It turns out the things we want matter far more than we know.#901•
He uncovered something perplexing, something which seemed to be present in nearly all of the most compelling novels ever written: characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don't spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior—most of all, their desires.#745•
Thiel left the corporate world and co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin in 1998. He began to use his knowledge of mimetic theory to help him manage both the business and his life. When competitive rivalries flared up within his company, he gave each employee clearly defined and independent tasks so they didn't compete with one another for the same responsibilities.
This is important in a start-up environment where roles are often fluid.
A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives—not their performance relative to one another—minimizes mimetic rivalries.#808•
When there was risk of an all-out war with Elon Musk's rival company, X.com, Thiel merged with him to form PayPal. He knew from Girard that when two people (or two companies) take each other as mimetic models, they enter into a rivalry for which there is no end but destruction—unless they are somehow able to see beyond the rivalry.#759•
Stories of sibling rivalry are universal because they're true—the more people are alike, the more likely they are to feel threatened#926•
People don't fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things#867•
The mysterium iniquitatis (the mystery of evil) remains just that: mysterious. But mimetic theory reveals something important about it. The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.#814•
1. Hidden Models—Romantic Lies, Infant Truth
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
—Milan Kundera#837•
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. The truth is that the line is always curved.#925•
We are tantalized by models who suggest a desire for things that we don't currently have, especially things that appear just out of reach. The greater the obstacle, the greater the attraction.#927•
Chapter 1
In the experiment, an adult acted as if he was trying to pull apart a dumbbell-shaped toy made from a central tube with a wooden cube on each side. As the adult strained to pull the toy apart, he let his hand slip off one end. He tried again, but this time let his hand slip off the other end. The adult's intention was clear: he wanted to pull the toy apart. But apparently he failed.
After the adult's performance, the researcher presented the object to the infants and observed what they did. The babies would pick up the dumbbell and immediately pull it apart—forty out of the fifty times the experiment was conducted. They didn't mimic what the adults did; they imitated what they thought the adults wanted to do. They read beneath the surface behavior.
The babies in the experiment were pre-linguistic. They were tracking the desires of others before they understood or had words to describe them. They didn't know or care about why other people wanted something; they simply noticed what they wanted.#2037•
Secrets Babies Keep
Desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it#899•
This natural and healthy concern in children about what other people want seems to morph in adulthood into an unhealthy concern about what other people want#749•
Adults do expertly what babies do clumsily. After all, each of us is a highly developed baby. Rather than learning what other people want so that we can help them get it, we secretly compete with them to possess it.#854•
The Martini Is a Gateway Drug
Sometimes I'll imitate him in a mirrored way, doing the opposite of whatever he does. If he buys a Tesla, then I'll never want to own a Tesla. I don't want any reminders that I'm always one step behind. I'm different. I'll buy a classic Ford Mustang and start narrowing my eyes at the Tesla drivers I see on the road (that sheeplike herd…)—completely unaware that my behavior is driven by my model.#830•
Torches of Freedom
Brill told Bernays that the cigarette is a phallic symbol that represents male sexual power. In order to turn cigarettes into an object important enough for women to fight for, Bernays would have to make smoking seem like a way for women to challenge male power.#860•
Mimetic Games
The important shift is seeing people in more than their professional role but also in their role as an influencer of desire#773•
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.#858•
The moment a person exempts themselves in their own mind from the very thing they see all around them is the moment when they are most vulnerable#791•
The pride that makes a person believe they are unaffected by or inoculated against biases, weaknesses, or mimesis blinds them to their complicity in the game.#894•
Models That Move Markets
No one believed the stock's movement corresponded to "reality."
But it did—just not the reality that most analysts accept. To paraphrase Shakespeare: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their investment philosophies.#819•
expectations," another hypothesis). Efficient market theory is the belief that asset prices are functions of all available information. Company news, investor expectations, current events, political news, and everything else that might affect a company's valuation are all assumed to be perfectly reflected in the stock price#777•
Chapter 2
Jobs had not realized it, but at the moment he walked into that room in college, Friedland had become a model to him. Jobs would later come to see through Friedland, but Friedland's immediate impact on the young Jobs was formative. He taught Jobs that strange or shocking behavior mesmerizes people. People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules.#2080•
Winston Churchill spoke about the reflexivity of architecture when he said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."#2082•
Two Kinds of Models
We are generally fascinated with people who have a different relationship to desire, real or perceived#845•
Imitate me—but not too much," because while everyone's flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.#846•
Celebristan
In Celebristan, there is always a barrier that separates the models from their imitators. They might be separated from us by time (because dead), space (because they live in a different country or aren't on social media), or social status (a billionaire, rock star, or member of a privileged class).#798•
Saints become Celebristan models—declared worthy of imitation—only after they are dead. Nobody can officially be declared a saint while they are alive#911•
Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous programmer thought to be the inventor of Bitcoin, boosted his mimetic value into the upper stratosphere of Celebristan through secrecy. He made himself impossible to compete with. "You can't be Satoshi-but-more-charismatic, because nobody knows for sure that they've met him#872•
Freshmanistan
In Celebristan, people don't compete with their imitators. They may not even know they exist. This makes it a relatively peaceful place.#861•
Shakespeare's play The Two Gentlemen of Verona shows how easily desires in this world become intertwined. Valentine and Proteus, friends since childhood, discover their desires converging on the same woman—not incidentally, but because of the other one's desire.#794•
Distortion 1: The Misappropriation of Wonder
Desire is not of this world," Girard has said, "… it is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence."#736•
Distortion 2: The Cult of Experts
So don't always try to pet a cat when you encounter one on the street, as popular psychologist Jordan Peterson advises in his 12 Rules for Life. Rather, make the cat want to get petted when it encounters you. Then you'll have really accomplished something special.#805•
Today value is largely mimetically driven rather than attached to fixed, stable points (like college degrees). This has created opportunities for anyone who can stand out from the crowd. This has positive and negative consequences.#857•
Distortion 3: Reflexivity
People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act#784•
In situations where desirous participants have the possibility of interacting with each other, there is a two-way interaction between the participants' desires.#800•
When mimesis is strong enough, rivals forget about whatever objects they were fighting for in the first place. Objects become completely interchangeable—the rivals will fight for anything, so long as their opponent wants it. They become locked in a double bind—each reflexively bound to the desires of the other, unable to escape.#859•
Mirrored imitation, then, is imitation that does the opposite of whatever a rival does. It is reflexive to a rival by doing something different from what the rival models.#779•
When mimetic rivals are caught in a double bind, obsessed with each other, they go to any length to differentiate themselves. Their rival is a model for what not to desire. For a hipster, the rival is popular culture—he eschews anything popular and embraces what he believes to be eclectic, but he does so according to new models.
According to Girard, "the effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch."#892•
The act of winning paradoxically brings about defeat. It signals to us that we picked the wrong model in the first place. In the purported words of Groucho Marx: "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members." And neither do we.
When one of the two parties to a rivalry renounces the rivalry, it defuses the other party's desire.#865•
Eight years have passed since they first struck out on their own. One day last year I ran across a news article profiling the rival and sent it to my friend. "Hey, look what Tony [not his real name] is up to," I wrote. To my surprise, my friend responded courteously: "Thanks for sending me this. I deleted it immediately.
About a year ago, I completely untethered myself from Tony to the point where I no longer even know what he's up to, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Someday, once my rivalry with him runs out of oxygen and dies, I might not mind.
But for now, I'm starving it to death.
Can you do me a favor and not send me stuff like this?"#729•
3. Social Contagion—Cycles of Desire
This is essentially the plot of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It is not merely the tragic story of two young lovers. It's the tragedy of a warring city devolving into mimetic chaos. The opening line of the play is, "Two households, both alike in dignity." Yet they hate each other#738•
The tiniest provocation has the potential to incite contagious violence that makes the families more alike, even as they think of themselves as more different.#774•
Karl Marx and William Shakespeare had very different views about why people fight. Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. People fight because they have different goals, desires, and ideas due to differences in the material goods they possess. In this framework, we would expect people who have the same material goods to fight less.
Shakespeare's view seems to be exactly the opposite: people fight when they are similar, like the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet.#734•
Desire doesn't spread like information; it spreads like energy. It passes from person to person like the energy between people at a concert or political rally#753•
Lamborghini versus Ferrari
A shift had occurred, and now both Lamborghini and Ferrari were living in Freshmanistan. Remember, Freshmanistan is defined by the possibility of direct conflict. Soccer stars Cristiano 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.
Through Lamborghini's success, they had come into close proximity and could compete directly.#820•
I don't invent anything," Lamborghini bragged. "I start where the others came from."#823•
If someone's primary objective is innovation for the sake of innovation, they usually end up in a mimetic rivalry with everyone in their field to compete primarily on the basis of originality#853•
By devaluing all forms of imitation, they play a game of differentiation to get noticed. Being different for the sake of being different is the ethos behind shock-value art and academics whose salient feature is making outlandish claims to stand out from the pack.#864•
Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, put it this way: "If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it."#869•
Ferruccio Lamborghini had a lifelong obsession with bullfighting. He understood its psychology.
In a bullfight, a bull is maneuvered into submission not by strength but by agility and psychology. The fight has three acts. In the first, the matador gets to know the behavior and quirks of the bull through a series of passes with a cape. In the second, the matador and his assistants stick sharp barbs in the bull's shoulders to wear him down.
In the third act, called muerte (death), the matador kills the animal after bringing the bull to the point of physical and psychological exhaustion.
Being in a mimetic rivalry is like being a bull in a bullfight. In a bullfight, the matador orchestrates the actions of the bull. He makes the bull charge at a waving red cape, only to pull it away at the last second—just when the bull thinks he's going in for the kill.#897•
Lamborghini didn't buy into the distortions caused by metaphysical desire, which leads people to seek satisfaction under a never-ending assortment of obstacles with no end. Girard explains the tragedy: "A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone," he writes in his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure.
"He turns over stone after stone but finds nothing.
He grows tired of such a futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up.
So he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift—he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it." Lamborghini chose not to.#756•
Lamborghini took specific measures to mitigate the negative effects of rivalry. It saved him from the death of the bull.#835•
Memes and Mimetic Theory
Competition can be good up to a certain point. The key is knowing what that point is and having the wherewithal to pivot around it.#826•
Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene. He 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.#740•
According to Dawkins, memes work in a similar way to biological genes: their survival depends on their being passed on and replicated as perfectly as possible. They might mutate every once in a while. But in general, memes are discrete, static, and fixed.#818•
According to meme theory, the spread of memes through imitation leads to the development and sustainability of culture. According to Girard's mimetic theory, culture is formed primarily through the imitation of desires, not things. And desires are not discrete, static, and fixed; they are open-ended, dynamic, and volatile.#797•
The Creative Cycle
Aristotle invented the word "entelechy" to refer to a thing that has its own principle of development within it, a vital force that propels it forward to become fully what it is.#771•
The Destructive Cycle
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt#787•
He suggested that the illusion of freedom—the idea that every entrepreneur is a master of their own desire—is dangerous.#856•
Desire is part of the web of connectivity. When people deny that they are affected by what other people around them want, they are most susceptible to getting drawn into an unhealthy cycle of desire that they don't even know to resist.#730•
Hierarchical Values
C. S. Lewis called this invisible system the inner ring. It means that no matter where a person is in life, no matter how wealthy or popular a person is, there is always a desire to be on the inside of a certain ring and a terror of being left on the outside of it. "This desire [to be in the inner ring] is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action," Lewis said.
"It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement.… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want."#739•
Values and desires are not the same thing. Values act to order desires the way they do a diet. If a person who loves meat realizes that their values are such that they no longer wish to eat meat, there comes a time—after they've lived out their values long enough—when they no longer even want meat.#765•
For many people, ordering desires starts out unconsciously. It may be this simple: I take care of my immediate family first, then others; I answer emails from people I know first and respond to unsolicited sales inquiries later; or if I only have time to clean one room in the house today, I clean the kitchen.
Whether we recognize it or not, our minds think in hierarchies all of the time—whether it's related to our daily to-do list, the priority of issues in an election, or even a glance at a menu in a restaurant (appetizers, main course, dessert). Without a hierarchy of values, which helps form and direct desires, we can't even begin to think about what to pay attention to and to what degree.#883•
My friends and my faith are both super important to me," one of my college buddies says. Good. But what will he do if one of his best friends schedules his bachelor party in Miami's South Beach on a high holy day? Saying that two different things are "super important" won't help. Without a clear hierarchy, he's more likely to choose according to the influences around him.
His decision will be mimetically driven, not values driven.#838•
The Collapse of Desire
Value systems with a clear hierarchy are more effective during crises than systems of values that lack a hierarchy.#871•
People don't think about the costs of a car crash until after they've been in one. Practically nobody thinks about collisions of desire before they happen. For Lamborghini, they were the same thing: colliding desires meant colliding cars.
Tony Hsieh wanted to maximize positive collisions, but he didn't take into account the hidden collisions of desire that happen in the mimetic space between people, in the hidden recesses of the human heart.#732•
Do you want to know what the Egyptians did to their cats?
In 2018, a sarcophagus from ancient Egypt was discovered with dozens of mummified kittens in it. Findings like this—which go back to at least 1799—have dispelled the myth that the Egyptians were the ultimate cat lovers. The truth is darker.
The Egyptians used their cats for ritual offerings and sacrifice. That's why they were considered sacred. In mimetic theory, there is a near-indissoluble link between chaos and order, violence and the sacred. Sacrificial rites—whether sacrificing cats in ancient Egypt or the ritual firing of coaches and CEOs today—are the mechanism by which mimetic contagion is contained and controlled.
The fourth and final stage of the mimetic cycle, which we turn to now, is the process by which chaotic desires become orderly desires in human societies: the scapegoat mechanism.#916•
Sacred Violence
Girard thought we had entered a dangerous new phase of history, ripe for what von Clausewitz called "the escalation to extremes"—the desire of each side in a conflict to destroy the other, which reinforces and escalates the desire of the other for violence.#887•
In his study of history, Girard found that humans time and time again turned to sacrifice in order to stop the spread of mimetic conflict. When societies were threatened with disorder, they used violence to drive out violence. They would expel or destroy a chosen person or group, and this action would have the effect of preventing more widespread violence.
Girard called the process by which this happens the scapegoat mechanism.#807•
Saving People from Themselves
The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color. Nothing is sacred anymore, and more important, nothing is legitimate—least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice.
And so, justice is seized by the crowd.
This is suboptimal.
The choice now would seem to be between building egalitarian institutions capable of withstanding public scrutiny, or further retreat into a dissembling fog.#879•
Chapter 4
Anger metastasizes and spreads easily. In a study conducted in 2013 and published in 2014, researchers at the University of Beijing analyzed influence and contagion on Weibo, a popular social media app in China. They found that anger spreads faster than other emotions, such as joy, because anger spreads easily when there are weak ties between people—as there often are online.#804•
Caiaphas could not have known the full import of what he was saying. "A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt," wrote Girard in his final book, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. "Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one."#855•
Chapter 5
The term "sour grapes" was popularized in one of Aesop's fables. A fox sees a beautiful cluster of ripe grapes hanging from a high branch. The grapes look ready to burst with juice. His mouth begins watering. He tries to jump up and grab them, but he falls short. He tries again and again, but the grapes are always just out of reach.
Finally, he sits down and concludes that the grapes must be sour and aren't worth the effort anyway.
He walks away scornfully.
By calling the grapes "sour," the fox invented a narrative in his mind to ease the pain of loss.#796•
A Fulfillment Story, as I call it, has three essential elements:#772•
But people are different: knowing something about the interior life of a person is necessary to understand why they do what they do and what it means to them. Fulfillment Stories get at the heart of action by looking at it from the inside out. Fulfillment Stories ask, "But why did that action mean so much to you?"#789•
Chapter 7
Immanent desire is like a "self-licking ice cream cone"—a phrase coined by Pete Wordon, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, to refer to NASA's bureaucracy#917•
When President Kennedy told the American people, "We choose to go to the Moon," he modeled a desire that surpassed what people had previously dared to entertain. "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things," he said, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."#766•
According to Montessori, the children had been scolded and ridiculed their whole lives for having runny noses—yet nobody had ever shown them how to use a handkerchief. The lesson made them feel "compensated for past humiliations," she said, "and their applause indicated I had not only treated them with justice but had enabled them to get a new standing in society."#769•
The word "decision" comes from the Latin word caedere, which means "to cut." When we decide to pursue one thing, we necessarily cut away another. If there's no cutting, we haven't made any decision at all.#834•
Chapter 8
Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible#1326•
Authoritarian regimes can only stay in existence so long as they can control what people want. We normally think of these regimes as controlling what people can and cannot do through laws, regulations, policing, and penalties. But their real victory comes not when they have authority over people's actions; rather, their victory comes when they have authority over their desires.
They don't want to keep prisoners in cells; they want those prisoners to learn to love their cells.
When there is no desire for change, their authority is complete.#1330•
Meditative thought, on the other hand, is patient thought. It is not the same thing as meditation. Meditative thought is simply slow, nonproductive thought. It's not reactionary. It's the kind of thought that, upon hearing news or experiencing something surprising, doesn't immediately look for solutions.
Instead, it asks a series of questions that help the asker sink down further into the reality: What is this new situation? What is behind it? Meditative thought is patient enough to allow the truth to reveal itself.#1319•
Much of life is made up of tacit knowledge—what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called "inarticulate rationality." These are things we know but can't explain#1322•
"Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want," he said. Ravikant is drawing on the perennial understanding of numerous spiritual traditions about the link between desire and suffering: desire is always for something we feel we lack, and it causes us to suffer.#1328•
Appendix
Memes are words, accents, ideas, tunes, and more that spread from brain to brain through some process of replication or imitation.#1331•