Book Review: Wanting

A book about mimeic desire

I was looking forward to reading this book as I am really fascinated by human psychology. It still amazes me to see how we all react and respond to events, as well as how easily influenced we are by others. We will listen intently to someone’s opinion on something they have no expertise in due to them being high performers in another area. 

The book, Wanting, is written by Luke Burgis. Burgis, himself, has an interesting background in that he was a high school athlete who suffered an injury early on in his career. The injury, coupled with poor coping skills, led him to "chase the money" and co-found 2 companies by his late twenties".He had even started a vending machine company out of a spare bedroom at age 23. He came to realize that he was on a Sisyphean journey.  I have included a link to his substack for your convenience. In addition, he is also on other social media platforms, which are not hard to find if you want to know more about him. 

A quick note: The book borrows heavily from Rene Girard, who is the founder of mimetic theory and passed away at age 91 in 2015.

Highlights

There are parts of the book that I really enjoyed and there are parts that were way over my head. I envy people like Burgis who can understand such abstract things in detail. Here are some highlights:

• Most of our desire is mimetic. We want what others’ want. Our desires are not INTRINSIC.

• After we have our basic needs met, we must figure out what we desire. We look to models to help us figure that out.

  • Models are people or things who show us what we should desire.

  • Models of desire are what make social media such a potent drug. Before the internet our models were much more local but now it can be anyone in the world.

• The more people are forced to be the same, the more pressure they feel to differentiate themselves inside the group.

• The illusion of autonomy is how desires work. Models are most powerful when they are hidden. If you want to make someone passionate about something, you need them to believe it is their own desire.

• 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, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis and even anti-mimetic and this is fascinating to us.

• Burigs also goes through the concept of Celebristan and Freshmanistan:

  • Celebristan or External Mediation - When a person imitates the desires of someone separated by time or space or social sphere and there is little chance of the person ever coming into contact with their model. In external mediation, the model mediates desire from outside, or external to, the world of the subject.

    • This is where dream dates and heroes live. There is a large barrier that separates us from the models.

    • These models are imitated freely and openly without any conflict.

• Freshmanistan or Internal Mediation - When a person lives within the same time, place, or social sphere as their model and the likelihood of coming into contact with the model is high. In internal mediation, the model mediates desire from inside, or internal to, the world of the subject. With the social and economic flattening of the world, more desire becomes internally mediated as models come from within our social worlds.

  • Like being in freshman year of high school where you have to jostle for position and differentiate ourselves from a bunch of other people.

  • Since these models are close to us, we have to wonder in secret

    • We’re easily affected by what other people in Freshmanistan say or do or desire.

• Distortions of reality

  • Misappropriation of wonder

    • We exaggerate the qualities of our models.

      • Celebristan – we openly gawk or gush at these models.

      • Freshmanistan – we admire in secret due to us occupying similar space and (potentially) competing for the same resources.

  • Cult of Experts

    • We live in a “liquid modernity”, where there are no culturally agreed upon models to follow and with no fixed points of reference.

    • The world is so vast and complex that we rely on “experts” (who should be more competent in our field of interest) to help us understand our desires.

    • Burgis mentioned that today’s experts seem to be less fact checked than in the past and experts are based on popularity/followers, not qualifications.

  • Reflexivity

    • Our perception of reality will change. Things can become a self-fulfilling circularity.

• Mirrored imitation is a concept that is introduced when rivals forget about whatever objects they were fighting for in the first place.

  • Mirrors distort reality, as they flip the sides of which things appear.

  • A couple examples are provided:

    • Hipsters - Why do all hipsters look alike yet nobody identifies themselves as one?

    • In an episode on Seinfeld, Jerry is dating an ex-girlfriend of Newman’s. Jerry finds out that Newman dumped her and struggles to comprehend why. He gets so fixated on it and  works himself up so much that he ends up getting dumped. This is a crisis to him, as now it appears that Newman is romantically superior.

• Scapegoats

  • Burgis goes over the history of scapegoats in different societies in our past.

  • The scapegoat unites others on a singular point of focus. This prevents a mimetic crisis, as they converge on a single person or group.

  • Scapegoats are usually easily identifiable, for example: physical, personality, neurodiverse, on the margins of society, and unable to fight back.

  • Burgis states the idea that people today can look back and judge the actions of those who participated in horrible events is why scapegoats happen.

• Empathy is anti-mimetic.

• Comparison trap

  • Comparing yourself to you yesterday is better than comparing yourself to others today.

• Burgis mentions the concept of Calculating thought vs Meditative thought.

  • Calculating thought – constantly searching, plotting how to reach an objective: A to B, beating the market, good grades, etc.

    • This leads to relentless pursuit of objectives without analyzing whether the objectives are worth pursuing.

  • Meditative thought – slow, non-productive thought that is not reactionary to an event or idea.

    • It’s asking a series of questions to understand the reality of the situation and not immediately jumping to solutions.

Closing Thoughts

In all honesty, I am still a bit torn on the book. I liked how many, of what I would consider, foundational mental models were identified and explained, such as who to compare yourself to, setting goals for you and not someone else, slowing down your thought process, and understanding where you get your desires from. Having said that, I have had to reread much of the book as I couldn’t keep up with some of the more abstract concepts and theories . At the end of the day, I am not sure I am any more informed about human behavior, but I did learn some new terminology and how to apply it.

I would be interested in hearing feedback from those who have also read the book or  any additional opinions on the book? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

Dean