Mimetic desire

Early in his career, professor and philosopher René Girard was asked to teach literature. For the first time, he read classic novels by authors like Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Flaubert. During his readings, Luke Burgis tells us, he noticed a pattern: none of the novels were plot-driven or character-driven; they were desire-driven. The object of the characters’ desires? Other characters’ desires. We are hardwired to imitate. Our desires, he realized, are mimetic.

Models of desire are all around us, which is why I’m using mimesis as this week’s theme…

To Be or To Do

The best American Fighter Pilot in history, John Boyd, first gave his famous “To Be or To Do” speech to the young Captain Raymond Leopold: 

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody . . . you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself . . . . you may not get promoted . . . .  and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superior. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.”

To be somebody, or do something. To work for a title, or for a cause. To want what other people want, or what you want. To think mimetically, or purposefully.

Torches of Freedom

In 1929, the president of the American Tobacco Company asked public relations expert Edward Bernays to help rid the negative stigma around women smoking in public. Bernays agreed and decided on the perfect time and place: the Easter Day parade in New York City. The parade was a way for high-society New Yorkers to sashay down Fifth Ave, showing off for the feverish media and lower-class onlookers. Bernays convinced a few of the parade’s influential women to smoke while they strutted down the street. He made sure that the photographers and journalists covering the event referred to the women’s cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. It worked. Women began lighting up in public, a celebration of liberty. Within a year, sales of Lucky Stripe tripled.

Peter Thiel’s $500,000 Bet

Our tendency to model behavior is what makes Facebook so influential: it’s full of billions of models of desire. It’s not celebrities or pro athletes that influence us most, it’s the people who look like us. When asked about his $500,000 Facebook investment that earned him $1 billion, Peter Thiel told Luke Burgis, “I bet on mimesis”. 

Find Yourself a Cato

Roughly two millennia before Girard put a name to it, Epictetus saw mimetic desire firsthand. As a slave in Nero’s court, he witnessed the endless cycle of competition and conflict. He watched as people fought and conspired over power, money, and fame—things they wanted because other people wanted them.

Five hundred years before Epictetus, the Buddha recognized our proclivity to mimic what we see. We’re on the constant lookout for change, he said, which is why desires and cravings seize us from moment to moment. As Karen Armstrong writes, the Buddha understood that “we are consumed and distracted by the compulsion to become something different.” 

We’re inclined to become something different, but we’re also inclined to become something better. That’s why we have ambition, why we want to grow, why we work so hard: to become who we’re capable of becoming. And the best place to start? Choosing a model worth following, a person whose values align with ours, and whose example teaches and challenges us.

Seneca advises us to “choose ourselves a Cato.” Choose someone whose high standards encourage us to raise our own.

“If, at any moment, you are unable to name a great man who is, or has recently been, having an influence on your conduct,” Ernest Dimnet said, “you will be passing the verdict: ORDINARY on the quality of your own thought and existence.”

Find a model whose greatness inspires your own.