How Mimetic Desire Actually Works

Summary

In this video, Johnathan Bi explores the intricate workings of mimetic desire, delving deep into Gerardian theory. He tackles three main questions: who is more prone to mimetic behavior, who do we actually imitate, and what attributes are typically imitated from models? Johnathan explains that the extent of mimetic tendencies is influenced by an individual's existential lack, which varies greatly from person to person. The video also highlights how societal esteem drives who we choose to imitate and how narcissism can reinforce self-esteem by inviting others to mimic self-desire. Finally, the video elucidates on the specific attributes we tend to imitate, which are perceived as contributing to a model's fullness of being. Through these insights, Johnathan aims to provide a systematic understanding of mimetic mechanisms in human behavior.

Highlights

• Human imitation varies based on perceived existential lack and personal aspirations. 😮
• Society plays a huge role in determining who we admire and imitate. 🌍
• People may admire narcissists because they project self-sufficiency, inviting others to imitate their self-esteem. 💁‍♂️
• We mimic specific qualities in models, often shaped by cultural or societal narratives. 🎭
• A deeper understanding of mimetic desire reveals why we don't idolize everyone equally. 📊

Key Takeaways

• Mimetic desire varies among individuals, often driven by existential lack or unmet personal expectations. 🤔
• The choice of who we imitate is largely influenced by the societal esteem surrounding them. 🌟
• Narcissism can create a loop of self-esteem through imitation, as it invites others to mimic the self-desire of the narcissist. 🔄
• Certain attributes of models are imitated, which are perceived as giving them a fullness of being, driven by societal narratives. 👟
• Understanding mimetic desire helps in recognizing behavioral patterns and influences. 🧠

Overview

Ever wondered why we're wildly different in whom we admire or imitate? Well, Johnathan Bi dives into the depths of Gerardian theory to unveil how mimetic desire operates uniquely within each individual. He starts by illustrating the concept of existential lack — the feeling of a void that varies in intensity and drives our desire to imitate. From Socrates, who seemed unaffected by mimetic impulses, to influencers driven by societal validation, mimetic desire's influence ranges widely. 🌐

Johnathan sheds light on how societal esteem shapes our models for imitation. It's not about success alone but who society deems as having a 'fullness of being.' He highlights how esteem from childhood influences our lifelong imitative patterns. For instance, parents who idolize tech entrepreneurs might inspire similar aspirations in their children. Narcissism, intriguingly, creates a mimetic loop by inviting admirers to replicate the narcissist's self-admiration, reinforcing a circle of esteem and desire. 🔄

The finale dives into the specific attributes imitated. From basketball legends like Michael Jordan selling more than sneakers to cultural narratives crafting desirable traits — mimetic desire is selective. By understanding the narrative-driven attributes we value, we discern why some qualities are imitated over others. Johnathan’s articulate exposition helps unravel why society doesn't equally idolize all, shining a spotlight on the complex dance of mimetic influences. 👁️‍🗨️

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Mimetic Desire This chapter introduces the concept of mimetic desire as explored in Gerardian theory. The chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of how mimetic desire works, beyond common discussions found online. It focuses on three main questions, one of which examines who is more susceptible to mimetic desire. It is discussed how individuals vary in their mimetic behavior, from those like Socrates, who appear largely unaffected, to individuals such as influencers, who seem heavily influenced by mimetic desires.
• 00:30 - 05:00: Who is more mimetic? This chapter addresses the question of who is more mimetic, i.e., who tends to imitate others and who is imitated. The level of mimetic behavior varies between individuals and can fluctuate throughout one's life. The chapter explores the underlying factors that determine mimetic tendencies and whom we choose to imitate. It emphasizes that imitation is not indiscriminate; it's not always directed towards successful or prestigious individuals, using the example of basketball's "be like Mike" cultural phenomenon.
• 05:00 - 12:00: Whom do we imitate? This chapter delves into the concept of imitation and who we choose as models to emulate. It examines public figures like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, exploring the specific qualities or attributes that people often imitate. It raises the question of why society prioritizes certain traits for imitation, such as endorsing products or lifestyle choices, rather than minor physical attributes. The narrative seems to address the broader implications of role models and the focus on commercialized aspects rather than personal characteristics.
• 12:00 - 13:39: What attributes do we imitate? The chapter explores Gerard's concept of mimetic or metaphysical desire, which is driven by a fundamental lack within humans. This existential deficiency creates a feeling of deep shame and motivates our imitative behaviors.

How Mimetic Desire Actually Works Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 In this video, I want to help you understand how mimisis actually works by going deeper into Gerardian theory than is usually talked about I see at least on the internet. And I want to answer three questions. Help you understand three questions. Number one, who is actually more mimedic? Because we clearly see the extent to which one is mimedic fluctuates from person to person. There are people like Socrates who don't seem to be affected by this thing at all and there are people on the other end of the spectrum perhaps influencers who seem to be governed. solely by mimisis. So mimisis the extent
• 00:30 - 01:00 to which you're a mimedic clearly fluctuates from person to person and even within one life as well. So how do we understand that? What governs who is actually mimedic? The second question I want to help you understand is whom is imitated? Clearly we don't imitate just about everyone, right? And it's not just as simple as people who are successful or prestigious even in basketball, right? be like Mike. We don't we don't
• 01:00 - 01:30 say be like uh you know Charles Barkley even though he was extremely successful. Um and the third one is what qualities of the model is imitated because when we say be like Mike we all know that's to you know go out and drink Gatorade or buy buy Jordans and it's not to shave your head bald okay even though uh baldness is just as much an attribute of Jordan as drinking Gatorade. And so I'll start with the first question of who is actually more mimemetic uh uh in terms
• 01:30 - 02:00 of their disposition and desires. And first to answer this question we need to understand why Gerard thinks we are driven by mimemetic desire or even more accurately metaphysical desire. And it's because of a fundamental lack. Gerard thinks that all humans but we suffer this in various degrees um have a deep core a deep shame a deep lack an existential lack within us. We feel a deficiency in our being. That's the language he uses. And we
• 02:00 - 02:30 attempt to fill this lack by imitating models who we we think have a fullness of being. Okay. And so there's a very simple answer um to who is more mimemetic than others. It's the the degree of the lack you feel, the degree of the existential emptiness you feel that you have. Okay, we can break this down even further. Um the lack the existential shame that you feel is the delta between the
• 02:30 - 03:00 uh amount of being you want to have your expectations and the amount of being you feel right the greater this delta the more you'll be driven to fill this lack and the more you will be mimemetic. So one way this delta is increased is by increasing your expectation and this is megalamaniacs right these people they might not seem mimemetic but they're hyper mimemetdic
• 03:00 - 03:30 even though if it's respect to specific models so think about someone like Caesar uh megalamania clearly and uh he he the story I like most about Caesar is that how he cried uh when he learned how much Alexander had accomplished lished um at his age, right? And so that's one direction where you can increase your lack, which is you you enhance your expectation of yourself. Another direction you can enhance your lack is
• 03:30 - 04:00 you decrease the amount of being you feel. And there are many ways that this happens. One is uh if you experience social shame, if you uh are not successful, if you fail at your enterprises. Um, and this is the thing that I think a lot of Gerardians kind of get wrong, which is that success actually works. Okay, confidence that results from repeated success um from from from your from your history,
• 04:00 - 04:30 whether it's in employment or athletics or competition diminishes your lack because it increases the amount of being that you feel. And so those are the two variables that determine how much lack you feel and therefore how much you are driven by these mimetic impulses. Now there's a specific condition um of sameness that increases this lack. And Gerard's idea is that this the being we want is exclusionary. We want to be the best. It's not just we
• 04:30 - 05:00 want to be equals with everyone else. We want to be seen as one amongst many partners. We all want to be exclusively the best. that that that is again to put it very simply one of the drives uh of Gerardian psychology. Now, because of this, it matters a great deal what your self-conception is, right? If your self-conception is the exact same as the self-conception of your best friend, let's say you're all uh in uh investment banking, you're all analysts at Goldman,
• 05:00 - 05:30 then his increase, his moving up the ladder will be you moving down because your understanding of being is so exclusionary. Now, so what really matters and this is why uh uh you know this perhaps this is behind Peter's philosophy, Peter Teal's philosophy of competition is for losers. Um what really matters is to have a fundamentally different self-conception from other people. So you know and this is something that I actually applied in
• 05:30 - 06:00 my own life. You know, first I was a philosophy student, but I didn't want to be going to academia directly because I would just be another philosophy student and knowing my own kind of competitive nature. I know that I would get wrapped in to this sort of academic publishing game. Now when I went to build a company, I also realized that if my if only my identity was an entrepreneur was company building um then then that would
• 06:00 - 06:30 also trap me and put me in direct competition uh with other people who you know many people especially here in New York that share the same conception. But if I were now to define my identity as this kind of weird like philosophy does some business kind of guy has this weird YouTube thing then suddenly my self-conception is non-competitive with almost anyone that I meet. Now there is a way that this can become a kind of coping mechanism right like oh like he
• 06:30 - 07:00 might have more YouTube followers than me but I have so much more money than he he does or you know he he's he's better at philosophy than me but uh you know I'm better at business than him. This can dissolve into a a kind of coping, but it doesn't doesn't have to be. There is a healthy manifestation of difference is what I'm trying to emphasize. And by the way, this is why I find living in New York so much more refreshing than living in San Francisco. Because in New York, you know, finance is the dominant kind of poll. Um, but there are other
• 07:00 - 07:30 domains like media, athletics, entertainment that can kind of balance your identity out so that you're not just competing on this one singular axis of tech where some or a place like San Francisco, you know, it's hard to like surf without the guy right next to you in the lineup, you know, talking to you about their Tesla stock or something like that. And so that is one condition where um uh lack is magnified is when you are
• 07:30 - 08:00 competing against people who are very similar to you. Now this is also why what Gerard called mimetic rivalry is so damaging when you are in direct competition with someone who has a similar self-conception because it both increases the expectations of what you want your being to be. Right? This is increasing the expectation because the model uh your your competitor seems to have this fullness of being but it also lessens uh uh when you lose at least
• 08:00 - 08:30 when you're on the losing end it lessens your own being your own kind of confidence and so that's a mechanism that kind of uh uh enhances this lack. All right, that's the first question. The second question is who do we actually imitate? Right? When we feel this lack, who do we actually imitate? And Gerard's answer, of course, is fullness of being. But that's not very practically helpful for us trying
• 08:30 - 09:00 to navigate in the world to understand the world because fullness of being is is such an abstract term like okay, but how do we determine what what that is? And so this is not Gerard. This is mostly me trying to build off Gerard. There's I think a pedagogical story that we can tell here which is that the people that we esteem determine who has a a sort of fullness of being. So let's say I grew up in in a household of uh I don't know
• 09:00 - 09:30 hippie parents and whoever they esteem imitating them this is this is mimemetic again I will I will learn to see as having a fullness of being right so this might be a great guru from Tibet who is now teaching in San Francisco but let's say my neighbor okay let's say he grew up with parents who are in tech right next to me we both live in San Cisco unfortunately um he might grow up with entrepreneurial
• 09:30 - 10:00 parents and their esteem might be directed at other entrepreneurs. And so what what I'm trying to explain is how people who grew up in the exact same kind of community can end up esteeming and imitating very different people because uh again this is a pedagogical story uh or sorry this is the developmental story where as they developed they learn what
• 10:00 - 10:30 characteristics what qualities for example being chill or being wealthy or or being intelligent gives a person a fullness of being and that ends up determining who they end up imitating. Okay. So the short answer is esteem. This economy of esteem um determines uh who we think has a fullness of being. This is also why Gerard
• 10:30 - 11:00 thinks narcissism is so attractive or can be so seductive. It's because the narcissist esteems himself or herself. The example that Gerard uses is of a co a coette, right? A seductress, very seductive woman who seems to only like herself, who seems to exist in her very own world, who has a illusion of self-sufficiency. And Gerard describes this as an esteeming of herself, as a desiring not not another person, not
• 11:00 - 11:30 another model, but her very own being. And this is seductive, Gerard thinks, because we as a suitor are invited to imitate her desire for herself. So in the case of the developmental story where you imitate your parents' desires for someone else, we imitate the coette's desire uh for for herself. And that's why Gerard thinks that narcissism is this self-reinforcing loop because we
• 11:30 - 12:00 imitate the esteem of the narcissist for himself or herself. But the narcissist is only able to maintain his own self-esteem, self-directed esteem by imitating the esteem of his or her suitors. Okay. So that's that's the second question of of who of whom we actually imitate. The third question of what attributes we imitate um is quite
• 12:00 - 12:30 straightforward which is whatever objects whatever qualities we think makes them have their fullness of being. So the way I like to think about this is in the same way that each of the apostles has their own attribute, right? Uh with Peter and his keys, one of them has a staff, one of them has a sword, one of them has a scale. That's also how mimemetic models work. There are core
• 12:30 - 13:00 qualities about them that we think give them their fullness of being. And how is that this determined? This is also determined mimemetically by the narratives around them. Okay. So, so this is very common I think in advertising or an example I gave Michael Jordan selling sneakers. He wants you to believe that it by owning those pair of Jordans that you can have a slice of his being. Okay, so those are the three answers uh to the questions and I hope
• 13:00 - 13:30 you you get a slightly better understanding of how mimisis actually operates because clearly not everyone is as mimedic as everyone else. Clearly uh we imitate some people not others and even those whom we do imitate there's only certain attributes about them that we do imitate and hopefully this video it gives you a better systematic understanding of who does the imitation whom im imitated and what about them is actually imitated. Thank you.