The Loneliness of Mimetic Desire

Luke Burgis’s recent book, Wanting, attempts to disentangle the kudzu of longing that chokes out the human heart and obscures us to ourselves. For Burgis, to desire is to imitate. Wanting is mimetic: once we get beyond our basic biological needs, we “enter into the human universe of desire” where “there is no clear hierarchy… Instead of internal biological signals, we have a different kind of external signal that motivates these choices.” These are models, which are “people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models—not our ‘objective’ analysis or central nervous system—that shape our desires.” These models are “the gravitational centers around which our social lives turn” and it is in our interactions with them that our desires are formed.