The Art of Manliness - Why Do We Want What We Want？

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, why do we

00:00:11.100 want the things we want? Well, we'll offer up plenty of reasons to explain our choices. My

00:00:14.720 guest today says the real reason we want the things we want is this. Other people in our

00:00:18.960 lives want those same things. His name is Luke Burgess and he studied philosophy, theology,

00:00:23.160 and classical literature, works as an entrepreneur, investor, and educator, and is the author of the

00:00:27.260 book Wanting, The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. Luke and I discuss how our

00:00:32.280 desires are strongly mimetic, that is imitative, and how there are two groups of people that act

00:00:37.120 as models of desire for us. First, you have your celebrities and public figures who are

00:00:41.080 distant from us, and then you have friends, family, and colleagues who are close to us.

00:00:44.780 Luke then explains why it's actually the latter group where we experience the most rivalry and

00:00:48.480 conflict because the more similar we are to somebody, the more we end up competing for the

00:00:52.080 same things, the more envy we experience, and the more we want to differentiate ourselves from the

00:00:55.640 crowd, even though the areas in which to do so can be increasingly small. In fact, as Luke will

00:01:00.220 explain, someone can be a model of desire not only in influence us to imitate them, but in motivating

00:01:04.980 us to act in the opposite way. Luke shares how mimetic desire can be both a negative and destructive

00:01:09.520 force or a positive and productive one, and offers advice on how to harness it for the latter

00:01:13.740 purpose by humbly recognizing the way other people are influencing our wants and using that

00:01:18.180 knowledge to opt out of games you don't want to play, utilize the healthy aspects of competition

00:01:22.220 without allowing it to get us off track and intentionally choose worthy, even transcendent

00:01:26.680 models desired to emulate. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash

00:01:30.740 wanting.

00:01:31.140 All right, Luke Burgess, welcome to the show.

00:01:49.700 Hey, Brett, thanks for having me on.

00:01:51.000 You got a new book out called Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. And this book is

00:01:55.720 about why we want the things we want. And something you don't think about, it's like,

00:02:00.880 why do I want that thing? Why do I like this thing? When people offer an explanation why they

00:02:06.420 want a job, why they want a specific person as a partner, what's the typical explanation for why we

00:02:14.040 want things?

00:02:15.400 Yeah, I mean, what's most typical is that we don't have any explanation at all. We just take

00:02:19.080 it for granted. We take our desires for granted. And we assume that we want things because we just

00:02:24.900 know that they're good for us. There's some perceived good that we determine and that we

00:02:29.740 arrive at the pursuit of things totally independently. For instance, I want to go to

00:02:34.760 Thailand because it just has the best beaches and the best food. And I name all of these objective

00:02:39.680 qualities. So we think that there's a one-to-one relationship between ourselves and the thing we

00:02:45.720 want, as if we kind of, you know, generate the objects of our desire or choose the objects of our

00:02:51.880 desire, you know, just through our imperial autonomous self. And the shortcoming of this

00:02:57.300 way of thinking is that we're incredibly social creatures. And this explanation of desire doesn't

00:03:03.520 take into account the way that desire is generated and shaped and formed by other people in our lives.

00:03:10.460 And this is where mimetic theory comes in. So what is sort of the big picture overview of

00:03:15.760 mimetic theory and who came up with it? Sure. So mimetic comes from the Greek word meaning to

00:03:21.700 imitate. So the fundamental idea of all of mimetic theory is this concept of mimetic desire. And

00:03:28.100 that's just to say that desire, human desire, especially abstract desires, not needs, but the

00:03:34.260 more abstract our desires are, the more they need to be mediated to us or shaped by a third party or a

00:03:40.700 third person, some hidden influence that helps determine why we choose to pursue one thing rather

00:03:46.940 than another. So rather than thinking of a one-to-one relationship or straight line between me and the

00:03:52.920 things that I want, there's this other kind of hidden factor. And those are the people or groups or things

00:03:57.860 that are models of desire for me. And I just want to be very clear. I mean, there's no doubt there's a

00:04:03.500 biological basis for all kinds of basic needs. If I'm hungry, I want to eat. If I'm cold, I want to

00:04:10.300 be warm. But me being thirsty and wanting to drink, you know, because I have instincts, right? That,

00:04:18.020 you know, if I see water in the desert, I don't need a model to show me that I want to drink that 0.91

00:04:22.000 water. But it doesn't explain why if I see somebody at a bar drinking a really cold gin martini,

00:04:30.800 slightly dirty with three olives in it, why I all of a sudden want to drink that specific drink

00:04:36.980 when 30 seconds ago, I just wanted a beer. So there's this, you know, there's models of desire

00:04:44.140 around us all the time. And the more we get into abstract thing, and that's kind of a superficial

00:04:49.000 example, but careers or forms of fitness, we always like to believe that there's a real just

00:04:54.800 objective explanation. We don't always account for the models. So this, where does this come from?

00:05:00.600 I mean, sometimes this seems kind of obvious, right? Like, I mean, aren't we affected by people

00:05:04.520 around us? But if you go deeper with mimetic theory, you begin to realize that it's not so

00:05:10.140 obvious. So this theory came from a French social theorist named René Girard. He came to the States

00:05:17.200 shortly after World War II, ended up staying in the States for the rest of his life. He landed at

00:05:21.500 Stanford, where he was a professor for a long time. Peter Thiel was one of his favorite students,

00:05:26.240 co-founder of PayPal. And Girard had this insight into mimetic desire in the late 50s by

00:05:31.700 reading classic literature. And he noticed that some of the best, most enduring books in kind of

00:05:38.380 the Western canon, Don Quixote, Brothers Karamazov, Virginia Woolf, The Red and the Black, the characters

00:05:44.000 in these books always have models of desire for what they want. They don't just spontaneously desire

00:05:49.160 anything. And he realized this was a reflection of reality, but we're just too close to see it.

00:05:53.920 So in a way, literature held up this mirror to human nature. And these authors were geniuses

00:05:58.760 because they wrote this aspect of human desire into their stories. And then Girard started looking

00:06:05.480 everywhere else to verify it. So he looked in history, he looked at business, he looked at the

00:06:10.180 way that relationships actually work in the world. He looked in the social sciences. We're even finding

00:06:15.720 neuroscience now kind of backing up this mimetic part of human nature, this imitative brain that we seem

00:06:22.440 to have where we're realizing that babies get really, really good at reading the desires of

00:06:27.040 other people from practically the first couple of years of their life.

00:06:32.680 Well, this idea of mimetic theory and how it goes back way far back in the literature,

00:06:35.860 you even see it in the book of Genesis in the Garden of Eden. Eve didn't want the forbidden fruit, 0.99

00:06:41.600 and yet she had to have a model. She had to have the serpent say,

00:06:44.720 hey, that looks pretty good. You should try that. Before that, she had no desire. It wasn't even on

00:06:49.000 her radar. It wasn't even on her radar. So that's a suggested desire. And that happens all the time.

00:06:56.040 I mean, clearly, this is kind of the way that advertising works. People subtly suggest different

00:07:00.960 desires to us. And part of understanding mimetic desire and mimetic theory is getting to the origin

00:07:07.540 of our desires. So a lot of people just overlook that fact. I mean, what you just said, it seems obvious,

00:07:13.360 but without the serpent, there would have been no desire for the apple. And we almost have to work

00:07:20.180 backwards with our desires, go back to the beginning, go back to the beginning of our lives,

00:07:24.320 understanding the models for most of us. For almost everybody, it's their mother

00:07:27.960 is the first model of desire. And then as we get older, we have different ones.

00:07:32.060 Well, this idea of mimesis is new. The Greeks understood it. Plato, Aristotle wrote about how humans

00:07:36.980 are imitating animals. And the things we consume, the media we consume can influence our desires.

00:07:42.160 It's why Plato, in his Republic, he wanted to ban poetry because he thought it would just give

00:07:47.940 people corrupt desires. Any other philosophers stand out in history that kind of understood

00:07:53.060 that this idea that we are imitating animals when it comes to our desires?

00:07:57.580 Yeah. I mean, imitation plays a pretty important role in the philosophy of Perennis. I mean,

00:08:02.080 it's always been around. Oscar Wilde, imitation is a serious form of flattery.

00:08:06.360 Aristotle, you know, 2,500 years ago said that humans are by far the most imitative creatures

00:08:11.720 in the world. But Plato and Aristotle tended to talk about the role of imitation in terms of

00:08:17.580 surface-level things, not so much on the level of desire. They talked about imitation in art.

00:08:23.900 So this is what Girard would call sort of imitation and representation, surface-level things.

00:08:29.580 So, you know, imitation is how we learn language. It's how we learn cultural norms. It's how we learn

00:08:34.840 how to dress. So it's tremendously positive force. We wouldn't have culture at all if we weren't so

00:08:39.980 good at imitation. But I think Girard's discovery is that it goes deeper down to the very level of

00:08:46.680 desire itself. And it's tricky. So you look at two, you know, men, for instance, where on the surface

00:08:52.700 level, they don't imitate each other at all. They dress in totally different ways. They speak in totally

00:08:57.820 different ways. Nothing about them seems imitative. But under the surface of all of that, you know,

00:09:05.100 they have a desire for the same quality of being. Maybe they work at the same company and they want

00:09:10.360 the same position. They want power. They want something. And it's kind of buried or hidden beneath

00:09:17.040 the surface-level forms of differentiation that we all engage in.

00:09:20.860 Our desires, our wants, they come from models. And these models are social. They're from other

00:09:27.020 people. And Girard says there's two potential sources for our social models, for mimetic desire.

00:09:34.200 The one is, you call it celeberstan, and the other one is freshmanstan. What did Girard call these?

00:09:40.140 And like, what's the difference between the two?

00:09:42.100 So what I call celeberstan, that's just my easy-to-remember phrase for what Girard called

00:09:47.380 external mediators of desire. So these are people that we have no possibility of coming into

00:09:55.880 serious contact with. Like, we can't compete with them for the same things. We can't be their rivals.

00:10:01.640 Now, that could be because they're dead. They're a historical figure. It could be because they're

00:10:06.040 fictional, a fictional character. So, you know, fictional characters can become models of desire

00:10:10.880 to us just like real people can. You know, and Don Quixote, you know, he read a fictional story and,

00:10:16.020 you know, caused him to go and change his whole life and become a nighterrant. Or it can just be 0.99

00:10:20.800 because there's such a social gap between us that there's really no possibility of us competing

00:10:26.580 seriously for the same things, right? Jeff Bezos, for me, is in celeberstan. He's a total external

00:10:32.720 mediator of desire for me. There's no possibility of us competing. So Elon Musk might be the other kind

00:10:39.400 model to Jeff Bezos and the other kind of model he calls an internal mediator of desire. And these

00:10:46.400 are people that are inside of our worlds. They're close to us. They're the people that we normally

00:10:51.800 don't recognize as models of desire for us. And we have the possibility of coming into contact with

00:10:58.400 them, competing with them, becoming rivals to them. And I call this in the book, Freshmanistan,

00:11:04.920 because it's similar to the experience of being a freshman all over again. You're all,

00:11:10.200 you have a lot in common. You're more alike than you're different. You're all the same age. Most of

00:11:14.600 the kids don't have a lot of money. They're all kind of in the same boat, taking the same classes.

00:11:19.240 And that's a situation where everybody is an internal mediator of desire to pretty much everybody

00:11:24.360 else. Okay. So let's break this down a little. So our desires can be influenced by celebrities

00:11:29.560 and public figures who are distant from us, or they can be influenced by people who are close to

00:11:35.180 us and like us. But in that first category, people who are out of our league, it seems to be less

00:11:41.180 fraught. Like there's less conflict there. Why is that? And why is it that if I decide to copy

00:11:48.580 something Elon Musk does, like his morning routine, I'm going to do exactly what he does for his morning

00:11:52.760 routine, that's okay. But if I decide to copy something my brother does exactly like he does,

00:11:59.640 he might be a little bothered by that. Right. So, I mean, the simplest explanation

00:12:03.760 is that there's no possibility of serious conflict arising from imitating models that are

00:12:10.740 outside of our world, that are like transcendent to the world that we live in. You know, we're never

00:12:15.420 going to, you know, come into serious conflict with them because we can't. So in other words,

00:12:21.340 the other person is not going to imitate back. There's no reflexivity in that situation,

00:12:26.380 which means it's less, it's less dynamic. So, I mean, I don't, I have no idea what Elon Musk's,

00:12:32.300 you know, morning routine is. It might be good. It might be stupid. I don't know,

00:12:35.720 but you're not going to, I mean, that's a perfectly fine thing to, to, to imitate or the,

00:12:42.180 you know, the aspirations of people in history, you know, people that we aspire to emulate,

00:12:46.760 right. Whether it's Martin Luther King or some famous athlete, this is how we grow. I mean,

00:12:51.740 I, you know, most people start out playing sports by emulating a great, like you, you watch Michael

00:12:56.800 Jordan and you emulate his, his style and the way that he plays. I think Kobe Bryant told the story

00:13:03.000 until a certain point, if that person is, is sort of in your world. And by the way, we can,

00:13:09.760 we, people can move between these two worlds. Michael Jordan started out as an external mediator to him,

00:13:15.120 but he became an internal mediator when they both played in the NBA and that, you know,

00:13:21.580 competition and rivalry can be an incredibly positive thing. I mean, it can drive innovation.

00:13:25.900 It can push people to be better, but in many cases, like in workplaces, in families, it's the

00:13:33.080 aspect of internal rivalry where people are really close to each other that we often don't recognize,

00:13:39.480 you know, the potential for serious conflict for, for misery and just getting like

00:13:44.680 caught in these cycles of like never ending comparison games, which we can't really do

00:13:49.940 with, you know, these, these sort of people that are in celebrity.

00:13:53.500 And I think that's, it's counterintuitive because that you'd have more rivalry with people who are

00:13:58.420 more like you, you'd think it'd be the opposite. But when you stop and think about it, it's like,

00:14:03.240 yeah, I don't really care. I don't really compare myself to some billionaire, but if there's like

00:14:09.800 some podcaster, sort of the same size, I'm, I'm focused in on that person, like, what are they

00:14:15.320 doing? What do I need to do? What they're doing? The, like the Joe Rogan's not even on my radar.

00:14:19.480 Cause he's just, he's way bigger than I'll ever be probably. But I, I, I'm keyed in more the people

00:14:25.180 who are like me.

00:14:27.060 Right. Yeah. I mean, if you ask most people who they're more, you know, jealous of or something,

00:14:32.580 or who they're paying attention to more, is it, you know, Jeff Bezos, you know, billionaire with

00:14:38.400 a yacht, or is it the person that went to the same college as they did and works in the same

00:14:43.520 industry and makes an extra 5,000 bucks a year or seems to vacation to nice spots and posted on

00:14:51.220 their Instagram. I mean, for everybody, it's the second person, right? There's just more in common

00:14:56.160 with them. We pay attention to them more. So in a sense, you know, jealousy, or you could even say

00:15:01.840 envy is kind of a function of proximity and similarity. So this, okay. The, most of the

00:15:08.720 conflict then when we, when we're starting to look for models and how to behave or how to have

00:15:13.620 certain desires, most of the conflict happens when there's people who are like us. You also argue,

00:15:20.280 make this case that, you know, the models within Freshmanistan kind of, they end up distorting 0.99

00:15:26.540 reality, even though they are more like us. If we just focus on that, it can tend to

00:15:31.640 distort reality. How so?

00:15:34.140 It just, it can distort reality because for one, we project all kinds of things on people

00:15:39.260 without really knowing much about them at all. So, you know, Gerard said that all human desire

00:15:45.540 is fundamentally not a desire for things. It's a desire for being itself. It's, he calls it

00:15:52.160 metaphysical desire. So we think that we, we lack something and we all do. And we think that this

00:15:59.560 other person, and this is all, you know, we never usually think of this consciously, but the reason

00:16:04.900 why we would adopt somebody else as a model of desire at all is because at some pre-conscious

00:16:10.380 or subconscious level, we think that they just have some quality of being that we don't. And that

00:16:16.780 if maybe we wanted some of the same things, or if we acquired some of the same things, that it would

00:16:22.500 turn us more into the kind of person that we want to be. And because we're kind of just playing a

00:16:29.880 guessing game, like, you know, we really don't know, we're projecting all of these illusions

00:16:33.940 on people around us. It leads to incredible, you know, distortions. And, you know, this is,

00:16:40.760 I talk a lot about this in the book, right? Sort of people that are extremely confident,

00:16:46.080 to give you an example, are typically incredibly attractive, right? Like people of the opposite 0.92

00:16:51.420 sex that are incredibly confident, people that, and what is confidence, right? It's like knowing

00:16:56.340 what you want and projecting that you know what you want. And why is that so powerful from the

00:17:02.920 standpoint of mimesis and mimetic desire? Well, most people, you know, if they, if they're really

00:17:08.880 honest with themselves, are super confused about what they want. So when there's somebody that really

00:17:13.320 seems like they know, that's incredibly attractive, they make a really powerful model of desire for

00:17:19.780 us, whether it's a man or a woman, whatever. And, you know, we have to be aware of that. And some

00:17:24.340 people play games with that, right? It's kind of, people play hard to get, people project all kinds

00:17:29.240 of things, because it's almost wired into us. Like we're looking for that. We're looking for people

00:17:34.260 that can help show us what to want. And those people are powerful.

00:17:37.420 And why does Freshmanistan cause mimetic rivalries? Why, I mean, why do we suddenly see the, like the 0.95

00:17:45.820 world as sort of a zero-sum game? Whenever we're looking at other people and what they're doing,

00:17:51.320 we, we start doing what they're doing. We're thinking, well, man, if, if he gets it, then I'm

00:17:56.060 not going to get anything when that really might not be the case.

00:18:00.500 Yeah. A zero-sum game is a great word to describe Freshmanistan. You know, why, why do we do that?

00:18:06.640 I mean, our world becomes very small in, in Freshmanistan. And this is one of the reasons 1.00

00:18:11.700 why I think what I call in the book, you know, transcendent models of desire, models of desire.

00:18:18.460 I mean, not all of our models have to be sort of transcendent models, but some of them have

00:18:22.800 to be because in a complete absence of any kind of transcendent model, they all have to

00:18:28.520 come from inside the system that we're already in, whether that's your company, whether it's

00:18:32.380 your school, whether it's your little, you know, industry that you work in. And that's,

00:18:36.860 that's dangerous, right? It becomes like a pot, right? Like a pressure cooker, because there's

00:18:41.220 nothing outside of it to kind of make us turn away from each other and look at something beyond.

00:18:46.720 And when I say transcendent models, I mean, you know, virtues are transcendent models.

00:18:51.440 You know, their religions have transcendent models. It could even just be as simple as

00:18:57.500 just outside of your own industry or something like that, or from the past or just some aspiration

00:19:03.820 in the future so that we're not turned inward. So Freshmanistan has a, has the effect of turning

00:19:09.580 everybody inwards on each other, sort of navel gazing and comparing. And it escalates sort of the

00:19:16.760 nature of mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry is always to escalate. And that can create a pretty

00:19:21.160 dangerous situation. How has social media exacerbated Freshmanistan, mimetic rivalry?

00:19:27.760 I mean, I, my opinion is that social media has basically, you know, turned the world into a

00:19:32.140 Freshmanistan. I mean, the, you know, my, my dad, you know, grew up in the fifties in Detroit in his

00:19:38.800 little high school with a couple hundred kids in it. And that was like, that was his universe models,

00:19:43.220 right? He probably had four or five that were super cool, that were real models.

00:19:46.740 of desire for him. But now, I mean, I can't really even imagine. I mean, now from the age of eight,

00:19:53.120 nine, 10 years old, you have a little device in your pocket that projects the desires of quite

00:19:59.740 literally billions of people from every corner of the globe into, into a child's brain and heart and 0.95

00:20:05.460 mind. And I don't think that we quite know what that's doing to us. And one of the things about

00:20:11.040 social media, and this goes back to, you know, when somebody's similar to us that we're more likely to

00:20:16.980 take them as a rival. And so the whole premise of social media is really, it's, it's made us more

00:20:23.480 alike. We have, we all have the same profile constraints and the case of Twitter, we can only

00:20:29.440 use the same number of characters. It sort of forced us all into very similar boxes. It's almost

00:20:34.560 like taking the world and trying to fit us all socially speaking under the head of a pin. We're

00:20:39.580 all incredibly close together. We're more alike. So it sets off this like crisis of sameness,

00:20:45.720 where everybody's trying to differentiate themselves from everybody else in this

00:20:50.360 sea of mediocrity, this sea of sameness. And I actually think that's why people and studies have

00:20:56.920 shown this. People basically say like more provocative and extremist things online, like

00:21:03.220 beyond what they even believe, beyond what they would tell you in private, because it's like the

00:21:08.620 only way to stand out in this crowd. So I think social media from the standpoint of mimetic theory

00:21:14.080 is, is incredibly dangerous. And I think we're going to have to evolve and find ways to, you know,

00:21:19.400 to, to allow people to, I don't have the answer. If I had it, I'd start the company, but I'm,

00:21:25.280 I'm working on it. Well, and the other thing social media has done is it's, it's taken models

00:21:29.400 from Celebristan and moved them to Freshmanistan. Right now, like you can, in your Instagram feed,

00:21:35.140 you have your, your siblings, your mom and dad, your, their dog pictures they're posting. But then

00:21:40.200 you're also seeing like personal pictures from, you know, sports athletes you follow, politicians.

00:21:45.700 It's all in the same, it's all the same. Right. And that's an incredibly important thing.

00:21:52.160 So if it's true that, you know, we're more captivated by the models that seem more like 0.97

00:21:57.780 us, then the best thing that a celebrity could do is make themselves appear to be more like

00:22:03.640 us. And I think that's what we do see. You know, we see them in their home, we see them

00:22:09.040 lounging around and it's like, Oh, they're just like me. So it's a, that, that illusion is that's

00:22:13.900 an important part of the marketing strategy to, to, to show that. And then now we have, you know,

00:22:19.220 YouTube stars that, you know, are, are just blowing up overnight seemingly. And that's

00:22:24.080 even more seductive because it's like, well, that, that could be me. So I think there's

00:22:27.880 definitely social media is blurring the lines between Celebristan and Freshmanistan. And that's

00:22:33.120 part of its allure.

00:22:34.680 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:22:39.140 And now back to the show. And so in mimetic theory, you described there's two cycles to it.

00:22:44.820 The first one is destructive. The second is positive. What does a destructive mimetic cycle

00:22:50.420 look like?

00:22:52.180 So these cycles, I don't know if Girard ever used these terms. So these, these are my terms

00:22:57.700 to kind of describe two different ways of, of, of looking at mimetic desire, because it's important

00:23:02.500 to realize that mimetic desire is not just this dark negative thing. Although, you know, Girard tended

00:23:08.160 to focus on the negative side because cycle one is the destructive cycle. It's kind of the default

00:23:14.380 cycle where if we don't know that we're these mimetic creatures and we're imitating the desires

00:23:20.600 of others, we're entering into rivalries and, and competition. We might not even know that

00:23:26.700 we are, and it eventually leads to, to conflict, which, you know, Girard says the conflict spreads

00:23:34.380 by contagion because desires are, are contagious, right? They spread and rivalry is also contagious

00:23:42.020 and people get more and more people get drawn into it. So when you have kind of a closed system

00:23:47.260 or a closed society, that this cycle of, of destructive mimetic desire, where nobody realizes

00:23:53.320 that they're, that they're kind of caught up in a mimetic escalating crisis, these have typically

00:23:58.960 been resolved in history through this, what he calls the scapegoat mechanism. And let me give you

00:24:05.720 one example of how a negative cycle was immediately transformed into a positive cycle. And if I can

00:24:12.860 use a biblical example, I just, I find it to be the most powerful one.

00:24:16.380 Sure. Go for it.

00:24:17.100 Yeah. So, you know, in, in the gospel of John, you have a, a stoning, which a stoning of a woman 0.99

00:24:24.160 who had been caught in the act of adultery. And, you know, she's brought into the square and the men

00:24:30.960 are picking up the stones, ready to stone her. And Jesus enters the scene. And this is the very famous

00:24:37.840 story where, you know, he challenges them, you know, you who is without sin, you know, throw the

00:24:43.720 first stone and immediately, you know, one drops the stone and the next person drops the stone and they

00:24:50.420 all eventually walk away. This story is incredibly powerful to read through the lens of mimetic

00:24:56.900 theory, because what had been happening was a negative cycle of mimetic escalation.

00:25:03.780 So what's the power of the first stone? Well, it's the first stone is the hardest one to throw

00:25:08.400 because there's no model. The second stone is, is so much easier to throw once there's been a model

00:25:14.400 and the third's even easier and the fourth is even easier. So through this contagion of mimetic desire,

00:25:21.020 all of these people had these stones ready to go. And once the first one had been thrown,

00:25:26.000 you can guarantee that a thousand or however many people were there, stones would have been thrown.

00:25:31.840 And the cycle was diffused and it was literally transformed into a positive one where now the

00:25:39.600 first model is not the stone thrown. It's the stone dropped on the ground and the man walking away.

00:25:47.160 Now that's a positive model to follow and a second and a third and fourth person did it.

00:25:52.160 So it was instantly subverted. And, you know, this, you know, you can transpose this story,

00:25:58.280 I think, to a lot of things in life, you know, to, to, to cancel culture. Like you don't see

00:26:04.420 what happened in that story happening very often, more often than not. I think 99% of the time

00:26:10.580 it escalates until somebody gets hurt. And, you know, that's, that, that was a total transformation.

00:26:16.200 I think it's very illustrative of these two different cycles of desire.

00:26:20.080 Yeah. I mean, I think that idea, it helps explain like the internet pylons. I think that there's,

00:26:24.120 I've actually seen studies where sociologists or psychology, whoever does this, would look at

00:26:28.880 this stuff on the internet with internet comments. They would do things where they would moderate

00:26:33.500 comments and not publish them right away. They'd only, they'd have to prove them first. And what

00:26:37.280 they noticed is that if they approve like a negative comment first, then the rest of the comments

00:26:43.900 that came in after that would be all negative. But if they approve the positive comment first,

00:26:49.580 the negative comments would go down and it'd all be like positive, which is, it just goes to show

00:26:54.040 like, I mean, we often think that we're, we're independent, rational thinking people and we are,

00:26:59.600 but we're also, we imitate, like we're very influenced by, by our models around us.

00:27:05.220 Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're, we're mimetic and it takes a certain amount of humility to realize

00:27:09.460 that it's like not something that a lot of people want to talk about in a, in a culture

00:27:13.800 where we really prize innovation and we juxtapose it to imitation. Like one thing can't exist without

00:27:19.440 the other. And that's just false. There's a continuum. I've heard some people say that,

00:27:23.860 you know, maybe the solution or a way to slow down some of the more nasty aspects of cancel

00:27:29.680 culture would just be that we all are pseudo anonymous or something like that. So that, you know,

00:27:33.880 you're, you yourself, you know, can't become victim of, of, of a cancellation. But I, I think that's

00:27:39.480 wrong because if you look at studies, when people are anonymous or pseudo anonymous, it's been shown

00:27:45.760 that they're much more likely to, to, to be the first one to comment, you know, in a, in a very

00:27:51.660 negative way on a thread, on an article. Like we, we know that. And when people have to take

00:27:56.900 responsibility for it, they're, they're a little more careful about what they have to say.

00:28:00.120 Well, you give an example in the book and we don't think into the details of it, but maybe the

00:28:03.480 highlights of it, of a destructive mimetic cycle that happened at Zappos. And I think if you've been

00:28:09.000 paying attention to the business media, people have read about Zappos, it was sort of like this

00:28:12.960 darling of the startup world. It was implementing all these radical ideas about management that were

00:28:19.540 different from traditional management theories. What happened there? How did those ideas that

00:28:23.940 looked like people thought were pretty cool actually ended up maybe leading to Zappos kind

00:28:29.140 of not floundering a bit? I have a bit of a contrarian take on what happened at Zappos because I was

00:28:34.640 around at that time and was a good friend of Tony Hsieh, rest in peace. And, you know, what I saw

00:28:39.980 happening was what I would describe as, as kind of a memetic crisis. So Zappos very successful. It

00:28:46.540 was kind of a darling of the startup world. They'd surpassed a billion dollars in sales.

00:28:51.100 Tony was always very innovative kind of thinker and launched a project called the Downtown Project

00:28:57.240 that really wanted to remake all of downtown Las Vegas, where I lived at the time,

00:29:00.980 into a startup community. And kind of, you could think of it like extend the campus of Zappos to

00:29:06.260 kind of encompass all of downtown Vegas, and then, you know, propagate the culture out to the city,

00:29:12.580 like the city as a startup, essentially. And what they did is they adopted some management

00:29:16.460 philosophies that were extremely non-hierarchical, like holacracy. They basically got rid of their

00:29:23.140 visible management structure overnight. So Tony was no longer the CEO. Nobody actually even had titles

00:29:28.380 anymore. And, you know, there are systems in place. So it wasn't like a free-for-all. There's

00:29:33.220 actually incredibly disciplined procedures for making decisions in groups. But what I saw happen

00:29:40.120 is that desires and memetic desire and hierarchies basically just went underground. So like what had

00:29:47.820 been visible in the light was now totally underground. Dostoevsky wrote this really important

00:29:54.300 book, kind of the first modern novel, Notes from the Underground, about this underground man whose

00:29:58.760 desires were all underground. And I saw like everybody in the company basically did that.

00:30:04.280 And all these little rivalries formed, you know, things were spread by contagion, rumors, gossip. I'd

00:30:10.400 never seen so much in my life. I'd been around Zappos for a few years. And it was essentially,

00:30:15.040 it was a memetic crisis. And, you know, some people were hurt. And, you know, I think some

00:30:20.160 scapegoats were made. So, you know, we're still learning more about what happened down there.

00:30:24.780 But when I was in the midst of it, that's kind of my take on it. And especially now that I've had a

00:30:29.780 chance to think about it through the lens of memetic desire and theory.

00:30:34.000 I've been, before I read your book, I've been kind of doing my own personal deep dive into envy.

00:30:39.320 So I picked up a bunch of books about envy. And a lot of philosophers and anthropologists,

00:30:44.700 you know, Tocqueville noticed this, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, a lot of the 19th century

00:30:48.100 existentialists noticed this, that envy, so envy is, you know, you feel like you see something,

00:30:54.960 somebody has something that you want, and like, you don't want them to have, like,

00:30:58.220 makes you feel like resentful and bitter. They've noticed that envy increases as societies become

00:31:04.380 more egalitarian, and that envy increases, you know, conflict increases. How did, did Gerard make

00:31:11.540 a distinction between memetic desire and envy?

00:31:13.960 I think Gerard would just say that envy is a form of memetic desire, and that memetic desire

00:31:20.300 manifests itself often as envy. And perhaps even, you know, envy might be the predominant form of

00:31:28.160 memetic desire and rivalry in today's world. That's how I would explain it. So memetic desire is kind of

00:31:34.540 a layer deeper, and envy is the way that it's kind of rearing its ugly head. I think Gerard said

00:31:39.820 something to the effect of, you know, nobody can talk about envy. I think the reason that we talk

00:31:45.500 about sex so much is that nobody dares talk about their envy. Like, the real repression in the Freudian

00:31:50.900 sense is the repression of envy. And that's a serious problem. Like, nobody talks about it publicly,

00:31:56.020 which probably means it's pretty prevalent. And I find it interesting, and I've read Tocqueville and,

00:32:00.560 you know, Michael Novak is a thinker that I like a lot. And they noted that, you know,

00:32:06.180 in earlier times in history, there were times when people would rejoice, you know, at the success of

00:32:12.280 others because it meant, like in their town or in their village, because it meant that there was

00:32:16.760 coming prosperity to their area or to their nation or to their city or something. It seems a bit

00:32:22.420 different now. And I don't know what's changed. It's not like envy's always been with us. It's not

00:32:27.560 like envy wasn't around or people weren't envious then. But it seems like it has become stronger and

00:32:35.180 just more of the ethos. And I don't know, maybe it's just because, you know, we don't, we're not

00:32:39.380 willing to openly acknowledge it.

00:32:41.240 Yeah. Yeah. Tocqueville said that'd be the, that's the biggest problem of the democratic spirit,

00:32:45.660 the democratic age is that envy. Everyone's, and everyone's just going to kind of play it safe.

00:32:49.960 They don't want to like lift their head up too much because they know if they do, they're going

00:32:53.160 to get hammered down and it causes a whole bunch of problems. And, and I mean, there's been like

00:32:57.640 people propose solutions for envy, you know, at the extreme end, it'd be like, well, you know,

00:33:02.220 Marx would be like, well, just make everyone the same, right? We'll get rid of, you know,

00:33:05.760 social classes through this sort of utopianism. But the interesting thing though, is like,

00:33:10.600 according to mimetic desire theory, and even some theories of envy, as you do that, you'll just

00:33:14.980 increase conflict. So like the solution actually might make things worse.

00:33:20.820 Yeah. I think that it would absolutely increase conflict. And one of the interesting things is that

00:33:25.780 wealth has traditionally been fairly hidden and mysterious. Like, you know, you see a wealth,

00:33:31.600 it's not like there weren't wealthy people, but we didn't sort of, we didn't have social media.

00:33:37.100 So, you know, people weren't sort of like showing their lost porn and their gains and Reddit forums

00:33:41.780 and stuff like that. And, you know, tweeting about, you know, how much they just made in crypto for

00:33:46.500 the day. So like, what's going to happen when like everybody knows how much everybody else is making in

00:33:51.220 the stock market, it is just a totally different world. So it seems like the kind of world that's

00:33:55.560 ripe for fueling envy, in my opinion.

00:33:57.480 Another interesting point you make is that, okay, people might hear this theory of this idea of

00:34:02.180 mimetic theory, mimetic desire, and they think, well, I'm not, I'm not a sheep. I, I make my own

00:34:07.920 decisions. Gerard, and you also flesh this out some more is that once you do that, you're probably the

00:34:13.160 most susceptible to mimetic rivalry and mimetic desires. Why is it that when you think I'm, I've

00:34:19.900 escaped the sheepdom, why are you more prone to fall into mimetic rivals? 0.99

00:34:24.940 Gerard said, the effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch or

00:34:32.000 something like that. You know, and in the book, I joke around about, you know, why do all hipsters 1.00

00:34:36.160 look the same? Well, part of it might be because they don't realize that they, they're also still

00:34:41.120 mimetic, right? So they've rejected the popular culture only to adopt, you know, a new model that 0.80

00:34:48.640 are in the subculture. So it's, you know, this, this funny thing that we joke about, but it's like,

00:34:52.900 normally, like the, the less mimetic you're convinced you are, like the more that you have

00:34:57.580 that conceit, you know, the, the, the more mimetic you, you may be right because you're

00:35:02.040 not even aware of it. So it's kind of like every scam artist kind of knows, like, you know,

00:35:07.800 the first step is just to get people as comfortable as possible and, and to develop a certain level

00:35:12.460 of trust. So I guess the lesson here is, you know, having a certain sense of humility and,

00:35:17.080 and, and awareness of, you know, who we are as creatures and that, you know, we are mimetic

00:35:21.480 and we all have models probably, whether we know it or not, models of manliness, models of

00:35:27.060 lifestyles, right? Of who we want to be as a, as a father or something. So, you know, and, and I think

00:35:32.080 just being able to have open conversations about that, being able to recognize who our models are

00:35:36.600 is an important part of the process.

00:35:38.940 Well, that's interesting points. I want to flesh that. So even when you, you can have a mimetic rivalry

00:35:43.720 with somebody, even when you're not imitating, but you're doing the opposite of what they do.

00:35:50.160 Yeah. So that's, you can call that mirrored imitation. Okay. So that means that the person

00:35:55.120 is still very much a model to us, but the way that we're, and so basically our, we're taking action

00:36:02.280 based on what they do. So in politics, you can sometimes, you could refer to this as negative

00:36:06.640 partisanship, right? It's like, well, if that side is doing that, like we'd be mortified if we ever

00:36:11.840 wanted to pass the same bill. So we better go do something different, right? It's like

00:36:15.120 that other, the irony is that like the other side is still very much a model of desire because our

00:36:21.820 desires are being shaped by their desires and influenced by their desires. One of the funny

00:36:27.160 stories, one of the funnier stories about this is, you know, the rapper Gucci Mane, and she wrote a

00:36:32.700 pretty good autobiography. It tells a story of how there was a rival rap group in Atlanta that put out

00:36:37.460 a song called white tea, pretty tame song, but it had a lot of success and they were a rival to him.

00:36:44.280 They were a model and he put out a song called black tea, which is a little bit edgier, took things

00:36:49.140 to the next level. And that song blew up too. So sure. It's not one for one. It's not positive

00:36:55.080 imitation. It's imitation. That's just negatively correlated with whatever the model is doing.

00:37:01.200 So our attempts to differentiate ourselves are, is a form of, you could call it negative or mirrored

00:37:07.680 imitation. It's like, we're still taking that person as a model. Siblings do this all the time.

00:37:11.440 Like big brother is wearing that, then I'll never wear that. If he's buying this kind of a car,

00:37:16.300 then I have to buy this kind of a car. Those people are super important for us and they're,

00:37:20.500 they're forms of mimetic rivals. We're just imitating them or reacting to them a little bit differently.

00:37:25.260 So what do you do with this information? Like once you learn this stuff, you start seeing like,

00:37:29.140 oh man, the things I want, like you can start seeing where you got those models from,

00:37:34.140 or even the things you don't want, you realize, I don't want it because like this model,

00:37:38.700 like, what do you do with this information? Are you able to sort of escape the cycle of mimetic

00:37:43.520 desire, sort of like reach mimetic nirvana where you're in, it's no longer holds any sway on you?

00:37:49.860 Yeah. Well, I, I, I certainly haven't yet, Brett. I do. I will say that I have a level of freedom

00:37:54.740 that I didn't have in my twenties for sure. You know, I'm able to see when I'm being hyper mimetic,

00:37:59.540 when I'm getting caught up in a crowd, when I have a tendency to scapegoat other people,

00:38:03.540 I can sort of diffuse my mimetic tendencies in myself and sometimes, you know, in others and just

00:38:12.560 focus a little bit more on what's important. I choose my goals more carefully. I check myself and

00:38:17.600 I'm getting overly concerned with, with what somebody else is doing. Somebody that I might not even

00:38:22.180 recognize as a rival, that's really important. And then, you know, we can, you know, we have

00:38:26.660 intentionality. We have the freedom to, I mean, at the very least to choose our models. So, you know,

00:38:31.260 I try to cultivate positive models and positive mimetic desire with all of my work, with all of

00:38:36.680 my projects and ventures, the kind of about creating or generating positive mimetic desire.

00:38:41.700 And I mean, frankly, I've, I've followed the art of manliness for a long time. And I think that's

00:38:45.560 what you're doing. I mean, it's like, it's a, there's a mimetic desire to be better men.

00:38:49.040 And, you know, my desire to do that is kindled when I see other men wanting to be better men and

00:38:53.800 we can emulate in positive ways. So once we have a certain awareness that this is real,

00:38:59.600 this is, you know, part of human nature, this is deep seated stuff. You know, we can just begin

00:39:04.440 to make choices about who we surround ourselves by, the kind of models that we adopt, the positive ones,

00:39:10.320 putting some boundaries between us and negative models. And then, you know, when we find ourselves

00:39:14.840 reacting or just getting caught up in stupid things that are taking our eye off the ball,

00:39:19.600 taking us away from our purpose, our vocation, whatever it is we want to do in life, because 0.97

00:39:24.220 we're looking to our right and our left, right? Like we're hyper mimetic. We just begin to notice

00:39:29.500 ourselves doing that. And we can develop some, some muscles, you know, to help us get a little

00:39:34.880 bit better at extracting ourselves from that stuff.

00:39:38.000 And also keen on those transcendent desires that Gerard talked about, like those virtues,

00:39:42.500 like make that your focus instead of social models.

00:39:46.840 And that, that was a key for me. You know, I was in the startup world. I was in the Silicon Valley

00:39:50.500 scene and I was looking around for a model that I couldn't find there. And the only way that I was

00:39:57.500 able to kind of escape, you know, with my soul was to find transcendent models that were outside of the

00:40:03.940 world that I was, you know, so caught up in. And I don't know what would have happened to me if I

00:40:07.600 hadn't done that, but I was lucky enough to have some, some great models of desire in my life that

00:40:12.920 modeled what it means to be a man and a husband and a father to develop virtues, right? I saw virtue

00:40:18.540 with my own eyes and I wanted to emulate that. And that was, that kind of pulled me out of,

00:40:23.600 of a freshman in a stand, so to speak. So the transcendent models are critical.

00:40:27.880 And I think a point you make though, is that these mimetic rivalries, they can be productive

00:40:31.460 because they can, you know, you push yourself and you give, but the trick is to like,

00:40:35.300 not let it consume you and switch over that destructive rivalry. And you have this great

00:40:40.240 story about the competition between Lamborghini and Ferrari and how Lamborghini kind of, he figured

00:40:45.380 out a way to get the benefits of that mimetic rivalry, but then I guess pull out before it

00:40:51.380 became destructive. Yeah. So, you know, Lamborghini was a tractor, tractor maker before he ever got into

00:40:56.780 cars. And I won't tell the whole story. It's pretty widely known, but I found some details that I put

00:41:01.700 into the book because I found this obscure book in Italy and translated a lot of, a lot of the stories

00:41:06.380 in it into English for the first time. So there's a bit of the backstory to this rivalry between

00:41:11.260 Ferrari and Lamborghini, but Lamborghini got into the car business because Enzo Ferrari, what was a model

00:41:16.700 for him? And he humiliated him. He told him he didn't know how to drive a Ferrari. And the reason

00:41:22.520 that he kept breaking his clutch was because he just didn't know how to drive. And he pissed Lamborghini

00:41:26.660 off and Lamborghini took him as a rival and said, damn it, I'm going to make a better car than you 0.97

00:41:32.120 make with a clutch that doesn't break. And he did. He put one of his tractor clutches in it. And, 0.93

00:41:36.600 and, you know, he ended up within two years, he'd produced the first Lamborghini, but he did,

00:41:41.000 he knew when to stop, right? Like he, he didn't let the personal rivalry with Enzo Ferrari determine the

00:41:49.420 future of his business and the future of his life and just like totally consume him. So he reached a fork

00:41:54.780 in the road with that business after he now had a successful car company. He could have taken the

00:42:00.480 competition with Ferrari to the extreme. He could have entered the racing business. He could have

00:42:04.920 just like lived the rest of his life miserable, basically, right? Consumed by constantly measuring

00:42:10.620 himself according to Ferrari, but he didn't do that. You know, he's incredibly mature. I mean,

00:42:15.080 he, he reached a point where he ended up retiring and basically starting a vineyard. And I mean,

00:42:19.860 the cars are more popular than ever, but he was able to kind of save himself from the more destructive

00:42:25.460 aspects of that, or that rivalry. So he used it for innovation. He used it to start a new company

00:42:31.160 and he, but he didn't let it take him off track, right? He didn't, he took the focus off of the

00:42:38.280 personal rivalry. And that could be hard or scary to do once you like, you decide you're not going to

00:42:43.160 play the game anymore, right? Like you decide you're just going to opt out. People are like,

00:42:46.900 what are you doing? Like you're, you're not, you're supposed to be paying attention to this

00:42:50.160 stuff. And he's like, I just don't care. And they're like, you're a crazy person. Like

00:42:53.000 that can, that can be, that can be risky. Well, we have, we have kind of a cult of competition.

00:42:57.960 I mean, I think competition is pretty positive. I think it's great in sports. I think it's good

00:43:02.440 in business, but we have a cult of competition. It's like become an ideology, right? Where if you

00:43:06.500 don't compete, you're a quitter or something. I mean, there's a lot of negative baggage attached to

00:43:10.760 people that opt out of some of those things, even when it's the right thing to do. So I think,

00:43:15.560 you know, we, we can't, we can't fall into the, that, that trap of thinking that competition is

00:43:22.400 always a positive thing. I mean, sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. And that was the wisdom

00:43:28.040 of Lamborghini was to know the difference between the two. I mean, knowing the differences is half

00:43:32.020 the battle in life. And he certainly was able to recognize that. Well, Luke, where can people go to

00:43:36.280 learn more about the book and your work? They can buy the book, you know, as of June 1st,

00:43:40.200 anywhere they like to buy books and at LukeBurgess.com. I've got a website. I published a

00:43:44.760 sub stack where I go a lot deeper into these topics, things I just didn't have room to go

00:43:48.720 into in the book. Fantastic. Well, Luke Burgess, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:43:52.100 Thanks so much, Brad. It's been great. My guest today was Luke Burgess. He's the author of the

00:43:56.100 book, Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:44:00.420 You can find out more information about his work at his website, lukeburgess.com. Also check out

00:44:04.380 our show notes at aom.is slash wanting, where you can find links to resources, where you delve deeper

00:44:08.740 into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast. Check out our website

00:44:20.040 at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written

00:44:24.060 over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free

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00:44:52.300 Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the A1 podcast, but put

00:44:56.260 what you've heard into action.

00:45:04.840 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - June 07, 2021

Why Do We Want What We Want？

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