Are You Programmed to Want Other Peoples Lives
Mimetic desire influences behavior, shaping our desires within the dynamics of individual/collective influence. Wordy sentence. Damn.
Disclaimer: These aren’t my beliefs. I’m just thinking out loud.
Sometimes I spend time alone. Whenever I have an extended period alone, I find myself going into rabbit holes. These rabbit holes are usually net positive in my world view. It forces me to spin my head around abstract concepts. I chanced upon René Girard's theory of mimetic desire. A lot of these contemporary philosophies have a lot of fluff attached. My tiny attempt at separating the wheat from the chaff.
Mimesis describes the natural capacity to imitate others as a form of social pressure.
It’s the driving force behind the malaise of modernity. That drive to make money you don’t need, to buy stuff you want, to impress people you don’t like. Everyone has felt that pull of mimesis in various aspects of their life. It’s a fundamental drive. Although the form it takes from person to community to society varies greatly.
Exploring mimetic desire and the forces of mimesis are akin to studying a map. Although your day-to-day may not change, the awareness of the power of mimesis may mean that you are slightly less likely to end up in a struggle and more easily able to avoid being trapped in the mimetic maze.
It is human nature to imitate. It is how we learn. It is how we socialise. It is how we innovate and create new things. Nothing is born from nothing. Everything is born from something. So mimetic desire is a manifestation of a very natural inclination.
Applying a Girardian hue to our perspective of the world could be a potential tool for understanding development. Though Girard focuses on the role of mimesis in the concepts of human nature.
Humans desire things. There are two aspects to that desire: the desire for the physical, and a metaphysical desire. The desire for the physical exists within the space of utility. I desire an education to get some work. This desire can move beyond the physical into the realm of the metaphysical. I desire to go to a top university for the prestige, for the value of being at a top university. You’ve moved beyond the utility of the education to the mimetic prestige associated with said university. Mimetics is when you’ve moved from a state of utility to a state of being.
Mimesis plays a pivotal role in human development. Animals, in a sense, are more lucid than humans. We are the only creatures that can create a story, a myth, a creed, and whip ourselves into an absolute frenzy over it. Kill for it, die for it. An animal that exists for utility is in a sense the more rational actor.
“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.”
- Yuval Noah Harari
Take, for example, something such as the “American Dream”. This is a metaphysical desire. A desire that extends far beyond its utilitarian purpose. A nice house, an attractive partner—how much of this was a genuine need and how much is to bolster a sense of self-worth, a drive towards a collectively defined identity? This acts as a polyfilla into the cracks of self-identity in a capitalist framework. We are told to desire material goods as part of our “dream” self. Just a thought.
One of the key mechanisms of mimesis is the projection of our role models onto objects. When I put on my Nike shoes, the label isn’t "Jump like Mike," it’s "Be like Mike." The promise being offered to us through mimetic behaviours. This can be conferred through objects, titles, status, etc and the pursuit of which can become all consuming.
Romance and infatuation are great examples of this. If I lean into my memories and think of my biggest crushes, how much of that is based on my objective attraction to them or a fantasy version of them I have created? These crushes have developed a social utility that is completely unbeknownst to them. These flights of fancy have never existed in a social vacuum. They are unit cells of a lattice of conscripted desire.
Thinking of life through a mimetic framework is to attack all facets of reality, even at times to break away from parts of it due to its fundamentally cyclic nature. This rejection of mimesis, and therefore reality, is an aspect of mimetics in and of itself. It’s a kind of reverse mimesis. Rather than looking at an object and forming a positive association, you look at an object and form a negative association.
One again is clout seeking. Clout seeking is lame and perceived as inauthentic. Equally, rejecting clout, to be completely contrarian, to go against the grain for the sake of the grain, is another manifestation of inauthenticity. These two acts aren’t binary in their relationship but both can be viewed through a mimetic valence.
Freeing yourself from mimesis is an impossibility. You can never quite free yourself from mimesis. To converge or diverge with a collective always tends you towards a collective. Mimesis & desire entraps us in every direction. Think of how many people aspire to be “free”, and how it’s the collective norm to desire freedom.
This social dimension to human beings, dragging us every which way, is core to us. After we've happened upon a collective, then we do start to build our mental forts. Irrational actors claiming to reason. Reason and logic as a post-hoc rationalisation. We absorbs the beliefs of this collective and alleviate ourselves from thought, and consequently responsibility. You see this with religion, politics, class, etc.
For most people, the reason for a belief comes after it has been formed. This process of rationalisation is a relatively modern means of navigating the world and requires a frequent challenging of “truths”. As I’ve mentioned before, we still have a lot of legacy processing in terms of culture and worldview. The brain is a hyper-efficient machine, and to logically understand a belief before ascribing to it is out of the norm.
This belief layering on top of the self can very easily mean that people can easily mistake dependence for autonomy, distance for independence, virality for originality. Mimesis is an all-conforming force and is bidirectional in its nature.
I could say more, but I got tired of writing…