Wanting - Luke Burgis

 

• Sur le plan individuel, selon Girard, les hommes se haïssent parce qu'ils s'imitent. Le mimétisme engendre la rivalité, mais en retour la rivalité renforce le mimétisme. Il y a double logique, celle du désir et celle de l'imitation. En d'autres termes, faire de l'autre un modèle, c'est faire de lui un rival.
• www.lukeburgis.com

Introduction

• How my desires entrapped me in cycles of passion followed by disillusionment.
• Mimetic theory isn't like learning some impersonal law of physics, which you can study from a distance. It means learning something new about your own past that explains how your identity has been shaped and why certain people and things have exerted more influence over you and others.
• The truth is that desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I'm part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand.Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.
• It is models, not our "objective" analysis or central nervous system, that shapes our desires.
• Like a lot of high school students, he strived to gain admission to a prestigious university without questioning why he wanted to go there in the first place.
• "Human being fights not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence" Girard.
• In Girard's view, the root of the most violence is mimetic desire.
• "You find yourself trapped in all these bad mimetic cycles". Girard.
• When there was risk of an all-out war with Elon Musk's rival company, X.com, Thiel merged with him to form PayPal.
• Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
• Facebook was build around identity, that is to say, desires. It helps people see what other people have and want. It is platform for finding, following, and differentiating oneself from models.
• Models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drug.
• I bet on mimesis.
• History is the story of human desire.
• The terrorists would not have been driven to destroy symbols of the West's wealth and culture if, at some deep level, they had not secretly desired some of the same things.
• "The Power of Mimetic Desire" is about the hidden forces that influence why people want the things they want.
• We're becoming more aware of how fragile and interconnected the world's systems are. 
• Public health has been challenged because even the best policies have to contend with groups of people who want different things.

The Power of Mimetic Desire

Hidden models

• The Romantic Lie is self-delusion, the story people tell about why they make certain choices: because it fits their personal preferences, or because they see its objective qualities, or because they simply saw it and therefore wanted it. They believe that there is a straight line between them and the things they want. That's a lie.
• People paying attention to other people's eye and reading things about their intentions and desires.
• Start with "why"
• Desire is the better place to start.
• If we receive a response to an email or text that doesn't sufficiently tone-match, we can go into a mini-crisis (Does she not like me? Does he think he's superior to me?  Did I do something wrong?). Communication practically runs on mimesis.
• My friend has become a model of desire to me.
• I'll start to make decisions based on what he wants.
• In the passage from childhood to adulthood, the open imitation of the infant becomes the hidden mimesis of adults.
• Mimetic desire operates in the dark. Those who can see in the dark take full advantage.
• He had seen opportunities where others saw obstacles.
• Models influence desire.
• Name your models. Think seriously about the people you least want to succeed.
• She influenced my desire by denying it.
• It's the Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily, they seem like gifts, while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.
• Efficient market theory is the belief that asset prices are functions of all available information.
• "Conformity is a powerful force that can counteract gravity for longer than skeptics expect". Jason Zweig.

Distorted Reality

• Imitate me, but not too much.
• Because rivalry is a function of proximity.
• Satoshi Nakamoto boosted his mimetic value into the upper stratosphere of Celebristan through secrecy.
• We are most likely to take someone as a model if they don't seem to be suffering from desire like us.
• Cats are mercurial (changeant). They usually seem uninterested in your opinion.
• Liquid modernity is a chaotic phase of history in which there are no culturally agree-upon models to follow, no fixed points of reference.
• The modern world is one of experts.
• We're model addicts. Right now, the models we prefer are experts.
• Principle of reflexivity. In situations that have thinking participants, there is a two-way interaction between the participants thinking and the situation in which they operate. Investors perceive there might be a crash, so they behave in a way that participates to the crash.
• People worry about what other people will think before they say something, which affects what they say.
• "Spiral of silence". Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.
• People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do. This increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion.
• Winston Churchill: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us"
• Mimetic desire is a truth at the heart of human relations;
• Our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us.
• Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media.

Social Contagion

• "If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities" René Girard.
• Karl Max and William Shakespeare had very different views about why people fight. Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. Shakespeare's view seems to be exactly the opposite: people fight when they are similar.
• Soccer stars Christiana Ronaldo and Lionel Messi may be celebrities to most of us, but to each other they are not. The same was now true of Ferrari and Lamborghini.
• In a bullfight, a bull is maneuvered into submission not by strength but by agility and psychology.
• Lanborghini enjoyed a peaceful final twenty years of his life in his vineyard, giving guests personal tour off his estate.
• "Meme". Richard Dawkins was attempting to explain the spread across time and space of nonmaterial things such as ideas, behaviors, and phrases. He called these things memes: cultural units of information that spread from person to person through a process of imitation.
• An internet meme is a deliberate alteration of something.
• To try to forge an identity relative to other people.
• They were too many changes, too fast, including the adoption of an experimental flat management structure. It created chaos.
• Most people gauge their happiness relative to other people.
• A good leader needs to consider the impact of their decisions on human ecology, the web of relationships that affect human life and development. No aspect of human ecology is more overlooked than mimetic desire.
• The idea and organization needed to come from someone other than me for not to feel like a top-down imposition of cultural expectations.
• Like the value of protecting the health and safety of all employees versus keeping the business running during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference.

The Invention of Blame

• The scapegoat mechanism turns a war of all against all into a war of all against one. It brings temporary peace as people forget their mimetic conflicts for a while, having just discharged all their anger onto a scapegoat.
• The scapegoating mechanism does no hinge on the guilt or innocence on the scapegoat. It hinges on the ability of a community to use a scapegoat to accomplish their desired outcome: unification, healing, purgation, expiation. The scapegoat serves a religious function.
• Anger spreads faster than other emotions, such as joy, because anger spreads easily when they are weak ties between people, as they are often online.
• A mimetic model, a person who knows what he wants.
• Nearly all people are religious in the sense that they subconsciously believe that sacrifice brings space.
• If only we could destroy that other political party, that other company, those terrorists, that troublemaker, that fast-food joint next door that has caused me to gain ten pounds, everything would be better. The sacrifice always seems right and proper. Our violence is good violence; the violence of the other side is always bad.
• 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. The death of George Floyd in the United States in May 2020 is one salient example.
• One claims victim status as a way of gaining advantage or justifying one's behavior.
• Protect me from what I want.

The Transformation of Desire

Anti-mimetic - Feeding the People, Not the System

• What have we done in the past, where are we today, and what do we want for tomorrow?
• Nobody will question your goals.
• But it's worth asking where goals come from in the first place. Every goal is embedded within a system.
• Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals.
• And that's when I began my miserable fifteen-month career in Advanced Excel and PowerPoint.
• Social media platforms thrive on mimesis. Twitter encourages and measures by showing how many times each post has been retweeted.
• The deathbed is where unfulfilling desires are exposed. Transport yourself there now rather than waiting until later, when it might be too late.

Disruptive Empathy

• If I decline to shake your hand, if, in short, I refuse to imitate you, then your are now the one who imitates me, by reproducing my refusal, by copying me instead. Imitation, which usually expresses agreement in this case, now serves to confirm and strengthen disagreement. Once again, in other words, imitation triumphs. 
• A negative mimetic cycle is disrupted when two people, through empathy, stop seing each other as rivals.
• The em - in empathy means "to go into". It's the ability to go into the experiences or feelings of another person, but without losing self-possession, or the ability to maintain control over our responses and to act freely, out of our own core.
• Empathy means finding a shared point of humanity through which to connect without sacrificing our integrity in the process.
• A person who is able to empathize can enter the experience of another person and share her thoughts and feelings without necessarily sharing her desires.
• Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives.
• The desire to retire is a thin desire, filled with mimetically derived ideas about the things one might do, or not do, in this ideal state. The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is thick desire.
• Peuple seeking professional prestige, respect or admiration for their talents, without realizing that the pursuit of prestige is the pursuit of Fata Morgana.
• Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment.
• The interior dimension of an action: What was the person's motivation for taking it? What were the circumstances? How did the action affect them on an emotional level?
• MASTER: a person motivated to MASTER wants to gain complete command of a skill, subject, procedure, technique or process.
• COMPREHEND AND EXPRESS: a person with this core drive wants to understand, define, and then communicate their insights in some way.
• If she reads a book, she is compelled to review it on her blog.
• Serving other people, contributing to the success of the team, fighting injustice, organizing an effort that serves the common good.

Transcendent Leadership

• Desires don't magically and spontaneously happen. They are generated and shaped in the dynamic world of human interaction. Someone has to supply a model.
• Transcendent leaders have models of desire outside the systems they are in. The greatest writers and artists in history were driven by them, and that's why their work are timeless. They were not confined to the popular desires of their age.
• Shift gravity.
• They wanted to grow up, carve out their place in the world, grow in dignity.
• The speed of truth.
• In times of crisis, the threat from inside a company is underestimated. People who don't want to take  responsibility find scapegoats.
• The health of any human project that relies on the ability to adapt depends on the speed at which truth travels.
• Discernment
• We're not always as rational as we think. Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler have demonstrated how easily we can be deceived.
• Sit quietly in a room.
• "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" Blaise Pascal.
• Invest in deep silence
• Filter feedback
• The MVP is "that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort".
• It's politics by polling, in which a candidate does whatever the polls tell them to do.

The mimetic future

• The model that we adopt for the future is critical to the formation of our desires.
• What we will want in the future depends on three things: how desire was formed in the past, how it is formed in the present, and how it will be formed in the future.
• Facebook is an endless stream of models in the form of other people's curated lives.
• The internet, despite creating enormous economic value by connecting the world, accelerated mimetic rivalry and diverted attention from innovation in others areas.
• But I can't help but think that the proliferation of these shows, thousands of them, with cooking competitions looping non-stop on twenty-four-hour food channels is symptomatic of our cultural stagnation and decadence.
• Google is like a deity that answers our questions. Facebook satisfies our need for love and belonging. Amazon fulfills the need for security, allowing us instantaneous access to goods in abundance. Apple appeals to our sex drive and the associated need for status, signaling one's attractiveness as a mate by associating with a brand that is innovative, forward-thinking, and costly to own.
• We lack a transcendent reference point outside the system.
• Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible.
• "Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy" George Gilder. 
• Ideologies are closed systems of desire.
• Wise people have said that it is best to compare to yourself only to who you were yesterday, not to who other people are today.
• People's desires are artificially shaped by external forces.
• Sometimes the market isn't a good indication of what people want. It's good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones.
• We must make a decision about what it is that is worth sinking our teeth into.
• 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.

Afterword

• Life is a process of ever-evolving desire.
• "Extremistan", "Mediocristan", "Celebristan", "Freshmanistan"
• "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind". René Girard.

Motivational Themes

• Top three core motivational themes
• I trained and competed in a marathon.
• EXCEL: Maybe you compete against yourself in efforts that test your limits and stimulate you to stretch yourself to develop your skills. You want to establish a reputation that confirms the excellence of your work. In general, you want to do better than others, for example, to be the fastest or most effective.
• OVERCOME: You are motivated to struggle with the factors working against you until you overcome them.
• MASTER: Your motivation is satisfied when you are able to gain complete command of a skill, subject, procedure, technique, or process. It could be that you concentrate on the principles behind an engineering problem. Your thinking and talents are oriented toward mastery, your goals toward perfection.
• Susan Blackmore, an expert of meme theory and author of "The Meme Machine" is explicit about the role of imitation.