The BIG problem with your desires

Rene Girard writes in Resurrection from the Underground that the big problem with human desires is they're "borrowed." The idea that we can desire original things without any reference point to others is a romantic lie.

Our desires are neither original nor rational. We don't seek out what's in our self-interest. Rather, we mimic the desires of those we admire, and then we fight with them over the now contested object of desire.

Dostoevsky's work reveals this dynamic over and over again. In The Double and Notes from Underground, the protagonists experience respect and scorn for the same set of people simultaneously.

We admire those we think are placed above us, and to become like them, we take their desires as our own. But now we detest them as they're the competitors chasing the same thing as us. Mimetic desires poison relationships.

Mimetic desires lead to mimetic rivalries, and this opposition is always "sterile." By sharing the same goal, two people's strategies and behaviors come to look alike too. They're stuck in a win-lose war and nothing new comes out of it.

Like Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes, mimetic rivalries trap us in behavior that is "repetitive and mechanical." Imagination and new visions are shut off; energy is spent completely on obsessing over the rival's moves and trying to out-do him.

In The Eternal Husband, Dostoevsky writes about a man whose wife betrays him. After she dies, he seeks out the man she used to sleep with. The second man becomes his mimetic rival. Before marrying a new woman, the widowed husband makes the rival meet her! What does this mean?

The widowed husband's very desires feel inauthentic unless his rival shares those desires too! He is unable to want the 2nd woman unless the rival wants her too. This shows mimetic rivalries weaken the conviction and clarity of our desires.

In Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's plot resolves around parricide - a "son-slave" killing the "tyrant father." Girard explains how mimetic desire plays in here - the son first admires the father, and internalizes the father's desires. The time-bomb of mimetic rivalry is set off.

Girard writes "parricide is simultaneously murder and suicide." The son kills the father, but he is half his father. Mimetic rivalry leads the fruit to destroy the tree it grows on. Therefore beware of mimetic rivalries that are counter-productive and lock people in sterile wars.