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

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Luke Burgis is an entrepreneur and author. We feel like we are in charge of our wants. Like we're the creator of our desires. But Rene Girard's theory of Mimetic Desire suggests an alternative - all we are doing is copying and modelling other people's wants, and then spitting them back out as our own. Expect to learn why you're going to die of a Brazilian butt lift, 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... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Wanting - https://amzn.to/3hpLFe9 Check out Luke's website - https://lukeburgis.com/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Luke Burgess, is 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. 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 René Gerard, and much more. This is another red pill to take. Sadly, Mimetic desires 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 under the comfortable blanket of ignorance that you are right now in other news. But 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. But now it's time to learn about why our desires aren't our own. With Luke Burgess.

Look Burgess, I'll look at the show. Hey Chris, thanks so much for having me on. 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 end circle of hell, where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift over and over again. What's that about? That is a quote from Dana Tordor Ritchie, who's the editor of N-plus-1 magazine here in the States. She's talking about mimetic 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's imitating the desires of everybody else and you know the joke is it's like turtles all the way down. It's like memetic desire all the way down like where where does this end? It makes this 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, you know, the signal through the noise. Why do we have memetic desire then? Is it adaptive? Mamedic desire is according to Renezharart 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 ape. 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, you can get a little awkward. So you know, this Gerard 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 a mimetic 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, everything from politics to the stock market. 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? That's a great question and a topic of great debate among people that read Gerard. Some would say no. I think there's some nuance, right? There's some there's some distinctions that we can 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 in the needs of spectrum. But there also seem to be some basic fundamental human desires, like classical philosophy as identified these, like the desire for knowledge, the desire for survival. These are just basic things that seem common to all humans, unless something kind of goes wrong. But in terms of the more abstract desires, as we get into things that are less grounded in any kind of instinctual basis, and we start talking about careers and lifestyles and fashions,

there's nobody that desires those things without having some kind of a model. I mean, they don't generate those desires, ex nihilo, like out of thin air, because they're already embedded. We're born embedded into this social process, and we haven't created these things ourselves. So even today, I mean, the irony is that things that used to be probably not so much in the realm of desire, like drinking water, for instance, there was just water. Now there's like 20 different brands of bottled water with all kinds of different minerality breakdowns and marketing aspects. Most people haven't actually analyzed those things, so they look to other people and they shape the valuation of those things through Memeces.

So most people think that they're the conscious agents of their own wants and desires. And then if determinism hasn't put them in the ground, memetic desire can come and hammer the nail into the coffin and throw a bunch of concrete on top of it. Is that kind of how it's looking at the moment. Exactly, I think it's probably a good way to put it. Usually the less the less mnemetic we think we are, the more we probably are. Fantastic. Obviously there's an implication for Maslow's hierarchy of needs there that you kind of have this bottom level of needs.

this bottom level of needs, but then above needs is desires, and then you say that a lot of these desires are kind of interchangeable, so the hierarchy becomes very messy as soon as you get past the needs. In fact, as soon as you get past the very bottom level of the hierarchy, I would say that there's no hierarchy at all. In the universe of desire, if you will, there's no hierarchy. So, you know, Maslow's pyramid, if you can picture it, it sort of goes up and our needs become a little more focused and smaller, the higher we get towards the top. And I think we could probably lap off Maslow's hierarchy right above the first couple of levels, right?

The physiological needs, the needs for security, like having a roof over our head. As we move beyond that, I think we just cut the pyramid right off. And we enter this very messy world of desires that doesn't have a strict hierarchy because there's often not a lot of objectivity to it. We look around at this universe of people around us. And the reason there's no hierarchy is that we adopt desires or we derive desires based on People that we come into contact with more than any kind of like

like teleology That's guiding us towards this very one specific thing and I'm not arguing that that doesn't exist If you're religious you you could you I think you have a strong case to make that there is There is some ultimate desire. Dante talks about that at the end of the inferno. But for most of us, as memetic creatures, we spend most of our lives bouncing like pinballs in a pinball machine from different models and from different desires to the next. That's one of the reasons this important to be able to see our mimetic nature and to be able to sort of put some to lay over some structure.

Because, you know, if some objective value to step back from the mimetic game and to be able to understand like, what is it that is there of certain things that I should want that are sort of objective goods that may be lost in kind of the mimetic craziness and noise of the modern world. Someone said that mimetic desire is to psychology, what gravity is to physics. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So if that's the case, how was it discovered? So it was discovered by a French academic named Renas Gerard, who came to the state shortly after World War II, and his degree was in history, and he discovered Meme de Gdysire outside of his field of expertise through reading classic literature,

because he believed that even mythological literature, classic fiction held deep anthropological truths inside of it. So the analogy here would be to Heinrich Schlioman, who was a gentleman in 1871, who set out to find the lost city of Troy with a shovel under his arm and a copy of the Iliad under the other arm. He had a shovel and he had the Iliad in 1871 and all the archaeologists, everybody laughed this guy kind of just like out of the room, but two years later he found Troy because he believed that the text actually held clues. Like there was there was some truth. He took the text seriously and he scrutinized the text and it allowed him to discover the city when nobody else took it seriously. So in other words, his method was wrong according to the experts.

But the guy used the Iliad and he found Troy. Oh, he did was read a book. He did was read a book that everybody else had read, but they just dismissed it as not important to this quest to find a city. Gerard is like that and that he read classic literature and mythology and he believed that the text held very important secrets about human nature. And he wasn't a literary critic. He didn't even study literature. He was self-taught.

But he scrutinized the text that way. And I think it probably helped that he had fresh eyes. Sometimes we see things easier when we're outside of the domain, where people are in the weeds. And we kind of stand back and have fresh perspective. And we can see things that other people miss. And that's what he did with the literature. And his discovery was that desire is mimetic

and a lot of the great classic novels, at least of the Western canon, like Gostaevsky, Servantes, a lot of great French literature, like Proust. And you notice that all of the characters in these novels, none of them want spontaneously. Like their desires don't arise out of the blue.

There's always some model for them, somebody influencing what they want. And Gerard was one of these great interdisciplinary minds. There's not a lot of them left. He studied anthropology, history, literature. So he saw this discovery in literature, the way that Shliam and did in the Iliad, this truth, and then he began to look for another place, and he found it everywhere. It's now, 60 years later, after Gerard started talking about Mimesis and Mamedic Desire,

we have neuroscientists finding mirror neurons and realizing that, in fact, imitation is hard wired into what it means to be human. If we imitate things like language and facial expressions in fashion, why wouldn't we also imitate desires? That's exactly what I thought as soon as I learned about René Gerard's work. Why would we believe that our children copy the faces that we pull at them when they're a toddler held in our lab? At at some point what you get agency, someone gives you the agency card at age 16 or something and that, right, okay,

imprinting is over. Mimetic desire doesn't begin. Now, of course, the imprinting that you have, it makes sense in an adaptive characteristic as well, right? You watch someone do a thing that looks successful. As a hunter gatherer that expedites your progress and your learning because you don't even need to be told it, you can just watch them do it. And then maybe you can be told it as well that adds some flavor to it too. It's just turbocharging learning. So why wouldn't that happen? But as you start to roll into higher levels of abstraction and you have these sort of lofty of goals and especially when you are exposed to far more stimulus stimuli than you would have done usually, it can be hijacked in a pretty sort of crazy way.

Yeah, and the smarter that people are, the easier they can convince themselves of anything, including that, you know, the mnemetic desire is not a part of them, you know. So the funny, interesting thing is that in children, we see memetic desire easily. You put a bunch of toddlers loose in a room and one of them picks up a single toy that none of the other kids were concerned about all of a sudden a second and a third one comes over.

And, you know, the more of them start uglying, the single toy, the more attractive it becomes. Like this power of attraction. It's kind of like when you're walking down the sidewalk and you see a bunch of people, like huddled around a corner, like watching some break dancers or something like that. It's like moth to a flame.

And that's a mimetic desire. We're taking our cues from other people. So in children, it happens and it's kind of funny. Like one kid wants a single toy and the other one immediately just starts crying if he can't have it too. And we know from childhood development, this happens. There's been many studies that I referenced in the book. But the funny thing, in children are open about their imitation

and open about who their models are. We call them role models. And they're not really embarrassed of their imitation. They imitate their older siblings and they're proud to do so. In fact, the better they can imitate the older brother or something like that, the better it may want to go tell everybody how much how well they're doing at being like the older brother, whoever. As we get older though, it seems that the the mnemetic part of ourselves we kind of like bury it. You know, it's sort of like it's not good to be known as an imitator as an adult, especially

with, you know, the way that entrepreneurship has sort of gone in the last 20 years. Like we really prize innovation and imitation has become a dirty word. So it seems like the the mnemetic part of what it means to be human has just went underground. It doesn't mean that it's disappeared. We haven't like engineered it away. If anything, we're probably more mimetic than ever because of social media, but as adults, it's not something that we talk about very often. Well, we call it out, right? People break the fourth wall with regards to the role models that they follow. Think about the Conor McGregor Walk. You know, that walk as he goes into the ring or the type of shirts that he was wearing, you wore that outrageous Versace shirt to the races one day. And then next summer, every

fast fashion brand for men has these sort of floral, like what would have been typically classed as like shit shirts, but now the coolest thing on the market because Conor McGregor War, but everyone's fine with that. People seem to be like, yeah, yeah, but that's conscious. I know I'm doing that. I'm doing the walk. It's kind of self-mocking almost and I'm breaking the fourth wall about it. I know I'm doing that. And for some reason, we presume that with a conscious agent of our own desires, it's not Brazilian but lifts all the way down. It's like Brazilian but lifts when I choose to get it, but not when I don't Yeah, exactly breaking the fourth wall is a great term to describe this because you know things do happen where we break the fourth wall

The fourth wall is strongest With the people that are close closest to us and that fourth wall doesn't get broken a whole lot so it's it's one thing to imitate Conor McGregor for for me to imitate Conor McGregor and his crazy shirts in the way that he walks and stuff like that, because he's Conor McGregor. It's another thing for me to have that relationship of imitation with somebody that is like my colleague or somebody in my workplace, somebody very close to me, or my own business partner. And Gerard says there are two different kinds of models of desire for the most part.

There are those that are external mediators of desire because they're outside of our world and they don't really imitate back. There's no threat of this kind of reflexive, weird relational situation that can turn into rivalry and create conflict. And then there are what he calls internal mediators of desire. And those are people inside of our world.

When I was talking about physical distance here, we were talking about our social world, like, existentially speaking. These are the people that, if we're imitating them, they might notice that we're imitating them. Kind of a Gregor has no fucking idea that I wear a shirt. So these are trickier. And I think we break the fourth wall on the external ones and we can joke about it, but rarely does that happen with the internal mediators of desire.

No, the only reason that you would ever do that would be if you were taking the piss. Right? Exactly. You've got some the new Australian in the office or the Brit, in the office and all of the Americans decide that they're going to try and do the British or Australian accent, which all of you are terrible at. And yeah, that's the way it works. So isn't Amicia kind of alchemy? Because it seems like you can create a desire or a demand for something which was originally worth nothing by just having other people appear to want it.

Yeah, you know, Rory Sutherland, who I've spoken to, you wrote a great book. I think we certainly say that it's alchemy. And I tell a story about Eddie Bernays, who basically used alchemy to manufacture an outcome in the early 20th century in the States. Women didn't smoke in public, it was totally taboo, but all the men were addicted to cigarettes because they were included in the ration packs in the first world war. So all the men smoked, none of the women smoked in public very rarely did they. And Bernays was hired by one of the large tobacco companies, American tobacco that made Lucky Strikes.

And Lucky Strikes realized that if they could tap into the market for female smokers, especially in public, then they'd make the modern day equivalent to billions of dollars back then. And Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, by the way, so he understood psychology. And even though he wouldn't have used the term memetic desire, he certainly understood the principle of Mimesis and that humans need models of desire.

And what did he do? He engineered this elaborate stunt at the 1929 Easter Day Parade. He had women, attractive women, come out of the churches with packs of lucky strikes planted inside of their fancy overcoats. And on cue, they whipped out the lucky strikes and started smoking them, just defiantly walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City. And these women served as models. They were all of the newspapers, were photographing them. And Bernays said, look at these women smoking torches of freedom.

They're defined this taboo. They're finally free because they're able to smoke. And it appeared that they spontaneously chose to do this. But in fact, the whole thing was engineered by Bernays. Because he realized that this model of a bunch of women at the same time spontaneously deciding that they were going to defy this taboo was incredibly powerful for all of the other women

that saw this. I mean, this is like Mamedic Desire 101. And then there's the element of rivalry in there, with the men, and he used this to create some kind of alchemy to generate a certain outcome. So we do have to be careful. Marketers know this very well. And even people that are really slick in the dating game know this very well too.

There's no better way to generate desire for oneself and to be able to walk into a bar and have your attractive friend of the opposite sex just pretend to be totally fascinated with you or something like that. There always needs to be a model. It seems like signaling and mimetic desire very closely into length. Is there a relationship between this? I think that I think is a deep relationship and it's very simple. It's just that models

of desire signal to us what is what is wantable. So it acts as a source of legitimacy for our own desires. Think about it. If I want something that nobody else wants or you know if I want something that nobody else wants, or if I want to go on vacation to a certain spot or pursue some path in life, most people, if they express this desire and they can't find anybody else around them who also seems to think that that thing is desirable, they begin to doubt themselves and wonder if they want the right thing. This happens in romance, it happens in careers. Now, I don't think, I mean, I have certainly some people, and I think entrepreneurs are the prime example.

Like, everybody could tell them they're crazy and that they shouldn't do something, but they do it anyway. That's a little bit different though. That's not necessarily a desire. That's just people weighing in, like, why don't think this will work for X, Y, and Z reason. When it comes to actual desires,

we look for other people, the models to signal the legitimacy of that desire for us. So I think there's a very deep connection. There has to be equivalence of a first mover, right? As you said with the kids, you got the kids in the play area and let's say that they're all doing nothing, then one does something. Now that something can have been iterated

on a memetic desire that they saw yesterday or that they saw two weeks ago or that the watched mum do in the car on the way here or something, but there does have to be a first mover. So there has to be gradations of how mimetic certain desires are that we have. There are certain people who step further outside

of the overt and window of what is normal acceptable behavior with regards to their desires. And there are others that are slap bang in the middle of the normal distribution. Yes, I think thinking of it as a gradation or as a spectrum of mimesis is exactly the right way to think about it. So let's take the little girl in the room who picks up a bright red fire truck. She may pick up that fire truck because her dad is a firefighter.

And that's the reason why she was the first mover. So there's nothing to do with the other kids in the room. It has to do with some external factor or something, you know, she saw on TV the day before. But it could have nothing to do with that. It could just be because the color red is just this like bright red color and all of the other toys have dull colors. And there's some kind of instinctual response where the red was attractive. I mean, we know this in animals with birds and flowers. So perhaps there is an instinctual basis for people moving

towards things and desiring it. And then the Mimesis maybe follows that. So I think there's all kinds of reasons why somebody could be a first mover, different gradations. And the trick is kind of like getting to the source, right, getting to the bottom of it. So if everyone's converging on desires, this must cause conflict, because more people are more alike, which means that increased rivalry and a greater desire for differentiation as well has to come out of it. Yes, the next step, the mnemetic desire

is like step one of Gerard's theory. Step two is that mnemetic desire quite naturally has to lead to conflict, because we're imitating the desire of a model where we're now pursuing what the model is pursuing. So we've defecto made ourselves into some form of arrival. So the model is now in obstacle to us in the pursuit of whatever the thing is. So you think of a hyper-mimetic environment like university, the students come into the university maybe with all kinds of grandiose ideas of what they wanna do when they graduate.

If you pull them on their first day, let's say it's a class of 1,000 students, you might get eight or 900 different answers of different things that they want to do post graduation. But the funny thing is, by the time that they graduate, if you ask them on the last day, you might get a hundred. Like in some sense, like their desires of what they want to do, just kind of converge through this mimetic process. Like one of them is like, oh, this is the company to work for. This is the industry to work in.

And their desires converge. And then it becomes hyper competitive. And they're competing over the same types of jobs, competing to get into the same companies. And it creates conflict. That's a relatively superficial example. But this can manifest itself in all different kinds of ways. So basically, the counterintuitive idea here for Gerard is that our conflict does not

arise primarily from our differences. It actually arises from our sameness. It arises from mimesis, from imitating each other, which draws us closer together and sort of brings us into a situation of imitating one another, but kind of wanting to hide it. This weird sort of situation of needing to differentiate ourselves while we're all secretly imitating ourselves. And the best example of this for me is social media. Social media has a homogenizing nature to it. If you think about the way that Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, we all have the same profiles, it's all kind of structured the same way, we have the same wiring, and we have to present ourselves in that way. We have the same number of characters to make a point. So it actually is brought us closer together. Nobody really knows who the models are to follow.

I mean, they change all the time. And there's this, you see, there's like this great anxiety that sort of differentiate oneself while in an environment where everybody's imitating everybody else in some way and responding to everybody else. So that's, this is the great paradox, I think,

of memetic desire. Yeah, it's interesting, especially on social media, because you have people that get to the top, right? So they have a power law advantage, because more people proportionally far more people see their content. And then they look at it and they think, oh, he's Luke's got good reach with that tweet. So I'll add that into the library of potential mimesis strategies. And then Luke's done it again. He's done it again with that same sort of tweet. And you see this, right?

You see this with different structures, whether it's putting clap emojis in between each word or whether it's using a particular hashtag, what is a hashtag? It's other people saying this is a trend. This is something else that I agree with. And a lot of what people are trying to do there is achieve success through the adoption of that trend. Here's something that's worked well. That's a signal of high value, high status, intellect, humor, whatever. Therefore, I'm going to adopt it. I'm going to absorb it into myself. Yeah, you see it all the time on social media.

Like when one person develops a certain tactic, all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere, it's imitated everywhere. And maybe the origin of that was some program of how to get more engagement in 30 days or something like that, right? So people start doing all kinds of funny things like asking these questions.

You can almost sniff it out, right? As soon as you see it. But imitating, there's a lot of cargo cult stuff happening, not only on social media, but in the startup world, for instance. And it's like imitating sort of the external things like we'll magically bring about some kind of result. So you see entrepreneurs like imitating all kinds of like surface level things, like ways of dressing, ways of working, kind of lifestyles, like different, the ways even that we communicate

in our email exchanges. Like, there was this like hypermimetic trend while why was living in California where like all of a sudden it seemed like overnight, like nobody wanted to use capital letters and emails anymore. And it was like, it's not cool. It means that you're not busy enough if you have to capitalize the first word of your sentences and use punctuation.

And it's like, in the course of a year, man, I'm not kidding. That just happened. So there's this imitation of all these funny external things that have very little to bear on the success of the company or on the valuation, right, and the value creation. So, you know, what we're imitating is very important. Is it like the superficial external things? Like, are we doing that with some like auto-magical expectation that if I put these three emojis after all of my tweets, suddenly, you know, I will have the following that Elon Musk has.

No, it doesn't work like that. If I wear the black turtle neck, then I get all of the insights from creativity and marketing that Steve Jobs had. This is what we saw with Elizabeth Holmes, right, from Theranar, so a woman who was a complete shister and a total con artist, it was very successfully so. And she wore a turtle neck the same way that Steve Jobs did. There's actually clips on YouTube, if you look hard enough of her real voice.

So you just... Yeah, so she lowered her voice to imitate the men that were in the industry, because she thought that having a lower voice would signal that she was more masculine, more disagreeable, more conscientious, more industrious, harder working. But the product that they created, what was it called, the Winston or something?

What was the thing that they made? Oh, I should forget the name of the actual product. The some famous scientists from the 1900s, they named this thing, the Edison, that was it. And, but that was shit. Total shit. Didn't do what it was supposed to do at all, but she'd got all the surface areas stuck. She'd got all of the easy to achieve things. Here's another thing, man, that I think about a lot. Scott Alexander put this on his blog a little while ago. Talking about how fashion's work, two rungs apart in terms of class or group hierarchy.

So if you're upper class, Kim Kardashian, let's say, you can wear heels with a pair of popper-sided jogger track suit bottoms to an awards ceremony and people are gonna think, oh yeah, that's so cool. It's like the clothes of the underclass. It's the clothes of sort of the street chav, but worn by someone who's really, really classy.

But if you're only one wrong above them, if you're perhaps lower middle class, you can't get away with that because you're so close that you could be confused. The signal that you're giving off and the mimesis isn't a signal of, I'm so cool that I can wear something that's two wrongs below me, or I am so rich, even though I might be in a sort of lower middle class or an underclass position that I can wear what the people above me are, I just look this way and I'm above my station basically. So you need to have these gaps, so the way that people model stuff and who they choose is also a signal in itself, right? Okay, what is this going to adopt within me?

What am I trying to say with this? Is there any confusion that this might actually be me slipping down a peg as opposed to moving up a peg? It's brilliant. And that has everything to do with what we talked about earlier that Kim Kardashian can do that because she lives in a different world. So it's not confusing. She's going far enough away into,

it's an external world for her, right? External mediators of desire and internal mediators. So she's going far enough away so it's not confusing. Where if she sort of stayed in the world of celebrity and did something, it could create a lot of conflict. So that has to do with the distinction of like what world to do the models occupy. And we see that in all kinds of different domains. The interesting thing with Elizabeth

Holmes, though, I have to add, is that what she did, like we can say that it's silly. We can joke about the black turtlenecks, but to some extent, it worked in the sense that she created an aura around her. Alchemy, man. That Alchemy, it was total Alchemy, that got people presumably very smart people. I mean, it's embarrassing if you watch the documentary, the amount of people, right? That are on there, touting her. So in a sense, memetic desire, models like literally distort reality.

You know, we project all kinds of things onto models like metaphysical things that they don't even possess. So there's a kind of a game that's being played. It's like who can make themselves out to be the right kind of a model? And if you can do that, you can raise, I forget some ridiculous amount of money that Elizabeth Holmes was able to raise.

And then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, like the more money you're able to raise, the more people that you get, like, you know, former heads of state, the more people don't even question. They just, they now have models of desire to follow. And it makes the seventh and eighth and the ninth one extremely easy. What goes on when Mimesis happens to social groups then? Usually when Mimesis makes this way through a social group, through kind of memetic contagion,

it leads to the group becoming more homogenous, if there's no kind of external reference in the social group. Gerard found that, you know, in this can happen at the micro level, it can happen in a family, it can happen in a company, it can even happen in a community or in a country, where everybody is reacting momentically to everybody else. And it kind of creates this, what he calls, excuse me, a memetic crisis. And Gerard found that at the root of a lot of societal crises is like out of control of a medic desire where there's no sort of clear models to follow. There's no shared models and everybody's kind of looking to everybody else and reacting to everybody.

It's interesting. We don't, you know, in at least I'm thinking of, you know, 2021 America, there's not a lot of shared models, right? I mean, what part of the problem is there's not a lot of shared models, right? I mean, what part of the problem is, there's not a lot of like, like models that we can agree on in terms of like who we should be following. So it just, in the absence of that, there's this kind of mimetic crisis

where different sort of groups and factions form and everybody is reacting to everybody else. And Gerard found that historically, these kinds of mimetic crises are solved through what he calls the scapegoat mechanism, through turning away from one another, through the imitation of one another, and sort of taking out the tension, taking out the aggression on some scapego that basically provides some temporary relief from the internal mediation that created the crisis. You dig into that a little bit more.

So, why does that happen? How is it a release valve? It happens because when people are imitating one another in conflict and in aggression, they think of it this way. Think of a bunch of people sort of standing, looking at one another, sort of fighting, taking their cues from the other side, tit for tat aggression.

And somebody or someone comes on the scene, a third party, that allows them to now stand shoulder to shoulder, and which in a sense releases them or makes them forget about their aggression towards one another, and they are able to essentially unite against whoever the scapegoat is. So it actually causes group cohesion when there's a scapegoat. So it goes all the way back to ancient Israel where there is a sacred right for this, right? Every year at Yom Kpur, the high priest would symbolically transfer all of the sins of the people onto a goat and then

they would collectively drive that goat out into the wilderness into the hands of a demon to die. And the act of transferring all of the blame, the transfer of a blame onto that scapegoat, and then very importantly, the act of collectively driving that goat away, exiling that goat, created cohesion among the people. Whereas before it was kind of, as Hobbes would say, like a war of all against all,

tons of interpersonal conflicts, the scapegoat is like concentrating all conflict and all blame onto a single kind of fixed point. It'd be like, you know, if cancer running all throughout our body, imagine how nice it would be if we could concentrate all of the cancer into one cell and eliminate the cell. Well, the scapegoat mechanism is essentially doing that,

but for a social process, not a biological process. So, I imagine in an individualistic society, this is even worse, right? Because you're so siloed out, everybody is their meritocratic utilitarian objective metric of success that they can add to society. And this must make the scapegoat mechanism even more so you've got the collapse of grand narratives, all the things that used to cohes us together in the past, attending church, going to the same sports games together. The paradox of choice is that when you can follow whatever interests you have,

you're less likely to cohesion with the people around you about their interests as well. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think when I look at the United States today, the one thing that seems to bind groups together more than anything else, like the most identifiable and easiest thing to identify the group is who their enemy is.

In other words, who their scapegoat is. So Gerard had a funny saying one time, he was like, you know, political partisanship is essentially, you know, having the same scapegoat as everybody else or something to that effect. But aside from politics, it's just, the scapegoat mechanism creates group cohesion through this kind of transference of blame, it binds people together through that. So I think that, I think you're right, I think that as our society becomes more hyper individualistic and fractured, we will see more and more in need for the scapegoat mechanism because we

have less of the shared values. One way to think of shared values would be like shared models, right? That's why I said it's hard to find like like models that everybody agrees on. I once tweeted out, I was like, who's a, who's like a model that like all Americans can like, like hold up as a good example? And I only got one response and it was Dolly Parton. The rock, the rock. Everybody loves the rock.

That's who I devoted full. I think I think the rock is probably up there. Yeah. But they're hard to find. I mean, the fact that we're talking about the rock. That's who I devoted for. I think the rock is probably up there. Yeah. Yeah. But they're hard to find. I mean, the fact that we're talking about the rock show shows you and not and not some like ideals or virtues or like sense of like what it should mean to be in a minute. Like that just says everything that you need to know about the state that we're in. There's a study that my buddy Rob Henderson told me about in 2008, which is when Obama got elected the first time.

Both parties loved their own party or liked their own party more than they disliked the other party. 2012, when they were pulled, people disliked the other party more than they liked the one that they were voting for. So it literally is like a protest vote. It's a vote against what I don't want to happen, as opposed to what I want to happen, which is crazy when you think about it like that. Does it, um, you had a story of how Lamborghini came to fame in the book.

You tell us that? Yeah, this is a beautiful story of a mimetic desire that turned into mimetic rivalry that ended well, which is rare. And it's why I thought it was important to tell the story because mimetic desire can lead to great innovation and it can be a tremendously positive motivating force for people as long as you don't let it metastasize and become negative and destructive and self-destructive. So the story of Ferrari and Lamborghini is fascinating. So Enzo Ferrari, of course, built the Ferrari automobile company known for these great racing cars. And Ferruccio Lamborghini, who's the founder of what we today

know as the Lamborghini automobile company, started out making tractors in the middle of the 20th century. He made these beautiful tractors. And he did very well for himself as a businessman, and to the point where he could buy himself a few Ferraris. So you have this successful entrepreneur, Ferruccio Lamborghini driving these Ferraris, and in one of his top of the line Ferraris, the clutch just kept on breaking on him, and he couldn't figure out what was going on. He would take it to the Ferrari shop.

They would charge him an arm and a leg, send him back, and the thing would break three months later, just infuriated. He finally had his tractor engineers open up the hood, take a look at the clutch. And he found out it was the same damn clutch that he used in some of his cheaper tractors. That is really pissed him off, because when he went to Ferrari, of course, they charged him 10 times more than the cost of the park.

So Lamborghini said through this, I'm just going to take a really top of the line clutch and put it in my car. So he rigged his car, he made himself a better Ferrari by putting one of his really sturdy clutches in. And his argument was like they're not using a clutch that can handle the power of this vehicle. So he did it, and then he swooped up the engine while he was at it. And then he would go out on the Auto Strada near where the Ferrari factory is,

where the Ferrari engineers would test their cars. And Lamborghini had swooped up his Ferrari. It's where it would beat the new Ferrari's coming out of the garage. And they're like, what did this guy do? Finally, Lamborghini said, I got to go tell Enzo Ferrari, it's where it would beat the new Ferrari's coming out of the garage. And they're like, what did this guy do? Finally, Lamborghini said, I got to go tell Enzo Ferrari, you know, what I think about him and his car. So he finally gets a meeting with the great Ferrari, and he tells them, listen, I think your clutches are shit. And Enzo says, well, maybe you don't know how to drive a Ferrari, you should just stick to making tractors. So, you know, Lamborghini leaves that meeting and basically resolves from that day that he's gonna make a car

and he's gonna make a better car to prove to Ferrari that he's a better engineer. He was an engineer by trade. And within two years, he had, he went on a whirlwind tour of the world, He went to Japan. He went to Detroit. He looked at the great automobile manufacturers and he imitated the crap out of them.

And it's funny, he says in his book, he goes, I have no shame. He goes, I learn from the best. I imitated the best. I didn't innovate much at all. I just took the best parts from all of these cars. The manufacturing from Detroit, like the beautiful design, I just put them all together.

And within two years, he made a Lamborghini model that in many respects was superior to the Ferrari in I think 1966. And they've been making cars ever since. So the whole company was born in essence out of memetic desire. The thought of making a car didn't even dawned on Lamborghini until he had the right model and the right rival for it.

He didn't just wake up one day and decide to go into the car business, right? It arose through this memetic rivalry that he had. And in the ending of the story is he realized after a decade or so of fierce competition with Ferrari, there was debate whether Lamborghini should enter into racing. And at the time they didn't race. They just made beautiful touring cars that had trunks and them. them different than a Ferrari, which was primarily a racing car I'm getting into Formula One by the way these days. So I because I wrote that story. It's it's solid It's given me one more thing to bet on

Anyways, he eventually realized that the rivalry would not end well if he continued that way He wanted to spend more time with his family. He knew that if he entered the racing business, he would just be in a war with Ferrari until the end of his life. So he said, we're not going to enter the racing business. He handed over a control of the company to other people. He retired to a beautiful winery, which is still in Italy to this day.

You can go by Lamborghini wine and visit Ferruccio Lamborghini's estate, where there's a beautiful bed and breakfast. You can get a tour of a barn where he's got all his classic cars. And he lived a very, very happy and fulfilling end of his life. And it was an example of him recognizing,

listen, my rivalry produced this beautiful company and car, but if I don't stop, it will basically lead to my death. And he was a really big into bullfighting. And he sort of likened himself to the bull in a bullfight. And he said, I'm like a bull. And I know what happens to the bull if it doesn't realize that there's always one more thing, there's always one more thing that I could do. So I'm going to resist the temptation to kind of take this to the end, and I'm going to kind of opt out of the game while I'm ahead basically.

And that's what he did. And the badge on the Lambo is a bull, right? It's a bull. That's where it comes from. It comes from his lifelong fascination with ball fighting and there's probably a little hamming way involved in that story, I'm sure. That's so sick, man. So I'm fascinated with people's ability to step into their own programming.

So so far, we've laid out a fairly bleak picture of human nature, we're just kind of these NPC, very easily imprintable creatures. What about stepping into our own programming? Is it even desirable for us to get rid of our mimetic desires? Surely there has to be some wisdom in crowds, right? The evolution of memes and ideas would suggest that the ones that stick about are at least partly useful. Yeah, I think we, I don't think it's possible to transcend memetic desire or to get rid of it completely.

We'll be rid of memetic desire when we're dead, as while we're living, we'll always have it. And it can be a tremendously powerful thing, right? It can spur us on to imitate great models. So I think we have a lot of agency, a great deal of agency, but we, you know, freedom is something that we can win or lose. You know, it's what happens with, you know, vices and addictions. You know, we literally lose freedom, or we can develop freedom.

So I think we can develop freedom to be more intentional about our lives and the kinds of models that we choose, the kinds of desires that we pursue. But we can't do that if we're not even aware that this is going on. Like if we can't step into our own programming, we have to know what the program is. And part of why I wrote this book is just to let people say, here's part of the programming. You know, part of a fundamental way that humans are wired is to be mimetic. We're constantly looking for models

of desire and just being aware of that allows us to step back, gain some self possession, take stock of your life, of the decisions that you're making, and then step into it in a more intentional way. But I find that very, very few people even acknowledge that this is a hidden force in the world. A hidden force that is to psychology, what gravity is to physics, you got to know that it exists or you can't develop the right muscles to combat it. It'd be like going through life, not knowing that gravity exists, and you never work out and you wonder why you have like your backharts. So, memetic desire is similar. We can step into it. We can, I think, stepping back, taking stock and then stepping back in is kind of the approach that I recommend in the book.

Well, thankfully, the audience that listens to this show are terrifyingly reasonable and unbelievably sensible. They're happy to swallow whatever uncomfortable truths they need to. So let's say that someone's listening and they want to become this intentional agent, right? They want to become a sovereign individual. What are some of the tactics that they can use to notice when they've been mimetically hijacked?

Yeah, I think, as you become aware of it, you can actually name some of your models, positive and negative. I think anytime you're able to name something, just kind of like emotions, you gain some control over them. So when I can name the people that I'm emulating and the people that I look to as rivals, I gain some control over them. So I mean, it's an exercise I would do.

I'd actually like take stock, take a piece of paper, and take stock of what your world of models looks like in different domains. Who's your model for investing? Who's your model for fitness? Who's your model for like what, you know, your relationships wanna look like, your family life? You're some good identifiers of this. Someone says, I want to find out who my model for fashion is

or for fitness or whatever. What are some of the things that the questions that they can ask themselves to help identify that? You can, I mean, when it comes to negative models, you can always ask yourself, like, who makes you uncomfortable when you see them doing certain things or having certain successes? That might be the kind of negative model or rival. I think the most powerful way to do this though is to actually look at your past and the formation of your goals and your desires. So I had a good friend of mine say, I don't know if you've seen this movie called A Few Good Men, it came out in the late 80s, Jack Nicholson. He watched this movie 20 years later,

and when he watched it, he realized that for the last 20 years of his life, he had been basically saying things that came from the movie and like modeling certain mannerisms and certain ways of dealing with people based out of some of the characters from that movie. And it wasn't until he saw it 20 years later, he was like, damn, that movie was literally like my model for certain kinds of like goals. So that being his genesis that had trickled through other people and then come back to him. And then come back to him. Yeah. So doing almost like a history of desire in our life, starting with our parents and family

and friends, and that's an important exercise to do. And I guarantee you, if you take the time to do that, you will begin to identify some models that you probably forgot that you had. That's one really, really, really easy way to get started. But it's not an easy exercise because it takes time. You might start with just with college. And then ask yourself, like, you know, you might realize, like, hey, I'm in this career that I'm in today because of some models that I had while I was in college. At the time, I never critically tested them. I didn't kick the tires. I just took them for granted. Now here I am. I'm not really that happy. Maybe it's because I've never really taken the time to understand how they influence me. That's an easy tactic, naming the current ones is another one.

I recommend in the book the importance of a retreat every year if you have the time to do it. And the reason that's so important is because it's hard to see something that you're in, that you're literally in, especially something that's inside of you. So you have to extract, without some form of like pulling back or extracting ourselves, we don't have the perspective that we need. So, you know, this is like a Bill Gates think week, but for desires. I try to take a few days every year. I mean, it's the most important thing that I do every year. You know, I recommend that to gain the perspective just to sit, to sit in silence, things will bubble up.

I talk about that a lot in the book actually, because it's, you know, just to sit in silence, things will bubble up. I talk about that a lot in the book actually, because it's the genesis of this whole project for me. If I hadn't had the luxury of taking that time, I never would have realized some of these things. That's, I find at the end of the year, I make more growth around my end of your review and my new year planning process than at any other time. And it's so dumb. So today, I've actually done my half year check-in. I'm going to sit down, I'm going to dedicate half an afternoon to it, and just go through everything. And he gets so much more clarity because you actually think, look at all of the things that when I was

less encumbered by culture and habits and routines and fears and desires and all this sort of stuff. Look the things that as close to my truth i was able to get on a piece of paper. And then yeah. Look at what the fuck i'm doing with my time now and look at how far how the huge delta chasm that's between these two and go right okay yeah yeah okay let's brush away all of this stuff let's get rid of all of that shit. Let's get back to the things that really matter, the highest points of contribution. No doubt. I like it as a quote by James Clear that I like a lot that I kind of transferred to the book

and it's, you know, we don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. And part of why it's so important to do this is to see the systems that we're part of, that we might not even know that we're part of. Like, what is this, what is the system of desire that I'm like swimming in right now? What Riptide might I be in? We never sort of see that while we're in the moment.

It's only in those moments of stepping back and gaining perspective because we all have systems, there's probably one for podcasters. There's definitely one for authors, be the first to tell you that. Having just written a book, there's a system of desire. There's certain things that I'm supposed to want. There's certain lists I'm supposed to be on.

Certain things. And I need to create a distance from that and say, well, is the goal to be a New York Times bestseller, or is there a better goal than that? Maybe like a long-term 12, 15, 20-year goal? And it's important to gain that perspective. We just take the, we basically, other people give our goals to us if we don't do that. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of good hearts, law throughout this. When the measure becomes

the outcome, you end up having some very sort of strange externalities. So, for instance, you could sell a book, which did a million copies, but let's say that it made the world a Totally awful place or let's say that it was really xenophobic or something and Absolutely annihilated your career and people were hate buying it so they could burn it in the street and you're causing riots to occur Like you have achieved the goal But because you've looked at the measure as the actual outcome that you're after and I suppose that in the modern era as well Again, collapse of gran narratives lack of reach back to tradition and stuff like that people don't really know What it is that they're supposed to want we look to other people and just over time you get this weird sort of fishery and runaway

increasing caricaturism of Big lips bigger boobs bigger arms bigger bank balance, faster car, bigger house, so on and so forth. I imagine there must be, is there an inversion of a model then that you, someone that you look to, that you kind of obsessed with, but is a role model that you're using as an example of what not to be? Everyone's got the sort of car crash Instagram accounts

that they hate watch all of the stories of online Yeah, yeah, that we that we hate watch You mean me personally or just in general in terms of the Mimetic desire infrastructure, I suppose Mm-hmm. I mean, I think it's I think it's critical to have those kinds of models that are Typically transcendent to the systems that we're in. It could be somebody from history or just some ideal, because if we don't have any kind of model that transcends our environment, we're kind of constantly subject to whatever

the tyranny of our age happens to be. We're always a product. We're always a child of our age happens to be. Like, we're always a product. We're always a child of our age. And I think that is with the collapse of, with the collapse of sort of meaning and grand narratives, we risk that, right? We don't have kind of anything like outside of, you know, it's like you're drowning in quicksand and you don't have anything to like latch onto. Everything that you're grasping for, other people that are also drowning in the damn quicksand. So I think it's critical to have some transcendent models. It doesn't have to be a person. It could be an idea, right? It could be something that is kind of what classic or perennial philosophy would

just call like these perennial truths of what it means to be human and what leads to it, you know, to the good life, right? As Aristotle would say, that can sort of save us from the destructive effects of Mimesis to be able to have something to hold on to in that way. Luke Burgess, ladies and gentlemen, wanting the power of memetic design in everyday life will be linked in the show notes below. If people want to check out, what else you do, where should they go? Luke Burgess.com. A lot didn't make it into the book, so I tried to write a sub-stack called Antimimetic

every week where I try to connect all these ideas to current events. Sick man. Thanks for coming on. Cool. Thanks so much for having me.