Why Do We Want What We Want？
Episode Stats
Summary
Why do we want the things we want? Most of us have no idea. In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay talks with author Luke Burgess about why we want what we want. They discuss the role that other people in our lives play in shaping our desires and how we can harness them.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, why do we
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want the things we want? Well, we'll offer up plenty of reasons to explain our choices. My
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guest today says the real reason we want the things we want is this. Other people in our
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lives want those same things. His name is Luke Burgess and he studied philosophy, theology,
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and classical literature, works as an entrepreneur, investor, and educator, and is the author of the
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book Wanting, The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. Luke and I discuss how our
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desires are strongly mimetic, that is imitative, and how there are two groups of people that act
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as models of desire for us. First, you have your celebrities and public figures who are
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distant from us, and then you have friends, family, and colleagues who are close to us.
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Luke then explains why it's actually the latter group where we experience the most rivalry and
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conflict because the more similar we are to somebody, the more we end up competing for the
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same things, the more envy we experience, and the more we want to differentiate ourselves from the
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crowd, even though the areas in which to do so can be increasingly small. In fact, as Luke will
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explain, someone can be a model of desire not only in influence us to imitate them, but in motivating
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us to act in the opposite way. Luke shares how mimetic desire can be both a negative and destructive
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force or a positive and productive one, and offers advice on how to harness it for the latter
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purpose by humbly recognizing the way other people are influencing our wants and using that
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knowledge to opt out of games you don't want to play, utilize the healthy aspects of competition
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without allowing it to get us off track and intentionally choose worthy, even transcendent
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models desired to emulate. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash
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You got a new book out called Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. And this book is
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about why we want the things we want. And something you don't think about, it's like,
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why do I want that thing? Why do I like this thing? When people offer an explanation why they
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want a job, why they want a specific person as a partner, what's the typical explanation for why we
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Yeah, I mean, what's most typical is that we don't have any explanation at all. We just take
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it for granted. We take our desires for granted. And we assume that we want things because we just
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know that they're good for us. There's some perceived good that we determine and that we
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arrive at the pursuit of things totally independently. For instance, I want to go to
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Thailand because it just has the best beaches and the best food. And I name all of these objective
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qualities. So we think that there's a one-to-one relationship between ourselves and the thing we
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want, as if we kind of, you know, generate the objects of our desire or choose the objects of our
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desire, you know, just through our imperial autonomous self. And the shortcoming of this
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way of thinking is that we're incredibly social creatures. And this explanation of desire doesn't
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take into account the way that desire is generated and shaped and formed by other people in our lives.
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And this is where mimetic theory comes in. So what is sort of the big picture overview of
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mimetic theory and who came up with it? Sure. So mimetic comes from the Greek word meaning to
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imitate. So the fundamental idea of all of mimetic theory is this concept of mimetic desire. And
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that's just to say that desire, human desire, especially abstract desires, not needs, but the
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more abstract our desires are, the more they need to be mediated to us or shaped by a third party or a
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third person, some hidden influence that helps determine why we choose to pursue one thing rather
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than another. So rather than thinking of a one-to-one relationship or straight line between me and the
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things that I want, there's this other kind of hidden factor. And those are the people or groups or things
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that are models of desire for me. And I just want to be very clear. I mean, there's no doubt there's a
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biological basis for all kinds of basic needs. If I'm hungry, I want to eat. If I'm cold, I want to
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be warm. But me being thirsty and wanting to drink, you know, because I have instincts, right? That,
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you know, if I see water in the desert, I don't need a model to show me that I want to drink that
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water. But it doesn't explain why if I see somebody at a bar drinking a really cold gin martini,
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slightly dirty with three olives in it, why I all of a sudden want to drink that specific drink
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when 30 seconds ago, I just wanted a beer. So there's this, you know, there's models of desire
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around us all the time. And the more we get into abstract thing, and that's kind of a superficial
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example, but careers or forms of fitness, we always like to believe that there's a real just
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objective explanation. We don't always account for the models. So this, where does this come from?
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I mean, sometimes this seems kind of obvious, right? Like, I mean, aren't we affected by people
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around us? But if you go deeper with mimetic theory, you begin to realize that it's not so
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obvious. So this theory came from a French social theorist named René Girard. He came to the States
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shortly after World War II, ended up staying in the States for the rest of his life. He landed at
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Stanford, where he was a professor for a long time. Peter Thiel was one of his favorite students,
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co-founder of PayPal. And Girard had this insight into mimetic desire in the late 50s by
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reading classic literature. And he noticed that some of the best, most enduring books in kind of
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the Western canon, Don Quixote, Brothers Karamazov, Virginia Woolf, The Red and the Black, the characters
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in these books always have models of desire for what they want. They don't just spontaneously desire
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anything. And he realized this was a reflection of reality, but we're just too close to see it.
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So in a way, literature held up this mirror to human nature. And these authors were geniuses
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because they wrote this aspect of human desire into their stories. And then Girard started looking
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everywhere else to verify it. So he looked in history, he looked at business, he looked at the
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way that relationships actually work in the world. He looked in the social sciences. We're even finding
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neuroscience now kind of backing up this mimetic part of human nature, this imitative brain that we seem
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to have where we're realizing that babies get really, really good at reading the desires of
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other people from practically the first couple of years of their life.
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Well, this idea of mimetic theory and how it goes back way far back in the literature,
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you even see it in the book of Genesis in the Garden of Eden. Eve didn't want the forbidden fruit,
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and yet she had to have a model. She had to have the serpent say,
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hey, that looks pretty good. You should try that. Before that, she had no desire. It wasn't even on
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her radar. It wasn't even on her radar. So that's a suggested desire. And that happens all the time.
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I mean, clearly, this is kind of the way that advertising works. People subtly suggest different
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desires to us. And part of understanding mimetic desire and mimetic theory is getting to the origin
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of our desires. So a lot of people just overlook that fact. I mean, what you just said, it seems obvious,
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but without the serpent, there would have been no desire for the apple. And we almost have to work
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backwards with our desires, go back to the beginning, go back to the beginning of our lives,
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understanding the models for most of us. For almost everybody, it's their mother
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is the first model of desire. And then as we get older, we have different ones.
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Well, this idea of mimesis is new. The Greeks understood it. Plato, Aristotle wrote about how humans
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are imitating animals. And the things we consume, the media we consume can influence our desires.
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It's why Plato, in his Republic, he wanted to ban poetry because he thought it would just give
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people corrupt desires. Any other philosophers stand out in history that kind of understood
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that this idea that we are imitating animals when it comes to our desires?
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Yeah. I mean, imitation plays a pretty important role in the philosophy of Perennis. I mean,
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it's always been around. Oscar Wilde, imitation is a serious form of flattery.
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Aristotle, you know, 2,500 years ago said that humans are by far the most imitative creatures
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in the world. But Plato and Aristotle tended to talk about the role of imitation in terms of
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surface-level things, not so much on the level of desire. They talked about imitation in art.
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So this is what Girard would call sort of imitation and representation, surface-level things.
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So, you know, imitation is how we learn language. It's how we learn cultural norms. It's how we learn
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how to dress. So it's tremendously positive force. We wouldn't have culture at all if we weren't so
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good at imitation. But I think Girard's discovery is that it goes deeper down to the very level of
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desire itself. And it's tricky. So you look at two, you know, men, for instance, where on the surface
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level, they don't imitate each other at all. They dress in totally different ways. They speak in totally
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different ways. Nothing about them seems imitative. But under the surface of all of that, you know,
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they have a desire for the same quality of being. Maybe they work at the same company and they want
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the same position. They want power. They want something. And it's kind of buried or hidden beneath
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the surface-level forms of differentiation that we all engage in.
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Our desires, our wants, they come from models. And these models are social. They're from other
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people. And Girard says there's two potential sources for our social models, for mimetic desire.
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The one is, you call it celeberstan, and the other one is freshmanstan. What did Girard call these?
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And like, what's the difference between the two?
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So what I call celeberstan, that's just my easy-to-remember phrase for what Girard called
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external mediators of desire. So these are people that we have no possibility of coming into
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serious contact with. Like, we can't compete with them for the same things. We can't be their rivals.
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Now, that could be because they're dead. They're a historical figure. It could be because they're
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fictional, a fictional character. So, you know, fictional characters can become models of desire
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to us just like real people can. You know, and Don Quixote, you know, he read a fictional story and,
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you know, caused him to go and change his whole life and become a nighterrant. Or it can just be
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because there's such a social gap between us that there's really no possibility of us competing
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seriously for the same things, right? Jeff Bezos, for me, is in celeberstan. He's a total external
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mediator of desire for me. There's no possibility of us competing. So Elon Musk might be the other kind
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model to Jeff Bezos and the other kind of model he calls an internal mediator of desire. And these
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are people that are inside of our worlds. They're close to us. They're the people that we normally
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don't recognize as models of desire for us. And we have the possibility of coming into contact with
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them, competing with them, becoming rivals to them. And I call this in the book, Freshmanistan,
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because it's similar to the experience of being a freshman all over again. You're all,
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you have a lot in common. You're more alike than you're different. You're all the same age. Most of
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the kids don't have a lot of money. They're all kind of in the same boat, taking the same classes.
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And that's a situation where everybody is an internal mediator of desire to pretty much everybody
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else. Okay. So let's break this down a little. So our desires can be influenced by celebrities
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and public figures who are distant from us, or they can be influenced by people who are close to
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us and like us. But in that first category, people who are out of our league, it seems to be less
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fraught. Like there's less conflict there. Why is that? And why is it that if I decide to copy
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something Elon Musk does, like his morning routine, I'm going to do exactly what he does for his morning
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routine, that's okay. But if I decide to copy something my brother does exactly like he does,
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he might be a little bothered by that. Right. So, I mean, the simplest explanation
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is that there's no possibility of serious conflict arising from imitating models that are
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outside of our world, that are like transcendent to the world that we live in. You know, we're never
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going to, you know, come into serious conflict with them because we can't. So in other words,
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the other person is not going to imitate back. There's no reflexivity in that situation,
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which means it's less, it's less dynamic. So, I mean, I don't, I have no idea what Elon Musk's,
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you know, morning routine is. It might be good. It might be stupid. I don't know,
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but you're not going to, I mean, that's a perfectly fine thing to, to, to imitate or the,
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you know, the aspirations of people in history, you know, people that we aspire to emulate,
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right. Whether it's Martin Luther King or some famous athlete, this is how we grow. I mean,
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I, you know, most people start out playing sports by emulating a great, like you, you watch Michael
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Jordan and you emulate his, his style and the way that he plays. I think Kobe Bryant told the story
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until a certain point, if that person is, is sort of in your world. And by the way, we can,
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we, people can move between these two worlds. Michael Jordan started out as an external mediator to him,
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but he became an internal mediator when they both played in the NBA and that, you know,
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competition and rivalry can be an incredibly positive thing. I mean, it can drive innovation.
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It can push people to be better, but in many cases, like in workplaces, in families, it's the
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aspect of internal rivalry where people are really close to each other that we often don't recognize,
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you know, the potential for serious conflict for, for misery and just getting like
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caught in these cycles of like never ending comparison games, which we can't really do
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with, you know, these, these sort of people that are in celebrity.
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And I think that's, it's counterintuitive because that you'd have more rivalry with people who are
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more like you, you'd think it'd be the opposite. But when you stop and think about it, it's like,
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yeah, I don't really care. I don't really compare myself to some billionaire, but if there's like
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some podcaster, sort of the same size, I'm, I'm focused in on that person, like, what are they
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doing? What do I need to do? What they're doing? The, like the Joe Rogan's not even on my radar.
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Cause he's just, he's way bigger than I'll ever be probably. But I, I, I'm keyed in more the people
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Right. Yeah. I mean, if you ask most people who they're more, you know, jealous of or something,
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or who they're paying attention to more, is it, you know, Jeff Bezos, you know, billionaire with
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a yacht, or is it the person that went to the same college as they did and works in the same
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industry and makes an extra 5,000 bucks a year or seems to vacation to nice spots and posted on
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their Instagram. I mean, for everybody, it's the second person, right? There's just more in common
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with them. We pay attention to them more. So in a sense, you know, jealousy, or you could even say
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envy is kind of a function of proximity and similarity. So this, okay. The, most of the
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conflict then when we, when we're starting to look for models and how to behave or how to have
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certain desires, most of the conflict happens when there's people who are like us. You also argue,
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make this case that, you know, the models within Freshmanistan kind of, they end up distorting
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reality, even though they are more like us. If we just focus on that, it can tend to
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It just, it can distort reality because for one, we project all kinds of things on people
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without really knowing much about them at all. So, you know, Gerard said that all human desire
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is fundamentally not a desire for things. It's a desire for being itself. It's, he calls it
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metaphysical desire. So we think that we, we lack something and we all do. And we think that this
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other person, and this is all, you know, we never usually think of this consciously, but the reason
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why we would adopt somebody else as a model of desire at all is because at some pre-conscious
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or subconscious level, we think that they just have some quality of being that we don't. And that
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if maybe we wanted some of the same things, or if we acquired some of the same things, that it would
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turn us more into the kind of person that we want to be. And because we're kind of just playing a
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guessing game, like, you know, we really don't know, we're projecting all of these illusions
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on people around us. It leads to incredible, you know, distortions. And, you know, this is,
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I talk a lot about this in the book, right? Sort of people that are extremely confident,
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to give you an example, are typically incredibly attractive, right? Like people of the opposite
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sex that are incredibly confident, people that, and what is confidence, right? It's like knowing
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what you want and projecting that you know what you want. And why is that so powerful from the
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standpoint of mimesis and mimetic desire? Well, most people, you know, if they, if they're really
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honest with themselves, are super confused about what they want. So when there's somebody that really
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seems like they know, that's incredibly attractive, they make a really powerful model of desire for
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us, whether it's a man or a woman, whatever. And, you know, we have to be aware of that. And some
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people play games with that, right? It's kind of, people play hard to get, people project all kinds
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of things, because it's almost wired into us. Like we're looking for that. We're looking for people
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that can help show us what to want. And those people are powerful.
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And why does Freshmanistan cause mimetic rivalries? Why, I mean, why do we suddenly see the, like the
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world as sort of a zero-sum game? Whenever we're looking at other people and what they're doing,
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we, we start doing what they're doing. We're thinking, well, man, if, if he gets it, then I'm
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not going to get anything when that really might not be the case.
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Yeah. A zero-sum game is a great word to describe Freshmanistan. You know, why, why do we do that?
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I mean, our world becomes very small in, in Freshmanistan. And this is one of the reasons
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why I think what I call in the book, you know, transcendent models of desire, models of desire.
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I mean, not all of our models have to be sort of transcendent models, but some of them have
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to be because in a complete absence of any kind of transcendent model, they all have to
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come from inside the system that we're already in, whether that's your company, whether it's
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your school, whether it's your little, you know, industry that you work in. And that's,
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that's dangerous, right? It becomes like a pot, right? Like a pressure cooker, because there's
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nothing outside of it to kind of make us turn away from each other and look at something beyond.
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And when I say transcendent models, I mean, you know, virtues are transcendent models.
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You know, their religions have transcendent models. It could even just be as simple as
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just outside of your own industry or something like that, or from the past or just some aspiration
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in the future so that we're not turned inward. So Freshmanistan has a, has the effect of turning
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everybody inwards on each other, sort of navel gazing and comparing. And it escalates sort of the
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nature of mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry is always to escalate. And that can create a pretty
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dangerous situation. How has social media exacerbated Freshmanistan, mimetic rivalry?
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I mean, I, my opinion is that social media has basically, you know, turned the world into a
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Freshmanistan. I mean, the, you know, my, my dad, you know, grew up in the fifties in Detroit in his
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little high school with a couple hundred kids in it. And that was like, that was his universe models,
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right? He probably had four or five that were super cool, that were real models.
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of desire for him. But now, I mean, I can't really even imagine. I mean, now from the age of eight,
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nine, 10 years old, you have a little device in your pocket that projects the desires of quite
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literally billions of people from every corner of the globe into, into a child's brain and heart and
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mind. And I don't think that we quite know what that's doing to us. And one of the things about
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social media, and this goes back to, you know, when somebody's similar to us that we're more likely to
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take them as a rival. And so the whole premise of social media is really, it's, it's made us more
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alike. We have, we all have the same profile constraints and the case of Twitter, we can only
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use the same number of characters. It sort of forced us all into very similar boxes. It's almost
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like taking the world and trying to fit us all socially speaking under the head of a pin. We're
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all incredibly close together. We're more alike. So it sets off this like crisis of sameness,
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where everybody's trying to differentiate themselves from everybody else in this
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sea of mediocrity, this sea of sameness. And I actually think that's why people and studies have
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shown this. People basically say like more provocative and extremist things online, like
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beyond what they even believe, beyond what they would tell you in private, because it's like the
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only way to stand out in this crowd. So I think social media from the standpoint of mimetic theory
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is, is incredibly dangerous. And I think we're going to have to evolve and find ways to, you know,
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to, to allow people to, I don't have the answer. If I had it, I'd start the company, but I'm,
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I'm working on it. Well, and the other thing social media has done is it's, it's taken models
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from Celebristan and moved them to Freshmanistan. Right now, like you can, in your Instagram feed,
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you have your, your siblings, your mom and dad, your, their dog pictures they're posting. But then
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you're also seeing like personal pictures from, you know, sports athletes you follow, politicians.
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It's all in the same, it's all the same. Right. And that's an incredibly important thing.
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So if it's true that, you know, we're more captivated by the models that seem more like
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us, then the best thing that a celebrity could do is make themselves appear to be more like
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us. And I think that's what we do see. You know, we see them in their home, we see them
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lounging around and it's like, Oh, they're just like me. So it's a, that, that illusion is that's
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an important part of the marketing strategy to, to, to show that. And then now we have, you know,
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YouTube stars that, you know, are, are just blowing up overnight seemingly. And that's
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even more seductive because it's like, well, that, that could be me. So I think there's
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definitely social media is blurring the lines between Celebristan and Freshmanistan. And that's
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. And so in mimetic theory, you described there's two cycles to it.
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The first one is destructive. The second is positive. What does a destructive mimetic cycle
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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.
00:24:17.100
Yeah. So, you know, in, in the gospel of John, you have a, a stoning, which a stoning of a woman
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
00:31:13.960
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
00:32:41.240
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
00:33:57.480
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?
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
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
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
00:35:38.940
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
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
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,
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
00:44:27.180
episodes of the A1 podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
00:44:31.320
sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up,
00:44:34.840
download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes
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of the A1 podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one
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minute to give us your view on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've
00:44:45.020
done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member
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who you'd think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support.
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Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the A1 podcast, but put