Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life Hardcover – June 1, 2021

This new book by Luke Burgis could actually change your life for the better. No hype. Just a rare, wonderful fact. In two days, it’s given me new ways of looking at pretty much everything and everyone around me, as well as myself. It may be my favorite book since a guy named Arrian jotted down what his Stoic teacher Epictetus was saying, or at least since an unknown poet wrote the story of Beowulf.The opening pages and chapters are a master class in grabbing and holding a reader’s attention for a topic whose importance may be in an inverse relation to its commonality of discussion in our time. We get to go with the author into PayPal founder Peter Thiel's home for a great conversation, hang out with Luke when the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, was trying to buy his own startup business, and then stand behind him as he opened the door to a hit man who came to visit about an unpaid bill. We learn about how Lamborghini was created and why the founder decided to walk away from the ultimate form of competition that he would surely have won. And why a Michelin 3 star chef, so ranked for 19 years in a row, asked to be left out of their famous guide. And on and on. There are so many great stories in this book that all shed light on our own lives in really new ways. They are such good stories, you have to run and tell someone right away.The topic of the book is the importance of two things in our lives: Desire and Imitation, or when the two are combined like they always are in our experience, Imitative Desire, or to use a word from the book’s subtitle, Mimetic Desire. From the moment we’re born, we come into the world as masterful imitators of others. It’s the way we get our bearings and begin to enter the adventures to come. And we also enter the world with needs that express themselves as yowling wants. But then the story takes a twist, and our wants begin to greatly outnumber our needs and play an even bigger role that those basic necessities in shaping our thoughts and actions and paths in the world.Socrates long ago urged us all to engage in self examination. The command was “Know Yourself!” We’ve long interpreted that as being about our own beliefs, emotions, and attitudes. Luke lets us know how importantly it’s about our desires—what they are, how we got them, and where they’re taking us.Ultimately, this is a book about inner metamorphosis, a sort of spiritual alchemy in transforming the desire engines of our lives into a more positive configuration and direction. It’s a book of great power and has been desperately needed in our time. Luke: What took you so long? Just kidding. No masterpiece happens quickly, and that’s as true of this book as it is of our best lived lives.I’ve been writing books of practical philosophy for about thirty years, and as I seek to be of help to people, I also try to read all the best current books that promise us new wisdom, great insights, and positive transformation. Most fall far, far short of their hype. Some are simply cons, bereft of usefulness and actually both misleading and dangerous. A few are very good, and rarely, now and then, one is actually great. This book occupies the outer reaches of that last category and is truly exceptional.Please do yourself and everyone around you a huge favor. Get this book and read it as soon as you can, and then read it again. It’s that good.Luke Burgis may have elevated himself with this book into the mantle of “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” I hope a Dos Equis Deal is in the works for him. But I'm equally sure he doesn't even want one, which is the real magic of transcendence to which he guides us in the end.

I’ve been waiting for a book like this. I’ll use it in a first-year seminar next fall and a senior seminar in the spring, two courses where I discuss mimetic theory with students who have various academic interests. It’s perfect for first-years facing the relational dynamics of college and for seniors making life choices and heading into the world of work. Burgis has written the most practical book on mimetic theory yet. Not that Wanting is intended as a college textbook. It promises to bring a solid treatment of mimetic theory to many new audiences.After a prologue about how his first exposure to mimetic theory helped him navigate a crisis in his business career, Burgis divides his book into two halves: four chapters on “the power of mimetic desire” followed by four on “the transformation of desire.” Interspersed throughout are fifteen inset “tactics,” from “Name your models” to “Live as if you had responsibility for what other people want.” Three appendices give: a glossary, with concise and accessible definitions of standard terms in mimetic theory as well as a few Burgis invents for the book; a reading list of ten books, mostly by Girard himself; and a list of “motivational themes” to accompany one of the book’s most promising tactics, identifying “thick” desires by focusing on “stories of deeply fulfilling action.”Mimetic theory comprises three main ideas. Burgis saves the second and third of these, the scapegoat mechanism and the revelatory importance of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, for his fourth chapter. Chapters 1-3 expansively probe mimetic desire and rivalry. Many cite simple examples of mimetic desire from advertising, but Burgis shows the genius of Edward Bernays, whom the New York Times called “the father of public relations” when he died in 1995 at the age of 103, for cleverly manipulating desire by setting up models of it. Apple founder Steve Jobs is exhibit A in chapter 2, on external mediation and internal mediation, which Burgis labels Celebristan and Freshmenistan. Given that our media climate has accelerated the movement of modern culture toward Freshmenistan, his emphasis on the ways it distorts our sense of reality is welcome.(from the full review I published in the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion)

I am very happy to have read this book. It has an amazing insight into what drives us to behave/want/do things that we do. It's a force of mimesis, seeking of models, of someone or something to copy and strive to be. Once you learn about it, you realize how much it has impacted your life, and how much it is all around us.It's a dangerous force where if left unrecognized, it can lead to personal and societal hardships.I would give this book five stars but it felt like some conclusions reached were a bit far fetched, or at least not tied up well together to make sense. It almost feels like it was rushed to get finished, or perhaps that's the result of the editorial process?Either way, I would recommend it to anyone to pick it up and explore what this book says.