I’ll have what she’s having

We’re all so preoccupied with getting what we want, that almost no one stops to think about why we want it in the first place. Not so for René Girard, a twentieth-century French anthropologist who developed the theory of Mimetic Desire. He proposed that we want things because other people want them. Whether it’s ordering the same drink as a friend in a bar, or buying the same furniture as your neighbor (66% of people do!), we look to ‘models’ to decide what is worth wanting.

Models are people who seem farther up on the path we’re on – they could be celebrities, friends or neighbors. They must be similar enough to us for their desires to be relevant, but they possess some quality or status that we do not. Mimesis as an evolutionary strategy makes sense: if someone similar but superior to us is doing something, the risk that it’s the wrong thing to do is significantly decreased. It also works in reverse: we’ll often decide to take the opposite action of someone that we dislike: we’re still modeling their behavior by doing the opposite.

However Mimesis can also become unhealthy when there’s competition over limited resources. We try to copy those above our station, but too much copying saturates that meme. Celebrities are incentivised to continually differentiate themselves, giving up on a fashion just as it becomes fashionable. To protect ourselves we’ve developed cultural counter-memes, like warnings against “keeping up with the Joneses” and to “love thy neighbor”. Mimesis is a powerful predictor of human behavior. Indeed, Girard’s most famous student, Peter Thiel, credits it for his career: “[Thiel] gave Facebook its first $500,000 investment, he said, because he saw Professor Girard’s theories being val

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