Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

“Our desires make us imitate and compete with others, but what we ultimately seek is recognition and approval from them.” Rene Girard

I used to teach a course called The Architecture of Human Identity. I was very interested in the fact that by knowing who we are, we take some authorship in who we become. Certain people believe we create ourselves and have the power to become who we want to be. But that is only partly true. As we come to know ourselves, we gain a kind of authorship of our lives. Thus, our real and experienced freedom is intimately connected to our awareness of our own identities. However, who we are at the beginning of our identity formation is mostly given to us – by parents and caregivers, by close friends and lovers, in other words, by significant others. Why is this important? It is because a key to being an authentic individual is the fulfillment of our deep psychic need for recognition. We attain an identity within the presence of significant others. Our parents and caregivers provide for our material needs of life, they provide a structure of need fulfilment – a home and location in the world, and connections to social world out of which we, as individuals, emerge. But beyond the material structures of individual existence, our psychological, emotional and spiritual needs are structured. A big way we exist as given is in our desires, which are derived from our origin and home with significant others who have shown us, and continue to show us, what to want.

Strangely though, human beings are the creatures that don’t know what to desire. So, we look to other people in order to know. That is very different than any animals. Animals have instinctual responses. They’re hungry; they eat. A lioness may show her cubs how to hunt, but the need to hunt is deep in the physiology of the cub. If they’re cold, they look for warmth. We have those instinctual drives too. But we’re different; we have a whole universe of abstract desires. Yet, we don’t have a mechanism for choosing between these objects of desire. Desire requires forces that are bigger than ourselves. If we could want anything, and snap our fingers to acquire or attain it, then the world would be a very different place. But that’s not the way that desire works.

In his piece, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, Rene Girard says, “My hypothesis [about desire] is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society.” What is mimetic desire, and why is it so dangerous? This is the topic of Girardian theorist, Luke Burgis, in his recent book: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic desire in Everyday Life. 

What is mimetic desire?

To say that desire is mimetic is to say that it’s imitative. We look to models of desire – people that help show us what is worth wanting. There’s kind of a certain humility needed to understand that I’m the product of other people’s desires starting with my parents, starting with the friends that I had when I was a kid. Continue that process of memetic desire well into adulthood where it goes underground and becomes a lot more hidden than it is when we’re children. A simple example of such a transformation is the way desire is expressed by children and by adults: when children are hungry, they cry out for food. There is no doubt that the expression of desire is coming from the child herself. However, when socialized adults arrive at noontime, they reach out for food. In socialized adults, the simple desire of hunger that belongs to the individual adult is frequently hidden. It is not entirely clear that eating at noon is entirely the intention of the adult. Eating at noon is at least partially structured by an abstract desire.  

Yet, in the case of abstract desires (and hunger is not abstract) there are 2 kinds – what Burgis calls thin and thick desires. Thick desires are like these layers of rock. That have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level they’re related to the core of who we are. Thick, yet abstract, desires such as truth, beauty, goodness, and human dignity are “built in” to every human being through the shaping and cultivating by our childhood significant others. Yet what I call thin desires, and Thomas Merton calls velleity, are highly memetic and ephemeral desires. They’re the things that can be here today and gone tomorrow. They’re subject to the winds of mimetic change because they’re not rooted in a layer of ourselves that has been built up over time. I think of thin desires like a layer of leaves that’s sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life. The old desires are gone. Suddenly, we want something else. 

A lot of people will find out that their careers are the product of thin desires. And as soon as they have a powerful enough model and the opportunity of a different career, they change. And then they do that 4 or 5 times before they realize that they never rooted their journey in the thick desires that will not so easily be shifted by others. Perhaps even taking darker tones, a similar process of the choice of life partners can, and often is, highly mimetic. Speaking from my own case, I chose partners based on thin mimetic desires: objective prettiness and artistic capability [my first wife was universally described as pretty and an amazing singer], or poetic intelligence [the rebound relationship from my divorce], or, prior to those two, a Christian leader whom I thought my father would approve. But these choices were highly mimetic. I was imitating others’ desires for what to have in a life partner. Each of these qualities I attempted to “acquire” were thin desires; they were not part of the hardcore formation of my identity. In other words, even though I chose those potential life partners in my actions, the desire I was attempting to fulfill was not intentionally mine. I was imitating desires that were on offer in my social horizons. And in imitating, I was going the exact the opposite way of fulfillment; I was frustrating myself and others. By not having a clear idea of my authentic desire – my thick desire – I was harming the world (and many people) around me.  

Why is mimetic desire so dangerous?

If you read the above section, you will have an example of the danger. Moreover, on an individual level, the danger can become imminent in something like addiction. I have spelled this out a little more clearly in my blog post, Cravings and So-called Desires. The etymological root of addiction is the Latin addictio, which means to be in extreme devotion to (in other words, worship). If our thin desires are ones we worship, we are in the state of addiction. Saint Augustine might have called this a “disordered love.” The danger of this on an individual level is that we misunderstand those desires, that are essentially someone else’s, as key to becoming authentically fulfilled. Not only can mimetic desires be terribly inauthentic, but they can also imbed themselves into us in such a way that we may actually be subservient to mimetic desires. One may not want to keep drinking, but one becomes powerless to stop. And the addiction, in the end, kills us and our loved ones.

Peter Thiel, the famed libertarian venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, was a disciple of mimetic theory, and in turn, Rene Girard. He leveraged the insights of Girard and picked companies that capitalized on mimetic desire to invest in, including Pay Pal and Facebook. The danger that Thiel personifies is that mimetic desire can be easily manipulated and profited from if one happens to be in the right position to do so. Thiel is listed as one of Forbes top tech investors and richest people in the world. And many would argue he is also a model for one of the darkest forms of mass social disempowerment of individuals because he has contributed to great social manipulation. Facebook, at the very least, has been a key example of reinforcing mimesis, rather than mitigating it. 

However, on the social level, mimetic desire can lead to dangerous political conflicts and sociological problems. In the early 2020’s, we encounter political polarization, cancel culture, and a renewed emphasis on free speech. In terms of political polarization, we act in highly mimetic ways, including pursuing confirmation bias (consuming information and saying things that confirm our existing prejudices) and quickly distinguishing between our friends and our enemies. “Woke Culture” is exactly one of these terms that becomes highly mimetic and politically polarized. On one side (e.g. Florida governor DeSantis, Donald Trump, and many fundamentalists of various religions), it is a totalitarian tool for social control; for others (e.g. liberally minded religious people, the LGBTQ community, and those fighting for racially disenfranchised groups), it means to be aware of, and mitigating, public injustice. For those familiar with Rene Girard, you will know that this leads to scapegoating, and the attempted censure of thinkers, public intellectuals, books, and groups is a clear example of such scapegoating. It can be much worse, including being used to eradicate whole groups of people such as in genocides, or less widespread, in racialized violence like lynching and police brutality, or in the apathy in pursuing cases of missing indigenous women. Mimetic desire has such explanatory power for our mass social expressions of desire, as well as our formation of group identity that it is indeed tricky to identify. Once we do, we must admit that we have been less free that we have thought – but, perhaps more existentially significant, we might also realize that our very specific concept of freedom and authenticity is a myth.  We have not been as free as we have imagined, and largely because we have been following inauthentic desires.  

Where do we go from here?

Being able to identify the difference between thin and thick desires is the key becoming intentional about the desires that we feed and the desires that we let go. We begin to recognize thin desires as not bringing us ultimate fulfillment. In the stream of daily life, we’re pushed and pulled in a million different directions. Yet, if we don’t extract ourselves and find time for recollection, we won’t be able to listen to our lives, to listen to others, and to understand the way that our relationships and our desires are growing and emerging. We will be surprised, 5 or 10 years from now, that we we’ve pursued desires that have led us to a place that we really may have not wanted to go.

I grew up as a pacifist Christian in a Mennonite Brethren community in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Since then, I have been intimately involved with Catholic, Anglican, Church of Christ, and Christian Reformed congregations. The tendency in all of these communities is that the members are so immersed in the communal lives of these congregations, that individuals rarely “extract” themselves, as much as “time alone with God” is mentioned in these places. The individuals stay socially embedded, and the process of mimesis has an overpowering effect on the individuals. Individuals in these communities are overwhelmed by the sheer social power of mimetic desire. They rarely, if at all, get themselves to a place of recollection, of listening.   

I am also the sixth son in my family. We were all hockey fans when I was a kid, with Saturday evenings, as was our national tradition, devoted to CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. One of my brothers, the only brunette amidst five dirty-blonde, father-resembling, ones, was also the only one who didn’t cheer for the Montreal Canadiens; he was a Chicago Blackhawks fan. He was also the one who was least listened to. He was a scientist, the one who most looked like our mother. He, often, was the scapegoat. But as I have come to know him again as an adult, I realized I may not have listened to him. I had imitated the others. I had imitated my mass of other brothers.

The listening is critical to the transformation. It is why now I don’t only pray, I also meditate. Meditation, in my experience, has helped me develop a pattern of recognizing mimetic desires and letting them go. By focusing on breath, I focus on what is core to my life. By letting thoughts and desires go, I stay more closely attuned to my own authentic identity, which is not a self per se, but is more of a space for experience and fulfillment. Parker Palmer said that before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen to and articulate what is and has been. How many of us do that? 

So, if we want to desire differently, explore into your life for those stories when you were engaged in deeply meaningful and fulfilling action and identify patterns. I promise you if you go through your life and you accumulate an increasing number of these fulfillment stories, you will probably begin to see patterns emerge. And that’s your life telling you something about where you find fulfillment. Your non-mimetic, but authentic, desires will indicate the needed transformation and change.