Do You Really Know WHY You Want What You Want? If Not, Read This— Wanting by Luke Burgis

Do you know what you want?

Do you know WHY you want what you want?

It may not be for the reasons you’d guess.

There are hidden influences working on you, impacting even the most basic thing about you — what you THINK you want, in work, play, and life.

In Wanting, author Luke Burgis explores the theories of a little known professor-philosopher who’s made a significant impact on the thought-life of Peter Thiel.

This book will tell you…

• How Freud’s nephew used powerful marketing techniques to turn droves of women into smokers in the mid-1900s
• How selling a single typewriter transformed Steve Jobs from a “shy, effacing…quiet guy” into the reality-distorting boss and founder of Apple?
• What the REAL reason was behind Romeo and Juliet’s families’ feud in Shakespeare’s infamous play

Ready to dive in?

Who this book is for: Readers and writers who are curious about psychology and human nature, who maybe feel a bit overwhelmed by outside influences and want to know how to escape harmful competition, who want to know why they want the things they want.

Scylighter rating: 4.33/6 ⭐s (explanation of ratings at the end)

Best Ideas From This Book

1. People think they want things for their own sakes. They don’t. They are (knowingly or not) always being influenced by mimetic models.
2. Mimesis can create both positive and negative cycles. The negative cycles can trap you in a destructive pattern for life.
3. The way to get out of destructive mimetic cycles and avoid thin desires (temporary wants that are not fulfilling), is to figure out your thick desires, which are unchanging and based on your deepest values.
4. To figure out your deepest values, tell and ask people to tell you their stories of fulfillment. Times when they felt most content, satisfied, and accomplished.

Join our merry band of Brilliant Writers for more book dives like this!

BOOK NOTES

Tactics

At the beginning of this book, Burgis gives a list of 15 tactics (advice for how to apply the concepts in this book) which will be explained in more detail throughout the rest of the book.

They are:

1. Name your models
2. Find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis
3. Create boundaries with unhealthy models
4. Use imitation to drive innovation
5. Start positive flywheels of desire
6. Establish and communicate a clear hierarchy of values
7. Arrive at judgments in anti-mimetic ways
8. Map out the systems of desire in your world
9. Put desires to the test
10. Share stories of deeply fulfilling action
11. Increase the speed of truth
12. Invest in deep silence
13. Look for the coexistence of opposites
14. Practice meditative thought
15. Live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want

Then Burgis includes two quotes about imitation:

• From Aristotle (“Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages [is that]…he is the most imitative creature in the world.”)
• And Dayna Tortorici (“We want what other people want because other people want it…down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift…”)

Note to Reader

In This Section

• A Stanford professor you’ve probably never heard of who is one of the “most important thinkers of his generation”
• A hidden force that governs “everything from economics to personal relationships,” a natural phenomena, like gravity, that you cannot escape, but must learn to use effectively.

Burgis begins with the argument that few take time to understand how they have developed their desires for the things they want.

Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn.

Burgis then launches into his personal story — his experiences starting companies in Silicon Valley and feeling a sense of relief when he left a company he founded.

He noticed that his “successes…felt like failures, and now failure felt like success.”

Burgis wanted to know why this was the case, so he started studying, reading books, researching. Then a mentor pointed him to Rene Girard, a Stanford professor, and someone Burgis argues is “the most important thinker of his generation. And you have probably never heard of him.”

Next, Burgis gives a brief sketch of who Girard was, and how he thought differently than other academics. His main idea that Burgis highlights here is the concept of mimetic desires, the idea that people want things for imitative, not intrinsic reasons.

In other words, people learn to want what they want, the same way they learn languages and cultural rules.

“Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.”

The power of human imitation allows us to come up with sophisticated tech, but it also can lock people into cycles of rivalry that are nearly impossible to escape.

This realization was a holy *** moment for Burgis. In his words:

“I’m now convinced that understanding mimetic desire is the key to understanding, at a deeply human level, business, politics, economics, sports, art, even love.”

Burgis argues that mimetic theory sheds light on everything from economics to personal relationships. But he adds a warning, of sorts:

“I don’t claim that overcoming mimetic desire is possible, or even desirable. This book is primarily about growing more aware of its presence so that we can navigate it better. Mimetic desire is like gravity — it just is.

So learning about mimetic theory is like learning about gravity, or other features of reality:

If we’re not aware of [mimetic desire], it will take us places we don’t want to go. But if we develop the right social and emotional muscles in response to it, mimetic desires becomes a way to effect positive change.

Burgis points out that Girard’s often associated with his famous former student Peter Thiel, but he doesn’t want Thiel to be the only interpreter of Girard’s work.

Hence this book.

Burgis works with many entrepreneurs, who all want freedom, but he points out that running your own business sometimes leads to the opposite.

Which is why he teaches classes to help people not “want naively,” by understanding mimetic desire.

Once you know how mimetic desire works, you will see it everywhere.

Quotes & Comments

Opening: This is a book about why people want what they want. Why you want what you want.

Closing: Once you know how it works, you will start to see how it explains much of the world around you. And that will include not just the family member whose weird lifestyle you would never choose, or the politics in your workplace, or the friend who cares about social media too much, or the colleague who brags about their kid who got into Harvard. It will include you. You will see it in yourself.

• Burgis’ comparison of mimetic theory to gravity is really interesting.
• When it comes to human nature, some argue that people are “blank slates” totally molded by external social structures. In reality, people have certain aspects to them that are objective and fixed, like gravity, and when you try to mess with that, bad things happen.
• This gravity metaphor sticks out to me because it feels like we’re living in a time when many people are trying very hard to claim that objective truth doesn’t exist — especially with regards to metaphysical or immaterial realities.
• But mimetic theory is exactly such an immaterial reality, so Burgis claims. The rest of the book lays out his theory…

Prologue: Unexpected Relief

In This Chapter

• How Burgis failed to sell his company to the Zappos CEO, and the insights that bought him.

In this prologue, Burgis tells the story of how he tried to sell his company to Tony Hsieh of Zappos.

Meeting Tony only amplified my despair. I was shooting for $10 million in sales. Zappos was doing $1 billion. from my perspective, Tony occupied an alternate reality — the one in which unicorn founders live. I couldn’t seem to break in.

As Burgis tried to conform himself to the Zappos culture, hanging out with Tony and learning his ways, “the desire that led [Burgis] to start and build [his] company was gone.”

He observed that his desire and ambition regarding his company felt like “rom-com love”

(By the way, did you know that in almost every language in the world, people fall in love? Nobody rises up into it.) ←Footnoe: This is an idea Burgis got from Jean-Michel Oughourlian, friend of Girard’s

Meanwhile, Burgis had a falling out with his company’s cofounder and became the sole owner of the business.

He started questioning why he wanted the things he did, afraid to even get married for fear that he would “stop desiring” that person suddenly. He needed to figure out what forces were driving his desires.

Just as Burgis was about to close a deal with Zappos, the board suddenly changed their minds.

Although this meant Burgis was now in a dangerous financial limbo, inexplicably, he felt relieved.

Quotes & Comments

Opening: In the summer of 2008, I experienced the moment many start-up founders live for: I learned that I would be able to cash out on my company’s success.

Closing: Without the Zappos deal, I’d be bankrupt within six months. As the full import of how my life was about to change sank in and I drained my Chianti, something changed. // I was relieved.

• Burgis’ observation that in many languages people “fall” in love rather than “rise up” into it is something I’ve been thinking about. There is one language I know, however, where someone does go “up” (literally uses the word “up”) to describe loving something or someone. Do you know what it is? 😉

Introduction: Social Gravity

In This Chapter

• Why Burgis hesitated to write this book
• Why Peter Thiel thought it too dangerous to mention his mentor’s ideas while writing his famous book Zero to One
• How studying literature allowed an influential thinker (the main character in this book) to discover his most important theory about human desires.
• That the classic novels are neither plot- nor character-driven. They are instead driven by THIS…

Burgis begins this introduction with an anecdote about visiting Peter Thiel, Paypal cofounder and contrarian thinker.

The chapter starts like a novel, with Burgis describing the look of the room, and how the assistant offered him coffee as he waits.

And then Thiel appears, ready to chat about Girard’s ideas.

A DANGEROUS MIND

And now we switch from the story scene to background. Burgis writes:

Rene Girard, a Frenchman who was a professor of literature and history in the United States, had his first insight about the nature of desire in the late 1950s. It would change his life.

This insight, of course, is mimetic desire.

“You can never be a neutral observer of mimetic desire” Burgis says. “It’s so personal that I hesitated to write a book about it. To write about mimetic desire to reveal a bit of your own.”

(To be fair, writing almost any book reveals a bit of yourself. But I get what he’s saying. Writing about your mimetic desires and experiences gets deeper into your psyche, and you’re more aware of it)

Burgis starts by asking Thiel why Thiel didn’t mention Girard (his mentor’s) mimetic ideas in his book Zero to One, and Thiel said it was a bit too dangerous.

But as Burgis points out:

“An idea that challenges commonly held assumptions can feel threatening — and that’s all the more reason to look more closely at it: to understand why. / An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie.”

The reason mimetic desire is such an unpalatable idea for many, Burgis says, is because people like to think we’re in charge of ourselves, that we aren’t THAT influenced by other people.

But “the truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand.”

In other words, might as well face up to the truth rather than bury your head in the sand.

Now, back to theory:

Burgis points out that Girard’s breakthrough came when he was “outside his main area of expertise, history,” comparing him to Henry Ford’s insights on seeing slaughterhouse assembly lines or Daniel Kahneman creating a new field of behavioral economics.

(Side note, not sure the Kahneman is the best example of someone having a breakthrough outside his main area of expertise…hold on, just googled it: Yep, I stand by that statement. Kahneman studied psychology and mathematics. Both significantly related to the field he eventually created).

Burgis relates a fun anecdote about how Girard was asked to teach literature, but the problem was, he hadn’t read a lot of the books, so many times he would read the novels “just in time to turn around and teach them.”

(Which is hilarious, and reminds me of pianist Menahem Pressler learning a piece on the train before the competition, as well as Frank Abagnale in the movie Catch Me If You Can pretending to be a teacher) 

It’s not an irrelevant anecdote, though, of course. The point is that Girard learned to look for patterns in the text, and he found that:

“Characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior.”

(This is a FASCINATING concept, and one I need to keep in mind while I do my fiction analyses. Is it true, and in what ways? Hmm…might be something aspiring fiction writers might be interested in looking into)

In other words, Burgis sums it up like this:

“Desire, like gravity, does not reside autonomously in any one thing or person. It lives in the space between them.”

Also:

“The novels Girard taught are not primarily plot-driven or character-driven. They are desire-driven.”

(Another interesting fiction-writer’s tip to look into and maybe “steal.” This might be one of those things that separate good from amateur storytellers. Actually, scratch that. I’m remembering how Lisa Cron basically says the same thing in Story Genius. In that book, she calls it the “third rail.”)

The interesting thing is, characters in the stories don’t even have to meet in person to affect each other’s desires. Burgis brings up Don Quixote, who was inspired by a famous knight named Amadis de Gaula.

(Yep. And nowadays with social media and the internet, which gives us access to archives like Project Gutenberg, time and space are less of an issue than ever before. We have SO MANY MORE influences to choose from, that are clamoring for out attention nowadays…)

And, Burgis says, the pattern Girard observed in fictional characters applies to real humans too. We don’t come to our desires through “biological drives or pure reason”…

(Yeah, I would say that desire is often on the opposite side of reason, actually)

…but we come to our desires through imitation.

And, to clarify, Burgis says that “desire” is not referring to the food or sex drive. Those are biological needs. (I would personally call the first a need and the second an urge, although I can see the argument for the opposite if we are zooming out and looking at humanity as a whole. Hm.)

Anyways. The point is desire is what you want AFTER your basic needs are met. And “knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.”

Girard was curious about how people came to want things when desire wasn’t based on instinct, because “in the universe of desire, there is no clear hierarchy.”

The key is that instead of internal biological signals, we desire things based on external models, which are people / things that show us what is “worth wanting.”

And here is where Girard coined the term mimesis from the Greek mimesthai (to imitate).

Burgis states:

“If you look hard enough, you will find a model (or a set of models) for almost everything — your personal style, the way you speak, the look and feel of your home”

THE EVOLUTION OF DESIRE

And now Burgis takes the reader back to the scene with Peter Thiel, who says that despite his contrarian reputation, he is more prone to mimesis than others.

Then he found out about Professor Girard at Stanford, and was fascinated by the way the teacher challenged students to understand the hows AND whys behind current events, using examples from classical and ancient literature.

(Here, Burgis name-drops a biography of Girard called Evolution of Desire, by Cynthia Haven)

“Girard was an autodidact with a wide range,” Burgis says, pointing out that he studied “anthropology, philosophy, theology, literature” and integrated them into a “sophisticated view of the world.

(This reminds me of the zettelkasten people, starting with Niklas Luhmann, and then his many proteges and followers…)

According to Girard, “the root of most violence is mimetic desire,” which is illustrated in the story of Cain and Abel.

(Very Jordan Peterson-ish)

Another area of interest to Girard is the idea of sacrifice. He believed that people domesticated pets like cats and dogs not for fun but originally to use them as sacrifices because “sacrifices are more effective when they come from within a community — when the victim has something in common with the sacrificers.”

(While this is an interesting and somewhat off-putting hypothesis, I haven’t yet seen any evidence to say there’s any truth in this idea, or if it’s complete cow poop* … we shall see if the book present any later.)

(*The thing about unpleasant hypotheses is that sometimes they are true, because we all know there are times when truth is unpleasant — hence the desire humans have to avoid it, sometimes going to extremes such as self-drugging with actual drugs, or other things like overwork, fantasy novels/movies, etc. 

HOWEVER, there are times hypotheses are unpalatable because they’re NOT true, and those who believe in them end up hurting or even destroying themselves and people around them. 

A primary example of this is the Karl Marx. He got human nature wrong, among other things, and when leaders adopted his ideas, everything that followed turned fatal. I’m talking Hitler-, Stalin-, Mao-levels of destruction. 

All three of these world leaders were greatly influenced by Marxian ideas, not just the latter two, which, unfortunately, too many schools and teachers fail to inform us. This is why truth is so important. Okay, putting soapbox away, back to the book.)

Thiel took what he learned from Girard and applied it to his business. For example, he minimized potential “mimetic rivalries” by giving each employee “clearly defined and independent tasks so they didn’t compete with one another for the same responsibilities. This is important in a start-up environment where roles are often fluid.”

Similarly, he teamed up with Elon Musk to form PayPal when he saw that their two companies were starting to compete with each other, because according to Girard, when two entities (people or companies) start a rivalry, “there is no end but destruction — unless they are somehow able to see beyond the rivalry.”

And Thiel considered mimesis when he chose to invest in Facebook, because he saw that FB was based on the idea of identity, or behaviors. These “models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drugs.”

Before FB, people got their models from a small group of family, friends, work, magazines, etc. Once FB took off, you could get models from everyone in the world, virtually.

And more important, FB models aren’t movie stars and celebrities. They are people close enough to us that we can compare ourselves to them.

WHAT’S AT STAKE

Burgis says that mimetic desire creates two different cycles. The first, default cycle leads to conflict and broken relationships. The second happens when you transcend the first and channel your energy into “creative and productive pursuits that serve the common good.”

Burgis states the thesis of this section by saying “history is the story of human desire” and then summarizing the reasons why the reader should care about mimetic desire and how it plays out in the world. Because:

1. Mimesis can hijack even your noblest ambitions
2. Increasing pressure and opportunity in this world to make people “the same” the more people will “fight to differentiate themselves”
   (Think sibling rivalry. Here Burgis cites 5 Biblical stories — Cain & Abel, Ishamel & Isaac, Esau & Jacob, Leah & Rachel, Joseph & brothers)
   (Okay. THIS is interesting. Is this why certain political actors keep crying for equality and equity? Because even if they don’t consciously know it, they subconsciously understand that the more “equal” everyone is, the more conflict and chaos there will be and the more opportunity they will have to seize power?)
3. Burgis cares about sustainability and says that the desires created by consumer culture have created “unsustainable desires.” In his words: “Goodness and truth need to be attractive — in other words, desirable.”
4. And “if people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones”

Also, Burgis says, “each one of us has a responsibility to shape the desires of others, just as they shape ours.”

So you want to ask yourself 2 questions:

1. What do you want?
2. What have you helped others want?

WHAT WILL YOU WANT TOMORROW

And this final section of the intro gives an overview of what will be in the rest of the book, with chapter-by-chapter summaries, plus what his overall goal is:

To give readers a “new understanding of desire — what you want, what others want, and how to live and lead from a model in which desire is an expression of love.”

(Okay. Oh boy. That’s a big task he’s chosen for himself there. And I always get a little nervous when nonfiction writers like these start talking about “love” or “spirituality.” More often than not, they don’t really define their terms, and you find out that their definition of “love” is not, actually, love in reality. But let’s see…)

Quotes & Comments

Opening: On the far wall hangs a photograph — a single black-and-white eyeball looking out, cropped close, no bigger than a coaster, matted in a twenty-two-inch frame.

Closing: If you’re like me, it [“your new or deepened awareness of mimetic desire”] will haunt you to the point that you start seeing it everywhere — maybe even in your own life. What you choose to do about it is up to you.

• Interestingly, I’d been listening to a podcast where the hosts were discussing how human beings are incredible imitators, and there’s no denying it. The only question is WHO do you surround yourself, how do you imitate? …Which is basically the premise of this book as well.
• Re: Point #4, I’m not against sustainability and caring for the planet, insofar as those values remain pure, but too often I’ve found that the people shouting the loudest for this also believe in an incorrect view of reality and human nature.
• For example, saying the Earth is more important than human life (this is like killing a child in order to keep her room clean), or believing that humans could all just get along if they realized that they are actually all “one” and they have simply forgotten their oneness in their selfish desire for individuation (they are not, and they have not).

PART I: THE POWER OF MIMETIC DESIRE

Chapter 1. Hidden Models — Romantic Lies, Infant Truth

Caesar’s Self-Deception…Love by Another’s Eyes…The Invention of PR…Why Playing Hard to Get Works

In This Chapter

• Why Caesar was not exactly the self-directed conqueror he thought he was, and who his influences really were.
• The concept of The Romantic Lie and how it interferes with your ability to see things as they really are
• A “secret idol” you have that might secretly be “wreaking havoc in your life” in a way you’re not even aware of…

Burgis begins the story with an analysis of Julius Caesar, who, with the famous words “veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) seemed to claim that he saw something and decided it was valuable enough to want.

But, Burgis argues, the reality is more complicated. For one, Caesar admired Alexander the Great. Second, in the Battle of Zela, Caesar was attacked first, he didn’t just go out and see, desire, and conquer, proactively.

Burgis calls this Caesarian idea of people “choosing what they want because they saw it and wanted it” the “Romantic Lie.”

“Desire requires models” Burgis says. There’s always a person or thing that influences what you want.

“There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life.”

Now, of course, the next logical question is, how do the models in your life decide what THEY want? And Burgis answers this by saying — why, other models, of course.

(It’s like “turtles all the way down,” except it’s “models all the way down”)

Here, Burgis brings in another Bible story — the one where Eve eats the forbidden fruit because the serpent “modeled it” or “suggested a desire” in other words.

(Ever notice how much people cite the Bible and its stories and passages in their writing? Very interesting. This is one reason why I strongly recommend aspiring writers to become familiar with the Bible, to read it deeply and think about it. It’s the bedrock of so many ideas, stories, and more.)

“We are tantalized by models who suggest a desire for things…that appear just out of reach. The greater the obstacle, the greater the attraction. / Isn’t that curious? We don’t want things that are too easily possessed or that are readily within reach. Desire leads us beyond where we currently are.”

(Side note: Even that word, tantalized, comes from a Greek myth of Tantalus, a guy who was punished by never getting what he wanted)

But, Burgis says, models aren’t necessarily bad. For one, we learn languages from models.

(SO true. Check out Stephen Krashen’s comprehensible Input, and then concepts like TPRS, and Marvin Brown’s ALG)

Not to mention people like George Carlin wouldn’t have succeeded without learning from earlier greats (like Lenny Bruce, in Carlin’s case).

“The danger is not recognizing models for what they are,” Burgis says. Because if you don’t know that you’re being influenced by a model, you’re more “easily drawn into unhealthy relationships with them.”

“Models are, in many cases, a person’s secret idol.”

Burgis wraps up this intro to the chapter by telling readers what’s coming up next:

• How Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations” used hidden models to “manipulate a generation of consumers.”
• How mimesis affects financial markets, and how understanding hidden models helps you understand stocks and bubbles

SECRETS BABIES KEEP

“Researchers have found that a baby’s imitative powers start developing even before birth,” in fact the sounds they mimic when they’re out of the womb is “shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb,” according to research by Kathleen Wermke.

For example, babies of Mandarin-speaking moms “tend to cry with more complex intonations than babies born to German- or Swedish-speaking mothers.” (As Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, and German and Swedish are not)

These and other theories, Burgis says, challenges the ideas of Freud, Skinner, and Piaget that babies are, in Freud’s view, “not a full person until socialized.”

Burgis cites researcher Andrew Meltzoff, who discovered that newborns as young as 42-minutes post-birth were able to mimic his facial expressions.

Meltzoff met Girard in the early 2000s and Girard was particularly interested in Meltzoff’s concept of research called joint visual attention. 

A short example of this is: when a mom looks at something, the baby looks at her face, then at what she’s looking at, because he assumes that what she is looking at must be important.

(This reminds me of the common trick people use in stories when a villain has cornered the hero, and the hero looks past the villain’s shoulder and gasps or opens his eyes wide, prompting the villain to look as well, and the hero makes his escape) 

As part of his research, Meltzoff conducted an experiment where he had babies observe as adults pretended to fail to pull apart a dumbbell.

Then he gave the dumbbell to the babies, who successfully pulled the dumbbell apart, 40 out of 50 times, showing that babies didn’t just mimic WHAT they saw the adults doing, they mimicked what the thought the adults WANTED to do. In other words, they INTERPRETED the adults’ behavior.

“Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it.”

Burgis refers to Simon Sinek and his concept and book: “Start With Why,” the idea of “finding and communicating one’s purpose before anything else. But Burgis says “that is usually a post hoc rationalization of whatever it is we already wanted.”

(This was super interesting. Because I remember reading Simon Sinek’s Start With Why and feeling really inspired by it at the time, but over the years, the idea lost its luster, and I am wondering now if Burgis’ observation here is the reason why)

Next up, Burgis addresses the idea of mirror neurons, discovered in the 1990s in Italy by Giacomo Rizzolatti’s team. These neurons light up when monkeys (or people) see others performing an action, and the parts of the brain that light up are the same parts of the brain as the person performing the action.

But while mirror neurons “may be one part of the neurological basis for imitation…they can’t explain all of it.”

Because while animals imitate things like facial expressions, sounds, aggression, etc., humans take it much father, imitating romantic ideals, social norms, worship, memes, and more.

“We’re so sensitive to imitation that we notice the slightest deviance from what we could call acceptable imitation. If we receive a response to an email or text that doesn’t sufficiently tone-match, we can go into a mini-crisis…Communication practically runs on mimesis.”

(This reminds me of a research summary I read once about how extremely good people are at detecting facial features. We subconsciously can pick out the slightest — millimeter — difference in various elements of the face, because faces are important to us. 

(I’ve noticed the same with accents, at least among some people. Certain people who care more about sounds and languages and accents are able to pick out a foreign accent in a highly fluent non-native speaker better than others. 

(I think it depends on what you care about, either consciously or subconsciously or both. And if Burgis’ explanation of Girard’s theory is true to reality, then desire of course would be something we all care VERY MUCH about, since our desires determine how we live our lives, for good or ill)

THE MARTINI IS A GATEWAY DRUG

Next section, Burgis gives an example of ordering drinks at a bar. If a friend orders a martini, he says, he himself will “realize” he wants a martini as well, even though that wasn’t what he walked into the bar wanting.

One interesting point Burgis brings out is that imitation isn’t always about doing the same as the model. It can be the mirror opposite.

For example, you might want to do the OPPOSITE of what your friend does. (And this is my example, Burgis uses Teslas vs Ford Mustangs) If he orders a martini, you go out of your way to order a beer instead, whatever is different from a martini…even if you may have originally wanted a martini.

“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.”

(This is a kind of fascinating quote because I’m thinking of language learning. When babies start learning, they have no self-consciousness. They babble, they make grammatical mistakes, and the adults around them never blame them or shame them for this. 

(But adult learners of new languages are often super self-conscious, and afraid to speak because they know they will make dumb-sounding mistakes, and what’s worse, the adults around them are not as understanding of their errors as they are of children’s errors. 

(Kids really do have a lot of advantages over adults in how society views them. That is as it should be, of course, but it is a little bit of a melancholy thought)

TORCHES OF FREEDOM

In this section, Burgis gives the promised story of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud…

(Side note, this is just one example, but man do our families influence us, even extended family. For example, Charles Darwin’s cousin was Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, who saw Darwin as a role model, hence the birth of social Darwinism. Crazy)

Bernays was a “sly observer of human nature who had a natural talent for rallying people to causes.” He rallied support for America to join World War I in 1917, by getting himself a position in the Committee on Public Information and using that agency to influence public opinion.

Later, he went into marketing. A pork company hired him to promote their product and he “made bacon and eggs the all-American breakfast by getting his friend, a doctor, to write a letter to five thousand other doctors” urging them to recommend heavy breakfasts.

(That. Is. Insane. It just goes to show how deeply flawed the idea of “trust experts” or “trust the doctor” is. Human beings are fallible. Just because someone in a white coat says something does not mean it is true or beneficial.)

A few other marketing successes by Bernays include:

• Organizing soap-carving contests in public schools to promote Ivory soap
• Persuading the US government to build Route 66 for his client Mack Trucks by rallying enthusiastic motorists to support the highway building.

“Bernays seemed to understand that models influence desire. Doctors were the “expert” models who recommended bacon and eggs. Teachers modeled soap carving…”

But Bernays most infamous campaign was when he popularized smoking among women for his client, the Lucky Strikes cigarette company.

Before 1929, men smoked, but women didn’t. There were social taboos against it. So Bernays consulted A.A. Brill, a student of Sigmund Freud, who told him that cigarettes were a “phallic symbol that represents male sexual power.”

In other words, Bernays needed to appeal to women’s desire to challenge male power in order to sell cigarettes to women.

So during the Easter Day parade in 1929, when media attention was already trained on 5th Avenue in New York, Bernays got a select group of good-looking but “not-too-model-y” debutantes to “smoke conspicuously” while joining the parade.

Bernays also positioned photographers and journalists to capture the demonstration, and gave them the catchphrase “torches of freedom.” And he planted a woman named Bertha Hunt, who gave an interview on “smash[ing] the discriminatory taboo on cigarettes for women…breaking down all discriminations”

As a result of all his efforts, Burgis reports, “Sales of Lucky Strikes triped by the following Easter.”

MIMETIC GAMES

Burgis starts this section with the quote:

“People play mimetic games because they have a tacit knowledge of how mimetic desire works even if they can’t name it.”

And then he gives a few examples of how people play mimetic games in various areas of life:

• Romance: Girard talks about being drawn to a woman, losing interest when she suggested marriage, then being attracted again when she started going out with another guy. “Her lack of desire for him affected the strength of his desire for her.” This is the reason why playing hard-to-get works. (Burgis also cites a Dostoevsky novel The Eternal Husband) 
• Business: Girard cites Adam Grant’s book Give and Take and an anecdote about a man who lost business to a competitor because his potential client thought the competitor was less friendly and affable than this man. In other words, in business, he who wins is he who “models their own desirability [by] postur[ing] as selective and demanding.” It’s the Paradox of Importance — we appreciate more what we worked hard for.
• Advertising: People don’t like being sold too hard. So a lot of advertisers are using self-deprecating humor to sell. By making people in their ads look like “mindless bandwagon-following lemmings” the advertiser encourages watchers to see themselves as “separate” or superior, which is “the moment when they are most valuable.” And then the people buy the thing in the ad, except they don’t attribute their desire to buy to the ad. Similarly, “if a news organization can convince its viewers that its programming is neutral, it disables their defense mechanisms.”

The pride that makes a person believe they are unaffected by or inoculated against biases, weaknesses, or mimesis blinds them to their complicity in the game.

(Pride really DOES go before a fall. This reminds me of the interesting phenomenon that I’ve observed in life — those who have a high view of themselves as “good people” or humans as “basically good” are the most likely to do and promote evil, sometimes unknowingly. 

(But those who acknowledge their own serious deficiencies and the dark side of human nature are more likely to stay sober-minded enough to do and promote good things that build up people, families, and societies) 

In between, Burgis suggests a tactic for getting on top of the mimetic games and not letting them drag you by the nose:

 —

Tactic 1. Name your models.

“Naming anything — whether it’s emotions, problems, or talents — gives us more control. The same is true for models.” Burgis advises thinking about both positive AND negative models in your life.

 —

MODELS THAT MOVE MARKETS

Now Burgis reports Tesla’s 2020 parabolic rise in stock prices. Why did this happen?

Burgis doesn’t explain right away, going back to explain the concept of the “efficient market,” which he calls a “Romantic Lie” in the financial market.

Efficient Market Theory says that prices (of stocks and assets) are “functions of all available information.”

But when it came to Tesla, people weren’t just focused on pure info. Apparently during Tesla stock’s meteoric rise, people who googled “should I” got the autocomplete: “Should I buy Tesla stock?”

This is mimetic desire, says Burgis.

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

And Burgis ends the chapter with a poem by Malvina Reynolds about children going to camps and universities “Where they are put in boxes / And they come out all the same.”

Quotes & Comments

Opening: When people tell you what they want, they tell a version of the Romantic Lie. It goes something like this: / I just realized that I want to run a marathon. (Like all my friends when they turn thirty-five.) / ’Cause I saw a tiger, now I understand…

Closing: Mimetic desire is profoundly human, and it will always be with us. It’s not something “out there” to be engineered and life-hacked away. It lives loudly within us, closer than we can see with our own eyes.

• It’s interesting that Burgis does a lot of telling readers what’s coming before it comes. It’s certainly one technique. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of it unless there’s a REALLY good hook that makes you want to keep turning the pages. Otherwise, it functions more as padding.
• Also, I have to point out, this particular research is pretty relevant to the current abortion debate.
• Reflecting on the way this chapter is divided up, I’m not sure the Martini section was needed. I mean, it helps in terms of making the book look visually less intimidating, but content wise, doesn’t seem like there’s a really good reason to separate it from the section that came before, especially since it’s a made-up anecdote rather than a historical thing that illustrates another facet of the concept, as in the Torches of Freedom section.
• To be honest, that final story about Tesla didn’t quite make sense. It seemed like the author was saying the Google autocomplete caused the desire, but he didn’t exactly SAY that in so many words, either. So I’m not sure if the autocomplete was the causal factor or a signal of another, different causal factor…?

Chapter 2. Distorted Reality — We’re All Freshmen Again

Celebristan…Pseudonyms…Cat Worship…Signified Rappers…Mirrored Imitation

In This Chapter

• How Steve Jobs became the compelling reality-distorting showman CEO due to one bizarre encounter with a taboo-defying college schoolmate.
• One “otherworldly” characteristic that certain people (and most cats) have that is particularly attractive to people.
• Two sources of role models, and how models from the latter are more likely to cause conflict, violence, and damage.
• Whatever you think you want is not the thing you really want. There’s something behind it that is driving that want…

Burgis begins with the story of a freshman in 1972 who wanted to make some money.

He ends the first paragraph with: “He learned a lesson that would help him one day become the greatest showman of his generation.”

(This is an interesting last-paragraph hook-sentence to raise curiosity. But the mystery of who the unnamed freshman is, is named in the second paragraph — Steve Jobs. 

Which, on the one hand it’s good the author isn’t stringing readers along with a minor mystery that may not be worth being mysterious. 

On the other hand, why not just name Jobs in paragraph 1? Who cares as much about the story of some unnamed freshman becoming “the greatest showman of his generation” as opposed to Steve Jobs becoming the greatest showman…?

Of course, when you say “greatest” you’re implying that the unnamed person you’re talking about is someone your reader will definitely know the reputation of. However, there’s a difference between saying Steve Jobs versus, say, Penn & Teller, or Houdini or someone else. 

Anyways. It’s an interesting problem to think about as a writer. When you open a section with an anecdote, do you or do you not temporarily veil the identity of the primary figure, and to what effect?)

So, the anecdote goes:

Steve Jobs was going to sell a typewriter to a student named Robert Friedland. But when he knocked on Friedland’s door, he got no answer, so he decided to go in and leave the typewriter, but was shocked to find that Friedland WAS present, but was in flagrante delicto with his girlfriend (Friedland’s, not Job’s), and when Jobs tried to leave, Friedland “invited him to sit down until he was done.”

Jobs was surprised and impressed by Friedland’s lack of shame, and Jobs started modeling himself after Friedland’s “mercurial, sure of himself,…dictatorial” personality.

According to a fellow student and early Apple employee, Jobs had once been a “shy…self-effacing…very private guy.” But after Friedland, Jobs apparently came out of his shell and became a quirky, take-charge type of person.

Burgis observes:

Friedland “taught Jobs that strange or shocking behavior mesmerizes people. People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules.”

(This is so true. Think of how many stories feature wallflowers, weirdos, and underdogs. 

And in real life, I know personally some of the people I most admire — people like Corrie Ten Boom and her family, Desmond Doss, Chiune Sugihara, Feng Shan Ho, etc —I admire because of their refusal to go along with the majority during a time when the majority was engaging in murderously evil acts [World War II].

But as this Jobs/Friedland story illustrates, this fascination with the “different,” is not always a good thing. It depends on WHY the person was behaving “differently,” and HOW were they different, which is why we need to have a moral compass that isn’t just based on following or rejecting trends)

Over time, Jobs developed something his associates famously called his “reality distortion field.” In Burgis’ words, “Jobs seemed to be able to bend everyone in his orbit to his will — that is to his desires…Jobs was brilliant, but that’s not what made him so alluring…Jobs was mesmerizing because he wanted differently.”

In other words, Burgis says, what makes people stand out to us is not their wit, confidence, etc., etc…all the standard things you’d expect. Rather, “we are generally fascinated with people who have a different relationship to desire, real or perceived.”

“When people don’t seem to care what other people want or don’t want the same things, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis…and that’s fascinating, because most of us aren’t.

(Hmm. This is an interesting thought. I think one of the most basic desires most people have is the desire to be liked. But that desire causes pain, because we are often DISliked or ignored by others. 

(And so when you find someone who really doesn’t care if people like him or not, there’s something super attractive about that, because they seem stronger than we are.

(Also, you feel like this person who appears uninfluenced by peer pressure must be worth following or learning from, because since he is less easily swayed, he must be more honest and genuine than most others. His convictions must come from clear thinking about the issues, unadulterated by selfish desires to “look good in front of others.” 

(That’s not always the case, but sometimes it is.

(Another interesting thing is that Burgis uses the descriptor “otherworldly” for such people.

(It reminds me of the line in the book of John 2, verse 24: “Jesus did not entrust himself to them [the people] for he knew all men…he knew what was in a man.” 

(The way I read that line is that Jesus didn’t care what people thought of him in the sense that we humans are influenced by peer pressure and our desire for others to think well of us. This is because “he knew what was in a man” perhaps meaning he knew men were fallible creatures and their approbation not worth winning, compared to the mission he was here for.

(I think both enormous moral purity and enormous depravity can create this sense of someone being not-affected-by-mimesis. Jesus is an example of the former, Friedland of the latter. Both had no shame — Jesus because he had nothing to be ashamed of, and Friedland because he 

(There’s more I need to think about on that, but anyways, back to the book…)

TWO KINDS OF MODELS

“Nobody likes to think of themselves as imitative…But everybody has hidden models” Burgis says at the start of this section.

He splits these models into two categories:

1. Celebristan: Models outside our immediate world
2. Freshmanistan: Models inside it

…And says that the consequences of mimesis vary for each category.

Then Bugis takes readers back 2500 years to Aristotle, observing that even as early as that, the philosopher knew human beings ahd advanced imitative abilities which allow us to be what we are today.

“Isn’t it odd, then, that people generally frown upon imitation?” Burgis asks. “One of our greatest human strengths is seen as a source of embarrassment, a sign of weakness, even something that can get you into trouble.”

Burgis cites the taboo of two women going to the same party dressed the same, and then says that people seem to say “Imitate me — but not too much” because that feels threatening. Here’s why:

Actually, Burgis doesn’t say why straight off the bat. First, he says that this is the most technical chapter of the book, designed to lay the groundwork for readers to understand mimetic theory and its implications.

And now he goes back to the two categories of influencers, beginning with “Celebristan” (he actually names it Celebristan at this part in the book but I retroactively added the names to the bullet points before).

Models from Celebristan are outside of your social sphere and are people you can’t directly compete with.

“We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t…because rivalry is a function of proximity.”

Which is why celebrities aren’t threatening to us. They don’t want the same things we do.

But in “Freshmanistan,” unspoken rivalries are common because everyone is in the same social sphere, so to speak, and changes the nature of the competition.

In other words, this chapter is about why imitation differs, depending on where it happens.

CELEBRISTAN

Girard’s term for models in this category are “external mediators of desire.” There’s always an invisible barrier between celebristan models and their imitators (that would be us).

Celebristan models are typically dead, in another country, or have a stratospheric social status that you could never hope to achieve. In other words, there’s no way they can become a real rival to you.

Which makes it easy for people to imitate them “freely and openly.”

Some clever folks put themselves in Celebristan by being tight-lipped about their identities, guarding their privacy to make people see them as “existing on a different plane.” (Like Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin)

This separation between models and imitators, says Burgis “makes it a relatively peaceful place.”

FRESHMANISTAN

But the “internal mediators of desire” (Girard’s term) are models who exist inside our world. And thanks to social media, globalization, and the destruction of old institutions, Freshmanistan has grown considerably.

Shakepeare, for instance, says Burgis, used mimetic desire a lot in his comedies (as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, where a guy falls ignores his vow of love to another girl and falls in love with his friend’s girl because his friend wants her)

Mimetic desire, says Burgis, is “both the bond and the bane of many friendships.”

On the one hand, friends can introduce friends to hobbies, but if any hint of mimetic rivalry enters the relationship, the fun these friends had, doing their hobby together, can turn into a never-ending competition.

According to Burgis, reality is distorted in Freshmanistan in several ways:

1. Misappropriation of wonder
2. The Cult of Experts
3. Reflexivity

In the following sections, he goes into detail about these distortions…

DISTORTION 1: THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF WONDER

People can’t openly gawk at or admire their models in Freshmanistan because they occupy the same space and it’d be awkward. So there’s an understood vow of silence.

Girard, Burgis says, claims that all “true desire…is metaphysical.” Meaning when someone “wants” a handbag, it’s not really the bag they want but the “newness of being” they think the bag will give them.

This “metaphysical nature of desire” can lead to psychiatric illnesses like anorexia, where the metaphysical desire overpowers the physical need to eat.

“We are all, in some way, anorexic, looking for models who can satisfy a nonphysical hunger, a metaphysical desire.”

Here, Burgis includes a rather long callout box discussing why people admire, even worship, cats. Because “we are most likely to take someone as a model if they don’t seem to be suffering from desire like us.”

And cats are the quintessential non-needy creatures. “The affectation of self-sufficiency makes them fascinating,” in other words.

(Here, Burgis includes a little dig — friendly or no, can’t really tell — at Jordan Peterson, saying: “So don’t always try to pet a cat when you encounter one on the street, as popular psychologist Jordan Peterson advises…Rather, make the cat want to get petted…Then you’ll have really accomplished something special.)

(Honestly, I don’t understand the point of this final aside, besides revealing that the author has heard of one of Jordan Peterson’s “Rules” for life…because the idea is that cats DON’T care to butter you up, so there’s no point trying to make them anyway. If we ever changed cat nature, they wouldn’t be attractive-because-of-their-aloofness anymore.)

DISTORTION 2: THE CULT OF EXPERTS

For the next distortion, Burgis says that “we are witnessing an inversion of value.”

Meaning: In the old days, people with advanced degrees were admired because they really did know much more than the average member of the hoi polloi.

Today, however, everyone has access to the internet, and certain advanced degrees can actually count AGAINST, rather than for, you, in the eyes of employers.

In the past, people decided what was valuable based on fixed points like getting college degrees. But today, what is valuable is “mimetically driven…creat[ing] opportunities for anyone who can stand out from the crowd.”

This is both good and bad, Burgis points out.

We live in a “liquid modernity” where “there are no culturally agreed-upon models to follow, no fixed points of reference.” In other words, Celebristan is dying. Simultaneously, the world has grown more complex, to the point where the knowledge one single human has compared to all of known human knowledge is microscopic.

And so people turn to “experts” to help them “mediate desire” and tell “what is worth wanting.” Influencers like Tim Ferriss tell people what books to read while other influencers make a name for themselves in a specific niche (Ex: Marie Kondo — junk purger)

According to Girard, “the modern world is one of experts…everything boils down to choosing the right expert.”

Models are so much in demand, Burgis says, that it has led to the existence of “mediators of desire where they don’t belong.” He gives the example of the show, Shark Tank, where experts (not the free market) decide whether or not a business has value.

The problem is, who is an expert?

According to Burgis, in today’s world, “the fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.”

And he ends this subsection of the book with a callout box for…

 —

Tactic 2. Find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis

Burgis advises readers to “find sources of knowledge that are less subject to mimesis” in this world where cultural values and even scientific concensus are more and more controversial.

For example, in hard sciences, experts are more likely to be legit, because they have to “show their work.” But watch out for self-proclaimed experts and scientism — “a mimetic game dressed up as science.”

 —

(In other words, pursue truth first and foremost. Not whatever your itching ears want to hear, but what corresponds with reality)

DISTORTION 3: REFLEXIVITY

Next, Burgis quotes George Soros on the “principle of reflexivity,” the phenomenon where people’s thoughts about a situation affect the situation and vice versa. It’s a two-way street.

Soros himself used his understanding of the concept of reflexivity to make a killing by betting against the British government. But because HE made the bet, others followed him, and he won the bet.

In other words, “our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.”

This phenomenon also plays a role in free speech. German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined “spiral of silence” to describe how “people’s willingness to speak freely depends upon their unconscious perceptions of how popular their opinions are.

And on the topic of fashion, Virginia Woolf said “clothes…change our view of the world and the world’s view of us…There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them.”

Winston Churchill said something similar about architecture: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

The point is, this “reflexivity of desire” distorts your sense of reality, because you think you want something for a rational or spontaneous reason (this, Burgis calls the Romantic Lie), when you are really being affected by others.

This reflexivity is what led to Theranos’ rapid success, Burgis says, and is also most problematic in rivalry-type relationships. Each person tries to outdo the other and they eventually crash.

“When mimesis is strong enough, rivals forget about whatever…they were fighting for int he first place…the rivals will fight for anything, so long as their opponent wants it.”

In other words, the two rivals get locked into a trap, stuck permanently with each other.

MIRRORED IMITATION

Next term to define: mirrored imitation refers to imitation that “does the opposite of whatever a rival does.”

Instead of picking a model you want to imitate, you have a model you want to do AVOID being like.

But, as Girard says, “the effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch.”

For an example of this, Burgis sites a few episodes from Seinfeld, and says the reason why that show did so well is in part because the writers grasped mimetic truth intuitively.

Following that, Burgis says “mimetic rivalries don’t end well unless one of the two parties…renounces the rivalry.”

Why? Because if you win the rivalry, you feel like you picked the wrong model. As Groucho Marx said: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

Only renunciation can “defuse the other party’s desire.” Because in mimetic rivalries, things have value only insofar as the other side wants them. It’s a “toxic relationship to a model,” and everyone has one, Burgis says. He will reveal the cure for this in the second half of the book, but in the meantime, he says, just try not to get into a mimetic rivalry in the first place, why don’tcha?

And he wraps up this subsection with:

 —

Tactic 3. Create Boundaries with Unhealthy Models

In short, if you’re following someone in an unhealthy way, cut it out! Unfollow and ignore them.

Burgis gives an example of a friend who got into an unhealthy mimetic rivalry with a colleague for eight years, and how this friend forced himself to consciously detox from the rival’s influence once he realized how damaging it all was.

 —

SOCIAL MEDIATION

Burgis starts off this subsection by saying that “social media” is really social mediation — crowds of people trying to tell us what to want.

Burgis sites former Google ethics exec Tristan Harris, who says smartphones are dangerous because they are like slot machines, getting people addicted through “intermittent variable rewards.”

But Burgis disagrees. Smartphones aren’t so much slot machines as “dream machines,” and our addictions are really “addictions to the desires of others, which smartphones give us unfettered access to.”

Because of the internet and social media, we’re all living in Freshmanistan, now. There are new opportunities and dangers that come with that, though…

And now, Burgis says, let’s see how mimesis works in group settings.

Quotes & Comments

Opening: During the 1972–1973 school year, three years before the first personal computer was introduced, a freshman at Reed College in Oregon was looking to make some cash.

Closing: Now let’s see how mimetic desire works in groups.

• Burgis begins every chapter with an epigraph that features key words from that chapter. In this case it was: “Celebristan…Pseudonyms…Cat Worship…Signified Rappers…Mirrored Imitation.”
• Personally, I dislike the way the ellipses look. I’d cut them and use commas or bullet points, but I wonder if the author or editor actually did some A/B testing on this element to see if it attracts other readers (besides me)
• That said, this is an interesting way to pique readers’ interest in reading the coming chapter.
• Also: There are a couple places in this chapter where Burgis says “this chapter is about.”
• It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but slightly distracting. Although nonfiction isn’t the same as fiction, there’s a nonfiction equivalent to “suspension of disbelief” that I believe writers want to maintain as they write without breaking the “fourth wall” (not exactly a fourth wall because this isn’t fiction, but let’s call it “flow”) too much.

Chapter 3. Social Contagion — Cycles of Desire

The Cigarette Test…Bullfighting Lessons…Return on Collisions…Under the Anthill 

In This Chapter

• The real reason why the Montagues and Capulets couldn’t get along in Shakespeare’s infamous Romeo & Juliet
• How an Italian truck manufacturer went up against one of the most elite racing car companies in the world, and the fallout of their competition.
• The problems with Dawkins’ version of mimetic theory and memes.
• Two cycles of desire, one of which leads to violence, the other to good.

According to Girard “rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations.”

And Burgis follows up this quote by citing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The reason why the Montagues and Capulets don’t get along, says the Bard — they’re too similar.

In this chapter, Burgis says, he will talk about how mimetic conflict is contagious, creating “cycles of endless conflict.” Beginning with a story from Italy, about the competition between Lamborghini and Ferrari.

LAMBORGHINI VERSUS FERRARI

Ferruccio Lamborghini began his career by building tractors. He was one of the best in Italy.

One day, Lamborghini made a few upgrades to his old Ferrari (car, obviously), and beat the test drivers of the newest Ferraris. As a car mechanic himself, he was able to replace the clutch in his Ferrari with tractor clutches from his factory, and create a better model.

This irritated Enzo Ferrari, who was miffed that a mere tractor maker was showing him up. He met with Lamborghini, the meeting didn’t go well, and Lamborghini left determined to defeat Ferrari.

Ferrari had been an “external model” for Lamborghini until this moment, when they became equals in Lamborghini’s eyes. Lamborghini started competing with Ferrari, poaching his best engineers and taking ideas from Japanese and US factories to improve the manufacturing process.

“I didn’t invent anything…I start where the others came from,” Lamborghini said. In just a few years, Lamborghini was dazzling the top car enthusiasts.

…And here Burgis interrupts the gripping tale to include a callout box with…

 —

Tactic 4. Use Imitation to Drive Innovation

Innovation begins with imitation, says Burgis, who interviewed a partner at Pentagon, one of the most “innovative design firms in the world.”

In fact, Burgis warns, trying to be unique from the start gets you into “a mimetic rivalry with everyone in [your] field” competing to be the most original.

“Being different for the sake of being different is the ethos behind shock-value art and academics…[who make] outlandish claims to stand out from the pack.”

 —

Aaaand back to the story of Lamborghini (whom, for the sake of not having to type out 11 letters every time I mention his name, I shall hereafter shorten to “Lambo”).

After several successes, people were begging Lambo to make a “true racing car” to compete with Ferrari on the racetrack, but Lambo refused. Because, Burgis says, he understood bullfighting.

In bullfights, bulls are manipulated via psychological tricks to their deaths. Similarly, in mimetic rivalry, your rival is like the matador, manipulating you to death.

Lambo, understanding this, didn’t want to fight Ferrari to the end, so to speak, because “he knew that there was no end.” He didn’t want to go after “a never-ending assortment of obstacles with no end.”

Lambo had a teenage son and he didn’t want this son to get addicted to competition. He thought competition was only good up to a point, after which it turned into dangerous rivalry.

Instead, Lambo lived the last couple decades of his life peacefully, in a vineyard. The lesson of his life, according to Burgis?

“Competition can be good up to a certain point. The key is knowing what that point is and having the wherewithal to pivot around it.”

MEMES AND MEMETIC THEORY

In this subsection, Burgis sites Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, which coined the term “meme”: “Cultural units of information that spread from person to person through a process of imitation.”

Both Dawkins and Girard saw imitation as “foundational to human behavior,” but other than that, their theories differ completely.

Dawkins’ view is that memes are “discrete, static, and fixed,” trying to survive through perfect or near-perfect replication. And this is what leads to culture’s development and sustainability.

But Girard’s mimetic theory says that culture forms through the imitation of desires, which are open-ended, dynamic, and volatile — and not through things that are discrete/static/fixed.

In other words, Dawkin’s view (meme theory) makes humans “insignificant carriers of information,” unimportant hosts of memes, which are like viruses. While Girard’s view (mimetic theory) says that people are not insignificant at all — they are “highly significant models of desire.”

In Burgis’ words:

“We don’t care about what is modeled as much as we care about who is modeling it…we imitate…to try to forge an identity relative to other people.”

Dawkins’ memes see imitation as neutral to positive, while Girard’s mimetic theory sees imitation as potentially positive AND negative. Because imitation of desire can lead to people competing for the same thing, which leads to conflict.

And these “creative and destructive cycles of desire,” Burgis says, “are responsible for the rise and fall of cultures. They can’t be captured in a meme.”

THE FLYWHEEL EFFECT

Burgis says that mimetic desire moves in 2 cycles:

1. Cycle 1: Negative cycle, where mimetic desire leads to rivalry and conflict
2. Cycle 2: Positive cycle, where mimetic desire unites people for the common good.

To illustrate Cycle 2, Burgis cites the flywheel illustration in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, about how good companies turn awesome.

A flywheel is a mechanism that is hard to get going, but once it gets past a certain tipping point, its momentum propels you forward. “The process begins to power itself,” in other words.

Similarly, Burgis says, mimesis “accelerates in a nonlinear way” for both good and ill.

THE CREATIVE CYCLE

As an example of a positive cycle, Burgis sites Jim Collins’ anecdote about Jim Gentes, founder of the company Giro Sport Design.

Gentes created a bike helmet that changed competitive cycling. By studying Nike, Gentes realized he needed social influence to advertise his helmet, and he picked American cyclist Greg LeMond to be his sponsor. LeMond won his next race, and the helmet business took off.

In other words, his creation of a superior product attracted the patronage of elite athletes, and their support attracted the mainstream customers.

Now Burgis applies this idea to his readers, saying they can “set up [their] lives in such a way that [they] maximize the momentum of desire.”

For example, if someone starts working out, he’ll likely want to eat better, which makes him hang out more with friends who also care about their health, and so on and so forth until healthiness is a desire, not a dread.

It’s not easy to get this “fitness flywheel” going at first, but if you persist, at some point the “momentum takes hold” and you look forward to working out and being healthy.

On the other hand, there are negative flywheels, “doom loops” where negative forces build on each other until everything is destroyed.

Aristotle, Burgis says, had an idea about this concept thousands of years ago. He coined the term “entelechy” to describe “a thing that has its own principle of development within it.” Like how an embryo has all it needs to become a full human being if you just let it develop.

A computer, on the other hand, lacks entelechy because it can’t assemble and program itself without outside help.

A flywheel, now, that has entelechy. But the thing is:

“Everyone has to construct their own flywheels. There is no one flywheel for fitness, for example; yours might look completely different than mine.”

You probably have some suspicions about what will or will not help you to be more likely to do something you “should do,” Burgis points out. All you need to do now is make it explicit and put the cycle into motion.

And here we break for:

 —

Tactic 5. Start positive flywheels of desire

Desire is a “path-dependent process,” Burgis says, like a chain of dominoes. Which is why you want to map out the consequences of your present actions on your future, as well as you can.

Think about what a “positive cycle of desire” might be in your life. Burgis advises beginning with a “core desire” like “writing a book” or “spending more time with your kids.” And then figure out your “system of desire” to make it easier for you to reach that goal.

 —

Burgis suggests one-sentence flywheel steps that each include the word “want/desire” and link to the next step with a connector like “so that / which leads to / which makes.”

He gives a hypothetical example:

We want our customer service team to feel empowered to take ownership of decisions; so that

Customers feel they are speaking to someone with authority…[and don’t ask] for a manager, so that

Managers spend less time talking to frustrated customers (more efficiency); so that…

They can create a bonus pool…to reward customer service team members who take ownership of decisions; so that

Customer service team members want to take more ownership of decisions.

(Good example to show readers how the last step circles back to the first, creating that circular…well, cycle. But personally, I’m not so sure the “so that” between steps 3 and 4 are really all that connected — because managers spending less time talking to frustrated customers isn’t a direct reason for there being a bonus pool— I suppose a distant case could be made, but I think there could be a better example…)

And after this callout box, Burgis returns to his original story about how he’d been influenced by Tony Hsieh and Zappos.

He thought Hsieh’s modeling of a simple company with a flat organizational structure and “enshrined weirdness” was the bees’ knees — but he didn’t know about mimetic theory at the time. And neither, Burgis says, did the Zappos people themselves.

THE DESTRUCTIVE CYCLE

According to Burgis, Tony Hsieh “wanted everyone to be happy.”

(And therein lies the first problem, in my view. Shooting for happiness is not the key to a successful OR good life. See Viktor Frankl quote here.)

Zappos had gotten extremely successful just based on “excellent customer service…the effort eventually paid off. The right people noticed.”

Now, Hsieh was focused on happiness because he believed that happy employees delivered great customer service, making happy customers and so on and so forth. Happiness makes the flywheel turn more easily, in other words.

But unfortunately for Zappos, mimetic desire soon started shifting their positive cycle of happiness into a negative one.

But Burgis doesn’t tell readers exactly how this happened, yet.

First he talks about how Hsieh sold Zappos to Amazon and then started an experimental startup city in downtown Las Vegas.

But as all these changes were happening, morale at Zappos was dropping. Less than a year into the Downtown Project, an entrepreneur involved in the project committed suicide. Then another. Then another.

Why?

Burgis’ answer: “The new flat management structure of Zappos [and the Downtown Project] had mimetic consequences that nobody had foreseen or taken into account.”

No one had a clear job. And shifting the goal from customer service to the vague concept of “happiness” made the number of mimetic models multiply. Everything was unclear. No one knew who was happy or not, who to imitate or not, who was a model and who wasn’t, etc.

“Zappos and the Downtown Project,” Burgis says, “had turned into Freshmanistan.”

Entrepreneurs, Burgis points out, citing Dr. Zubin Damania who was part of the Downtown Project, are particularly attracted to the ideas of freedom and being masters of their own destiny or whatnot. But this is an ILLUSION.

“When people deny that they are affected by what other people around them want, they are most susceptible to getting drawn into an unhealthy cycle of desire that they don’t even know how to resist. // Mimetic desire breeds rivalries, which breed collisions and conflict.”

When there is “no clear separation between models and imitators,” communities can break down.

(Clarity and structure is super important to human beings. I’ve learned the power of this when it comes to learning. People will PAY to have structure and guidance and goals to shoot for, even if they can get the same material for free online. 

(The thing is, getting information online is a crapshoot. It’s too chaotic and spread out. Having a teacher who knows what he or she is doing feels much safer and more likely to succeed. Even if all they offer you is structure)

Tony Hsieh coined the idea of “return on collisions,” the idea that lots of good can come from random serendipitous meetings between strangers. To encourage this, he staged lots of social events and frowned on closed doors.

Burgis recounts attending one of these Tony Hsieh events, where he met at least twenty other ambitious entrepreneurs that he was now comparing himself to. Instead of being inspired, Burgis left feeling far more anxious than he was before.

As Zappos scaled, Hsieh came up with a new management philosophy called “holacracy,” where he got rid of traditional titles like CEO / COO and had different people fill different roles at different times via constitutional elections.

This led to a total mimetic meltdown. As Burgis says:

“To introduce something foreign to human nature — like an organizational ‘operating system’ that doesn’t account for mimetic desire — is to open up a Pandora’s box.”

(And this, friends, is also why socialism/communism and its various offshoots doesn’t work, has never worked, and will never work. Because its ideological founder(s) didn’t understand truth or human nature and based all their ideas on a false foundation)

In other words:

“Zappos had eliminated the management heirarchy, but they couldn’t eliminate the network of desire and the need that people have to be in relationship to models. There is always a hierarchy of desire from the perspective of an individual: some models are worth following more than others, and some things are worth wanting more than others.”

(Man, this reminds me so much of the infamous Jordan Peterson debate with Cathy Newman and his point about lobsters and how hierarchy is natural, not socially-contrived)

Here, Burgis also says something veerry interesting and important for writers and aspiring writers to take note of:

“We are hierarchical creatures. This is why we like listicles and ratings so much. We have a need to know how things stack up, how things fit together.”

(Exactly. Which is why the listicle will never die. It may evolve, but it won’t go away. Neither will ranking-style articles — after all, that was how Buzzfeed survived for years — not to mention all kinds of social media with their thumbs up or claps or stars or whatever. Think Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, etc. 

(Also, this is a service that great writers can perform for their readers: Offer helpful rankings of whatever their area of specialty is. 

(Whether that’s reviewing books and movies so people can waste less time on bad stuff, or ranking restaurants for the same reason, or going even deeper and explaining why certain ideas are better [truer to reality] than others, and so forth)

When Zappos got rid of visible roles and titles, they just “reappeared in different ways underground.”

(Imagine that — it’s just like how black markets inevitably pop up in socialist countries like North Korea…or China before it adopted a kind of capitalism — while keeping its main government totally socialist, of course)

The lack of clear roles at Zappos made everything more political, says journalist Aimee Groth. People were “less secure in their jobs…less clear on how they could hold on to their roles.”

And here, Burgis takes a (well deserved?) dig at Hsieh and his book on Delivering Happiness, which turned “delivering happiness” into the “first and primary” step in the flywheel, where before, happiness was the LAST stage (the result, not the inciting incident, so to speak).

“It’s presumptuous for anyone to think that they can ‘deliver happiness’ to anyone else…it’s not our job. It’s certainly not the job of a company,” Burgis says.

Why is “delivering happiness” so dangerous from a mimetic theory perspective?

Because people “gauge their happiness relative to other people.” It’s an intrinsically mimetic unit of measurement — it’s not even a unit of measurement, really.

Here, Burgis cites CS Lewis’ concept of “the inner ring,” an invisible system that everyone wants to be inside of and is afraid of being outside of.

Zappos, Burgis says, forgot about this inner ring.

HEIIRARCHICAL VALUES

The failure of Hsieh’s Downtown Project “was an impoverished view of human nature,” Burgis says.

Good leaders need to understand human ecology — “the web of relationships that affect human life and development,” and that includes the most overlooked (in Burgis’ eyes) concept of mimetic desire.

As an example, Burgis writes that if colleges suddenly started paying history majors $10K in cash, more than a few students will suddenly develop a desire to be history majors. They might even convince themselves into thinking this sudden love of the past is authentic and genuine (but, of course, we know better).

Without a clear hierarchy of values, Burgis says, “marketing, money, and models” will distort people’s desires. Which is why people in power (CEOs, professors, etc) need to be aware of and careful with how they “signal value,” (subtly or accidentally pushing certain behaviors, majors, jobs, etc.)

As a teacher, Burgis has seen too many students come to him saying they suddenly want to major in, say, accounting, because they “got the full-court press from an aunt or uncle or friend or career counselor about the job security that awaits them…”

The reality is, the students don’t know what they want to major in, and the model they’re looking at seems happy with their job in accounting, so they figure that’s what they want, too.

So Burgis coaches his students to tell him about their hierarchy of values, because “values act to order desires”:

“It’s not enough for them to tell me all the things they care about. They have to put them in some kind of order. I challenge them to make decisions and prioritize them. Augustine of Hippo called this the ordo amoris, or the ‘order of love.’”

(First observation: This is a great journaling exercise for us writers. To take some time to think about our values, and then order them.

(Side note: It’s super interesting all the different thinkers Burgis cites in his book. From Peter Thiel and Rene Girard to Dawkins to CS Lewis and Augustine…definitely not all people who agree with each other on the most fundamental things. 

(But that’s generally a good sign. It shows the author is at least aware of and probably has considered his theme from several different angles)

To give an example of how values order desires, Burgis says:

“If a person who loves meat realizes that their values are such that they no longer wish to eat meat, there comes a time — after they’ve lived out their values long enough — when they no longer even want meat.”

(This is so true. I have literally experienced this exact phenomenon in a kind of odd and sadly twisted way: 

(I grew up avoiding certain foods due to values imposed by my family and subculture and only recently learned that the real reasons for these values were…not legit, let’s say. 

(However, I now have a strange aversion to foods in a way that hasn’t been really good for my physical health. I’ve started trying to eat some of these formerly-forbidden things, but it’s been slow going, because a large of me is instinctively averse to the taste or even idea of these foods.

(Another observation: This passage reminds me a lot of the concept of sanctification, of the line in Exodus about “God hardening Pharaoh’s heart,” and of the idea of an eternal hell — all three have to do with when you value something, and you continually act in line with that value, you eventually can change your desires, both for good and for evil.

(Another observation: This concept puts a real damper on modern day opinions on things like sexuality and gender identity. Identity, in the modern conception, is based on desire — who you are is what you want. Or what you want is who you are.

(But here, Burgis is arguing that it’s not what you WANT that makes you who you are, actually. It’s what you VALUE. And that is a very different thing. Think about it.)

“Whether we recognize it or not, our minds think in hierarchies all of the time…Without a hierarchy of values, which helps form and direct desires, we can’t even begin to think about what to pay attention to and to what degree.”

(Another idea I recognize from Jordan Peterson. I’m sure these two aren’t the only ones who have pointed such a thing out, it’s just that they’re the most recent ones I’ve been exposed to)

The reason why a hierarchy of values is important is in part because sometimes you have to choose between various good things. If you don’t understand your values, then you will use mimesis to drive your decision making.

And here we break for:

 —

Tactic 6. Establish and communicate a clear hierarchy of values.

Right out the gate, Burgis has a great line: “A hierarchy of values is an antidote to mimetic conformity.”

(In other words, if you truly want to be original, don’t do the opposite of what others are doing. Figure out what your values are and live in integrity to those)

If all values are equal in your life, then in a conflict, the one that wins will be the one that’s most mimetic. Just like people who panic-buy toilet paper in a pandemic.

Values also need to be ranked, because if they aren’t, you’re not really valuing anything. Burgis encourages people to map their values out on paper. And to remember that conflict comes from sameness, not difference, which is why you DON’T want everything to be “the same” or you’ll increase possibility of conflict.

 —

(Oh man. Just had a thought. I wonder how many of the pushers of equity/equal outcomes understand this concept overtly or even subconsciously? How many of them are actually pushing equity because they want conflict and chaos, and not because they truly care about so-called “fairness”?)

THE COLLAPSE OF DESIRE

The hierarchy of values is what saved Lamborghini, Burgis says.

Because he valued his son and protecting his son from racetrack rivalry, Lambo was able to resist the allure of competing against Ferrari on race cars.

He quit wile he was ahead, instead of getting sucked into never-ending mimetic one-upmanship.

Tony Hsieh, on the other hand…well, he left an interesting legacy, after dying in Fall of 2020. Tony always stood out, Burgis said, but standing out is a risky thing.

Why? Burgis doesn’t say right away but instead tells readers he will tell them in the next chapter.

And then Burgis skips to another topic that we’ve seen before — cats.

Egyptians, Burgis said, used cats as “ritual offerings and sacrifice” because they were considered sacred. And in mimetic theory, there’s a powerful link “between chaos and order, violence and the sacred.”

Sacrificial rites, Burgis claims, “are the mechanism by which mimetic contagion is contained and controlled.”

And this is the 4th, final stage of the mimetic cycle — the scapegoat mechanism.

(duh, duh, DUH! A very nice, dramatic exit for this chapter that really makes you want to turn the page…)

Quotes & Comments

Opening: In August 2019, two families went to a water park in California. By the time they left, they had gotten into a melee that left one man in a coma.

Closing: The fourth and final stage of the mimetic cycle, which we turn to now, is the process by which chaotic desires become orderly desires in human societies: the scapegoat mechanism.

• Figuring out your flywheel of positive desire seems like good advice to experiment with. I suspect it’s much more complicated to do in real life than it seems, written out, but it’s worth a try.
• The personal anecdotes with Tony Hsieh (coupled with analysis-from-a-distance) are also a good touch. No one but Burgis can write this particular aspect of his story, so it’s a valuable addition to the book.
• As a writer, I also appreciated his insight into listicles and rankings/ratings. I hadn’t thought of it quite that way, but it was an interesting observation, and one I think is true to reality.

Chapter 4. The Invention of Blame — An Underrated Social Discovery

The Danger of Purity…Safety in Judgment…Ritual Scapegoats…Self-Awareness, Self-Hatred

In This Chapter

• How people turn to a quasi-religious ritual to deal with mimetic desires gone haywire.
• Why scapegoats exist in the past and what kind of people are most likely to be made into scapegoats.
• Why the crucifixion of Jesus “stands at the center of human history” from a mimetic theory perspective.

Burgis kicks off chapter four with an anecdote about Jenny Holzer, a “subversive artist” who posted anarchistic lines on walls at night. One of her statements was “Protect me / From what / I want.”

Burgis comments:

“Each of us has desires that, if followed to the end, are dangerous to ourselves and to others.”

And this is true at the larger societal level as well.

Girard believed that people protected themselves from “mimetic crisis” by “converg[ing] on one person or group, whom they expel or eliminate.”

This is the scapegoat.

SACRED VIOLENCE

Girard, Burgis says, believed mimetic desire can create “a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance.”

Girard thought:

“through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.”

(That reminds me of this quote from Dostoevsky)

“Small, interpersonal conflicts are a microcosm of the instability that threatens the entire world,” Burgis writes.

 He then cites Prussian military general Carl Von Clausewitz’s book On War, and how “Girard credits him with having recognized the mimetic escalation of most conflicts.”

Clausewitz feared that wars were becoming more and more extreme.

In such cases, what do people do?

Girard believed that people stopped mimetic conflict through sacrifice. Through the “scapegoat mechanism.” How it works is by turning “a war of all against all into a war of all against one.”

Girard believed this process was the “foundation of all culture.”

(Is he right? Let’s see what his [and Burgis’] argument is…)

THE DANGER OF PURITY

Burgis begins this story with the ancient Israelite ritual of the scapegoat during Yom Kippur. (Note: You can read about this ceremony yourself in Leviticus 16).

The people would bring two goats to the Temple, the high priest would lay his hands on the scapegoat, symbolically transferring the people’s sins to the goat, and then sending the goat out into the desert.

(I’m pretty sure Burgis or Girard are interpreting this story incorrectly. For one, in the Torah/Old Testament record of this ceremony, the goat that is NOT the scapegoat is the one that is actually killed/sacrificed. For another, the thing being expiated in this ceremony is sin, not misguided mimetic desire.)

In Greece, Burgis goes on to relate, people sacrificed other people, rather than goats. This person, a pharmakos, was someone at the “margins of society” and if you thought the word pharmakos sounded like pharmacy, that’s because the pharmakos was “seen as a poison to the community,” making the sacrifice of the pharmakos the “cure” to the society.

These people were “often tortured and humiliated…in a public place. And this ritual produced what Aristotle called “catharsis” — releasing strong emotions through an external event.

(This is giving me Hunchback of Notre Dame vibes)

To give a more modern example of this concept, Burgis relates how an executive he once worked with organized a paintball outing to let the people run around and shoot each other in order to NOT snipe at each other in the office.

In the Greek city of Massalia (now Marseilles), Burgis says, crowds would push the pharmakos to the edge of a cliff and force him off it.

(This reminds me of the time Jesus was almost forced off a cliff Luke 4:29–30 after the whole “no prophet is honored in his hometown” line)

The idea is that when a crowd commits murder, everyone is guilty yet no individual is. “The entire group reaped the benefit of discharging violence onto someone without the threat of retaliation.”

(Spoiler: And THIS reminds me of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Except that the victim deserved it. I wonder where she got the idea…?

(Also reminds me of the mobs burning things down in America from 2020+)

SAVING PEOPLE FROM THEMSELVES

Burgis gives an example of what happens if lightning strikes while you are in an ocean versus when you’re in a pool.

The latter situation is far more dangerous. Because water conducts electricity well but if you have an ocean’s worth of water, it diffuses electricity fast. But if you’re in a pool, you have nowhere to go.

Similarly, “In Celebristan…the degree of social distance between people is high; the risk of mimetic contagion is low.”

Whereas Freshmanistan is more like the pool.

“We can’t predict when the wisdom of the crowd becomes the violence of the mob.”

Here, Burgis cites writer Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote in a NYT opinion piece about “the new cancel culture,” saying “Nothing is sacred anymore…nothing is legitimate…And so, justice is seized by the crowd.”

(Coates is not exactly promoting crowd-seizing-justice, but I’m not sure why Burgis included a paragraph-length quote from Coates in here, it doesn’t really help buffer his argument. It doesn’t necessarily hurt, except to include more bloat, but it doesn’t help. This would be one of the things I would cut, though I suspect there may be other reasons for this quote from this person being here…)

Next, Burgis says, accusations are “dangerously mimetic.” The first one is the hardest because there are no models for it, and people are heistant to accuse others of “truly terrible” things. But once the first accusation is made, others can jump on. The second accuser has an easier time making an accusation, the third even easier, and so on and so forth.

(This reminds me of the hashtag-me-too movement and how once one person started it, tons of people jumped on. Same with the dancing video of one man crazily dancing alone, attracting more and more until there’s a huge crowd)

Burgis cites a few more examples of the scapegoat mechanism, one about Apollonius of Tyana who supposedly ended an epidemic by having people stone a blind old beggar.

Burgis also threads a hypothetical story throughout this section, about a group of people in a pool who accuse an innocent guy of trying to electrocute them:

One person who is stuck in the electricity of the pool finds the strength (through sheer rage) to come out and attack the outsider, and becomes the model who motivates more people to come out of the water and attack the scapegoat.

Burgis explains:

“Models spur people to action. Sometimes they help lead to breakthrough performances. At the 2012 London Summer Olympics, more than thirty world records were broken at a time when many scientists thought the human body had reached the limits of its development”

Mobs, Burgis says, are “hyper-mimetic organisms” where individuals lose their personal agency. “Crowd psychology is different than individual psychology.”

(Goodness this is really reminiscent of identity politics and the communistic ideas of class, where there are no individuals, and everyone is a member of a group and is seen and expected to behave as such).

Burgis says that there are only 3 possible endings to his hypothetical pool-electrocution story.

1. The scapegoat is expelled from the community
2. The attackers recover their reason and calm down (this is the Romantic Enlightenment idea that is not realistic, Burgis says)
3. The attackers beat up the scapegoat and throw him into the electrified pool

The scapegoat mechanism, Burgis says, is “most operative at times of instability” like during the rise of the Nazi party or the Rwandan genocide.

It doesn’t matter if the scapegoat is guilty or innocent, Burgis writes. It only matters that the community gets to use them to achieve “unification, healing, purgation, expiation.”

The scapegoat “serves a religious function.”

THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

How are scapegoats chosen, though? Burgis says all scapegoats tend to have certain qualities in common:

1. They’ve got an extreme personality or neurodiversity or physical abnormality that makes them noticeable
2. They’re on the margins of society
3. They’re considered deviant in some way
4. They can’t fight back
5. They show up “as if by magic without society knowing where they came from or how they got there” (Here, Burgis references climate activist Greta Thunberg being a potential scapegoat…it might be too early to say, because Thunberg may yet have a massive downfall, but I don’t think reality is as Burgis portrays it here)
6. And they are disproportionately kings or beggars (or both)

Scapegoats basically “have the power to unite people and defuse mimetic conflict”

Then Burgis talks about how ancients linked social ills to physical epidemics, like how Oedipus’ (inadvertent) sin of murdering his father and marrying his mother in the Greek story resulted in a plague, or so the people thought.

Today, Bugis points out, people still use natural-phenomena-style language to describe “the fallout of crises” such as “an avalanche of housing debt” or “a tsunami of a pandemic” etc.

“Most people maintain the illusion of independent desire — the Romantic Lie. But as the world’s…systems become more complex, so do our systems of desire. // Each of us occupies multiple, often overlapping and intersecting, systems of desire. Developing the ability to know which ones we’re in and what to do about them is a key goal of the second half of this book.”

THE DANCING MANIA OF 1518

Next, Burgis tells the story of a woman who started dancing uncontrollably in the streets of Strasbourg in 1518. This from the book The Dancing Plague by John Waller.

After her, “spontaneous dancers popped up in cities throughout Europe.”

In Italy, this phenomena was thought to be caused by the bite of the tarantula, but Italian ethno-psychiatrist Ernesto de Martino dug into the issue and said that the dancing came from people who’d been through trauma and were triggered by a trauma.

The affliction was relational, in other words.

(This is one thing I’ve been thinking about more and more, especially in the area of mental health. I think the best and perhaps only solution for people suffering from mental-emotional issues is for them to mend or create a healthy web of relationships with other people. It’s not talking therapy or medications or hospitalizations that will do the trick, but curative relationships.

(Similarly, I suspect the vast majority if not all of mental-emotional health issues stem from some kind of broken relationship. Abuse, divorce, breakups — either romantic, familial, or other — parental neglect, etc. These are the things that break people’s minds, hearts, and spirits. Healing people will mean reversing that trend)

Tarantism, Burgis says, was a ritual that protected the community from further breakdown of relationships. “The dancing was caused by mimetic desire. It was symptomatic of a social contagion.” In other words, not tarantulas.

(Nope. The connection here to mimetic desire is not clear)

SAFETY IN JUDGMENT

“Scapegoats are chosen through a mimetic process of judgment, not a rational one.”

Burgis talks about how stoning was the official form of capital punishment in ancient Israel, and then relates the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11).

Jesus was confronted by a mob of religious leaders who wanted him to order an adulteress’ death. But he only said that the one without sin could throw the first stone, resulting in the accusers leaving, frustrated.

Burgis argues that this story shows how throwing the first stone is hard because the first stone has no mimetic model.

(Again, I disagree with the use of this story in this way. The point is not that the first stone is hard to throw, it’s that no one dared to throw the first stone because it would mean that they thought they were sinless, which is a shameful thing for a mere human to claim)

Next, Burgis cites a study in China on the social media app Weibo, saying that anger spreads faster on social media because it is most contagious between people with weak ties.

Here Burgis breaks to talk about…

 —

Tactic 7. Arrive at Judgments in Anti-Mimetic Ways

Burgis advises people to vote without seeing how others are voting if you want a “true, pre-mimetic reflection of what people think.”

 —

THE JOY OF HATE WATCHING

In this section, Burgis talks about Trump’s show The Apprentice. In it, Trump is perceived as “a mimetic model — a person who knows what he wants” because he’s the master who fires the apprentices.

“There is probably no more effective thing that a politician — or potential politician — can do to gain popular support than resolving a mimetic crisis. Such a person mimics the role of the High Priest in ancient Israel.”

Girard claims that scapegoating happened naturally in ancient times, and then people started to “ritually reenact” the process by “creating disorder, allowing mimetic tension to reach a peak, then expelling or sacrificing something symbolic. (This is the formula of reality television today).”

Burgis says this works due to “sacrificial substitution” such as substituting animals for human or through “termination of executives, mass incarceration, social media cancellations.”

“There seems to be no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to satiating our hunger for sacrifice.”

Burgis gives some literary examples of the scapegoat mechanism, from Stephen King’s Carrie, to Shirley Jackson’s short “The Lottery,” to Lord of the Flies, Midsommar, and, of course, The Hunger Games.

(Interesting that I’m currently analyzing that series…)

And in sports, teams cut players or coaches after losing games.

THE SCAPEGOAT WINS

Now, Burgis turns to Jesus’ story. Or rather, Girard’s commentary on the story:

Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, said that Jesus had to die, in order to avoid a greater violence, because Jesus was “creating tension in Jerusalem at an already tense time.”

Burgis claims that all people have “religious thinking” in the sense that “they subconsciously believe that sacrifice brings peace.”

(I’m not sure I’d agree that that is a good definition or description of “religion.”)

Girard claims that sacrificial rituals worked so well they “hindered scientific progress.”

In fact, according to Girard “we invented science because we stopped burning witches.”

(Disagree. Girard sounds like he believes in scientism, the idea that science is a thing, like a god or like Fate, when in reality it is the name for a process of inquiry in order to figure out what is true about a certain material, physical thing. 

(Science has nothing to say about philosophical or moral matters, it in fact depends on people’s a priori commitments to non-scientifically-provable ideas like the idea that objective truth exists and is discoverable through rigorous experimentation.

(In other words, it’s not because people stopped blaming “witches” and being superstitious that they discovered — not invented — the science process. It’s because the first scientists believed in an orderly, figure-out-able world that they figured out how to learn more about it.)

Now Burgis returns to the Bible, to the Ten Commandments, specifically — the tenth, which says “you shall not covet your neighbor’s house…wife…slave…ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” (Ex 20:17)

This commandment is interesting because it prohibits certain desires, rather than external actions. Burgis interprets this to mean that the Bible forbids rivalrous desires, because it leads to violence.

He then turns to the Old Testament story of Joseph, whose jealous brothers sold him into slavery. Joseph eventually worked his way up to second in command in Egypt and saw his brothers again when they came to buy food during a famine.

They don’t recognize Joseph, and Joseph is willing to forgive them, but not without testing them first. He sets up his brother Benjamin as a thief to see how the others will react, but his other brother Judah steps in to save Benjamin. This is when Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers and welcomes them to come live with him.

And now, for the most important story in the Bible:

Girard read Jesus’ crucifixion as “human behavior operating differently than he had seen anywhere else in his reading of history.”

(I always find it interesting when non-believers in Jesus take Jesus’ story seriously, from Jordan Peterson to this Rene Girard. Although they don’t trust in Jesus as their God and savior, they still see something very interesting in His story, from their areas of expertise. In Girard’s case, mimetic theory. In Peterson’s case, psychology/Jungian theory).

After Jesus’ crucifixion, it seemed to have quelled the mob, but a few days later, Jesus’ followers were coming out to say he was innocent and had come back to life, according to Girard.

(Actually, Jesus’ followers didn’t say he was innocent. They didn’t have to — Everyone knew he’d been wrongly condemned, including Pilate, the Roman official who condemned him to death. The coming-back-to-life part, though, that is the key. But it doesn’t fit very neatly into the mimetic theory stuff that Girard is trying to promote here)

According to Burgis (Girard?) Jesus’ scapegoat story is different from other ancient scapegoat stories because those stories saw the scapegoat as at least partly guilty, whereas Jesus’ story is told from the perspective of Jesus being totally innocent and story audiences are supposed to “see the folly of the crowd and…move beyond it.”

Girard believes that the gospel story was a “definitive turning point — the moment when the scapegoat mechanism began to lose its absolute power” because the story forced people “to come to grips with their own violence.”

(The Jesus story is actually way more than that, and I’m not sure it really makes the point that Burgis/Girard is trying to say here)

“Those of us who grew up in cultures that have been touched by this history have been so inculcated with the concern for innocent victims that it’s easy to forget how some of our deeply held convictions may have been formed in the first place.”

(This is a good point. Those who have had the benefit of growing up in a Christian milieu, even if they and their families never believed, take for granted certain moral feelings that not everyone has in this world. 

(That’s the whole thesis behind Tom Holland’s book, Dominion)

SELF-AWARENESS, SELF-HATRED

Burgis quotes Girard pointing out that ancient cultures did not care about victims the way we modern people do. “Think about how peculiar [that] is,” Burgis says.

“Western culture has developed strongly around the defense of victims,” Burgis says. This is due to how our cultural awareness “comes from the biblical stories,” over the course of two thousand years.

Ironically, non-religious people have adopted this “defense of victims” idea even as they’ve rejected the religion from which it came, which, Burgis said, has led to mimetic rivalry between non-religious and religious people.

(I’m not sure I’d call the conflict between a religious and non-religious worldview a mimetic conflict. I think it’s deeper than that)

The balance of power has shifted, Burgis points out. In the past, victims were totally helpless. Today, recognized victims have tremendous cultural influence.

“The scapegoat mechanism has been so thoroughly subverted that there is some semblance of a reverse scapegoating mechanism…The original scapegoat mechanism brought order out of chaos — but the order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos is meant to shake up the ‘orderly’ system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change it.”

Here, Burgis cites George Floyd as an example of the above statement.

But Burgis warns that defense of victims can lead to new dangers. People can claim victim status in order to gain power, politically, economically, or spiritually. These self-proclaimed victims can now pick new scapegoats and make new victims with their power.

Burgis points out that Old Testament prophets were often persecuted and scapegoated. In Jesus’ time, the Pharisees honored these dead prophets and claimed they would never persecute such people themselves…and then they killed Jesus.

This should be a warning to people who look at the atrocities of, say, Nazi Germany, and clai they would never participate in such heinous acts.

“That is exactly what makes the scapegoat mechanism possible — the idea that you are not capable of it. We lack the humility to see that we are all caught up in the mimetic process.”

(I agree that too many people don’t realize they are absolutely capable of committing horrors. But I wouldn’t call that blindness to mimetic processes. I’d call that blindness to depravity and sin)

And then Burgis quotes the famous Solzhenitsyn speech: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

(Man, that last sentence really hits)

SIGNS OF CONTRADICTION

Now, Burgis wraps up the chapter by returning to his story of anarchist poet Jenny Holzer’s line: “Protect me from what I want.”

The idea was to make people reflect on themselves.

Likewise, Burgis says, “the crucifixion of Jesus…stands at the center of human history in stark contrast to everything that surrounds it” and makes people consider their own culpability in “sustaining a cycle of violence.”

He wraps up with the story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, about a utopian city whose happiness depends on the eternal suffering of a child.

And a quote from Girard: “Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat.”

Quotes & Comments

Opening: Between 1977 and 1982, Jenny Holzer stalked the streets of New York City under the cover of night, pasting her subversive artwork on walls.

Closing: “Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat,” wrote Rene Girard. “I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats.”

• I’m not sure I agree with the main thrust of this chapter.
• It is true that individuals, and even entire societies, are capable of pinning all their evil attentions on one person or group and unfairly condemning, even killing, whatever unlucky person or group gets focused on.
• But I can’t say I’m convinced that this is due to a desire to dissipate mimetic crisis. You could as well attribute it to bouts of evil insanity or the acting up of dark spiritual forces.
• In sum, this was (to me) the worst chapter of the whole book in terms of argument made, communication of argument, and support of argument.
• It had a lot of word-fat and the thread of thought did not flow smoothly and logically from one point to another. Burgis also quoted or referenced several people who are…questionable, at best. Irrelevant or even detrimental (to his point, to society) at worst.

PART II: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DESIRE

In This Section

• How to protect yourself from destructive mimesis and what anti-memesis really is.

Burgis starts this section with a warning:

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

Burgis argues that with the internet now an integral part of our lives, we need to develop “machinery in our guts” to help us deal and resist “dangerous mimesis,” learning to be a bit anti-mimetic, which is the purpose of this second half of the book.

Being anti-mimetic, Burgis says, is not being free of mimetic desire, but like Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility, you want to develop the ability to “counteract destructive forces of desire.”

Quotes & Comments

Opening: We can now go out into the world and find all of the scapegoats, point out every rivalry, and maybe even have a laugh at the expense of those still caught up in the quixotic throes of mimetic desire.

Closing: The second half of this book is about developing the stuff inside our guts. It’s about developing the stuff inside our guts. It’s about developing the ability to resist knee-jerk social reflexes, to separate from the deafening crowd, to renounce the allure of easy desires, to want differently, and to want more.

Chapter 5. Anti-Mimetic — Feeding the People, Not the System

Questioning Desire…Probing Origins…Dropping Out

In This Chapter

• A chef who refused Michelin stars. And why he did so.
• What mimetic systems are and how they trap you.
• How you aren’t “completely responsible” for choosing your goals, and what really drives your goal-making.

The chapter opens with Burgis interviewing chef Sebastien Bras, whose restaurant “draws crowds in spite of its location in the middle of nowhere.”

The key reason for this interview?

To hear the story of how Bras told the Michelin guide that he didn’t care about their opinion, and asked them to remove his restaurant from their guide.

MOVING GOALPOSTS

Burgis quotes James Clear’s Atomic Habits:

“We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”

And when it comes to desire, goals are the product of our systems.

Burgis argues that: “the obsession with goal setting is misguided, even counterproductive.”

Why?

Because if the focus is on the how of goal-setting rather than the why (or how to choose a goal) then goals can turn into “instruments of self-flagellation.”

Most people, Burgis says, aren’t completely responsible for choosing their goals. They pick goals based on what’s available in their “system of desire.”

Goals are often chosen for us, by models. And that means the goalposts are always moving.

For example: Chef Bras once pursued Michelin stars, until he realized the pursuit was killing him, then he quit.

Burgis argues that “every goal is embedded within a system” and that mimetic desire is that system behind your goals.

So your job is to become consciously aware of that system so that you won’t pick bad goals.

MIMETIC SYSTEMS

Now, Burgis turns to a discussion on mimetic systems.

The first, most obvious examples it he US education system. In it, most students are focused on getting into college via their GPA, standardized test scores, and extracurriculars.

But they have “lost sight of the teleology, or final purpose, of the education system.”

5th graders want to become 6th graders who are focused on turning into 7th graders and so on and so forth until 12th grade, at which you are supposed to transition into college, but there, the teleology of education gets even more vague.

What’s after college? Grad school? A job? Becoming a well-rounded critical thinker?

Burgis observes that when he was an undergrad, he had no idea what to do so he just looked at what others wanted and went for that.

“And that’s when I began my miserable fifteen-month career in Advanced Excel and PowerPoint,” he says.

Burgis points out that other groups also function on mimetic systems: From venture capital funds to social media, to prisons, families, friend groups, and more.

And when a strong mimetic system is in place, it remains in place until it’s disrupted by a stronger one.

BEING WATCHED AND RATED

Here, Burgis turns back to Chef Bras’ story of running his restaurant (Le Suquet) in a small French town, Laguiole.

The Michelin system involves sending spies called “Inspectors” into restaurants unbeknownst to the chefs. These investigators have the power to add or remove stars, and the removal of stars has been known to drive chefs to suicide.

Several chefs have rebelled against the system including British chef Marco Pierre White and Paris chef Alain Senderens.

But the point is, everyone has “our own version of a Michelin star system.”

We can easily find ourselves, like a French chef, wanting “stars” — marks of status and prestige, badges of honor.

 —

Here, Burgis inserts Tactic 8: Map Out the Systems of Desire in Your World.

The point, he says, is to know “which systems of desire you’re living in. There’s probably more than one.”

For example, why were Western countries unprepared for COVID-19? Why did they suffer shortages of ventilaters, test kits, and the like?

Not because they couldn’t or didn’t know what was needed, but because they didn’t want to make them.

The problem is inertia.

“If you understand the systems of desire that color the choices of people around you, you’re more likely to see emergent possibilities by daring to look in different directions.”

 —

THE TRA-LA-LA AND THE CHICHI

Back to the Michelin story.

The first Michelin Guide was published in 1900 by brothers who used mimetic marketing to “go from being a company that sells tires to a company that sells desire. They would go from being Compaq to Apple.”

Back in the 1900s, people weren’t driving cars much, but the Michelins projected that they would, and that they (the Michelins themselves) could drive up that desire.

Over time, however, the Michelin guide has turned into “a limiting and stifling system of desire.”

As Chef Bras points out, there are official and unofficial codes in the guide that chefs must follow, or risk being de-starred.

THE ONE LESS TRAVELED BY

“We can’t know ourselves without knowing the history of our desires.”

Chef Bras himself was the son of a chef, and he wanted to be a chef when he grew up. But to test this desire, he went to school for economics, first. After he realized he still wanted to be a chef, he came back to his family restaurant with the goal of helping it win three Michelin stars (at the tie, they had two).

They did win the third star, but soon, Chef Bras began to chafe under the system.

 —

Tactic 9: Put Desires to the Test

“Don’t take desires at face value. Find out where they lead.”

Burgis advises projecting any competing desires you have into the future, using your imagination to think in detail what will happen if you follow one path versus another.

Imagine yourself on your deathbed, he says. From that perspective, what choice would make you most content?

 —

Burgis asked Bras why he gave back his Michelin stars, and Bras said that Michelin “tried to set itself up as ‘both judge and jury.’”

He was particularly miffed when Michelin tried to sell him some new marketing tools.

Supposedly, chefs were free to decline, but the fact that Michelin was selling marketing tools to chefs when they had such influence over a restaurant’s reputation was unacceptable to Bras.

Bras went on a bike ride, and when he returned, he decided to request removal from the Michelin guide. It was the first time anyone had done this in 120 years, and Michelin didn’t do anything about it…

MODELING A NEW MINDSET

So Bras posted a video in 2017 announcing his removal request. He used the power of social media and his video blew up to 1M+ views. But Michelin still didn’t respond until he saw that in the 2018 guide, his restaurant had been removed.

The fact that Bras HAD three Michelin stars before asking for removal may indicate to some people that he wasn’t acting out of a sour grapes mentality (See: Aesop’s famous fable about the fox).

Which is all fine and dandy, but as Burgis points out:

Don’t believe that a person has to buy into and play a mimetic game and win before they can opt out of it with a clear conscience.

In other words, not every renunciation is due to resentment or envy.

We are free, Burgis points out, to choose some of the systems of desire we want to be part of, and we can alter our relationship with others. But “the earlier we exercise our agency in the process, the easier it is.”

The thing about the fox in Aesop’s fable, Buris says, is that he was alone, so he was able to be a “Romantic Liar.” If he was with others, it would’ve been impossible to say the grapes were merely sour.

“Sebastien Bras tasted the grapes, and the grapes were sour. Do you need to taste to believe?”

Bras decided to reject the Michelin system because he wanted to focus on values like family and sharing food of his region without “fear of reprisal.”

Bras’ decision to leave Michelin made many chefs reach out to him. Many understood him (most were 3-star chefs), but many did not (most were 1– or 2-star chefs).

The end of the story?

In 2019, Bras got a call that Michelin was reinstating him in their guide with 2 stars. He simply laughed at them.

Quotes & Comments

Opening: “There are key moments in life when we ask ourselves questions,” Sebastien Bras says.

Closing: In February 2019, exactly a year after learning of his initial victory, Sebastien received a phone call…”He informed me that I was being reintegrated into the 2019 guide — and with two stars.” // “And what was your reaction?” I asked him. // “I laughed,” he said. “I laughed a lot.”

• Burgis makes a mistake with comparing the Atomic Habits quote to his idea that “goals are the product of our systems.” His system is externally environmental, Clear’s is referring to the system you create to accomplish your goal. It’s an internally directed environment, and not just an environment.
• Burgis’ note on losing sight of the teleology of education resonates with me. His personal experience looking at “what everyone else wanted” also resonates. It made me think about who I looked up to, what peer group I designed my goals around, and the answer is sobering.
• Burgis includes a line: “We can’t know ourselves without knowing the history of our desires.”
• This is interesting. “I think therefore I am (that is, I exist)” turns into “I want therefore I am (who I am)”
• The problem with Tactic 9: You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Your projection now may not be true, may even be wildly off the mark (see: Communism). How do you know you can trust your imagination?
• A better way might be to look for people a few steps ahead of you on the path. However, even that is not certain. A blacksmith could have made a great living back in the 1800s, but once the car was invented, very few people could see how that would impact them. Not everyone has the gift of an accurate imagination.
• This story of the Michelin stars reminds me of Max Lucado’s children’s book about Punchinello.

Chapter 6. Disruptive Empathy — Breaking Through Thin Desires

Fireside Chat with a Hit Man…More Sex, Less Envy…Empathic Listening

In This Chapter

• The unexpected thing that happened when a hit man invited himself to Burgis’ company barbecue.
• How to stop a negative mimetic cycle in its tracks.
• The difference between sympathy and empathy, and how (and why) one is mimetic, and the other is anti-mimetic.
• How to protect yourself from cheap mimetic desires.

Chapter 6 begins with Burgis returning to his Zappos story — or rather, the fallout. In late 2008, he could no longer keep his company afloat financially, so he tried to buy time by making a list of suppliers he had to pay back, starting from strictest to most flexible.

Unfortunately, he found that one company he hadn’t prioritized turned out to have rumored connections with organized crime.

One day, they sent an agent (pseudonymed Dave Romero) to Burgis’ house. Romero had already contacted Burgis three times previously, calling, showing up at a bar, and so on.

But this time, Romero didn’t just ask for repayment, he also casually asked for an invite to Burgis’ company barbecue taking place the next night. Burgis couldn’t exactly say no.

“I had invited a hit man into my home,” Burgis recalled.

That night, after the party while guests were sitting around a fire, Dave suddenly blurted out that he had killed a man before. While everyone was stunned at this revelation, Dave continued:

“What would you all dream of doing if you stopped worrying so damn much about money?”

For an hour, Dave asked increasingly personal questions of everyone present (around fulfilling work, deeply loving people, numbing pain, etc), and as Dave was vulnerable, so were the others.

After the party, a week passed before Burgis found out that Dave was actually a partner of the business, not a hired hit man, that he had died from a heart attack, and before dying, he’d more or less cancelled the debt Burgis owed him.

This anecdote illustrates Burgis’ concept of “disruptive empathy.” (Here, Burgis cites Gil Bailie’s book Violence Unveiled, where the term is used as a chapter heading).

Negative emotions like fear, anger, anxiety are “easily amplified by mimesis”

For example, if someone refuses to shake your hand, your instinct is to withdraw as much or more than what that person withdrew from you.

It’s an odd phenomenon, Girard observes, that someone refusing to imitate you by refusing your hand causes you to imitate him by refusing to engage with him.

This is how negative mimetic cycles get started.

But you can negate a negative mimetic cycle when both parties use empathy to stop seeing each other as rivals.

Empathy is about “getting to know people at their core” and this “reduces the possibility of cheap mimetic interactions.”

How do you do it?

By sharing and listening to “stories of deeply fulfilling action.”

THE PROBLEM WITH SYMPATHY

The problem, Burgis says, is that sympathy and empathy are not the same.

• Sym: together
• Em: to go into

Sympathy means “feeling together,” and can be “easily hijacked by mimesis.”

Empathy means you are “going into the experiences or feelings of another person” but without losing self-possession.

Empathy involves sharing another’s experience without imitating them or identifying with them so much so that you lose your individuality.

Empathy, in other words, is anti-mimetic.

It disrupts negative mimesis cycles because the person empathizing is able to enter another’s experience, sharing their thoughts and feelings, “without necessarily sharing [their] desires.”

Empathy allows you to connect deeply without becoming like other people.

In a mimetic crisis, everyone becomes alike, losing their freedom and individuality. But empathy helps you to avoid sacrificing yourself so that you can “find and cultivate thick desires.

What are thick desires?

They are desires that are not hyper-mimetic” and can “form the foundation for a good life.”

THICK DESIRES

Thick desires protect you from cheap mimetic desires and help you have a more fulfilling life.

While thin desires are “highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow,” thick desires are like “diamonds that have been formed deep beneath the surface, nearer to the core of the Earth.”

The desire to retire, for example, is a thin desire. It wasn’t widely adopted until after WWII, after all.

The desire to invest time with family is a thick desire. How do you know? Because you can start doing it today, and you can continue it for the rest of your life. It “grows with compound interest over many years.”

How else to you distinguish the difference between thin and thick desires?

You can’t tell based on feelings alone, especially because the thinner the desire, the more intense a feeling often becomes.

As you grow older you tend to recognize thin desires better because you have more life experience showing you what kind of desires leave you feeling unfulfilled. 

But that is not always the case.

SHAKING THE DUST

And here, Burgis returns back to his Zappos story.

After the deal fell through, he asked himself why he wanted to start his company in the first place?

He realized he’d started with 3 thick desires that, over time, he’d replaced with thin ones:

1. He wanted to create value in the world (This was replaced with a craving for personal prestige, once he saw that his peers craved recognition)
2. He wanted to create his own lifestyle with “clear boundaries and balance,” the ability to read and walk his dogs and be in loving relationships (This was replaced by conforming to the lifestyle pattern of other entrepreneurs)
3. He wanted classical wisdom (This was replaced with consuming memes, tweets, and tech news “which led to my imitating ideas without knowing it. I knew more about what blogger Gary Vaynerchuk had to say about happiness than Aristotle.”)

“Within a few years of starting my first company, I spent more time looking sideways than I did forward. I was looking for ways to measure success and finding them everywhere.”

Here, Burgis discusses envy:

Envy is basically “an engine of destructive mimetic desire, and there are few things to stop it because it operates underground.”

It comes up when people care about prestige, because prestige is based on comparing yourself to others and seeing that they have something we lack.

In Silicon Valley, Burgis observes, lifestyles are “largely a function of mimesis.”

Some examples he cites:

• Simultaneously wearing hoodies with logos and Vans
• Sending “trite, unimaginative, prosaic emails in all lowercase letters, feigning busyness and self-importance” ← (Burgis suggests responding to such missives with “something respectful, thoughtful, beautiful)

In Burgis’ situation, he became “infected with the Zappos culture mania.” Hsieh “spoke about the Zappos culture as though it were a cargo cult — if you simply follow the same recipe, you’ll build a successful culture.”

Burgis’ conversation with “Dave Romero” (from the earlier story above) showed him that his desires had turned “thin and fragile…capable of being blown away at any time” and not a solid foundation for his life.

He rethought his life and discovered that one of his Big Questions was to better understand humanity at a deeper level, starting with himself. So he took a 3-month vacation to reorient himself.

FULFILLMENT STORIES

Now, Burgis turns to address the audience:

“Thin desires aren’t so easily dismissed, and thick desires are not something that you can self-generate out of thin air. They take time — months and years — to develop.”

So what do you do?

Burgis advises readers to “start with the thick desires you probably already have.” Although they may not be easy to recognize.

Burgis says he has an “anthropological, philosophical, practical, even spiritual” approach to figuring out one’s thick desires.

He defines spiritual using Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ definition of “open[ing] ourselves to something greater than ourselves” for example, when some people “find it in the beauty of nature, or art, or music…prayer…learning a sacred text…helping other people or in friendship or love.”

“As we’ve seen so far, desire is social. Desire is connectedness.”

So, Burgis says, he hopes that “even if you don’t think of yourself as spiritual, these approaches will be helpful because they are grounded in …what it means to be human: we are not entirely our own, but exist in a web of relationships connected by desire.”

One technique is to take time and listen to “the most deeply fulfilling experiences” of the lives ot eh people around you, and share your own stories with them.

“The more we understand one another’s stories of meaningful achievement, the more effectively we understand how to work with each other.”

(This sounds simple, but it’s not easy to do. You need to find someone with the temperament for sharing such stories, and then you have to trust each other enough to share the stories. Which in some cases is easier with strangers than with close friends and families. Because both parties have to be confident that the other person truly cares about what they have to say, and won’t try to hold anything against them.)

Burgis’ next line: “It seems simple, but nobody does it.”

(Yep. See above comment)

The reason Burgis suggests this exercise? To help you identify “core motivational drives” which are “specific and enduring behavioral energy that has oriented you throughout your life to acheive a distinct pattern of results.”

(Okay, that’s a bit word-salad-y)

These drives are “enduring, irresistible, and insatiable.” They are your “motivational energy — the reason you consistently gravitate toward certain types of projects and activities” and here Burgis gives the example of “team versus individual, goal-oriented versus ideation” or “sports, arts, theater, forms of fitness”

Burgis asks people to “Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment.”

These Fulfillment Stories have 3 elements:

1. It’s an action. You were the protagonist, and you weren’t passively experiencing stuff.
2. You believe you did well. By your own estimation, not others’. It mattered TO YOU.
3. It brought you a sense of fulfillment. Not a fleeting endorphin rush, but real satisfaction, even joy.

Burgis quotes Aristotle’s line “actions follow being,” meaning that things “act according to what [they are].”

But Burgis says humans are more than outward actions. There’s an “interior dimension” to people’s actions.

“We can mostly understand the actions of cats and dogs from the outside looking in. But people are different: knowing something about the interior life of a person is necessary to understand why they do what they do and what it means to them.”

Burgis talks about a friend who specialized in narrative psychology, taking him through the process of telling Fulfillment Stories, and Burgis realized that every time he told a story, another one came up.

MOTIVATIONAL PATTERNS

Here, Burgis recommends an assessment called the Motivation Code (MCODE) that helps people identify different motivational themes in their lives.

Here are some motivational themes Burgis gives, with a few anecdotes from his friends’ lives:

• Explore: You like to challenge your limits and discover the unknown.
• Master: You want to gain command of a skill, subject, etc.
• Comprehend & Express: You want to understand, define, and communicate your insights

(I bet a lot of writers are of the comprehend & express theme!)

Understanding your core motivational drives, Burgis says, will help you figure out why some activities are “deeply engaging” to you and others aren’t. Plus they will help you “understand how you are most deeply motivated to love.”

(Hmm. Felt that love quote came out of nowhere, and it’s not really explained in the following text either)

Now, for:

 —

Tactic 10. Share stories of deeply fulfilling action

This is just a summary of the previous content on how to “mine” Fulfillment Stories in our lives and others.

Because knowing how others are motivated creates a “greater sense of connectedness.”

 —

Burgis continues after the callout box by saying “great leaders start and sustain positive cycles of desire” which is teeing readers up for the content of the next chapter.

(A bit of a jolt, this transition)

Quotes & Comments

Opening: Dave Romero (a pseudonym) had a business card that said “Customer Relations Specialist.”

Closing: Great leaders start and sustain positive cycles of desire. They empathize with others’ weaknesses; they want to know and be known by others, at all levels of an organization; they focus on cultivating thick desires. They transcend the destructive mimetic cycle, which opens up a new world of possibilities: the world beyond our immediate wanting.

• Burgis’ description of empathy was really interesting. The word “empathy” has a stronger positive nuance than “sympathy” and I always thought empathy was stronger than sympathy because it involves people “getting into other people’s shoes.”
• But Burgis has it the other way around: SYMpathy is the one where you “feel with the other person” and can get hijacked by mimesis, whereas EMpathy is feeling for the other person without losing yourself. It might be just a pedantic dictionary thing, but it’s interesting to think about.
• Also the way Burgis said you can’t assess thin versus thick desires based on feelings alone is a good point. Too many mental disorders and political problems today are based on this “I feel a certain way, therefore I am a certain way.”
• I shook my head at Rabbi Sacks’ definition of “spirituality.” It’s way too broad and vague and undefined and that is a big problem with our culture today, lack of clarity and truth.
• Everything important gets down to the spiritual level sooner or later. All human beings utterly refuse to believe that they are nothing but meaningless meat puppets drifting along accidentally in an uncaring universe (as they should, because they are not), so all good books eventually hit this level. Which is why I always evaluate books on three levels: core, concept, craftsmanship.

Chapter 7. Transcendent Leadership — How Great Leaders Inspire and Shape Desire

Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones…Hidden Yearnings…Minimum Viable Desire 

In This Chapter

• How system-immanent desires trap people with their “centrifugal force”
• How great leaders “tap into underdeveloped desires.”
• The 5 characteristics of transcendent leadership.

Burgis starts this chapter with a couple quotes, one of which is the Antoine de Saint-Exupery line about how “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood…Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Then he launches into an anecdote about Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of dating app Bumble, which is unique because it has women make the first move, instead of men.

“Tapping into underdeveloped desires is typical of great leaders.” Burgis says, using as an example Toni Morrison who “got her start by writing the kind of book that didn’t exist in the market.”

“I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it,” Toni says.

But Burgis reminds readers: “desires don’t…spontanesouly happen. They are generated and shaped in the dynamic world of human interaction. Someone has to supply a model.”

People are always “looking for more,” Burgis says, but the question is can you help move people toward “fulfilling their greatest desires? Or unknowingly peddle them pathetic ones?”

IMMANENT DESIRE

Burgis compares certain desires to the Gravitron — a carnival ride that uses centrifugal force to pin you against the wall.

This is how “systemic desire” works. Desires that are system-immanent traps people in a “system whose main purpose is sustaining itself.”

“Without transcendent leadership,” Burgis says, this is the norm.

TRANSCENDENT DESIRE

But transcedent leaders “have models of desire outside the systems they are in.” This is what makes certain artist and writers’ works timeless — “they’re not confined to the popular desires of their age.”

Here, Burgis cites President Kennedy’s desire to go to the Moon beacuse it’s hard, a big goal that will “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

“Our greatest desire gives shape and order to every other desire”

Then he cites MLK Jr. as another transcendent leader.

Burgis believes transcendent leaders do 5 things well:

1. Shift gravity: The best leaders don’t focus on themselves but on a transcendent goal, which lets them stand shoulder to shoulder with others instead of being above them. (Example given: Montessori teaching children how to wipe their noses in her book, The Secret of Childhood)
2. Allow truth to travel speedily: “Truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature — it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is…truth combats destructive mimesis and rivalry.”
3. Have discernment: When truth isn’t that obvious (because, as Kahneman and Tversky have showed us, humans aren’t as rational as we think we are, and reason has its limits), leaders need discernment to move forward when there isn’t a clear path. (Ask yourself, Burgis says, where a given desire comes from)
4. Sit quietly in a room: Voluntary silence helps people to “learn the truth about who we are and what we want.” Burgis says if you’re not sure, then be silent for a few days (not hours). Aka, a silent retreat.
5. Filter feedback: Transcendent leaders care first about thick desires, and after that the less important ever-changing things like news cycles, feedback, etc. This goes against the Lean Startup methodology of Eric Ries, which is all about cycles of feedback and based on “immanent desire.” Instead, it’s more like Elon Musk who “builds things that he would like to buy and he bets that other people will want to buy them too.”

A few quotes from this section for each characteristic:

1. Shift gravity:

“Good teachers awaken dormant desires and generate new ones. Montessori likens the role of the teacher to that of a great artist teaching another person to see.”

2. Allow truth to travel fast:

“The passionate pursuit of truth is anti-mimetic because it strives to reach objective values, not mimetic values.”

3. Have discernment:

“Desires are discerned, not decided.

4. Sit in silence:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” — Blaise Pascal

5. Filter feedback

“Transcendent leaders are not afraid to undertake a thick start-up — a project that is not predicated on feedback (which often consists of thin desires) but instead is built on the basis of thick desires and remains guided by them.”

“Part of the joy of being an entrepreneur is the ability to lead: to take desires ssomeplace new. // Big Data is the place where the entrepreneurial spirit goes to die.”

 —

Tactic 11. Increase the speed of truth

Burgis advises experimenting with how quickly truthful news spreads in a company or organization by planting information in one place and seeing how long it takes to travel to the person in question.

Burgis also asks people what they’ve sacrificed in service of the truth in interview questions. Because people who haven’t thought about “their relationship to the truth enough…will decrease the speed at which it travels”

 —

Tactic 12. Invest in deep silence

Burgis recommends doing 3 days a year of a “personal silent retreat” with no screens or music, only books.

 —

(Personally, I don’t think mere silence is enough. Some people have distracted themselves so much they do need to sit still with their own thoughts for a while and detox from the constant distraction. 

(But even after that you will find it’s not enough. Because the answers do NOT come from within or from listening to your heart, contrary to the loud messaging to the contrary from powerhouses such as Disney and Hollywood. Following your own self-desires is the path to destruction) 

Burgis ends this chapter with:

“The future will be a product of what people want…”

Quotes & Comments

Opening: Whitney Wolfe Herd is the founder and CEO of a multibillion-dollar dating empire.

Closing: The things we build, the people we meet, and the wars we fight will depend on what people will want tomorrow. And that starts with the way that we learn to want today.

• This chapter starts with an extra quote-epigraph from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood…Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
• I like this quote. This is a necessary but insufficient first step for all accomplishments. Begin with a desire and a goal, and then figure out the way to get there afterwards.
• Both Toni Morrison and Elon Musk have similar attitudes toward creation:
  Create something they themselves would want, and bet that others will want it, too. This is an interesting concept. But you have to be careful what “want” you derive your creativity from.

Chapter 8. The Mimetic Future — What We Will Want Tomorrow

Sex Robots…The Pill of Murti-Bing…Living Like Weasels

In This Chapter

• How the Big Four tech companies address each of the most deep-seated human needs
• Two ways to escape the destructive cycle of mimetic desire (but one is harmful while the other works)
• How to break free of ideological thinking.

Burgis begins this chapter with a few predictions from futurists like Kurzweil and Pearson. (Rather dark predictions, in my view, and ones I highly doubt will actually happen)

Burgis quotes Yuval Noah Harari who writes “The real question facing us is not ‘what do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’”

The reason why this question is unsettling, Burgis says, is because “the question implies that it’s possible to want to want something, yet not be capable of wanting it. // We cannot want what we lack a model for,” in other words.

(Actually I see this “want to want” issue from another angle. It’s not just possible but a VERY common thing to “want to want” something yet not quite want it. 

(Just think about the idea of “being good,” or more specifically, the concept of “forgiveness.” If you’ve ever known you should forgive someone for something they did to hurt you because it is the right thing to do…but deep inside, a part of you holds back, then you know what it means to “want to want.” 

(In other words, your desires do not match your values. It’s Romans 7 all over — “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.”) 

(Another example: If you’ve ever had depression or anhedonia, and you see other people enjoying activities in their lives, and you know you could do the same activities but you don’t feel like it because you also know they wouldn’t give you the same satisfaction, you know what it means to “want to want.”)

Burgis advises readers to lean how they came to want the things they do, as individuals and also on a societal level. American culture, he says, has grown more mimetic in the last few decades.

(Of course. What with the introduction of the internet and social media, how could it be otherwise?)

He argues that “how well we manage mimesis in our personal lives and — by extension — in the ecosystems of desire that we’re a part of” will determine the future.

CULTURAL QUICKSAND

Burgis says there is a technological and spiritual stagnation going on right now. “The world has become demystified, disenchanted.”

(This is perhaps one reason why fantasy and magical novels are so well-liked)

Burgis cites professor Scott Galloway, who “thinks that each of the Big Four tech companies taps into a deep-seated need in humanity…better than churches do.”

• Google: a prayer (question)-answering deity
• Facebook: love and belonging
• Amazon: security, abundance
• Apple: status

Western culture has become like “kids who, after eating all of the Halloween candy, sit in a stupor…asking, ‘What now?’”

And Burgis says the “primary and underexplored reason for our stagnation and decadence is mimesis.” The lack of a transcendent reference point outside the system.

(Sure, although I wouldn’t call that a problem of mere memisis. Check out this video: The Future of Atheism)

Then Burgis quotes Tocqueville’s book on Democracy in America — “He saw the danger of…a society that was increasingly liberal and individualistic, with a high degree of equality, but in which differences between people were noticeable?…Tocqueville wrote, ‘the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity.’”

When we fight for “equality in the areas that matter,” Burgis says (human and civil rights, the pursuit of happiness in US declaration-speak), we run into the danger of “fighting for equality in areas that do not matter” (making as much money as someone else, having the same number of social media followers, etc).

Mimetic desire, Burgis says, blurs the lines, turning us from thick desires to thin ones. We get into cycles of destructive desires and have no hope that things could be different.

INSTRUMENTS VERSUS RELATIONSHIPS

How do people escape he destructive Cycle 1 of desire?

Burgis says there are two ways.

1. Engineering desire
2. Transforming desire

Engineering desire is the authoritarian approach of Silicon Valley and the “Cult of Experts,” who think they can “plan a system in which people want things that other people want them to want.”

(Yep. That’s Marxism and neo-Marxism in a nutshell)

This, Burgis says, threatens human agency and disrespects human free will and choice.

“The Cult of Experts, with their ‘Follow These Five Steps’ approach to happiness, lacks respect for human complexity.”

(Now THIS is an interesting quote in light of the earlier observation on hierarchies and listicles and why they will always exist…we humans DO like to have things simplified for us, which is sort of what the expert class claims to do “listen to my simple, numbered advice, don’t ask about my reasoning because the background information is too much, or too complex, for you to understand, but rest assured I know what I’m talking about because I have a PhD…”)

Transforming desire, on the other hand, is like “regenerative farming” and happens through relationships.

ENGINEERING DESIRE

Tech companies like Google have pioneered “surveillance capitalism” where companies use behavioral data to “exploid [people] for profit.”

By searching things on Google, for example, you are telling it about yourself and your desires. You are telling it more than you tell people in your life.

“Authoritarian regimes can only stay in existence so long as they can control what people want…their real victory comes not when they have authority over people’s actions; rather, their victory comes when they have authority over their desires…they want [their] prisoners to learn to love their cells. When there is no desire for change, their authority is complete. // The purpose of a ‘reeducation’ camp is…fundamentally about the reeducation of desire.”

(It’s how Satan and sin gets us, too. If they can use the nice, painless way to deceive, they’d rather go with that than violence)

Burgis cites author Roy Medvedev who told the story of a woman who’d been in a Soviet Gulag labor camp and was trained to be addicted to ice cream. She ended up “supporting the very political party that had enslaved her because it was the only party that promised to help her fulfill the impoverished desire they had given her.”

(This reminds me of a book I once read as a kid about a character who was given a poison that would kill her if she didn’t get an antidote daily, to fend it off. This kept her from escaping her prison because she needed to get that antidote or die. 

(Or so she thought. Later it was revealed that she hadn’t been given a poison initially — the antidote ITSELF was the “poison,” an addictive substance that caused horrendous withdrawal symptoms that made her FEEL like she was dying…her captor had basically given her a desire for something bad to keep her as a slave.)

Burgis also cites the story of Langdon Gilkey, a Japanese internment camp survivor who wrote about his experiences in his book, Shantung Compound.

Gilkey observed that the compound disoriented people’s desires and made them easier to control.

“Ideologies are closed systems of desire. They provide clear constraints about what is acceptable or not acceptable to want…there is no room for opposition”

The opposite of ideological thinking?

“to be able to hold on to two conflicting desires or…ideas at the same time without immediately rejecting one or the other, before there has been time for a careful discernment.”

(I appreciate this line, especially the last part, because there are some “gurus” out there, literal or otherwise, who say only the first half, that maturity is about holding two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time. 

(The thing is, you don’t hold the two conflicting ideas FOREVER. You hold them in your mind FOR A TIME, in order to DISCERN which idea is true and which false. And then you eventually eject the false idea. 

(Because truth is not self-contradictory. It can be complex, seemingly paradoxical at times, beyond our ability to comprehend, in certain cases, but not self-contradictory)

 —

Tactic 13. Look for the coexistence of opposites

Burgis says a great way to cut through ideologies is to pay attention to seeming opposites, paradoxes, contradictions.

Why? Because “these coincidences of opposites point to something transcendent. The reason things seem like they shouldn’t coexist is that they don’t map onto how I experience the world.”

They are a sign that your mental map has errors and you need to “go further, to reevaluate.”

Burgis goes on to say that people advise others not to compare themselves to others, but only to themselves in the past.

This is true, up to a point, because “The person I was yesterday is not a model I can imitate…What I need is a model of the future — a transcendent model, where there are no more paradoxes of opposites…when my desires aren’t in constant, unresolvable tension.”

And where you see the “coexistent opposites,” Burgis says, is often a sign “pointing us in the right direction.”

 —

Burgis then tells the story of Murti-Bing, a magical pill that engineers people’s desires so they can accept a new way of life. But people who take the pill go crazy because it wasn’t an organic development.

Burgis says this pill concept was a predecessor of the Matrix movies and similar to soma in Brave New World. If we do develop such a thing in the real world, will you take it?, he asks.

TRANSFORMING DESIRE

Burgis says there are 2 ways of thinking, that correspond to engineering desire versus transforming desire.

1. Calculating thought — the kind of thinking that is always “searching, seeking, plotting how to reach an objective,” the dominant mode of thought in these technological days.
2. Meditative thought — patient thinking, slow, nonproductive, non-reactionary. Allows time for the truth to reveal itself.

“There is nothing wrong with engineering. But some things are meant to be engineered (motorcycles) and other things are not (human nature).”

 —

Tactic 14. Practice meditative thought

Meditative thought lets you notice divergent possibilities rather than converging on one. It’s also essential to discerning desires, Burgis says.

He suggests getting a beverage and looking at a tree for an hour, paying attention to everything you notice.

 —

“The calculating brain is only able to fit new experiences into existing mental models. The meditative brain develops new models…Calculating thought simply doesn’t stay in the present long enough for anything thick to present itself.”

PIVOTAL SPACES

Burgis says many relationships are “held together by mimetic bonds,” even healthy relationships. The thing is to recognize in what ways you have mimetic rivalry in your relationships and how to confront them.

Here Burgis looks at three areas of life to discuss this phenomena: family, imagination, and work.

Families “are the place where people first learn how and what to want.” Parents and older siblings are mimetic models for kids. Then in adolescence, kids turn hyper-mimetic as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to be.

Here, Burgis warns parents to be careful who they set up as competition in their kids’ eyes. “We should be mindful of who our children learn to love and hate.”

Next, with imagination, Burgis says: “Each of us has a universe of desire that is only as big as our imagination.”

And literature is “one of the primary influences on the imagination — a school of desire.” In fact, “fictional characters who model great, thick desires can be a counterbalance to real-life models of weak, thin desires.”

Now, for work:

Burgis says employers have a responsibility to think about how “the company and the nature of the work within it contribute to the overall flourishing of the person?”

And to think about how they shape desire.

“The market…[is] good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones,” Burgis notes.

THE THREE INVENTIONS

Girard believed that “two major social inventions in history…mitigated the negative consequences of mimetic desire: the scapegoat mechanism and the market economy.”

The first “contained violence through violence.” But today, Burgis says, the scapegoat mechanism doesn’t work. People who crush a scapegoat are at it again the next day. Because “We no longer fully believe that what we are doing is just. The loss of our belief in the scapegoat’s guilt led to its impotency.”

(Again, I don’t think I agree with this, but I will keep it in mind for a while and see what else I learn)

The second “channels mimetic desire into productive activities.” In the sense that someone who is jealous of a company founder may go on to found his own company.

(This reminds me of what it says in Ecclesiastes: “I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. — Eccles 4:4)

Burgis says that this economic competition has its downsides too, for exploited workers or winner-take-all systems.

So there needs to be a third way to “channel desire in productive and nonviolent ways” or else “mimetic desire will spiral out of control.”

Burgis doesn’t know what this will be, but suggests maybe some kind of technological superstructure, an evolution in money, or space colonization or an educational innovation.

(Nope. None of these ideas sound good. This book is better at diagnosing the situation than on suggesting solutions)

In the meantime, Burgis says, we all must look at how we “shape and manage our own desires.”

SINGLE GREATEST DESIRE

“Mimetic desire manifests itself as the constant yearning to be someone or something else (what we called metaphysical desire),” Burgis says. People choose their models because they think those models will lead them to what they are REALLY looking for.

But, Burgis says, metaphyiscal desire is a “never-ending game” where people cycle through models “faster than we cycle through clothes.” As soon as you win something, you feel unsatisfied and sure that you chose the wrong model, so off you go searching for another model in replacement.

“Mimetic desire is a paradoxical game. Winning is how you lose. Every victory is Pyrrhic…All schemas ultimately come up short.”

We have to change our desires, Burgis says, by letting go of thin desires, but that requires some suffering.

The idea is to pick your greatest desire and let the lesser ones be transformed. And grabbing hold of that greatest desire involves grabbing hold of models because “we can’t access our desires without models.”

(I wonder if Paul’s line works here: “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.” — 1 Cor 1:11. A friend of mine once complained to me about this line, asking why Paul didn’t just tell people to follow Christ directly. But I think this makes sense with the idea of models. At this point, Christ had left the earth, but Paul was still there, he was a more accessible model to follow. I think there’s more to it than that, as well, but this is possibly one aspect of the answer.)

“We will always follow those models that are most real to us — who possess a quality of life that we feel transcends our own.”

Burgis says his greatest fear is to spend his life, pouring himself out on anything other than pursuing thick desires.

“The destructive mimetic cycle works when people are convinced of the absolute primacy of their own desires. They’re even willing to sacrifice others in order to fulfill them. But in the positive cycle of desire, people respect the desires of others as they would their own. What’s more, they take an active role in collaborating with others to help them achieve their single greatest desire. In a positive cycle, we are all in some sense midwives to the thick desires of our neighbors.”

(I like that idea. Midwives can work…maybe also catalysts or enzymes, to use a more chemistry-related metaphor. We help others catalyze their dreams…bring forth the goodness they are capable of…)

 —

Tactic 15. Live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want

Burgis says we help others by helping them want more, less, or differently.

And we do this with EVERYONE we meet. We are constantly “nudging other people’s desires” he says, so model positive desires whenever you can.

 —

“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. We find, paradoxically, that it is the very pathway to fulfilling our own.”

(While I agree with this sentiment, writing-craft-wise, it’s a bit of a leap of thought from what we were talking about before. This is one of the things I’ve realized makes writing so hard. 

(Our thoughts come fast and furious and not usually in single file. Reading the written word, however, is slow and methodical and IS single-file. Translating thought to words in a follow-able way is the real work of writers).

“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.”

(It’s interesting here that he uses the words “yield” and “single.” Because the modern world’s conception of freedom is to ‘do whatever I want’ not realizing that they then succumb to slavery to their strongest desires, which, in Burgis’ words, is often your ‘thin desire’ — instant gratification of the flesh, as some say. That leads to a destroyed and destructive life. It’s not freedom.

(True freedom is surrendering to something greater than your hedonistic pleasures and personal desires. And that thing is singular. Because if you have more than one priority in life, you have none.

(This is also the philosophical reason why one God makes sense. If you have more than one, all of moderately equal power, you have no such thing as omnipotence or omniscience, but just squabbling powers that will pick away at each other in a never-ending conflict, until everything is gone) 

Quotes & Comments

Opening: I think that we must examine our history and try to see whether, beneath what has already occurred, there are not additional layers of phenomena waiting to be revealed; whether some aspects of life that used to be constrained by the old sacrificial system are not going to flourish, other domains of knowledge, other ways of living.

Closing: In the meantime, and probably at all times, we have something warm to sink our teeth into: wanting what we already have.

• I noticed that in the “brief summary of content” at the top of each chapter in this book, Burgis uses “sex” more than once.
• This makes sense, because as former detective J Warner Wallace pointed out in several books and podcasts, all human motivations for murder boil down to the desire for one or more of three things: money, power, sex. That’s it.
• Crazy to think about, but the advertisers knew this a long time ago. So it’s crafty of Burgis to use this technique in this book.
• It can make sense, because sexual desire can be one of those thin desires Burgis warns about, but at the same time, it’s also a cheap attention-grabber, and I don’t recommend it.

Afterword

In This Chapter

• Wrapping up the book with a final note on what it was like for Burgis as a writer to create this book, from the perspective of mimesis and desire.

In this afterword, Burgis comments that Girard and Stephen King both believe something along the lines that first drafts are deceptive illusions that writers create, blinded by Romantic Lies coming from their own mimesis.

As writers come back to edit, they realize that “life is a process of ever-evolving desire.”

Burgis’ final paragraph directly addresses some of the people in his book, saying that whether he mentioned the person positively or negatively (critically), that person was “probably some kind of model” for him.

And that he hopes he’s affected someone else’s desire “to write a better [book about mimetic desire].”

Quotes & Comments

Opening: Rene Girard wrote that “the author’s first draft is an attempt at self-justification.”

Closing: I’m probably already hard at work, competing with you.

• This was a bit of a confusing afterword, I think Burgis was trying to tie the

FINAL THOUGHTS

Why I Rated This Book 4.33 Stars

I use this criteria to rate every book (out of 6 points per category):

Star ratings:
1 star = Basically, trash. Or worse.
2 stars = Only worth it if you really like the topic.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = Quite Good.
5 stars = Worth re-reading more than once.
6 stars = Life-changing.

3. Craft ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍

Is this work is well-written, and are the ideas clearly and skillfully presented?

Overall, the book was solidly written. There were a few places where there might have been a bit too much padding, some stories which might have been cut, a few quotes that (in my opinion) were not the most relevant to the point being made, but it was fine.

Burgis uses a lot of introductory material in each chapter. Besides a chapter title, there’s a keyword-list of the stories or examples that will be covered in the chapter, and then a quote or two from an outside source, and then he dives into the content of the chapter, usually by starting with an anecdote.

Personally, I think it’s a little too much, but to each their own.

I think starting with a list of tactics and then explaining what the tactics are later in the book was not a bad idea. From what we know about learning these days, it can be helpful to preview material before you explain it, preparing the mind to grasp those concepts.

For a long work such as a book, that is dealing with some complicated ideas, having that heads up was helpful.

2. Concept 📖📖📖📖📖

Is this an interesting concept, well-executed? (Are implicit and explicit promises paid off?)

LMA/LDB: This is primarily a LEARN & BE book.

Wanting has a fairly simple structure, which doesn’t mean it’s bad (on the contrary, lots of the best books and creations are simple in structure).

Basically, it’s an extended essay where the author attempts to convince readers of an overlooked reality, in this case, “mimetic desires.”

He explains what it is and why it’s important, primarily from the perspective of academic/thinker Rene Girard, then uses examples from literature, history, and his own life to illustrate his points.

The idea is to help readers LEARN what mimetic theory is and BE more resistant to the negative cycle of mimesis.

1. Core ❤️❤️❤️❤️

Are the worldview, themes, and arguments of this work true, edifying, and worth learning?

Burgis and Girard aren’t the only ones to consider desire as a key principle driving human behavior, attitudes, and lives.

There was Viktor Frankl, who came up with logotherapy and the theory of “quest for meaning” (as opposed to Freud’s “quest for pleasure” or Nietzsche’s “quest for power”) being the thing that underlies all human lives. (It’s not quite the same as desire, but related)

Buddhist philosophy also theoretically addresses human desire as, (in a general and simple way), an undesirable (pun!) “attachment” that must be excised in order to reach enlightenment.

Note that my citing the above four examples does not mean that I agree with their conclusions (in many cases, I completely disagree).

I’m simply pointing out that many people who have spent significant time thinking about these problems, have all come to somewhat similar conclusions (although different solutions or ways of addressing the issue).

I personally don’t believe that the level of “desire” is the deepest or most effective level of understanding the human experience, but it certainly goes many layers deeper than the average shallow self-help book, which is why I found this book so interesting.

However, there was something about the scapegoat chapter that didn’t ring particularly true or helpful for me. I’m not sure the analysis and examples used in that section really made the point he was trying to make, nor that the point itself was true to reality.

It IS true that man’s envy of each other can cause problems to the point of violence, but I don’t think it’s simply a matter of “mimesis gone out of control.” I believe there are other and deeper factors at work.

I’ll have to think about this a little longer before coming to any strong conclusion, but for now that chapter did bother me.

Aside from that, I think Burgis has a really good point in advising people to consider, seriously, why they want what they want and asking themselves what role models are they (inadvertently) following in their lives.

Not that naval-gazing is a good thing, but the opposite (living life blindly, buffeted by influences you’re not even aware of) isn’t good either.

Taking some time to reconsider who is influencing you and whether or not you should let them is a wise move, in any case.

LED Assessment

How did this book Lighten, Enlighten, or Delight the reader (that would be moi, in this case, since I’m writing this review ^^)?

Overall, I felt this book was enlightening, mostly. Not particularly delightful because Burgis wasn’t trying to entertain, that wasn’t the point of this book. But it was helpful to see his thoughts on Girard’s theories, and I was particularly impressed with his personal experiences with Tony Hsieh, and later with Dave the hit man.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of his tactics or solutions for the downsides of mimesis, but I think there are a few good ones in there that are worth experimenting with. Perhaps after trying some of them out, I’ll let you know if the ideas did help Lighten the load for me 😉

Writing Tips & Practical Application

Because learning doesn’t happen until you change something you do…

• Prepare readers: If you’re working on a long-form article or book, experiment with ways to present your main tactics or points before diving into the meat of the information. Let people know what is coming and prepare their brains to receive the lessons you want to teach.
• Write some listicles: As Burgis points out in the book, humans have a natural need to understand where things are on a hierarchy, which is why the listicle form is so popular and evergreen in writing. Experiment with different kinds of listicles, rankings, and subjects, even if just for fun. It might trigger some ideas!
• Use Bible stories in your work: Burgis uses several stories from the Old and New Testament to make interesting points. Not that I agree with all of his interpretations, but the Bible is a rich source of metaphors, wisdom, and ideas that can help writers become more brilliant 🙂 I believe it would behoove all writers to read it, study it, know it.