Wanting summary

Social media is perhaps the greatest engine of mimesis ever invented. Sites like Facebook and Instagram provide billions of models for us, accessible at all times right in the palms of our hands. These platforms are based on showing us what other people have and want –⁠ and ultimately, dictating what we have and want.

Mimesis exists on scales large and small. One of the first and most important ways you can diminish its power over you is by identifying and shedding light on your models.

Who are you more jealous of: Jeff Bezos, or a coworker whose job is similar to yours but whose salary is higher?

Your answer is probably the coworker. And that makes complete sense. Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world –⁠ his success lies in a totally different stratosphere from yours, and you know you have little chance of competing with him.

Ferruccio Lamborghini began his career as a highly successful tractor manufacturer in Italy. One day, he decided to purchase a luxury vehicle with his hard-earned money –⁠ specifically, a Ferrari.

Lamborghini liked to race the Ferrari, but he kept having issues with the clutch. The problem persisted even after he took the car to the Ferrari factory multiple times for repairs. Eventually, he decided to ask his own mechanics to take a look –⁠ and they found that the luxury Ferrari was using the exact same clutch as Lamborghini’s cheap tractors.

When a plague or other natural disaster occurred in ancient Greece, the people responded with a gruesome ritual. 

First, they selected a pharmakos, someone considered a poison to the community – usually a slave, criminal, or person with physical deformities. This person was blamed for the crisis and then publicly tortured and humiliated, sometimes for days at a time. Finally, crowds of people gathered to expel or kill him.

When Sébastien Bras was a child, the kitchen was his playground. His childhood bedroom sat directly above his father’s restaurant, Le Suquet, which was –⁠ and is –⁠ situated on a remote, idyllic hillside in rural France. When Sébastien was growing up, Le Suquet had two Michelin stars, and Sébastien was hell-bent on helping it get its third.

Le Suquet was awarded that third Michelin star in 1999. Ten years later, Sébastien took over the restaurant from his father. But soon after, Sébastien began to feel dissatisfied. The Michelin system was no longer driving him to succeed. Instead, it was creating extreme pressure for him to conform to a set of specific rules and expectations. That’s because it was a mimetic system, sustained by mimetic desire.

For thousands of years, Senagalese people and other West Africans have been growing and cultivating a type of grain called fonio. But after Senegal’s colonization, when people were forced to displace fonio crops in favor of peanuts, Senegalese people became convinced that their native crops were basically worthless.

A company called Yolélé Foods, co-founded by a Senegalese chef called Pierre Thiam, is trying to change all of that. Yolélé is working to import and introduce fonio and other Senegalese and West African ingredients to the US. This, Thiam hopes, will boost West Africa’s image in the US –⁠ which will in turn boost its image in the minds of West Africans. 

Picture three artists standing side by side. Each of them is painting the same scene –⁠ but that’s where the similarities end.

The first artist might be practicing her landscape painting skills so she can win a competition. The second one might be creating a memento for his husband because they had their first date at this spot. And the third one might be trying to translate his imaginative vision of the landscape into reality. 

American culture is growing more and more mimetic. Tensions are rising while innovation stagnates. Instead of creating new and interesting art, we rehash the same old material with sequels and remakes. We monetize YouTube videos of people reacting to other YouTube videos instead of incentivizing people to build tools that will better serve humanity.

Much of this is a result of the big four tech companies –⁠ Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple –⁠ engineering our desires. By mining and using our data, these companies are creating a system that tells us what to want. It’s important for us not to let them do that. Instead, we must transform desire by changing our relationships to each other and to ourselves.