Why you want what you want

strategy+business, August 12, 2021

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Catherine Falls Commercial

In the new book Wanting, Luke Burgis, entrepreneur-in-residence and director of programs at the Catholic University of America’s Busch School of Business, takes readers down the rabbit hole of mimetic theory. Developed by French social scientist and philosopher René Girard in the 1960s and 1970s, mimetic theory seeks to explain human relations and culture in terms of desire. Girard’s theory and Burgis’s book are worthy of executive attention because they offer leaders insights into their own behavior and careers, as well as the behavior of the many stakeholders they are charged with understanding and influencing.

Our desires—above and beyond our innate human needs—are the driving force of mimetic theory. Girard’s analysis starts out, innocently enough, by suggesting that desire, which shapes every aspect of our lives, stems from observing other people and adopting them as models in an often-unconscious manner.

In short, what we want is what someone else has. The 1957 film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? offers a satirical example that may hit uncomfortably close to home for some leaders. Tony Randall plays a lowly ad man who desires an executive’s salary and prestige. But when he hits upon a scheme to promote a client’s lipstick using Jayne Mansfield’s lips and then rockets to the top spot in his Madison Avenue agency, he wonders why he wanted to get there in the first place. He leaves to raise chickens.

Girard’s theory isn’t as humorous. He argued that mimetic desires spawn rivalries as people vie to realize their ambitions. Sometimes, when the resources desired are limited, the competition intensifies into conflict. And because most people don’t understand or admit the true nature of the resulting conflicts, they scapegoat others. Girard believed these innocents are unjustly sacrificed in a kind of relief valve for societal pressure. Witness the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s demonization of Jews.

Girard went on to identify Judeo-Christianity as a historical aberration that subverted the scapegoat process. With the crucifixion of Jesus, the sacrifice of scapegoats was revealed as an unjust mechanism, writes Burgis, and “a veil was lifted on the recurring cycle of violence in human history.” (Unfortunately, lifting the veil has eliminated neither the scapegoating nor the violence.)

Like Girard, Burgis sees mimetic desire everywhere, and he interprets all sorts of events through its prism, including his own entrepreneurial ambitions. Read the rest here.