Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

Sometimes the market isn’t a good indication of what people want. It’s good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones.

Economic competition is less bloody than the sacrificial world that it supplanted. At the same time, it produces its own victims: the poor who don’t have access to markets, exploited workers, and winner-take-all systems.

Engineering desires in robots or in humans raises serious questions about humanity’s 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?’

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.

By the third trimester, babies can hear the tones of their mother’s voice. Shortly after birth, babies born to Mandarin-speaking mothers (Mandarin is a highly tonal language) tend to cry with more complex intonations than babies born to German- or Swedish-speaking mothers, for example.

In the passage from childhood to adulthood, the open imitation of the infant becomes the hidden mimesis of adults. We’re secretly on the lookout for models while simultaneously denying that we need any. Mimetic desire operates in the dark. Those who can see in the dark take full advantage.

It’s deceivingly difficult to figure out why you bought certain things; it’s extraordinarily hard to understand why you strive toward certain achievements. So hard that few people dare to ask. Mimetic desire draws people toward things.4 “This draw,” writes Girard scholar James Alison, “this movement … [is] mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity

There have been two major social inventions in history that mitigated the negative consequences of mimetic desire: the scapegoat mechanism and the market economy.

Most people aren’t fully responsible for choosing their own goals. People pursue the goals that are on offer to them in their system of desire. Goals are often chosen for us, by models. And that means the goalposts are always moving.