desire, the only things we see are imaginary or superficial differences (These imaginary differences will be products of our misrecognition, from the reality distortion that mimetic desire causes. Misrecognition is what causes groups to mistakenly see scapegoats as grotesque and dangerous)
We find ourselves in a cycle of destructive desire. But that, in itself, is not deadly. It’s deadly because people don’t seem to think there’s any alternative. Our society is decadent and stagnant because it lacks hope. Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible. The fourth point is critical. Without the conviction that the fulfillment of a desire is possible, there is no hope — and therefore no desire. Hope is the soil in which thick desires grow. For lack of vision the people perish.

Instruments Versus Relationships

There are two approaches that people commonly take to escape from Cycle 1.
The first approach, engineering desire, is the approach of Silicon Valley, authoritarian governments, and the Cult of Experts. The first two use intelligence and data to centrally plan a system in which people want things that other people want them to want — things that benefit a certain group of people. This approach poses a serious threat to human agency. It also lacks respect for the capability of people to freely desire what is best for themselves and the people they love. The Cult of Experts, with their “Follow These Five Steps” approach to happiness, lacks respect for human complexity
The engineering approach is like extractive industrial farming, which uses pesticides and tills the land with large machinery, then measures success by seasonal yield, shelf life, and uniformity. The transformation approach is like regenerative farming, which can transform a barren piece of land into rich soil according to the laws and dynamics of the ecosystem. In our case, the ecosystem is one of human ecology — and desire is its lifeblood.
Transforming desire happens through relationships. Engineering desire happens in labs, with cold, lifeless instruments.

Engineering Desire

Technology companies have the power to engineer desire because they increasingly stand as mediators between people and the things they want. That is the definition of a mimetic model.
Amazon mediates desire for things. Google mediates desire for information itself
Companies that operate according to Surveillance Capitalism (coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff) translate private human experience into behavioral data that can then be used to engineer their desires, or atleast to exploit them for profit.
Surveillance Capitalism: A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales
A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification
A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history
The foundational framework of a surveillance economy
As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth
The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy.
A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty
An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty
Google’s path to riches is that with enough data and enough processors it can know better than we do what will satisfy our longings — George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

CENTRALLY PLANNED WANTING

Authoritarian regimes can only stay in existence so long as they can control what people want. We normally think of these regimes as controlling what people can and cannot do through laws, regulations, policing, and penalties. But their real victory comes not when they have authority over people’s actions; rather, their victory comes when they have authority over their desires. They don’t want to keep prisoners in cells; they want those prisoners to learn to love their cells. When there is no desire for change, their authority is complete.
It’s a sign of maturity to be able to hold on to two conflicting desires or two opposing ideas at the same time without immediately rejecting one or the other, before there has been time for a careful discernment. To live with desire is to live with tension.
The coexistence of opposites is often a sign, pointing us in the right direction.

AN EASY WAY OUT

Transforming Desire

There are two different ways of thinking that correspond, respectively, to engineering desire and transforming it: calculating thought and meditative thought
Calculating thought is constantly searching, seeking, plotting how to reach an objective: to get from Point A to Point B, to beat the stock market, to get good grades, to win an argument
Engineering a culture is engineering a religion
Some things are meant to be engineered (motorcycles) and other things are not (human nature).
The calculating mindset allows the scapegoat mechanism to thrive.
Meditative thought is simply slow, nonproductive thought. It’s not reactionary. It’s the kind of thought that, upon hearing news or experiencing something surprising, doesn’t immediately look for solutions.
Meditative thought is also essential to the process of discerning desires.
The calculating brain is only able to fit new experiences into existing mental models. The meditative brain develops new models. If we spend all of our time in calculating mode, we spend our lives trying to fit every new encounter into boxes. And when it comes to desire, that’s deadly.

THE IMAGINATION

We can only dream using the inputs we’ve received.
Fluency in a new language, a sense of humor, emotional intelligence, and aesthetic sensibility are all things we probably know tacitly but cannot articulate fully. So is a vibrant imagination, which is filled with models of desire at a young age.
Our desires are only as big or as small as the models that we are exposed to.
Education has shifted away from the liberal arts and toward increasingly specialized, technical knowledge — calculating thought
Sometimes the market isn’t a good indication of what people want. It’s good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones.

The Three Inventions

THE FIRST INVENTION

The scapegoat mechanism prevented a society in crisis from destroying itself from within. It worked in a paradoxical way: the scapegoat mechanism contained violence through violence. Instead of a war of all against all, there was a war of all against one. In spite of its injustices, Girard recognized that the scapegoat mechanism had a stabilizing effect in early societies.

THE SECOND INVENTION

As the scapegoat mechanism has lost its effectiveness, the modern market economy has arisen to take its place
Economic competition is less bloody than the sacrificial world that it supplanted

THE THIRD INVENTION

The scapegoat mechanism was the first major social invention to address the problem of desire. The market economy was the second. Neither will be able to protect us from mimetic escalation and crises in the future.
Humans could create a technological superstructure that plays the same role that archaic religions played in scapegoating: diffusing violence — through billions of bits and bytes — into the ether. It might be an invention that brings about an evolution in money, which makes it easier to measure and reward value creation at the individual level. It might be an invention that accelerates space exploration and colonization so that humans have entirely new parts of the cosmos to explore and therefore will be less focused on destroying each other. Or it might be an invention in education that makes it easier for each person to carve out their own track.

Single Greatest Desire

Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want — Naval Ravikant
Mimetic desire manifests itself as the constant yearning to be someone or something else (what we called metaphysical desire).