There's something deeply ironic about reading a book on mimetic desire that itself becomes a perfect example of mimetic performance. I just speed-ran Luke Burgis's "Wanting" at 2.5x speed – the audiobook equivalent of skimming through a LinkedIn post masquerading as philosophy. The experience was enlightening, though not in the way the author intended. What started as an attempt to understand desire through Girard's framework quickly revealed itself as what I call the McDonald's version of libidinal economy: fast, digestible, but ultimately unsatisfying.
The book attempts to explore how human desire functions through imitation, but instead of examining how want operates as a productive force flowing through social assemblages, we get profound insights like "sometimes when someone orders a martini, you might want one too." Welcome to Celebristan™️, where famous people are famous, and their influence flows down from their mountaintop of clouds (complete with a triangular diagram featuring sunglasses – I wish I was joking). Burgis creates cute geographic metaphors, splitting the world into Celebristan™️ and Freshmanistan™️, as if the complexity of human desire could be reduced to a two-column table explaining that sometimes people admit who they're copying and sometimes they don't.
What's fascinating, however, is how the book itself performs the very phenomenon it attempts to describe. It's a mimetic performance of "serious philosophy," complete with obligatory name-drops of ancient philosophers, random Shakespeare quotes, and Silicon Valley case studies. It's like watching Plato's Cave put on a TED Talk, where the shadows on the wall are wearing Patagonia vests and drawing triangles about desire. The performance doesn't stop with the content – it extends to the book's reception in business circles, where it's praised as groundbreaking by people whose entire philosophical education consists of airport books and LinkedIn posts.
But here's where we can actually find something interesting, not in the book's intended message but in its existence as a cultural artifact. The way this book operates in business and self-help circles is actually a more sophisticated example of mimetic desire than anything described in its pages. It's become desirable not because of its insights (which rarely transcend common observation) but because other "thought leaders" desire it. The mimetic cycle becomes complete when readers praise its "profound insights" about the nature of wanting, wanting to be seen as the kind of person who understands such profundity.
This got me thinking about how we actually process and transmit meaning, particularly in our digital age. The way memes function as crystallized packets of shared experience offers a far more nuanced window into mimetic desire. When we deploy a reference – say, the Spider-Man pointing meme – we're not just copying an image. We're tapping into a distributed network of shared meaning, a statistical clustering of reactions, descriptions, and understanding that creates what we might call "fuzzy precision" of meaning.
My recent interactions with AI have illuminated this further. Large Language Models understand memes not through image recognition but through what I'd compare to how rice cookers use fuzzy logic to achieve optimal results. The AI processes what we might call the semantic footprint of a meme: the accumulated descriptions, reactions, and usage patterns that create a normal distribution of meaning. This isn't random; it's statistically relevant pattern recognition based on how human communities interact with and create meaning around shared references. This framework helps explain why AI can engage with complex references and ideas – it's not about truth in an absolute sense, but about mapping patterns of human meaning-making.
The randomness in AI responses is constrained by statistical relationships in human discourse, creating what we might call a "lower t truth" – not capital-T Truth, but reliable patterns of shared understanding. This is far more interesting than the book's simplistic observation that people sometimes want what others want. It suggests that desire operates through complex networks of meaning, creating patterns that can be mapped and understood, even by artificial intelligence.
Consider how this applies to the book itself. "Wanting" has become successful not because it offers profound insights into desire (it doesn't), but because it performs a certain kind of business philosophy that people have been trained to want. It's the intellectual equivalent of a luxury brand – desired not for its intrinsic value but for what possessing it signals to others. The fact that I had to speed up the audiobook to 2.5x just to maintain interest speaks volumes. When you're used to operating in what I jokingly call the hyperbolic time chamber of actual theoretical frameworks (yes, that's a Dragon Ball Z reference – philosophical thinking doesn't have to be dull), watching someone do philosophical push-ups for the cameras gets old fast.
What makes this all particularly fascinating is how it illustrates the gap between performative understanding and actual analysis. While Burgis draws inspiration from René Girard's work on mimetic desire, he manages to flatten a complex theoretical framework into something that could fit on the back of a business card. It's like watching someone try to explain quantum physics using only emoji – something fundamental gets lost in the translation.
The distance between this book and actual theoretical engagement becomes apparent when we consider how desire actually functions in our digital landscape. Take social media virality, for instance. The mechanism isn't as simple as "people want what others want." Instead, it operates through what I call libidinal frameworks – systems of desire that fuel memetic spread through complex networks of meaning and recognition. When content goes viral, it's not just being copied; it's being transformed through each interaction, creating new layers of meaning and desire.
This is where our earlier discussion of AI and pattern recognition becomes particularly relevant. The way artificial intelligence processes meaning offers us a mirror to understand how human communities create and transmit desire. Think about how a meme evolves: each iteration, each comment, each reaction creates a semantic footprint that becomes part of its meaning. The fuzzy precision of these accumulated meanings creates a sort of distributed understanding – not unlike how our desires are shaped by the complex interplay of cultural signals and personal resonance.
But instead of exploring these fascinating dynamics, "Wanting" gives us a world neatly divided into Celebristan™️ and Freshmanistan™️, where desire flows as predictably as water downhill. It's a framework so simplified it becomes almost meaningless, like trying to understand ocean currents by looking at a kiddie pool. The book's approach to mimetic desire is itself mimetic of a certain kind of business literature – the type that promises profound insights but delivers fortune cookie wisdom wrapped in Silicon Valley buzzwords.
Consider how Peter Thiel's investment in Facebook is presented as some kind of profound insight into mimetic desire. Yes, social platforms leverage our tendency to want what others want – but the actual mechanism is far more complex and interesting than the book suggests. It's about how desire functions as a productive force in digital spaces, how it creates and sustains attention economies, how it shapes not just what we want but how we express and understand wanting itself.
The real irony here is that by attempting to make Girard's ideas more accessible, the book ends up demonstrating exactly why superficial understanding of complex ideas can be dangerous. It's like trying to understand a forest by looking at a single leaf – you might learn something about chlorophyll, but you'll miss the entire ecosystem.
Speaking of ecosystems, let's talk about who this book is actually for. It's not for people seeking deep understanding of desire or mimetic theory. It's for a specific ecosystem of business readers who want to feel like they're engaging with profound ideas without the hassle of actual theoretical engagement. It's philosophical fast food – designed to be consumed quickly, provide a brief satisfaction, and leave you hungry for the next trending business book.
This is why I had to engage with it at 2.5x speed – not because I couldn't understand it, but because my mind, trained in what I jokingly call my hyperbolic time chamber of intensive reading (300 books in 3 years will do that to you), simply refuses to stay engaged with ideas moving at such a basic pace. When you're used to swimming in deep theoretical waters, splashing in the kiddie pool of Celebristan™️ gets old fast.
The tragedy isn't that this book exists – simplified versions of complex ideas have their place. The tragedy is that it represents a broader trend in how we engage with ideas: the constant pressure to make everything "accessible" often results in making it meaningless. Real understanding of desire – whether through Girard, Deleuze, or contemporary analysis of digital culture – requires grappling with complexity, not running away from it.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that this critique itself might seem elitist or unnecessarily harsh. But there's an important distinction between making ideas accessible and making them shallow. You can explain complex ideas clearly without stripping them of their power. You can engage with theoretical frameworks without reducing them to cute geographic metaphors and PowerPoint-ready diagrams.
In the end, "Wanting" becomes a case study not just in mimetic desire, but in how not to translate complex ideas for a broader audience. It's Bodies without Depth – a simulation of philosophical insight that might leave you wanting, but not in the way the author intended.
[Note: All Celebristan™️ references were made with ironic intent. Side effects may include sudden urges to give TED Talks and create triangle-based diagrams like the one shown here at 2 percent battery.]
Stats:
Duration: 11/26/24-11/27/24 (Speed-run at 2.5x audio)
Pages: ~250
Time Investment: About as long as a mediocre TED Talk
Reading Level:
Business Self-Help (MBA-lite)
Assumes familiarity with: Basic business concept
Requires understanding of: LinkedIn post structure
Preferred prerequisites: A Patagonia vest and AirPods
Rating: ⭐️⭐️
One star for having pages
One star for unintentionally demonstrating mimetic desire through its own existence
Difficulty: As challenging as reading Harvard Business Review book cover
Recommended for:
Airport bookstore enthusiasts
TEDx speaker aspirants
People who quote Gary Vee unironically
LinkedIn thought leaders
Anyone who finds fortune cookies too complex
Not Recommended for:
Anyone who has read actual philosophy
People who understand what "libidinal economy" means
Readers operating above Freshmanistan™️ level
Those allergic to triangle diagrams with sunglasses