Great beginners guide to Mimetic Desire and some of Rene Girard’s powerful ideas on how we come to view the world.

We view the world in the light of the individuals we look up to... what they desire, we then desire.

If Kanye thinks that is a really cool shirt; and I look up to Kanye. Chances are I am going to think that is a really cool shirt.

Now thinking about our social networks, which I continually prod at viewing as our personal learning networks...

What our TL (timeline) continues to converse about, we naturally gravitate towards that in our daily conversations. This is why when one spends time on their given platform, you must consider the consequences of doing so.

These consequences guide the stories in which we tell ourselves. Or more so, from a Girarduan perspective, our TL’s provide the models in which we desire to pattern ourselves after.

Be mindful who you connect with. It may just change your life.

This is Reeeeaaaaally Good.

Models are like people who seem farther up ahead on the path we’re on; they can see around a corner that we can’t see around. We assume that they have some insight into which direction to go that we do not. In short, we assume they have something that we do not—that they possess some quality of being that we do not. And so we follow them.

Mimetic desire means that we make many of our choices according to the desires of others—our models.

Legit.

And one thing is clear, on a societal level: any society in which people are no longer struggling with scarcity but coping with abundance will undergo an explosion of mimetic desire.

Desire is unique to humans in this sense. Animals don’t have abilities of abstraction, which means they can’t want things beyond their immediate worlds. Humans, on the other hand, have learned to want the most obscure and trivial things. And our mimetic nature has made us a target of manipulation by those who understand how this mechanism works.