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Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life QUOTES

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life QUOTES

1 " People don’t fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

2 " Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

3 " Italians have a way of saying “I love you” that is particularly instructive: Ti voglio bene, they say. It means “I want your good”—I want what’s best for you. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

4 " An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand. By embracing the lie of my independent desires, I deceive only myself. But by rejecting the truth, I deny the consequences that my desires have for other people and theirs for me. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

5 " rivalry is a function of proximity. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

6 " 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. This energy can lead to a cycle of positive desire, in which healthy desires gain momentum and lead to other healthy desires, uniting people in positive ways; or it can become a cycle of negative desire, in which mimetic rivalries lead to conflict and discord. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

7 " While we fight for equality in the areas that do matter: for fundamental human and civil rights, or for the freedom for each person to pursue their thick desires (in the United States, this is called "the pursuit of happiness"); we also begin fighting for equality in areas that do not matter, our thing desires: to make as much money as someone else, to have the same number of Instagram followers, to have the same amount of status or respect or professional prestige as any one of the nearly eight billion models on the planet. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

8 " engineering desire, is the approach of Silicon Valley, authoritarian governments, and the Cult of Experts. The first two use intelligence and data to centrally plan a system in which people want things that other people want them to want -- things that benefit a certain group of people. This approach poses a serious threat to human agency. It also lacks respect for the capability of people to freely desire what is best for themselves and for the people they love. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

9 " We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

10 " My definition of an entrepreneur is simple. One hundred people look at the same herd of goats. Ninety-nine see goats. One sees a cashmere sweater. And the alertness of the one isn’t due to data analytics. It stems from a willingness and ability to look beyond and to see something more than meets the eye, and then to do something about it. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

11 " It’s easy to be an armchair contrarian. It’s hard to take contrarian action: to question the dominant narrative, to be honest with yourself, to tell the truth even when the immediate outcome is pain "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

12 " The old-fashioned word for that experience is “envy.” “I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy,” Girard said.4 Envy is an engine of destructive mimetic desire, and there are few things to stop it because it operates underground. Prestige is measured relative to what we perceive someone else has that we lack, so it’s a breeding ground for envy. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

13 " It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive—in other words, desirable. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

14 " The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

15 " Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

16 " else. They lose self-possession and freedom. The prolific letter-writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton noticed this was happening to him during his college years at Columbia University. Later in life, he wrote: “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3 "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

17 " But the tension between thick and thin always remains. Every artist has experienced it. They may have had a lifelong desire to tell the truth, to make art that expresses something important. Yet they have a competing desire to sell their work in the marketplace, to be accepted, to be praised, to get reviews, to stay on top of trends that can change from year to year, month to month, day to day. The latter are superficial desires that, if allowed to accumulate, can completely obscure the thick ones. Sometimes it takes a particular event to shake those thin desires out of us. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

18 " The American author and educator Parker Palmer writes, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”7 "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

19 " Tony didn’t look like a guy who had millions. He had sold the first company he co-founded, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998 at the age of twenty-four. But he dressed in plain jeans and a Zappos T-shirt and drove a dirty Mazda 6. Within a few weeks of hanging out with him, I ditched my True Religions (I know) and started shopping at the Gap. I began to wonder if I should drive an older and dirtier car. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

20 " Thin mimetic desires abound. They’re peddled to us every minute of the day. We can nip at them, maybe even sink our teeth into them, but they won’t take us where we want to go. Our choice is between living an unintentionally mimetic life or doing the hard work of cultivating thick desires. The latter may require us to suffer from the fear of missing out on the shiny mimetic objects that surround us. "

― Luke Burgis , Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life