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What is behind human motivation? Freud would tell you that all human goals are manifestations of the biological need to reproduce. All our desires, including intellectuality and aesthetic taste, are merely by-products of sexual signaling.
Comedians are not witty because there is anything unique about their personality, but because it enhances their chances of standing out, and being sexually selected – this is Matt Ridley’s thesis in The Red Queen. But there is an alternative theory, which not only seeks to explain why human beings are motivated to do things other than survive, but why scapegoating is a universal phenomenon, why conflict arises, and why there is a tendency for people who are closer together tend to fight more frequently. That is Girard’s mimetic theory.
Girard says that we borrow our desires from other people. We are not autonomous beings that select for ourselves our own goals. Our desires for an object are provoked by the desire of another person (a model) for this object. The subject does not directly desire the object, but there is an indirect triangular relationship between the subject, object, and the model.
Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. Girard calls desire “metaphysical” in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, “all desire is a desire to be”,[8] it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.
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Mimesis can either be positive or negative. You can either emulate a bad model or a good model.
Girard is a literary theorist who spent decades looking for a unifying theory in literature. Instead of focusing on what makes literary works stand apart, which is what literary theorists usually do, Girard wanted to find what they all have in common, but more specific than that, he wanted to find what the great works have in common, because it was only the great writers that succeeded in representing the mechanisms of human behavior faithfully, without distortion. The greater the writer, the less variable this system of relationships, the more truthful they were.
It is the feeling for the general in the potential writer, which selects material suitable to a work of art because of its generality. He only pays attention to others, however dull and tiresome, because in repeating what their kind say like parrots, they are for that very reason prophetic birds, spokesmen of a psychological law.”
Proust, A Remembrance of Things Past
Many things can be extrapolated from Girard’s analysis. First, even though many things affect what you desire, the models set forth by others both set the scope of what you can possibly aspire towards, and the intensity and conviction with which you pursue it. Second, in a democratized system, whether political, financial, or familial, conflict is inevitable. A third takeaway is that it is not the object of desire that is desired but the ontological state of the model.
Whether you choose to accept a potential fourth takeaway, which is to seek a supernatural model, or to choose a single religious system to adhere to, is a complex and difficult question, which I will not explore for now.
But what can be learned from the first three takeaways is significant and helps explain how the world works.
Choose Your Models Carefully
From the first, you can learn to be vigilant about the models that you choose to implicitly or explicitly follow, for they will determine not only your desires in a positive sense, but your desires in a negative sense too. The model does not take into consideration what is best for the emulator. It is up to the emulator to choose what is worth imitating and what is not. Never idolize anyone blindly.
Competition is Bad
The second takeaway warns us of some false pretenses we may have inherited. A liberal education teaches us to embrace competition and to distrust hierarchies, but the world does not operate according to liberal ideals. Competition, while good for the community, can be bad for the individual.
Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, knows this. He deliberately seeks monopolies because it is the only game worth playing in business. Competing with others is a loser’s game. The more competitive an industry is, the more players it will have, and the less likely it is that you will be profitable. The other caveat to democratization is that it imbues a political system with an inherit disadvantage, to remain in a perpetual state of conflict. Democratic nations are now losing economic ground to China, and potentially, to other nations, because the top-down form of government has proven to be capable of seeking long-term strategic goals, and can do so through a capitalistic system. It has been taken for granted that the Western model of governance is the only sustainable one, but this is quickly changing.
The Desire of The Ontological State
A third takeaway is that the elimination of differences is not a source of peace, but a cause of conflict, since what people desire is not the object itself but the ontological state of owning the object that is experienced by the model. This a pessimistic view of human life since it implies that our efforts to have peace through erasure of difference between people through mimicry is what created conflict – it is not the differences that create conflict. If people become less different, they become more similar, more mimetic, more desirous of the same objects, more competitive, more prone to conflict.
Take the idea of possessing endless material wealth, which is harmful to society, according to the New Testament (the love of money is the root of all evil), and Marx (capital and wealth is the mechanism of alienation of the human being from their own humanity and community).
Bertrand Russel and Buddha give us the same warnings.
Desire has been understood as a destructive force to society. In literature, this idea is apparent. Girard often mentions the theft of Helen by Paris as an example. Girard’s contirubution to the idea of desire is that what is desired funamentally is not the object, but the onological state of the subject which possesses it. Mimicry itself is the goal of competition. Paris did not want Helen, he wanted to be a great king like Agamemnon. A person who desires seeks to be like the subject he imitates. What Paris wanted, then, was not Helen, but to be a great king like Agamemnon. A person who desires seeks to be like the subject he imitates, through the medium of object that is possessed by the person he imitates. Girard writes:
“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.[11]
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