Just finished reading “Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don’t Truly Want”. Full blog here.
The human universe of desire. Mimetic desire. We are copycats by nature. We learn through imitation. It also shapes our identity. Based on an ecology of desire. Are we all just imitation machines? No. Mimetic desire is only one piece of a comprehensive vision of human ecology, which also includes freedom and a relational understanding of personhood.
Your past
Which means you need to examine your own past to explain how your identity has been shaped and why certain people and things have exerted more influence over you than others.
Imitation machines
Are we all just imitation machines? No. Mimetic desire is only one piece of a comprehensive vision of human ecology, which also includes freedom and a relational understanding of personhood.
Identity
Identity and mimetic are closely linked. That brings you into the world of social media, sales, and marketing. Products as models of desire. Mimetic desire, because it is social, spreads from person to person and through a culture. It explains the success of Facebook. Mimetics and identity. Every industry, every school, every family has a particular system of desire that makes certain things more or less desirable.
Hyper-imitation
We live in a time of hyper-imitation, political polarisation, groupthink, and destructive consumer culture. Shaped by shaping your desires. Shaped by mirror neurons. Humans imitate: retirement planning, investments, romantic ideals, sexual fantasies, food preparation, social norms, worship, rituals, professional courtesies, memes, etc.
Who are your influencers
So, who are the people influencing your buying decisions, your career path, and your politics? Some models are easy to name. They are what we typically think of as “role models”—people, others we don’t think of as models. Take fitness. A personal trainer is more than a coach—they are a model of desire.
People’s desire
Desire is not a function of data. It’s a function of other people’s desires. What stock market analysts referred to as “mass psychosis” was not so psychotic after all. In both bubbles and crashes, models are multiplied. Desire spreads at a speed so great we can’t wrap our rational brains around it.
There is a lot to desire
Some of the topics covered in the book:
- Proximity.
- Rivalry
- Friendship
- Wonder
- The cult of experts (authority is mimetic)
- Chaos and liquid modernity
- Self-fulfilling circularity and mirrored imitation
- Smartphones are like slot machines.
- The addiction to the desires of others (social media)
- Social contagion cycles
- Doom loops
- Flywheels of desire
- Entelechy (the realization of potential)
- Ancient wisdom
- Sacrificial rites
- The scapegoat mechanism (somebody has to hang)
- Catharsis
- Unanimous violence (is always anonymous violence)
- Mimetic crisis
- Superspreaders
- Mobs
- Safety in judgment
- Goal setting (every goal is embedded within a system)
- Michelin stars
- Venture capital (VC funds operate in a mimetic system)
- This desire versus thick desire
- Disruptive empathy
- Fulfilment
- Stories of meaningful achievement
- Transcendental leadership
- The speed of truth
- Centrally planned wanting
Mimetic models
No aspect of human ecology is more overlooked than mimetic desire. Leaders should also consider that economic incentives are always more than economic. If the signals are strong enough, they can distort desires and give people a “false north” on their career compass. Marketing, money, and models distort people’s desires when there is no clear hierarchy of values.
Be mission-driven
Most companies have a mission statement. Many of them have core values or some equivalent. Few make explicit—either to themselves or to the outside world—their hierarchy of value. A hierarchy of values is especially critical when choices have to be made between good things. Map your hierarchy of values. What’s important to you? In what order?
- Value systems with a clear hierarchy are more effective during crises than those without one.
- Values and desires are not the same thing. Values act to order desires the way a diet does. Therefore, establish and communicate a clear hierarchy of values.
Mentions
Trump is mentioned, Tony Hsieh (delivering happiness) is mentioned, Tim Ferris is mentioned, NFL, the bible, Ursula K. Le Guin (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas), James Clear (Atomic Habits), Marco Pierre White, JF Kennedy, Naval Ravikant, etc.
Who drives your desires?
Ultimately, it is a question of who drives your desires. Others or yourself. Is it thin or thick? Is it true to you? The ultimate way to test desires—especially major life choices such as whether to marry someone or whether to quit your job and start a company—is to practice this same exercise but to do it while imagining yourself on your deathbed.
Go thick
That helps you to find and cultivate thick desires—desires that are not hyper-mimetic, desires that can form the foundation for a good life. Discovering and developing thick desires protects against cheap mimetic desires—and ultimately leads to a more fulfilling life. Thick desires are like diamonds that have been formed deep beneath the surface, nearer to the core of the Earth. Core motivation.
The skills needed
There is a skillset you can apply.
- Focus on others, not yourself.
- Increase the speed of truth.
- Be discerning
- Listen to your heart.
- Meditate
- Filter feedback
- Look for the contradictions.
- Read books/literature.
I am particularly fascinated by the speed of truth
The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within. And the real truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature—it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is. Striving to reach objective values, not mimetic values. Make the truth move fast. When critical new information comes to light, everyone should know within seconds.
How to measure the speed of truth
Identify a key executive or employee in your organization who is a need-to-know person, and explain what you’ll be doing; nobody else should know the experiment is taking place.
- Measure precisely how long it takes to reach the people whom it should reach from various starting points.
- Observe two meetings, with and without a boss. Count the number of times someone says something challenging and true.
- Divide the number of hours by the number of truths: that’s the number of truths per hour, or TPH. The speed of truth. Compare.
The mimetic future
The book moves to the mimetic future. Sexbots, Kurzweil, singularity, and how desire will shape that future. Historian Yuval Noah Harari ends his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind with these words: “But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires, too, the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become? But ‘What do we want to want?’ The question “What do we want to want?” is unsettling partly because, in a world of engineered desires, we have to wonder who is doing the engineering.
The signs for the future
What we’ll want in the future depends on the choices we make today. The signs are not good:
- One of the most powerful companies in the world today is named after and inspired by college yearbooks.
- The extraordinary success of a few internet companies has masked the embarrassing lack of major breakthroughs in other domains.
- Business pitch competitions seem more like rites of passage or rituals than processes for discovering genuine innovation. (Personal bugbear!).
- Education has shifted away from the liberal arts and toward increasingly specialized, technical knowledge and calculating thought.
Facebook satisfies our need for love and belonging; Amazon fulfills the need for security, and Apple appeals to our sex drive and the associated need for status, signaling one’s attractiveness as a mate by associating with a brand that is innovative, forward-thinking, and costly to own.
You have a choice
The fight for things that do matter intersects and interacts with the fight for things that don’t matter because mimetic desire has the effect of blurring the lines. You have a choice. You can let Silicon Valley engineer your desire (in labs, with cold, lifeless instruments). Surveillance capitalism, centrally planned wanting, and closed systems of desire.
Be in control
Or you control it yourself. Practice meditative thought. It is the door to transformation. The calculating brain is only able to fit new experiences into existing mental models. The meditative brain develops new models. Look for metaphysical desire. Focus on relationships, family, and love. If you have a company, focus on purpose. Every business should seriously consider how its mission aligns with models of desire.
On your deathbed
Our choice is between living an unintentionally mimetic life or doing the hard work of cultivating thick desires. At the end of your life, the primary fear you will have is having missed out on, is the pursuit of thick desires. Live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want. The transformation of desire happens when we become less concerned about the fulfillment of our own desires and more concerned about the fulfillment of others.
Follow your purpose
Our choice is to yield to the mimetic forces making claims on our desire at every moment or to yield to the freedom of our single greatest desire: doing the one thing that we were made to do, all of the time, over and over and over again, until we’ve developed a desire thick enough to stake our life on.
