The Biggest Lie You Tell Yourself

The secrets of human desire, explained by Rene Girard

The following is a transcript of a Youtube video on my channel. If you prefer to watch that, you can find it here:

• Joe :)

  ---

“In the birth of desire, the third person is always present” - Rene Girard

Arguably the entirety of a person’s life is structured around the concept of “desire”. What we desire shapes so many of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that to not address it is to leave much of the human condition completely unexamined. There are few issues that are as essential to making sense of ourselves and the world as understanding where human desire comes from, and what makes some of our desires so intense they drive people to violence and conflict.

This is where Rene Girard comes in. Over the course of the late 20th century, he put forward one of the most influential theories of desire in history. If it is correct, it has enormous implications for philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics, and more. So today I want to explore the basic framework behind his theories, found in his first book: Deceit, Desire, and The Novel.

Get ready to learn how your desires are not purely your own, why rivalry is vital to understanding politics, and perhaps the most important piece of self-knowledge you will ever learn.

As always bear in mind that I will only be able to cover a fraction of the content of Girard’s book in this video, and I highly encourage you to read it for yourself to get your own reflections. I will also be simplifying some of his ideas here to make them a bit more digestible, so I beg your patience with that.

But, with that out of the way, let’s begin by exploring the foundation of Girard’s thesis in this book: the concept of mimesis.

1. Mimetic Desire - a brief overview

There is a huge assumption which burns at the heart of our self-perception. Dostoevsky once said that there are some truths that are so hard to bear that we will not admit them to anyone, not even ourselves. According to Girard, this is one of those truths: that many of our desires are not really our own, but are in fact caught from other people. And in some situations, our desire is actually to be another person.

If we stop and think, we often take it completely for granted that our desires stem in some sense “from us”. Even the greatest philosophers in history have rarely stopped to question this. For instance, while Schopenhauer, the Stoics, and The Buddha all talked about the pain that unfulfilled desire can bring, it is often tacitly assumed that our desires still ultimately arise from within us. This is reflected by our everyday experience as well. If I were to uncritically thin about what happens when I want, say, a new jumper, it goes something like this. I see the jumper, I think “that looks nice”, and then I get a desire to obtain the jumper. Most of our wants FEEL like this. We think that we fall in love with someone purely because of the qualities of the person we love. We think that we want our dream job, car, or house because those things have attractive properties. Everything, from our food preferences, to our life plans often is thought to come from something deep within. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche called it “the will”, while the Stoics called it “the passions” or sometimes “the appetite” depending on the thinker. But either way, this is almost always assumed to simply be part of us, and part of our mind. But it is this foundational premise of our everyday experience that Rene Girard calls into question.

At its core, mimetic desire is a very simple concept. A MIMETIC desire is a desire that we “catch” off of another person, be they real and present or a personified ideal like a book character, a legendary figure, or a spiritual leader. We tend to recognise this sort of thing if it appears at a very trivial level. For instance, it is pretty evident in the purchasing trends that appear in a society and then disappear just as quickly, especially in something like fashion. In the UK, there was, for a while, a trend of men wearing absurdly skinny jeans, almost to the point of infertility. At a surface level, the individuals involved probably thought they looked really good, and by the fashion standards of the time, I suppose they did. However, this is clearly not the whole story. People wanted to wear them, and came to regard them as fashionable, because other people were wearing them. It was a desire spawned by the opinions and tendencies of others. And history tells us this can happen with some totally arbitrary things. From the brief Victorian fad of making hats out of taxidermied birds, to the tulipmania of 17th century Holland which culminated in a speculative bubble, the force of mimetic desire occasionally becomes painfully obvious.

However, for Girard, mimetic desire is certainly not limited to these frivolities, but can become deadly serious. In some ways he thought this would be inevitable. Imitation is a key skill we humans use to learn and survive. As many psychologists like Albert Bandura have pointed out, young children learn all sorts of things not by being told them, but instead by copying the adults around them, and then refining that process until they get it right. In Girard’s terminology, the person we are imitating in our desire is called the “mediator”. We can think of the object of the desire, the desirer, and the mediator as forming a triangle. The mediator desires the object, and the desirer desires the object BECAUSE of the mediator. As I said, it is quite a simple concept. The real nuance comes in the different types of mimesis Girard outlines, and their differing effects.

First, we can put different mediators along a scale regarding what Girard calls their “spiritual distance from the desirer”. That sounds like it will be quite wooly but it ends up being a very down to earth notion. A mediator is more towards the “external” end of the spectrum if it cannot be a rival for the desired object, and it is more towards the “internal” end if it can be a rival for the desired object. A good example is the difference between imitating a spiritual ideal, and a real person you know. If my desire is mediated through a spiritual leader, someone like Christ or the Buddha, in order to attain some kind of spiritual fulfilment or set of moral values, they cannot compete with me for that goal. If nothing else, they are not physically there to do so. By contrast, if my mediator is my neighbour, and I desire to be extremely wealthy because he does, then he is much more likely to be a rival to me. We will be rivals to see who can become more wealthy than the other, and this will probably cause some conflict. Either emotional conflict, or, in extreme cases, maybe even physical violence.

Secondly, Girard draws the distinction between more mundane mimetic desire, and what he calls “metaphysical” mimetic desire. Whereas more standard cases of mimetic desire involve desiring the same object as our mediator, metaphysical desire is the wish to in some way BECOME our mediator. To want their life, their existence, and to be them. In mild forms this can be desiring their social status or their fame, but in more serious ones it can be desiring their very identity. Girard sometimes calls this state of wishing to be someone other than ourselves as an “ontological sickness”. We can imagine the process a bit like this. For whatever reason, we admire someone, and that admiration takes on a certain transcendence, to the point where we implicitly see them as someone to imitate. Just like how Christians wish to emulate Christ, we wish to emulate whatever this person does. This is one reason why Girard sometimes sees metaphysical desire as a form of worship, and often couches it in religious terms. For him, it is someone else assuming the role that religious leaders, or God Himself, normally do.

And, as will become a running theme of the video, these patterns are very easy to spot in other people, but considerably harder to own up to in ourselves. This is because, in our current value system, we find the idea that we could desire something because of someone else, or desire to be someone else, intensely embarrassing. This is what Girard calls the “romantic” set of values. Think about our popular culture, and how often it glorifies the single person standing alone against others, pursuing their self-sourced passions wherever they lead. There are not many romance films or adventure stories where the protagonist spends the entire time imitating other people. As a result, Girard thinks we conceal our mimetic desires even from ourselves, to spare our ego this realisation that what we want is as much shaped by other people as it is by us.

But there is danger in this path, because if we are unaware of our imitation, it can easily turn destructive. And I would like to explore some of those paths now.

2. Double Mediation and Conflict

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a large part of the initial story follows Dmitri Karamzov and his father Fyodor, as they fight over the shared object of their romantic passions: a young woman named Grushenka. As a result, they fall into a bitter rivalry that kicks off the plot of the book. Dmitri sees his father as a lecherous old man attempting to rob him of his happiness, and Fyodor sees Dmitri as some upstart little whelp who should show a bit more respect to his father, however inadequate a father he might have been. I won’t spoil where this rivalry leads, but suffice to say, it ends in disaster. And this sort of dynamic is exactly the sort of thing Girard is worried about with his idea of double mediation.

Double mediation is sort of a strange concept, but once you see it you can’t unsee it. It occurs when two people serve as one another’s mediators. That is, they each want what the other wants, because the other wants it. We often see this dynamic most openly with young children, especially siblings. I am lucky enough to have a number of younger siblings, and I remember that when my sister and brother were little, they used to fight over toys or games that did not matter to them in the slightest, except that the other wanted it. My sister would show a sudden interest in my brother's scarf as soon as he put it on, or my brother would immediately be fascinated by my sister’s new book the moment she started to read it, and this put them instantly into conflict. I think many of you will have seen similar things in your own life.

The trouble is, as soon as two people enter double mediation, their effective aim becomes to take everything they possibly can from the other person. We also see this dynamic at play with romantic rivalries. One of the things that is thought to make someone desirable to others is social proof. That is, already being desired by many people. But this immediately leads to a form of double mediation between every one of the romantic rivals. There is a huge propensity for enmity and conflict here. Girard is not necessarily saying this is a bad thing in all situations, but rather simply describing an effect that shared mediation can have.

Of course, double mediation can only really occur when two people are “spiritually close” in the way we defined in the last section. That is, that they even can compete for the same desire. It is one reason why, on average, Girard thinks that external mediation, where the mediator is distant, often causes less conflict, because these rivalries simply cannot develop.

It is worth noting that Girard’s observation here does not simply apply at the individual level. He says it is possible for groups of people to find mediators in other groups, and for this to sometimes lead to double mediation as well. So in a royal court, every group might have the group “above” them as their mediators. The gentry imitating the higher aristocracy, the aristocracy imitating the inner circle of the monarch, and so on. But Girard says that one consequence of democracy we ought to watch out for is that since we are all, in theory, equal, this sort of double mediation can start to occur more often. To clarify, Girard is not saying that this makes democracy bad, just that, like all governmental systems, it has effects we might want to keep an eye on.

He takes the example of the sort of “bourgeois competitiveness” found in Proust’s novels, and his own observations about middle-class culture. He points out that this setting is almost tailor made to birth a sort of misery-creating double-mediation. My American friend tells me there is even a phrase for this in the US: “keeping up with the Joneses”. People decide they must have something because their neighbour has it, and their neighbour responds by getting something that THEY have. For Girard, “comparison is the thief of joy” is an incomplete observation. It should be “comparison is the thief of joy when we contract mimetic desires from that comparison”.

Girard argues this shared mediation is crucial for understanding how conflicts arise within a society. If we desire things simply because other people have them or want them, and vice versa, then any PURELY material analysis of social competition becomes incomplete. Girard is not saying that material circumstances like inequality do not breed conflict and resentment, but he rather says that we should be careful not to attribute ALL conflict and resentment to factors like these. For Girard, it is perfectly possible for people to enter into bitter rivalries over things that have virtually no significance in and of themselves. Indeed, the less value the object of desire has apart from the mimesis, the purer the symbolic victory over the rival. Having an expensive ornament on your shelf may be pointless, apart from the fact that the next time another well-to-do family visits you, they will notice it, and envy you.

For Girard, this is all closely related to a sort of psychological power that is held by the mediator over the mediated. We can think of double mediation as not so much a static state. But rather an ever-changing process where at points one party becomes the more dominant mediator, and then it might switch back, and so on. For whomever is in that dominant mediating spot, they then hold a form of influence over the other person. They inspire envy, a sort of reluctant admiration, and, most importantly, they agitate the mind of the other person. Again this is perhaps most clear in a romantic setting. Girard points out that sometimes couples will be stuck in a dynamic where they are forever “switching places”. As soon as one of them makes their desire known through overt affection, the other pulls away, but then the first person responds with coldness, drawing the second person back in, and so on. Here there is a clear power dynamic at play. Both the lovers value one another as mediators: they feel good by being the object of the other person’s desire. That is, they desire themselves through their lover’s eyes. But whoever is in the more dominant spot gets all the decision-making power. They choose whether the entanglement ends, continues, or on what terms it continues. Thus, the lovers are stuck vying for this spot, and so trap themselves in a cycle of behaviour that will just make them both miserable in the end.

And again, it is all well and good observing this in other people, but Girard wants us to notice this in ourselves. So it is worth taking stock: where do we think we have entered into this sort of double mediation in the past. If it helps, I will start: I have definitely been in romantic relationships that have almost exactly mirrored Girard’s observations. It is actually something I have worked hard on not falling into again, and have been much happier for it. Girard’s is not a philosophy of mere contemplation, but of brutal, uncompromising practice. But if he is right, we will all be much happier recognising where these sorts of dynamics arise in our lives, so we can make careful decisions about what to do with them.

But next I want to move onto the more existential aspects of Girard’s work. Let’s revisit this concept of metaphysical desire, and the wish to abandon your own self, and become someone else.

3. The Depths of Metaphysical Desire

In some ways, the sort of mimetic desire we have already looked at can strike us as fairly obvious. As we said earlier, we see it in consumer choices, and the notion of “fads”. The idea of a rivalry is also pretty commonplace, although we may not have analysed them in quite the way Girard did. But perhaps the most important extension of Girard’s notion of mimetic desire is METAPHYSICAL DESIRE. That is, the desire not for what someone has, or what they want, but to actually be someone else.

For Girard, this sort of metaphysical desire is closely related to a sense of dissatisfaction or emptiness in our own lives. This is what he calls “ontological sickness”. A person realises that they feel discontented with being themselves, and they see someone who represents some sort of ideal to them. They might be someone more successful, or more desirable, or simply someone that does not seem to suffer from this ontological sickness. That person then slowly becomes their mediator. They implicitly see in them the solution to their existential woes. Again, this is a role Girard thought was previously played by religious figures. For Christians, imitating Christ was and is a way to avoid this ontological sickness. But in the absence of something like this, our metaphysical desire does not go away, it simply finds new objects.

For Girard, the trouble becomes pretty stark when we begin to take the real people around us as the mediators of our metaphysical desires. The desirer becomes stuck in a destructive state where they both resent this person they desire to be, but also deeply admire them. They see in them a release from all their woes, and notice just how inadequate they seem in comparison. They think if only they were their mediator, they would finally be happy. But there are some real issues with this approach:

The first is that attempting to become someone else is just an impossible task. This is why Girard thinks that the extreme end of metaphysical desire is, technically, death. Behind the wish to become someone else is the wish to escape yourself, and the only real way to do that is to die. It is a false promise because even if the assumption that you would be happy being this other person is correct, it would still be totally impossible to do. In acquiring a strong metaphysical desire, we set off on a never-ending journey, forever fooling ourselves into thinking fulfilment is just around the corner. It is a similar observation to the one made by Arthur Schopenhauer about all desires, but Girard thinks it is particularly pointed in this case.

Secondly, the desire to be someone else only exacerbates the root cause of the issue, which is the feeling of ontological sickness and personal insufficiency. For Girard, the idea that our life in particular is uniquely empty and pointless is sort of like a form of existential low self-esteem. But metaphysical desire essentially tells us that we are correct in this assessment, and that our existential woes ARE due to our inferiority compared to our mediators. As a result, we take on a general stance of insufficiency about ourselves. Far from resolving our ontological sickness, this ends up amplifying it.

Thirdly, the dynamic that emerges between the desirer and the mediator in metaphysical desire can very quickly turn incredibly ugly. For Girard, when we admire someone in this metaphysical way, we also tend to resent them or envy them. We are thus caught in a contradictory state. On the one hand we want to get closer to our mediator, to win their attention and affection, but on the other hand, we resent them for being something we would want to be, and this makes us dislike them at some level because it threatens our pride. This is why Girard thinks metaphysical desire is so closely aligned with hatred, and may be behind the notion that there is a fine line between love and hate. We may have seen this situation ourselves: someone admires someone else in a deep and profound way, but feels rejected by that person, and so immediately leaps to the other extreme. All their admiration immediately turns to hate and spite. We find it in Milton’s Satan or when some people face romantic rejection: if they fail to actually achieve their desire, they turn to despising what they previously wanted, to save themselves the indignity of admitting they have failed. In metaphysical desire, this trend reaches a fever pitch because the stakes seem so much higher. What could have been a simple interpersonal relationship seems like a matter of life and death because our very sense of self is now on the line. And it is not just Girard who has noticed this. It is a well-known trend that rejection from groups tends to spark self-destructive, resentful, and antisocial behaviour. Girard’s theory simply helps to explain why.

Lastly, metaphysical desire is almost always untenably unstable when it is held for another real person. Girard thinks that however much we try to embody someone else, this will not grant us fulfilment because they are not us. They have different inner drives that are unlikely to match one-to-one with ours. Moreover, there is no guarantee they are not suffering from the same sort of ontological sickness we are. They may seem like they are existentially fulfilled, but secretly they may have their own metaphysical mediator, trapped in their own cycle of resentment and admiration. So this is yet another way in which the metaphysical desire heightens the ontological sickness. But then the cycle begins anew. The ontological sickness propels us back into metaphysical desire all over again. We think that while this mediator did not solve our ontological sickness, some other mediator would. When this new mediator inevitably does not help, the ontological sickness worsens another step, and the search for the fabled perfect mediator continues.

At its extreme end, Girard thinks that the metaphysical desirer ends up trapped in this vicious cycle until they almost lose hope. They fall into an existential void, grasping outwards for anyone who holds the briefest hope of giving them a scrap of fulfilment. To use his words:

“[our mediators become] a series of dictatorships as savage as they are temporary”

For Girard, this is partly behind the existential philosophers’ obsession with “authenticity”. But nonetheless, his solution to this destructive mimetic cycle is very different to someone like Heidegger or Sartre. Because for Girard, authenticity does not come primarily from within, but instead in a surprising act of extreme humility.

So let’s explore what Girard thinks we should all do about mimetic desire.

4. Humility and The Self

As we said at the beginning of the video, it is incredibly difficult to admit to having mimetic desires because it strikes at the core of our pride. This is even more pronounced in its more extreme versions. To admit that your own life feels so empty that you would happily trade in your identity with someone else is not an easy thing to do. But in Girard’s view, it is this very thing that will help mitigate the destructive effects of some mimetic desires, and especially metaphysical ones.

On the surface, we can see how admitting to these desires might help to dispel them. As soon as you say something like “I think I only want that because other people do” or “I think I want to become this person I admire”, the absurdity of the situation becomes apparent. At this point what was a deep internal struggle becomes almost comic. As Nietzsche might say, we progress from a state of intense seriousness to one that feels far lighter. For Girard, it is partly this lightness that can bring us relief from the more destructive cycles of mediation. But this move is incredibly difficult to do if we have a huge ego blocking our path, because it is essentially holding up our hands and saying “haven’t I been silly?”. But to understand this a little deeper, we need to appreciate what Girard thinks being lost in deep mimetic desire is like.

For Girard, being in extreme mimesis, including metaphysical desire, is paradoxically a result of “self-centeredness”. This is not in the sense of arrogance, or of narcissism, and can even look like the exact opposite. It is rather closely related to that sense of personal inadequacy we talked about in the last section. It is an attempt to see in other people the answer to our own problems, to look to them or what they desire to let us know what will make us happy. In small doses, this is not necessarily an issue - social proof is not an irrational thing to look for. But Girard thinks that at the extreme end this distorts both our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others. It distorts our relationship with others because we stop treating them as people in their own right, and more as simply “our mediators”. But it also distorts our relationship with ourselves because our entire personhood is then “borrowed” from other people. We become a patchwork of our mediators, and lose sight of any idea of who we are in the process. As Girard puts it:

“self-centeredness gives rise to imitation and makes us live outside ourselves. This self-centeredness is other-centeredness as well;”

Strangely, our refusal to own up to this comes from the aspiration to this individual “authenticity”, where none of our desires are EVER mediated by others. And for Girard, it is in admitting to our mimesis that we can repair this strained relationship to ourselves. Once we have confessed our mimetic bent, we become aware that we have fallen short of this romantic ideal, where our desires all stem from deep within ourselves. But it also grants us the self-awareness to actually know which of our desires are purely mimetic, which do genuinely come from within, and which are a mixture of both. Girard thinks that this movement of dispelling the illusion that both maintains our ego and our misery takes extraordinary humility, but is absolutely worth it. Or, to again quote Girard:

“When he renounces the deceptive divinity of pride, the hero frees himself from slavery and finally grasps the truth about his unhappiness”

And it is this act of self-discovery that Girard wishes us all to partake in. It is what he thinks is behind the genius of many novelists like Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Stendhal. For him, these authors eventually realised their propensity towards mimesis, and learnt to move past it into something beyond. This development looks quite different in different characters, because they all start from different mimetic positions. Whereas Madame Bovary imitates the lifestyle of those of a higher social class, Raskolnikov has a metaphysical desire to imitate people he sees as superhuman like Napoleon. In each case, they abandon the desire in the final moments of the novel, sometimes far too late for it to have any positive effect, but sometimes just in time to begin a new life.

It is also not just personal fulfilment on the line, but the very organisation of our societies. According to Girard, it is in recognising mimetic desires that we can resolve the conflict caused by double mediation that we mentioned earlier in the video. Once we realise that a lot of our social rivalries originate from this double mediation, they begin to lose their sting. We can subject our rivalries to questioning to see if we actually wish to continue them. But again, this requires humility. It means potentially admitting that some long-held resentments and conflicts may be to do with this slightly embarrassing human tendency. But if we can push past this, Girard thinks we can genuinely lessen the extent and impact of many conflicts. This cannot be achieved in one sudden realization, because each new conflict will present us with all the reasons why it has nothing to do with mimesis at all. But with practice, we can learn to distinguish just when the conflict is inevitable, and when it is based on double mediation. This idea of breaking cycles of violence becomes much more prominent in Girard’s later works, where he will discuss the way we use Scapegoats and target innocent people as the vector for our collective social anger. But I plan to do a whole video on that so I won’t go too into it now.

Lastly, I think that a fantastic revelation of this book is the simple awareness of how our seemingly spontaneous desires really are shaped by the people around us. After finishing this book I spent a long time sitting down and evaluating my own desires, and I was taken aback at just how many of them seemed to have mediating origins. Girard’s point is not that I must now immediately abandon all of those desires, and I am not even sure if such a thing is possible. But with that new self-knowledge, I can better appreciate my place in the world. It dispels the notion that I am some kind of romantic-style individualist, whose desires come from deep within my soul. But, if Girard is right, then this new self-knowledge will allow me to approach life with my eyes more open to the psychological forces at play in my mind, and so have a more truthful relationship to both myself and others.

I don’t know about you, but I think it is worth a try.

And if you are interested in more of this psychological philosophy, then click here to watch my analysis of the origin of much of Dostoevsky’s own profound insight.

I hope you enjoyed the video (script), and have a wonderful day.