Wikipedia summarizes René Girard’s mimetic theory like this:
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
In other words, you think you want something for your own internal reasons, but the actual reason you want it is that someone else wants it, and that makes you desire the thing and compete for it.
The “someone else” whose desires you copy is someone you care about. It could be a friend, a sibling, or a colleague. It could also be a famous person, or even a fictional character. (Not a stranger you don’t care about.)
This creates unnecessary social conflict, as people gradually converge on wanting the same thing, people start seeing each other as rivals, this attitude gets copied too, then people start hating each other, but who hates whom gets copied too, until everyone synchronizes at hating one specific person… and then they typically murder the person, and everyone feels happy about the conflict being resolved.
The choice of the person to kill is arbitrary, in the sense that the selected person is definitely not responsible for everything they get blamed for. It is typically someone who is a natural target of coordinated hate, such as a stranger, a poor or disabled person. But sometimes it could even be a king.
It is important for the people not to be aware of this mechanism—the relief only comes from sincerely believing that the scapegoat was responsible for all the problems, and that by killing them the problems will go away.
...and this is supposed to explain the origins of religions. The sacrifices are the ritualized acts of choosing and killing the scapegoat. Christianity reversed the trope by providing the perspective of the victim—and although it did not stop the burning of witches and lynching completely, it reduced their occurrence by providing sensitivity to the victims.
Another mechanism to reduce the conflicts was to keep people at a distance by various hierarchies, rituals, and taboos. But the modern era (which meant the 19th century for Girard) makes us formally equal, which increases the tensions again.
.
An interesting theory, isn’t it? They don’t make them like this in the postmodern era anymore. Actually, before I did my research (asked Claude to explain it to me), I haven’t even seen the theory in its entirety. But there is a part of it that seems to resonate with the cool kids these days (which prompted me to write this post), specifically the part claiming that “your desires” are not truly yours, but merely copied from others. Some people just take this for granted. Which made me think, could it really be true?
There is actually plenty of evidence in favor of the theory. Anyone who has small children has probably seen it: as soon as one child picks up a toy, their sibling immediately gets interested in the same toy, starts crying or fighting, but as soon as the first one abandons the toy, the sibling usually looses interest, too.[1] The adult version is buying expensive fast cars (even if the law prevents you from ever actually using that maximum speed), or choosing a career that you don’t like but other people see it as prestigious. Advertisement often tries to convince you that other people are buying some products or services, implying that therefore you should want that, too.
But...
I think it is too easy to claim that everything follows this pattern, even when it does not. The accusation seems unfalsifiable—you are the only person who has a direct access to your inner desires, and the theory says that you are wrong about them: you may think that something is your natural desire, but that is exactly what you would believe if it was not.
Okay, not literally everything—even Girard himself admits that some desires are natural, such as hunger, thirst, sleep, avoiding pain. Sexuality is (according to Girard) a borderline case: humans do have a weak sexual instinct, but who we fall in love with depends on whom other people consider attractive. Status? Entirely mimetic (i.e. copied from others).
So here is the first point where I disagree. I believe that status is just too useful—to get more allies, more resources, more available sexual partners—for the nature to leave us unconcerned about, until at some moment in history some random guy started desiring status for some random idiosyncratic reason, and everyone else decided to play along. That would be too much of a coincidence.[2]
According to the theory, a mimetic desire is internalized. Using this as a criterium, it would leave out everything we do for purely instrumental reasons. For example, the desire to have more money is instrumental, even if money itself is a social construct. If I want food, and if I know that money can be used to buy food, it makes perfect sense for me to want money. The fact that everyone else around also wants money, simply means that they can make the same logical connection, too. -- It would be different if I desired the money intrinsically, e.g. if I was fascinated by the shiny coins… but as far as I know, that’s actually not how most people like their money; they are perfectly okay with a banknote or a number in a computer network, as long as it buys them the food (and other things).
Arguable, it could be different when you are a billionaire; when you already have enough money to buy all the food you could ever eat, and so on, but you still keep competing to collect more money, because that’s what the people in your peer group do. Maybe, maybe not. I have never been a billionaire; perhaps ask me later. But I imagine that billionaires simply think about greater projects they want to accomplish, and obviously you need more money to build a railroad than you need to buy a car. Or maybe I am wrong here. Anyway, billionaires are not a representative example of average population, so they should not be our main argument to prove a point about everyone.
Let’s consider career. It’s something the apes don’t have, so no direct career instinct. But again, career is associated with status and money. The desirability of status (intrinsic) and money (instrumental) should be enough to explain the desirability of a successful career. We do not need the mimetic theory on top of that. It might perhaps explain why suddenly many people decide to be e.g. lawyers, but even then, maybe they just believe (correctly or not) that lawyers have more status and money than other professions they think about.
(I am trying to construct a thought example of a hypothetical career that brings neither status nor money, whether people would still want it if it was popular—but that feels like a contradiction in terms.)
Sexuality? This again feels like a naïve blank-slate theory. “You are only attracted to young and healthy people because of Patriarchy.”[3] Uhm, nope? “But different cultures use different signifiers of status, and those are considered attractive in those cultures.” Yeah, I already said that desiring status was natural. Accepting other people’s definition of what’s high-status is not the same as wanting high status only because other people want it.
.
The last category that comes to my mind is hobbies. These seem like good candidates for the mimetic theory—people feel like they are a part of their identity (they are something that you do, not what everyone does), yet they are something that most people do with their friends.
But I feel this too reverses the causality. Lonely hobbyists exist. And people sometimes travel to other cities to meet others who have the same hobby—wouldn’t it be much easier to simply adopt a hobby of some group that lives closer to your home?
And yet… do you think that you would invent the hobby of e.g. collecting stamps, if you never saw another person do it? If you never knew that philately was a thing?
I think that this line of thinking is also misleading, but it is more difficult to explain why. Basically, people suck as predicting what they want. Which is not the same as not having genuine preferences.
Let me use a personal example. I enjoy walking in nature. By that I mean, when I walk in nature, I typically feel happy. And yet, when I am home, if you tell me to go for a walk in nature, I will probably hesitate and feel too lazy to go outside. I might even reject your invitation. But once I am outside, I will feel happy that I chose to accept.
On the other hand, I spend a lot of time browsing social networks, which often leaves me frustrated, as if I am trying to find something that is simply not there. Communicating with people in writing does not have the same emotional appeal as meeting them in person. And the truly enjoyable articles are rare. And yet, I keep habitually returning.
This is a well-known difference between “wanting” and “liking”. A naïve behaviorist might think like: “If choosing to walk in nature gets constantly rewarded by the feeling of pleasure, and choosing to browse the web gets constantly punished by the feeling of frustration, soon he will feel an aversion to opening the browser, and the desire to put on his shoes and walk out.”
But a more experienced behaviorist (such as the ones employed by the social network companies) knows that things do not work like this: both the rewards and the punishments apply most strongly on the short time scales. -- The immediate punishment for choosing to go outside is having to put away what I was currently working on, checking the weather forecast, preparing some water and other supplies, putting on my shoes and a coat, walking out of the door… and only then the nice part begins. Too late. On the other hand, the immediate reward for choosing to open the web browser is the feeling of hope that maybe today it is one of those lucky days when I find one of those articles that I will enjoy reading and sharing with my friends. The variable-ratio schedule, one of the most addictive things humans invented!
So, if we suck this much at choosing the things we are already familiar with, how much more do we suck as predicting how much we would like the things we have never tried?
And here is when the friends come and make you try a new thing that you have never tried before. And sometimes you like it! Even if yesterday you had no idea that it existed.
Is this an example of copying other people’s desires? I think it is not. It is an example of other people helping you discover something that you may genuinely like.
“What a coincidence that the thing that your friends wanted you to do, and you didn’t even know it existed, happened to be exactly the thing that you like. Isn’t that a bit suspicious?” Uhm, no. I am not saying that the thing that your friends showed you was exactly the thing you would like most if you could experience all possible things in the world. You are probably not that lucky. But it is plausible that it was better than whatever you would be doing instead. (Especially if you suck at doing the things you actually like.)
.
Now, of course, it is possible that I went too far here. I am not saying that the mechanism described by Girard does not exist at all. It does. But before we choose it as an explanation for why someone might want something, I think we should consider the obvious alternative explanations first. Saying “people don’t even know what they want, they are just sheep” is edgy, but not necessarily true.
It is also possible that I am too autistic, and generalizing too much from my own example. I know that I resist many popular temptations: I never wanted a fast car or an expensive vacation, I have resisted decades of peer pressure to make me drink beer, I have a lonely hobby (reverse engineering old DOS games no one else probably cares about), and even within the rationalist community I remain unimpressed by Buddhism, don’t take nootropics, etc. I am an uncool old guy; I don’t give a fuck about what most people think.[4]
So, maybe the theory actually applies quite well to the neurotypical population. Dunno. Just wanted to express some disagreement, and see whether it resonates with someone.
In theory, it can be tested experimentally: Split people into two groups, tell one group that X is considered cool by others, tell the other group nothing or something irrelevant. Then ask people from both groups which reward (options including X) they want to choose, or how much would they pay for X. Compare statistically.
Too bad this cannot be applied to a specific desire of a specific person. Or maybe someone smarter will devise an experiment for that, too. In theory, making you believe that other people do not consider something cool should make you stop wanting that, even if you previously insisted that you wanted it for the thing itself, not instrumentally. (Perhaps use hypnosis?)
Also, it is suspiciously similar to other popular (and debunked) narratives about a golden ancient age when all humans lived together in perfect harmony, until capitalism came and taught them all those bad things… many of which we actually share with our ape cousins.
Best supported by finding one historical example of someone who had a fetish for the sick and/or elderly. Because one example proves more about human nature than millions of examples.
Against Girardian mimesis
Wikipedia summarizes René Girard’s mimetic theory like this:
In other words, you think you want something for your own internal reasons, but the actual reason you want it is that someone else wants it, and that makes you desire the thing and compete for it.
The “someone else” whose desires you copy is someone you care about. It could be a friend, a sibling, or a colleague. It could also be a famous person, or even a fictional character. (Not a stranger you don’t care about.)
This creates unnecessary social conflict, as people gradually converge on wanting the same thing, people start seeing each other as rivals, this attitude gets copied too, then people start hating each other, but who hates whom gets copied too, until everyone synchronizes at hating one specific person… and then they typically murder the person, and everyone feels happy about the conflict being resolved.
The choice of the person to kill is arbitrary, in the sense that the selected person is definitely not responsible for everything they get blamed for. It is typically someone who is a natural target of coordinated hate, such as a stranger, a poor or disabled person. But sometimes it could even be a king.
It is important for the people not to be aware of this mechanism—the relief only comes from sincerely believing that the scapegoat was responsible for all the problems, and that by killing them the problems will go away.
...and this is supposed to explain the origins of religions. The sacrifices are the ritualized acts of choosing and killing the scapegoat. Christianity reversed the trope by providing the perspective of the victim—and although it did not stop the burning of witches and lynching completely, it reduced their occurrence by providing sensitivity to the victims.
Another mechanism to reduce the conflicts was to keep people at a distance by various hierarchies, rituals, and taboos. But the modern era (which meant the 19th century for Girard) makes us formally equal, which increases the tensions again.
.
An interesting theory, isn’t it? They don’t make them like this in the postmodern era anymore. Actually, before I did my research (asked Claude to explain it to me), I haven’t even seen the theory in its entirety. But there is a part of it that seems to resonate with the cool kids these days (which prompted me to write this post), specifically the part claiming that “your desires” are not truly yours, but merely copied from others. Some people just take this for granted. Which made me think, could it really be true?
There is actually plenty of evidence in favor of the theory. Anyone who has small children has probably seen it: as soon as one child picks up a toy, their sibling immediately gets interested in the same toy, starts crying or fighting, but as soon as the first one abandons the toy, the sibling usually looses interest, too.[1] The adult version is buying expensive fast cars (even if the law prevents you from ever actually using that maximum speed), or choosing a career that you don’t like but other people see it as prestigious. Advertisement often tries to convince you that other people are buying some products or services, implying that therefore you should want that, too.
But...
I think it is too easy to claim that everything follows this pattern, even when it does not. The accusation seems unfalsifiable—you are the only person who has a direct access to your inner desires, and the theory says that you are wrong about them: you may think that something is your natural desire, but that is exactly what you would believe if it was not.
Okay, not literally everything—even Girard himself admits that some desires are natural, such as hunger, thirst, sleep, avoiding pain. Sexuality is (according to Girard) a borderline case: humans do have a weak sexual instinct, but who we fall in love with depends on whom other people consider attractive. Status? Entirely mimetic (i.e. copied from others).
So here is the first point where I disagree. I believe that status is just too useful—to get more allies, more resources, more available sexual partners—for the nature to leave us unconcerned about, until at some moment in history some random guy started desiring status for some random idiosyncratic reason, and everyone else decided to play along. That would be too much of a coincidence.[2]
According to the theory, a mimetic desire is internalized. Using this as a criterium, it would leave out everything we do for purely instrumental reasons. For example, the desire to have more money is instrumental, even if money itself is a social construct. If I want food, and if I know that money can be used to buy food, it makes perfect sense for me to want money. The fact that everyone else around also wants money, simply means that they can make the same logical connection, too. -- It would be different if I desired the money intrinsically, e.g. if I was fascinated by the shiny coins… but as far as I know, that’s actually not how most people like their money; they are perfectly okay with a banknote or a number in a computer network, as long as it buys them the food (and other things).
Arguable, it could be different when you are a billionaire; when you already have enough money to buy all the food you could ever eat, and so on, but you still keep competing to collect more money, because that’s what the people in your peer group do. Maybe, maybe not. I have never been a billionaire; perhaps ask me later. But I imagine that billionaires simply think about greater projects they want to accomplish, and obviously you need more money to build a railroad than you need to buy a car. Or maybe I am wrong here. Anyway, billionaires are not a representative example of average population, so they should not be our main argument to prove a point about everyone.
Let’s consider career. It’s something the apes don’t have, so no direct career instinct. But again, career is associated with status and money. The desirability of status (intrinsic) and money (instrumental) should be enough to explain the desirability of a successful career. We do not need the mimetic theory on top of that. It might perhaps explain why suddenly many people decide to be e.g. lawyers, but even then, maybe they just believe (correctly or not) that lawyers have more status and money than other professions they think about.
(I am trying to construct a thought example of a hypothetical career that brings neither status nor money, whether people would still want it if it was popular—but that feels like a contradiction in terms.)
Sexuality? This again feels like a naïve blank-slate theory. “You are only attracted to young and healthy people because of Patriarchy.”[3] Uhm, nope? “But different cultures use different signifiers of status, and those are considered attractive in those cultures.” Yeah, I already said that desiring status was natural. Accepting other people’s definition of what’s high-status is not the same as wanting high status only because other people want it.
.
The last category that comes to my mind is hobbies. These seem like good candidates for the mimetic theory—people feel like they are a part of their identity (they are something that you do, not what everyone does), yet they are something that most people do with their friends.
But I feel this too reverses the causality. Lonely hobbyists exist. And people sometimes travel to other cities to meet others who have the same hobby—wouldn’t it be much easier to simply adopt a hobby of some group that lives closer to your home?
And yet… do you think that you would invent the hobby of e.g. collecting stamps, if you never saw another person do it? If you never knew that philately was a thing?
I think that this line of thinking is also misleading, but it is more difficult to explain why. Basically, people suck as predicting what they want. Which is not the same as not having genuine preferences.
Let me use a personal example. I enjoy walking in nature. By that I mean, when I walk in nature, I typically feel happy. And yet, when I am home, if you tell me to go for a walk in nature, I will probably hesitate and feel too lazy to go outside. I might even reject your invitation. But once I am outside, I will feel happy that I chose to accept.
On the other hand, I spend a lot of time browsing social networks, which often leaves me frustrated, as if I am trying to find something that is simply not there. Communicating with people in writing does not have the same emotional appeal as meeting them in person. And the truly enjoyable articles are rare. And yet, I keep habitually returning.
This is a well-known difference between “wanting” and “liking”. A naïve behaviorist might think like: “If choosing to walk in nature gets constantly rewarded by the feeling of pleasure, and choosing to browse the web gets constantly punished by the feeling of frustration, soon he will feel an aversion to opening the browser, and the desire to put on his shoes and walk out.”
But a more experienced behaviorist (such as the ones employed by the social network companies) knows that things do not work like this: both the rewards and the punishments apply most strongly on the short time scales. -- The immediate punishment for choosing to go outside is having to put away what I was currently working on, checking the weather forecast, preparing some water and other supplies, putting on my shoes and a coat, walking out of the door… and only then the nice part begins. Too late. On the other hand, the immediate reward for choosing to open the web browser is the feeling of hope that maybe today it is one of those lucky days when I find one of those articles that I will enjoy reading and sharing with my friends. The variable-ratio schedule, one of the most addictive things humans invented!
So, if we suck this much at choosing the things we are already familiar with, how much more do we suck as predicting how much we would like the things we have never tried?
And here is when the friends come and make you try a new thing that you have never tried before. And sometimes you like it! Even if yesterday you had no idea that it existed.
Is this an example of copying other people’s desires? I think it is not. It is an example of other people helping you discover something that you may genuinely like.
“What a coincidence that the thing that your friends wanted you to do, and you didn’t even know it existed, happened to be exactly the thing that you like. Isn’t that a bit suspicious?” Uhm, no. I am not saying that the thing that your friends showed you was exactly the thing you would like most if you could experience all possible things in the world. You are probably not that lucky. But it is plausible that it was better than whatever you would be doing instead. (Especially if you suck at doing the things you actually like.)
.
Now, of course, it is possible that I went too far here. I am not saying that the mechanism described by Girard does not exist at all. It does. But before we choose it as an explanation for why someone might want something, I think we should consider the obvious alternative explanations first. Saying “people don’t even know what they want, they are just sheep” is edgy, but not necessarily true.
It is also possible that I am too autistic, and generalizing too much from my own example. I know that I resist many popular temptations: I never wanted a fast car or an expensive vacation, I have resisted decades of peer pressure to make me drink beer, I have a lonely hobby (reverse engineering old DOS games no one else probably cares about), and even within the rationalist community I remain unimpressed by Buddhism, don’t take nootropics, etc. I am an uncool old guy; I don’t give a fuck about what most people think.[4]
So, maybe the theory actually applies quite well to the neurotypical population. Dunno. Just wanted to express some disagreement, and see whether it resonates with someone.
In theory, it can be tested experimentally: Split people into two groups, tell one group that X is considered cool by others, tell the other group nothing or something irrelevant. Then ask people from both groups which reward (options including X) they want to choose, or how much would they pay for X. Compare statistically.
Too bad this cannot be applied to a specific desire of a specific person. Or maybe someone smarter will devise an experiment for that, too. In theory, making you believe that other people do not consider something cool should make you stop wanting that, even if you previously insisted that you wanted it for the thing itself, not instrumentally. (Perhaps use hypnosis?)
This typically ends before it develops into murder or a religion, but maybe if we had more kids and left them alone for a sufficiently long time...
Also, it is suspiciously similar to other popular (and debunked) narratives about a golden ancient age when all humans lived together in perfect harmony, until capitalism came and taught them all those bad things… many of which we actually share with our ape cousins.
Best supported by finding one historical example of someone who had a fetish for the sick and/or elderly. Because one example proves more about human nature than millions of examples.
In theory, that should make me kinda cool, but in practice it does not.