Mimetic Desire: Why Do We Want? - Luke Burgis | Modern Wisdom Podcast 344
Luke Burgis (guest), Chris Williamson (host)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Luke Burgis and Chris Williamson, Mimetic Desire: Why Do We Want? - Luke Burgis | Modern Wisdom Podcast 344 explores how Mimetic Desire Quietly Shapes Our Wants, Conflicts, And Lives Luke Burgis explains René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire: most of what humans want is learned by imitating others, not generated independently. Social media, marketing, and culture act as engines that manufacture and amplify these desires, often without our awareness, leading to convergence of goals, rivalry, and even societal crises.
How Mimetic Desire Quietly Shapes Our Wants, Conflicts, And Lives
Luke Burgis explains René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire: most of what humans want is learned by imitating others, not generated independently. Social media, marketing, and culture act as engines that manufacture and amplify these desires, often without our awareness, leading to convergence of goals, rivalry, and even societal crises.
He distinguishes between basic needs (like food, water, safety) and higher-level desires (careers, status, lifestyle) that are largely mimetic and not arranged in any neat hierarchy as Maslow suggested. Burgis describes how mimetic desire can both spur positive innovation (e.g., Lamborghini vs Ferrari) and fuel destructive rivalry, scapegoating, and polarization.
The conversation explores how signaling, fashion, celebrity behavior, and startup culture all exploit mimetic dynamics, including famous examples like Instagram aesthetics, Conor McGregor, and Elizabeth Holmes. Burgis also outlines Girard’s idea of the scapegoat mechanism as a way groups resolve mimetic crises by uniting against a common enemy.
He closes by arguing that we cannot escape mimetic desire, but we can gain agency over it by recognizing our models, reflecting on the history of our desires, periodically stepping back from our environments, and deliberately choosing better models and longer-term goals.
Key Takeaways
Most higher-level desires are imitated, not self-generated.
Beyond basic needs like food, water, and safety, our aspirations—career paths, lifestyles, brands, even where to vacation—are typically borrowed from models around us rather than arising spontaneously from within.
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Social media and marketing are powerful mimetic desire machines.
Platforms like Instagram and tactics like engineered PR stunts (e. ...
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Mimetic desire naturally leads to rivalry and conflict through sameness.
As people converge on the same desires and goals—like students chasing the same elite jobs—models become obstacles, and conflict arises more from our similarity and competition over shared objects than from our differences.
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Scapegoating is a recurring way groups resolve mimetic crises.
When everyone is imitating and reacting to everyone else, societies often regain cohesion by uniting against a scapegoat, concentrating blame on one person or group and expelling them—an ancient dynamic still visible in modern political polarization.
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Imitation can be creative and constructive when consciously directed.
The Lamborghini story shows how rivalry and imitation of ‘the best’ can drive innovation and excellence—as long as you recognize when rivalry is turning self-destructive and choose to step out before it consumes you.
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You can’t escape mimetic desire, but you can choose your models.
Burgis argues for ‘stepping into your programming’ by identifying who shapes your desires in different domains, reflecting on the history of your wants, and deliberately selecting better models (including transcendent or long-term ideals) instead of unconsciously copying your environment.
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Regular reflection and temporary withdrawal restore clarity over desires.
Practices like annual retreats, mid-year reviews, or silent time away from normal inputs help you see the ‘systems of desire’ you’re embedded in, compare your current life to your deeper priorities, and reset around more meaningful goals rather than short-term status metrics.
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Notable Quotes
“We want what other people want because other people want it.”
— Dana Tortorici (quoted by Luke Burgis)
“In the universe of desire, there is no hierarchy.”
— Luke Burgis
“Our conflict does not arise primarily from our differences. It actually arises from our sameness.”
— Luke Burgis
“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.”
— Luke Burgis
“If we don’t have any kind of model that transcends our environment, we’re constantly subject to whatever the tyranny of our age happens to be.”
— Luke Burgis
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can an individual distinguish between a genuinely self-endorsed desire and one that is primarily mimetic, especially when both feel subjectively ‘authentic’?
Luke Burgis explains René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire: most of what humans want is learned by imitating others, not generated independently. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What would a healthier social media ecosystem look like if it were designed with mimetic desire and rivalry explicitly in mind?
He distinguishes between basic needs (like food, water, safety) and higher-level desires (careers, status, lifestyle) that are largely mimetic and not arranged in any neat hierarchy as Maslow suggested. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can organizations or societies cultivate shared, positive models to reduce their reliance on scapegoating as a source of cohesion?
The conversation explores how signaling, fashion, celebrity behavior, and startup culture all exploit mimetic dynamics, including famous examples like Instagram aesthetics, Conor McGregor, and Elizabeth Holmes. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In your own life, which major decisions (career, relationships, lifestyle) might have been heavily shaped by unnoticed models from your past?
He closes by arguing that we cannot escape mimetic desire, but we can gain agency over it by recognizing our models, reflecting on the history of our desires, periodically stepping back from our environments, and deliberately choosing better models and longer-term goals.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What practical criteria can we use to choose ‘good models’—people or ideals worth imitating—rather than unconsciously copying whoever appears successful or visible?
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Transcript Preview
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. And it can be a tremendously powerful thing, right? It can spur us on to imitate great models. Um, so I think we have a lot of agency, but we... you know, freedom is something that we can win or lose. (wind blowing)
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 Nth circle of hell, where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift over and over again." What's that about? (laughs)
(laughs) That is a quote from Dana Tortorici, who's the editor of n+1 magazine, uh, here in the States. Uh, she's talking about memetic desire. She wrote a beautiful piece about Instagram and the effect that Instagram is having on what we want. And her finding was th- basically the topic of my book, that the nature of desire is memetic. Meaning we're... 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? (laughs) It makes us 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?
Memetic desire is... according to Rene Girard, 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. Uh, perhaps, uh, if we got back to the evolutionary process, perhaps it's something that humans developed in order to sort of separate ourselves, you know, from, from the great apes. So it may... this may have actually been adapted, uh, from an evolutionary perspective, um, to help us create culture, uh, to learn language. I mean, imitation plays a fundamental role in all kinds of very positive human things. Social interactions. Uh, if, if we're not imitating each other the right way, it can get a little awkward. Uh, so, you know, this... Girard said that imitation actually helps prevent violence and helps cultures to form. So, it's part of the human condition, uh, something that we can't escape. Uh, but very few people are kind of a- aware that there is such a thing as memetic desire, and we, 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, for things, for people, for groups. Um, this affects everything from politics to, you know, to the stock market.
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