Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

C. S. Lewis called this invisible system the inner ring. It means that no matter where a person is in life, no matter how wealthy or popular a person is, there is always a desire to be on the inside of a certain ring and a terror of being left on the outside of it. “This desire [to be in the inner ring] is one of the great permanent mainsprings of

Models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drug. Before Facebook, a person’s models came from a small set of people: friends, family, work, magazines, and maybe TV. After Facebook, everyone in the world is a potential model.

The scapegoat mechanism works by diversion; the more we see it in others, the less we can see it in ourselves.

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 both bubbles and crashes, models are multiplied. Desire spreads at a speed so great we can’t wrap out rational brains around it.

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The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it.11 Real truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature—it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is.

Empathy is the ability to share in another person’s experience—but without imitating them (their speech, their beliefs, their actions, their feelings) and without identifying with them to the point that one’s own individuality and self-possession are lost. In this sense, empathy is anti-mimetic.

It’s as if everyone is saying, “Imitate me—but not too much,” because while everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.