Mimetic Desire: Why Do We Want? - Luke Burgis - #344

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people? welcome back to the show. My guest today is Luke Burgis. He's an entrepreneur and an author, and we are talking about why we want what we want. We feel like we're in charge of our wants, right? Like we're the creator of our desires, but Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire suggests an alternative. All we're doing is copying and modeling other people's wants and then spitting them back out as our own. Today, expect to learn why you're going to die of a Brazilian butt lift over and over again, why mimesis is a kind of alchemy, how mimetic desires cause people to become scapegoats, why Lamborghini's creation story is explained by Rene Girard, and much more. This is another red pill to take. Sadly, mimetic desire seems to have all the hallmarks of something I don't want to be true, and yet almost definitely probably is. So, yes, enjoy emerging from this conversation, even less under the comfortable blanket of ignorance than you were right now. In other news, before I get to other news, I'm going away this week. I'm going away to Ibiza. So this Saturday, there is no episode. I'm sorry, but even I need a holiday, and after 15 months of unrelenting three episodes a week, you're just getting two. So, Monday, Thursday, next week, but no Saturday episodes for the next couple. For now, it's time to learn about why our desires aren't our own. With Luke Burgis.
Luke Burgis, welcome to the show.

**Luke Burgis** (1:51)
Hey Chris, thanks so much for having me on.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
I've got a quote that I need you to explain to me, okay? Okay. We want what other people want because other people want it. And it's penciled in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell, where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift over and over again. What's that about?

**Luke Burgis** (2:14)
That is a quote from Dana Tortorici, she was the editor of N plus 1 magazine here in the States. She's talking about memetic desire. She wrote a beautiful piece about Instagram and the effect that Instagram is having on what we want. And her finding was basically the topic of my book, that the nature of desire is memetic, meaning we always look to other people, we look to models who help us understand what to want. And that the social media platforms like Instagram are essentially just these machines of generating desires, memetic desires. Everybody is imitating the desires of everybody else. And the joke is, it's like turtles all the way down. It's like memetic desire all the way down. Like where does this end? Makes us miserable and depressed because we don't realize that that's part of what social media is doing to us. It's just providing billions of desires out there. And we can't tell the signal through the noise.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
Why do we have memetic desire then? Is it adaptive?

**Luke Burgis** (3:16)
Memetic desire is, according to Rene Girard, who sort of discovered this phenomenon in the late 50s and early 60s, is just a part of human nature. It's part of what it means to be human. Perhaps if we got back to the evolutionary process, perhaps it's something that humans developed in order to sort of separate ourselves from the great apes. So this may have actually been adapted from an evolutionary perspective to help us create culture, to learn language. I mean, imitation plays a fundamental role in all kinds of very positive human things. Social interactions, if we're not imitating each other the right way, it can get a little awkward. So, you know, Girard said that imitation actually helps prevent violence and helps cultures to form. So it's part of the human condition, something that we can't escape, but very few people are kind of aware that there is such a thing as memetic desire. I mean, we have this modern hyper-individualistic, hyper-rationalistic understanding or view of ourselves and why we want the things that we want, where, you know, I lay eyes on something and I want it because of X, Y and Z, and I describe all of these objective qualities without taking into account that I'm a social creature and I'm constantly looking to other people that shape the perception of value for things, for people, for groups. This affects everything from politics to, you know, to the stock market.

**Chris Williamson** (4:47)
Do we have any wants that aren't mimetic, do you think? Or are there humans out there who don't have any wants that aren't mimetic?

**Luke Burgis** (4:55)
That's a great question and a topic of great debate among people that read Girard. Some would say no. I think there's some nuance, right? There's some distinctions that we could make. For instance, instinctual things that we have a biological drive for. Food and water, sexual pleasure, these kinds of things. They're kind of like built into us. We could call those desires, but I like to sort of think of those more on the needs spectrum.