# Wanting **Luke Burgis**  --- _Most of what you want isn't really yours._ René Girard's insight, transmitted here through Luke Burgis, is that desire is mimetic: we learn to want things by observing what other people want. The Romantic idea that our wants emerge from some authentic inner source, from genuine preference or individual character, is fiction. "Desire, like gravity, does not reside autonomously in any one thing or person. It lives in the space between them." We want what our models want. The line between us and the things we desire is always curved, bent by the gravitational pull of people we rarely acknowledge. This matters practically. If you don't know your models, they're running your decisions invisibly. The colleague whose success irritates you, the lifestyle you're chasing without knowing quite why, the goals that felt urgent until you achieved them: all of these are symptoms of unexamined mimesis. Naming your models gives you some power over them. --- **Models operate at different distances.** Girard distinguished two worlds. Celebristan is where models live outside your social sphere: separated by time, money, or status. A dead philosopher, a billionaire, a historical figure. Because there's no direct competition possible, you imitate them freely and openly. The distance prevents rivalry. Freshmanistan is where models live inside your world: colleagues, neighbours, peers. Here proximity breeds rivalry. You admire them secretly because admitting you want to be more like them feels exposing. The closer the model, the more intense the competition for the same objects of desire, and the harder it becomes to see the dynamic clearly. Rivalry is a function of proximity. This is why office politics grows vicious, why family feuds run deeper than they should, and why we become like our enemies the more we fight them. You don't just oppose the person you're rivalling; you mirror them, tracking their moves, wanting what they want, shaped by them in the very act of resistance. --- **Mimetic desire moves in cycles.** The negative cycle is mimetic desire leading to rivalry and conflict, driven by scarcity thinking: they have something I don't, and there isn't room for both of us. This accelerates like a flywheel: each turn intensifies the conflict, which intensifies the desire, which intensifies the rivalry. The positive cycle is mimetic desire uniting people around a shared goal, driven by abundance thinking. People start wanting things they couldn't have imagined wanting alone, and help others go further in the same direction. A negative cycle is disrupted when two people, through genuine empathy, stop seeing each other as rivals. The distinction between empathy and sympathy matters here. Sympathy is feeling what someone else feels. Empathy is entering another person's experience without merging with it. It's what allows you to understand a rival's position without imitating or identifying with them. This is rarer than it sounds. --- **Models are most powerful when hidden.** If you want someone to become passionate about something, they have to believe the desire is entirely their own. The illusion of autonomy is how mimesis actually operates. In childhood, imitation is open and celebrated. In adulthood, it becomes hidden: we're secretly on the lookout for models whilst insisting we need none. The more sophisticated and self-aware you are, the more you deny needing models, and the more invisible they become. This is when they're most powerful. **Authority is more mimetic than we believe.** The fastest route to being treated as an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you one. It's worth occasionally tracing the mimetic layers behind someone's authority: how did we actually choose our sources of knowledge, and who were they imitating when they decided what to know? --- **True desire requires discernment, not decision.** The Latin root of decision (*caedere*) means to cut or to kill. When we decide, we eliminate alternatives. Discernment (*discernere*) means to distinguish: to see the difference between paths clearly enough to know which serves you. The test for a genuine desire is practical: does it produce lasting satisfaction or only fleeting? Is it generous in its orientation? Would you be at peace with it at the end of your life? Where does it actually come from? **The health of an organisation is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it.** This is a diagnostic for [[Psycho-Logic]]: mimetic games, hidden rivalries, and status competition all slow truth down. Healthy organisations make mimetic dynamics visible and manageable, because invisible dynamics don't stop operating; they just operate without anyone being able to address them. Transcendent leaders have models of desire that sit outside the systems they lead. This is how they avoid being captured by the mimetic games around them. They can see the system because they're not fully inside it. That distance is not detachment; it's perspective, and it's rare. ---