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. 

Burgis’s book is an exegesis on the thought of French anthropologist René Girard, whose study of literature revealed that “all the most compelling novels ever written” share a common trait: “characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior—most of all, their desires.” Burgis compares Girard’s insight to “the Newtonian revolution in physics, in which the forces governing the movement of objects can only be understood in a relational context. Desire, like gravity, does not reside autonomously in any one thing or person. It lives in the space between them.” Mimesis, which “draws people toward things,” is “‘to psychology what gravity is to physics.’” While gravity “causes people to fall physically to the ground,” mimetic desire causes them “to fall in or out of love, or debt, or friendships, or business partnerships. Or it may subject them to the degrading slavery of being merely a product of their milieu.”

In short, mimetic desire is the process by which we want things; what we want is to become like a model whom we have, consciously or otherwise, chosen to imitate; and we become like this model by competing with the model to obtain or achieve the object that the model desires. Critically, if left unchecked, this pattern of desire and competition will inevitably lead to crisis and violence. In Girard’s words, “human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.” 

Although it often results in evil, mimetic desire is rooted in a fundamental and distinctive good of human beings, wrapped up in “freedom and a relational understanding of personhood. The imitation of desire has to do with our profound openness to other people’s interior lives—something that sets us apart as humans.” There is thus a vital distinction between Girard’s mimetic theory and Newtonian physics. Unlike an atomistic theory that conceives of all interactions between objects as occurring via force and collision, Girard sees human beings as opening up to one another from within even if this vulnerability results in violence. Human beings are made to be for each other; the fact that our desires are mimetic means that they are inherently self-transcending. By nature, by necessity, we are oriented towards (and can thus ultimately only be fulfilled by, since nature is not deficient in necessary things) relationships with persons beyond ourselves.

Burgis builds on Girard’s theory with examples from across the professional world: Girard’s influence on Peter Thiel and Thiel’s early investment in Facebook; the rivalry between Ferrari and Lamborghini; a five-star chef who avoided being stirred up into a mimetic crisis by the Michelin Guide; the collapse of Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project in Las Vegas; and Burgis’s own experiences trying and failing and being relieved by his failure to sell his start-up to Hsieh’s company, Zappos. Burgis pairs these case studies with a surprisingly deep dive into Girard’s thought, translating complex facets of mimetic theory (e.g., external and internal mediation, which describes whether a model is far outside or within one’s immediate social sphere) into simple and memorable terminology (“Celebristan” and “Freshmanistan”).

Wanting’s genre is elusive. Burgis uses the tropes and writing style of popular self-help and “life hack” books to frame Girard’s work, offering a guidebook for aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to become the next Peter Thiel. But Burgis does not seem to want to limit his intended audience to budding business owners; rather, his goal with the book appears much broader: to make Girard’s key concepts accessible to a popular audience for the sake of spurring a broader readership to greater self-awareness and personal transformation oriented towards greater intimacy with truth. Though some of his pedagogical tools are more clearly aimed at readers coming from an entrepreneurial background (see, for instance, his adaptation of mimetic theory to Jim Collins’ flywheel model, an image used elsewhere in Wanting to chart the business strategies of Zappos and the Michelin guide), Burgis takes even these up into his larger project: the widespread cultivation of authentic desires, which is to say, transcendent desires, desires that shift their center of gravity away from one’s self towards a loving desire for the good of the other. 

Transcendent desires are contrasted with immanent desires, “a system of desire in which everyone is spinning around, pinned to the wall, unable to escape, in the same pattern, wanting the same things.” In other words, these desires operate according to a deviated transcendency that makes the locus of desire “a sacred center around which everything turns” that is not actually sacred, like the charismatic CEO of a company, and create a system “whose main purpose is sustaining itself.” Those who are wrapped up in immanent mimetic cycles “insist on the primacy of their own desires” and “make them the center around which everyone and everything must revolve.” This turning inward of desire appears to be merely egocentric, but is actually much more insidious, because within this process is lost the personhood of the desirer herself, who in seeking to overthrow and replace her mimetic rival aims to transform herself into anything but herself. Immanent desires tend towards the liquefaction of the subject’s identity into the mediator; even as the subject seeks to supplant the mediator, it is the subject herself who is supplanted. (This is at the root of the foundational lie: you will be like gods. Why is this a desire worth pursuing when it would mean the self-destruction of my own human being?)

Burgis, like Girard before him, observes rightly that to be locked into immanent desires is to be trapped in a world that tends towards its own obliteration, that sees non-being as prior and preferable to being. The concrete reality of who I am, as receiving my being from another to be lived out for another, becomes less real than the process of abstractification of myself from myself into and instead of the other whose desires I am imitating. Despite the distinctions between the two, Burgis’s claim that mimetic theory is like Newtonian physics is correct, not simply because both are revolutionary and deal with relationality, but more profoundly because Newton’s idea of reality and the world of immanent desires share the same metaphysics: both assume that becoming (process) is more real than being (essence), that the abstract (calculus; to artificially become like the mediator) is ontologically prior to what is in front of us (motion; to naturally be who I am). Severed from a true transcendence, mimetic desire reduces us all to a process. This is why it is often so difficult to answer questions about my being like “Who am I?” and yet to feel so frequently like what I am doing is divorced from who I am, because in acting on my immanent desires I have time and again, whether I’m aware of it or not, tried to become someone else. If we are what we repeatedly do, what we are is anyone but ourselves. 

Transcendent desires, on the other hand, provide an alternative flywheel in which the “center of gravity” shifts from oneself “toward a transcendent goal”: the good of the other person. One oriented towards the transcendent “models the desire for an object and then withdraws as a mediator of desire so the [other] can interact directly” with the object, aimed towards cultivating “a positive cycle of desire” in which “someone models a different way of being in a relationship—a non-rivalrous approach, in which the imitation of desire is for a shared good that can be had in abundance.” At the heart of this approach is empathy, “the ability to share in another person’s experience—but without imitating them (their speech, their beliefs, their actions, their feelings) and without identifying with them to the point that one’s own individuality and self-possession are lost.” Transcendent desires guide the subject toward an authentic encounter with the other made possible only by the subject being who he is rather than trying to become the other. In other words, transcendent desires enable the subject to love the other, to recognize that the other is a gratuitous gift, “another me,” that is good simply because she exists, a move which in turn opens up the goodness of the subject’s own being to himself: true fulfillment of human desires comes from a relationality marked by an authentic gift of self to the other, which is possible only if I am wholly myself and the other is wholly herself. The end of desire is not a process but a deeper being, brought out through relationality.

Burgis identifies (though not as explicitly as Girard) the foundational and ultimate transcendent desire as beatitude, an eternal, eschatological relationship with God. The flywheel of transcendent desire he proposes begins with mimetic desire, leads to empathy, and culminates in transcendence without returning to mimetic desire. This image captures the true aim of Burgis’s book: conversion, to turn to God without turning back again. Beneath what may initially seem to be a series of life hacks and best practices aimed at greater professional success and self-improvement is an extraordinary accomplishment: a book that adapts the complex theory of a brilliant French anthropologist into language comprehensible and appealing to an average college undergraduate at a business school yet pushes that reader to consider deeply the reasons why her heart feels restless and what the ultimate source of that rest might be. 

Wanting is like a pair of corrective lenses for why we want what we want. It enables its readers to see human desire as it is: ugly if turned inward, stunningly beautiful if turned towards the transcendence it was made for.