The social theorist Rene Girard is best known for the observation that people often want things because others want them first, not because of their inherent value. He dubbed this type of imitative acquisitiveness “mimetic desire.” While this concept is counterintuitive in some respects, it also accords well with familiar social patterns such as “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s straightforwardly at work in advertising, which instills in us the desire for products by showing us attractive, cheerful people already enjoying them, and in social media, which enables us to look first at what others do and say before forming our own desires and opinions.
Girard was based at Stanford University from 1981 until his death in 2015. This placed him squarely in Silicon Valley during the explosive growth of personal computers, the mainstreaming of the internet, and the rise of smartphones and social media. Although Girard’s work rarely made mention of the burgeoning technology industry, it is now perhaps among tech entrepreneurs that Girard’s ideas are most prominently discussed, largely thanks to the influence of PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has oft stated his admiration for Girard’s work.
Thiel’s 2014 manifesto Zero to One avoids any extensive direct discussion of Girard’s influence on his career and outlook, and there have been few serious attempts to synthesize the relevance of Girard’s “mimetic theory” to the world of business and technology. Luke Burgis, an entrepreneur and Catholic University professor, has endeavored to fill this gap with Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, a lucid primer on Girard’s ideas that alternates between autobiography, social commentary, managerial philosophy, and practical advice.
Girard equated the recognition of the role of mimetic desire in our lives with the experience of religious conversion. To realize our desires are mediated by others is tantamount to realizing one has been worshiping false gods in the form of other human beings whom we have fashioned into idols. At the outset of Wanting, Burgis describes the moment when the scales fell from his eyes. After building a successful wellness startup, he recounts, he was on the verge of selling the company to Zappos, whose CEO, Tony Hsieh, he admired. Just when he thought the deal was sealed, it fell through — but his gut reaction was not disappointment but relief. Why?
This enigma, Burgis tells us, propelled the journey that led him to the theory of mimetic desire. Girard’s ideas helped him see that the life he believed he had wanted — roughly, the meteoric rise of the young startup founder, as celebrated in the press in recent decades — was driven by his adulation of figures like Hsieh. Once he realized that his life path had been driven by unconscious imitation, Burgis tells us, he was able to reach a new assessment of what he wanted: In his terminology, he was able to shed “thin desires” acquired from mindless emulation of others and reorient his existence around “thick desires” rooted in his core sense of self.
The difficulty with this contrast of thin and thick desires, from a Girardian point of view, is that it risks reinstating what Girard called the “Romantic Lie” — the modern myth of individual autonomy based on self-directed desire. Burgis’s claim that “thick desires are less mimetic than thin desires” seems to hint at the possibility of becoming a self-propelled person — a vision that, by his own account, might mask a continued unconscious desire to mimic others. The effort to move beyond mimetic desire, then, always entails the danger of falling squarely back into it.
Perhaps to counter this risk, the first of the 15 tactics Burgis offers his readers is to “name your models” — that is, be conscious of whom you’re acquiring your desires from. Burgis makes clear that for some time, he was acquiring his from the charismatic Hsieh, but the shortcomings of Hsieh’s enterprises, Zappos and the Downtown Project in Las Vegas, also serve in Wanting as a case study in the dangers posed by mimetic dynamics. Because we want what others want, our desires lead to rivalry with our peers, which can spill out into destabilizing conflict. Organizations that fail to take this into account, Burgis argues, will exacerbate the problem. He is critical of flat organizational structures of the sort fostered by Hsieh, which underestimate the risks of competitive rivalry and neglect the value of having explicit, well-defined models.
Girard’s term for the person whose desires we imitate is the “mediator.” If, for Burgis, Hsieh is a former mediator, one of his present mediators, as he explicitly tells us in his afterword, is the contrarian statistician and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Burgis borrows several key literary flourishes directly from Taleb’s work. He offers the terms “celebristan” and “freshmanistan” to refer, respectively, to the imitation of our social higher-ups (the famous, wealthy, and powerful) and the imitation of our peers and competitors. These neologisms, as he notes, echo Taleb’s “extremistan” and “mediocristan.” Burgis also adapts Taleb’s “antifragile” to his own “antimimetic,” which should not be mistaken for “non-mimetic.” Rather, it’s an approach that “counteracts the negative forces of mimetic desire” while recognizing that desire’s inevitability.
Burgis notes that “there’s a false dichotomy between imitation and innovation.” Real innovation, he argues, passes through conscious imitation, and he counsels his readers to “use imitation to drive innovation.” The alternative, pursuing “innovation for the sake of innovation,” risks landing us squarely back in Romantic Lie territory. Girard saw this concealment of imitation behind ostentatious flouting of convention at work in the willful obscurantism of his fellow academics, and he argued that it also drove the escalation of scandalizing gestures in modern art. Burgis notes that it is just as rampant in the business world, especially among tech startups.
The failure mode of applied Girardianism is a shallow contrarianism that is just as mimetic as the herd mentality it eschews. If rejecting mimesis merely means doing the opposite of the crowd, one is still under the crowd’s sway. In a world in which rival contrarians compete for attention by diverging from the supposed standard, being outré is the conventional stance, and innovation is the mask worn by imitation.
The irony of an advice-driven book about the risks of mimetic desire is that the author necessarily puts himself in the risky position of the mediator. Disciples of the “antimimetic” worldview might easily fall into patterns of competitive rivalry, and Burgis himself might also become a rival and obstacle. But one of the strengths of Wanting is Burgis’s awareness of the paradoxes inherent in the theory he advances. It is one of the most readable and nondoctrinaire introductions to date to the ideas of a thinker whose significance is only now beginning to be appreciated.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
