At the DMV the other day, I gazed around at the other poor souls that were trapped with me. We all sat idly, waiting for the robotic voice to call our numbers. A woman in my row of seats stared at her laptop while talking on the phone. A teenage girl waited impatiently with her mother, maybe hoping to get her learner’s permit. The man next to me hunched over his phone, staring at the Wordle for a bit before googling “what is the first letter of today’s Wordle?” When I want to be charitable towards strangers I’m silently judging, I think wow, everyone is so different, with their own needs and desires. But why would someone want to cheat on the Wordle?
I needed to understand desire to understand this man. I had already been reading about desire a lot, mainly about the philosopher René Girard, who sought to explain the nature of man through what he called mimetic theory. The core focus of mimetic theory is the source of all desires. It posits that “we want things not because they are inherently desirable, but because someone else’s desire for them has made them attractive to us.”1 Rather than believing that we were able to cultivate some powerful and unique eye for quality in the things that we desire, Girard argued that every single desire was mediated by a third party, some model.
Mimetic theory also explains the entire conception of the attention economy—all forms of advertising, from influencers to podcast ads, are attempting to create the models that mediate our desires for whatever they’re peddling. An influencer that appeals to my value system becomes a model, and all of the things that they own and show off feel like things that I want to have as well.
This idea feels straightforward and obvious for some things, like fashion trends, but seems completely incomprehensible for others, like a desire for another human being. However, Girard suggests that we’re often completely unaware of the mimetic origins of our desires. As we move through the world, driven by various desires, many of us are completely convinced of our own agency—the idea that our specific individuality grants us a unique ability to decide what we want and what we don’t. Perhaps we are simply reacting to models that we are unaware of, ones that shape the beauty standards that we look for, the ideas of what a good life can be.
This theory of desire is humbling. It forces us to exit our own individuality for a moment and think about how much of what drives us comes from outside of us. Aren’t our beauty standards derived from our society? Don’t we learn the models for falling in love from our media and our surroundings? When we desire something that would help us belong, we are choosing a model in a person that we want to belong with. When we desire to be different, that is a desire mediated by the models of those we want to be less like.
I often find myself feeling pretentious and highfalutin when encountering extremely popular things. As I see people obsess over Labubus, or the latest trendy water bottle, or whatever new consumer good is popular, a part of me feels sophisticated in my lack of desire for these things. I, with my superior coastal elite taste, am beyond being influenced by such things. But even this desire to be better than everyone else is mediated by someone else! I only look down on these things because my taste is influenced by different models from the ones that everyone else does.
Who are these models? At a young age, our parents must guide our desires, as we seek to be just like them. We develop values that we inherit from them, and use those values to identify new models.
I imagine my parents’ value of humor led me to see George Costanza as a model of sorts, while their value of virtue led me to see Hindu mythological figures as models. When it comes to my pretentiousness, I can imagine that being praised for my performance in school and for reading created models out of people I perceived to be intellectuals, or whoever I understood to be cool. I don’t know if I can even name all of these models, the ones that make me desire to write and desire to research theories of desire.
What about that man? Was there a model that taught him that victory was the most important thing to desire? Did this model not care about the virtues that were needed to achieve a victory? Would this model also be comfortable cheating when it came to Wordle?
It was clear that there was a world between me and him, even as we sat next to each other in the same DMV. But as his number was called before mine, I became aware of how much I wanted my number to be called. For a moment, this incomprehensible man had become a model for my desire to go up to one of the counters and get my renewed license. No amount of knowledge or intellectualism or research on theories of desire could protect me from mimesis. I will always just be a man, seeking the same things as another man.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - july 25 - where do the months go?
POEM - “No Regret” by Rochelle Kraut - but I study the beauty / and know the names