We watch and learn by imitating others, and the most important thing we learn from others is desire. Rene Girard, a French Historian, Philosopher, and Stanford Professor spent his life around decoding human desires.
**Mimetic desire sits at the intersection**
Why do we want specific things, objects, and people? This theory managed to answer some hard questions and constantly challenged my assumptions.
The Big Idea
Think of two kids and two identical toys.
One child picks up one toy, and immediately the other child has the unquenchable desire to take away that toy, ignoring the identical one right next to it.
This is a mimetic desire. We’re all guilty of doing this in one form or the other. Most of us anyway.
We want what others want. We want it because they want it.
Girard believed that human development occurs initially through a process of observational mimicry, where the infant develops desire through a process of learning to copy adult behaviour, fundamentally linking acquisition of identity, knowledge and material wealth to the development of a desire to have something others possess.
- Wikipedia
There was this widespread assumption that our desire is authentic and our own. Beyond food, shelter, sleep, and sex all our desires are adopted by observing the desires of other people.
To learn, a human needs a model; but as he copies his model, he also copies his model’s desires. Desire is triangular: it is a relationship not merely between a desirer and an object, but between an observer, a model, and the model’s object of desire.
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