All Your Desires Are Fake (Mimetic Theory Explained)

let me take a guess as to what you want in life you want a stable yet risky job ideally you want to start your own business and run a team of people but you want it to be risk-free you want a happy marriage with a good-looking person and a smart person that loves you back yes marriage you don't actually want that situationship you also want the ability and freedom to travel see the world eat luxurious foods from all over and if you're a boy like me you want that Lamborghini or that Ferrari some cool car

and finally you want a bunch of friends a group of people a community to share these life experiences with and to belong now that's the broad General goals for some of you but if you go micro some of you might want a specific degree maybe you want to get into a specific College like the iits you want to go to a specific destination maybe New York you want to run a specific specific type of YouTube channel maybe like Mr Beast sorry but I'm going to burst your bubble right now out of all the desires that

we spoke about only one is a real desire the rest are fake the real desire is you want to belong to understand why I need to explain to you a very deep philosophy on how humans behave by a philosopher called Renee Girard Gerard's main contribution to philosophy was the psychology of Desire why do you desire the things you desire and in this video join me we'll go on a very deep study of Gerard's work to find out where your desires come from how desires can actually destroy society and What mechanisms ancient society and modern society

has in place to make sure these desires are kept in check in all of this we'll also learn why there are so many negative tweets about Amani's son's wedding why Fame is a bad thing to go after and why many of us are becoming unhappy after being successful without much further Ado let's get started Gerard starts by saying that all desire is mimetic desire what does that mean it means no desire you or I have ever had is ours apart from Food Water Shelter and sex the word mimetic comes from the word mimickry or imitation

or copying every desire you have ever had has been copied from somebody else now instinctively we know this we learn from others we have mirror neurons in the brain that fire both when an animal acts and then when the animal observes the same action being performed by another we copy Trends we copy fashion we copy how film stars smoke cigarettes or their walking style but Gerard says that not only do we copy behaviors we also copy our desire from other people he says that the objects of desire don't even matter instead it's more about the

people who influence our wants Gerard terms these influential figures models of desire a model is someone who you want to copy you copying somebody else's need for a superar is the same as you copying some film actor's walking style Girard DB this the concept mimetic desire you don't want something you want to be someone and there's a very important distinction there you don't want a f because of the car itself I personally find people who buy a superar and then talk about the features or whatever very cringe you're buying a super car for the status

for the club the Teslas today are faster you're not really buying a super car for the speed per se but what these people really bought is a membership into a club a club where you can go tell people I am a Ferrari owner the objects don't matter they're temporary it's the people that's key most of psychology says a lot about individuality who you are this thing like Live Your Dream but Gerard says that's all it's all a scam you and I only think we are authentic individuals because we think others feel like they are authentic

individuals everybody is wholesale copying other people we're all copying each other's desires too this thing is particularly evident in teenagers consider a young person who desperately wants to be part of the popular crowd at school they've always enjoyed Marvel movies let's say but one day they overhear the cool kids mocking Marvel movies they start calling it nerdy and childish what do you think happens next not only will this teenagers stop mentioning their love for Marvel they may also rapidly convince themselves that they don't actually care about Marvel and never actually cared even the things you

like even the things you really enjoy are driven by other people and trying to fit into some group even if you care about some Niche thing like some very specific band or robotics you still only care about it so do why because some very specific people or group does and we want to be like them the Bas emotion work working here is shame you feel shame for not having the same desires as other people you feel shame for not wanting to crack J when so many people are attempting you start lying to yourself and convince

yourself that no actually you are the kind of person that likes J and can crack it now that's phase one mimetic desire Gerard says that the problem with mimetic desire is that in every human interaction it sets the stage for violence either verbal or physical now that's where it gets dangerous because mimetic desire can be transferred it can go from one person to another it also creates rivalries you think you want a lamby and you think there are just two things in this equation you and the object the lambogini but what ends up happening is

your brain starts thinking that the person whose desire I'm imitating to buy this car is also the person in my way that person is my obstacle if someone is imitating you as you all know it can get annoying artists will come out and say hey this guy is copying me even though nine out of 10 times that other person is just admiring that artist's work so this is a problem all of us want to be seen as different yet all our desires are copies when you are not able to afford a super car but the

person you admire can it creates emotions in you that doesn't hate the superar it hates the person you admire you feel like they are the blocker this is your mind coping with losing and now you might wonder how the hell can you hate someone that you admire or used to admire but I've seen this Behavior a lot and we'll come to this in a bit but Gerard says that human conflict is not about you fighting with someone else about the object the object does not matter the fact is that the other person wants the object

or has got it is what pushes you to fight whenever this mimetic rivalry started taking place in ancient times it almost always led to violence which is verbal or physical violence and ideally both very few wars in the past were fought by two starving Nations who really wanted some resource like gold it was mostly fought on egos the ego of why should the other person have the gold why should the other person have this resource right so somebody wanted an object the object didn't matter so much but then it became about the other party and

that other party has the object why should they have it the best example of this is in college academics or research now I'm not a researcher but have you ever met academics or researchers especially in Indian colleges I've met a few and they are so petty they will cut each other's funding write long letters about how this other professor doesn't deserve the funding they will write letters to remove one chair from the other professor's room just to screw around you know why because in college academics or research the stakes are so low the object they're

Desiring their name on a paper or the chance to work on something it just doesn't matter it's about the fact that the other guy wants it it's Petty ego and the source of the petty ego is some object that they both mutually want even if the object itself doesn't matter much there's a problem here with mimetic desire you have to stop this quick because when two people want the same thing no they start copying each other's desires this can spread quickly through a group like a fast moving disease if Nothing Stops it soon everyone in

the group wants the same thing as this happens people in the group become more alike they all focus on getting or being this one thing this makes them less differentiated less different from each other when everyone wants the same thing but not everyone can have it people get angry it creates tension and this often leads to fighting or violence in the group this idea helps explain why groups sometimes turn against each other like the Inta Coupe that happened at open ey it also explains why the overcrowded software engineering industry in India has turned Cutthroat and

with frustrated people fighting and turning on each other in the same industry in the ancient past it explains betrayals by families and allies after people start fighting the coping does not stop instead of copying the things that people want people start copying the violence itself they forget about what they wanted in the first place there's a very interesting quote I remember listening to in House of dragons where two people are talking and they're talking about the fighting why two families are fighting where somebody says they forgot why they're fighting but they've been fighting for Generation

so it's just about revenge now like I said now it's no longer about what the object of Desire is now it's just about hurting those who hurt them back it becomes about revenge now unlike animals who usually figure out who's in charge and then just stop fighting humans can keep fighting forever animals quickly create Alpha Beta systems and it's clear who the dominant animal is people think humans have a clear Alpha Beta structure but we don't actually have a very clear structure we have thoughts and cannot stay submissive to another set of people or another

person for too long unlike animals humans won't stop they even pass on their fights to their children and grandchildren the fight enters the bloodline this destroys communities families groups and even whole country trees keep getting back at each other everything gets turned upside down if Nothing Stops this cycle of everyone copying each other's violence the whole Community can fall apart let me remind you of the root of this again it was desire for some meaningless object now both the mimetic desire and the violence in the past was spread slowly if someone wanted something they didn't

put up an Instagram post about it today it spreads fast if one influential person wants something or has something they put up a post about it now everybody wants it social media is like dry Forest Grass if you have a desire and you are influential you can light the entire Forest on fire quickly and what also spreads is the violence and the hate all of us have become more alike on social media and therefore competing for the same stuff the same imaginary stuff and fighting we're now copying verbal violence too somebody else said something so

I'm going to attack him back Instagram and Twitter allows this resentment and irritation with other people accomplishing things to grow we're all irritated with another person why is that that person doing so well I wanted that thing I wanted that degree I wanted that job I wanted that girl just look at the number of posts of people on famous celebrities or of the Amani weddings it's none of your business you probably don't even care about the objects like the watch that's being given away or the dancing it's just that in the past you wouldn't see

photos of rich people's weddings so you wouldn't Envy it it wouldn't create mimetic desire in you this is a social media problem most mimetic desire in the past was related to families or neighbors mimetic desires Between Brothers of father and son was the worst because they're in close proximity you can constantly see how well your brother is doing or how well your father is doing you were not in close proximity to society's richest but because of social media it's brought the world closer it now bothers you that the ambanis are making so much money or

they have 10% of India's GDP you are suffering because of it and it is slowly starting to turn into verbal violence cuz when you see this there are only two things you can do first is you go become an Amani very hard you can go after the things you think will make you like them but you know it's hard and when you fail because there's a lot of luck involved in that you get angry at the role model seeing them as the enemy you think I can't be like them or have what they have because

they're in my way or the government is in the way or capitalism in the way everything is rigged against me the second option is that you internalize it and you blame yourself you say the reason I'm not an Amani is because something is wrong with me I am the problem the reality is neither of these is actually true the way the world is structured some people win some people lose if not Amani it would be somebody else who would win and be in his place but the question you should be asking is Win what is

that prize even something you wanted in the first place celebrities coming and dancing at your wedding or watches being given to each other you don't really want it it just feels like the cool thing because these desires like Gerard says these mematic desires are granted to you or absorbed by you from looking at somebody else the real question is is this price something that you want because others want it is it a mimetic desire in the first place no matter what happens you me and millions of others are feeling an attack on our egos and

our self- worth because someone else is achieving some desires that you and I think we have but are not actually yours in the past when the role model was Far Away We praised them or we admired them once they're too close problems take place and that's the problem with social media brings all these people closer together where we shouldn't have been so close together our thoughts our ideas our good moments our bad moments they shouldn't have been so close in the first place when we experience these emotions we start to act strange strangely we might

say bad things about the person we admire we might try to cause problems for them or irritate them these actions seem weird because they don't match how we really feel inside but the human brain needs to cope with losing status and status is always relative someone will always be bigger than you in the world now this has happened for centuries and Gerard says that Society has evolved mechanisms to combat this it's evolved mechanisms to soothe people's egos it's crazy he says that the one mechanism that can arrest these cycles of Desire competition and finally violence

is called a scape coat that's right you need a buckra so here Gerard out when Society is burning because of this repeated cycle of desire and violence you can stop it by sacrificing one person it's just crazy how this works the community has to basically pick one person to blame everything on all of society's problems and then destroy them live everyone all sides have to turn against this person the group then hurts or kills or publicly humiliates this person together this makes the group feel United and peaceful again we killed the bigger evil together if

the fighting stops after this the group thinks they were the right to blame that person but then something strange happens they start to think that this person was special or magical because see in order to claim that sacrificing or canceling one person is sufficient to create peace then you have to give that person certain powers no you have to tell the story of how this person is first a God or a devil otherwise everyone knows sacrificing a common man is not going to do anything this mechanism is there in every culture every religion like Christ

being sacrificed for the sins of the people and being reborn a God or in n's mythology the gods killing the Giant yamir and using his body to create the world you need to first make a villain and then sacrifice the villain for the Peace of the community but here's the thing the sad thing for this to work the person being sacrificed should ideally not be a villain all you have to do is say this is the person responsible for all of us fighting let's publicly humiliate and Destroy them but if that person who you are

trying to scapegoat is an Insider and can build support for themselves or can fight back then it doesn't work they necessarily need to not have a voice because scapegoats need to be an easy solution to the hard problem they're not supposed to be able to fight back Gerard says that ideally the victim should be neutral to the conflict if the victim is from one side then you have made a martyr it will be interpreted by the community as violence to one of the two sides if you kill someone from Team blue then team blue will

come after you it has to be some random person one example is Trump as you and me know Trump can clearly fight back but he was kicked off Twitter after which good or bad he couldn't fight back you shut his voice and therefore he was blamed for everything and in my personal opinion even though he's pretty toxic he wasn't responsible for all the bad stuff in America but scapegoats need to be blamed for everything see in the past we hung these people but today we legally can't hang them we cancel them instead we write some

long article about how they're evil or whatever to make videos about them we take it to the court of public opinion to social media and by Design people say all sorts of crap and treat it like the truth for example Aina my wife she had made a video about America and on Reddit someone was saying hey this woman she's a US citizen and she's American and she's gatekeeping and that had a lot of likes Aina is very much Indian she lives in India she lives in bangal with me but when finding a scapegoat for a

temporary period you can suspend the truth usually when anybody lies about something else society's aggressive about it but when you lie or make up things about a scapegoat During the period where they're being scapegoated anything goes temporarily society allows us to talk nonsense as long as we're talking nonsense about that particular scape CED person Reddit in fact has actually become this platform where everyone is facing mimetic desires all the time they're all defeated or in a partial state of defeat and scapegoating basically everyone else to feel better why because in ancient history finding a scapegoat

and blaming them for all your problems makes you feel better if you successfully scapegoat someone you actually get community points and upwards your standing in the community for identifying the scapegoat goes up and because of mimicry others will scapegoat the person too because everything is mimetic this is why on social media when that humans of Bombay girl was being cancelled even random people who I know have done much worse things than her what she had done was she copied her idea from some American company which to be honest every Indian startup does but I saw

so many people piling on her when they had no business talking about her but they were taking out their unrelated pent up frustration and like I said during the skateboarding process temporarily you can say any bad thing about the person because the mob as a whole decides that it is okay to say bad things even untrue things about who we think is a bad person now as you can imagine Society had to build an immune system against this because this constantly finding scape goats is bad it's random and basically cuts down someone randomly at scale

without any warning it's a Witch Hunt and Society started recognizing it early and they said instead of allowing mimetic desires to grow all this is because of this thing of why is this other person doing so well or why does this person have this object that I do not have and for us to keep letting these mematic desires grow and randomly keep scapegoating people creating violence because I told you the cycles of violence start with desire let us prevent it and Society invented the most powerful mechanism against mematic desire that tool is called religion before

we move on to the next chapter if you are interested in learning how to edit like the video you are just seeing and want to learn to tell compelling stories Folks at a are hosting a video editing Master Class they will cover fundamentals of editing storytelling gen workflows and an introduction to video editing as a career if you are interested in taking that up the link to register is in the description see not so smart people think religion is about a specific God or a specific story people who think they're intellectuals on the other side

think oh religion is bad it's scamming people it's some of this but not all of this by inventing a higher power a God who you will not compare yourself to therefore you will not have Mim desire against you are creating a tool to stop societal violence and conflict at all given points of time most of society is feeling bad and jealous about other people religion is a tool humans invented independently in many different civilizations the Sumerians developed a complex religion with multiple gods around 3,500 BCE they worshiped natural gods and believed in Divine Kings Egyptian

religion emerged independently around 3,100 BCE with its own unique sets of Gods and rules around the afterlife Greek religion with its group of Gods on Mount Olympus developed independently from around 1,200 BC all known religions started as a way to reduce Community Conflict by creating an afterlife the stories the gods sorry but they don't matter as much but Concepts like the concept of the afterlife or the morals of the stories you remember when we were young each story had a moral they were more important than the characters they were more important than the story itself

because the morals reduce Mim desire and Community conflict the stories are the delivery vehicle for these morals they're the vaccine given to young kids to avoid conflict in the future just like kids don't like eating medicine and you put medicine inside some chocolate to give kids for it to taste better the kids don't like listening to just morals be good to your neighbors do this they don't like listening to all that they need the sugar coating of the story or they don't take in the moral in the past there was religious and cultural prohibition of

mimetic Desire if you had a desire for something people said don't exhibit it don't talk about it if you had a lot of things don't show it off and this applies to many types of resources for example marrying multiple people isn't allowed in most cultures because it creates too much conflict around desire for partners not showing off and hiding your wealth helping others not bullying people these were all morals given to us packaged as stories a lot of cultures like Buddhism created pride in using a begging bowl and simple mon clothes one of the Ten

Commandments in Christianity he said Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house wife servants ox or anything that belongs to Thy Neighbor this directly addresses mimetic Desire by forbidding Envy of other people's possessions the Buddha leaving his Palace and wealth behind to seek Enlightenment promotes Detachment from Material desires that these material Des these objects they don't matter as much many Hindu stories illustrate Maya the illusion teaching that the worldly desires are ultimately unimportant this is all an illusion anyway do not envy one another is is a direct teaching attributed to Muhammad discouraging mimetic desire the problem

with prohibiting things like showing off wealth might seem arbitrary like if you just made wealth because you are skilled but don't understand philosophy of people you might not know why it's a bad idea and you've probably seen this a lot right you'll see people these YouTubers making a video called I made one CR this year showing off their lifestyle this is inexperience and a lack of respect for philosophy but stories that were once heard in religion can transfer the required philosophical knowledge in early childhood through the medium of stories unfortunately some people get misled by

the story itself the story itself is not that meaningful and people take it too literally but it's a vaccine against mimetic desire this is the main reason that hiding wealth in India was a big thing even today when people see businessmen they think oh businessman is a bad person for example I'm a businessman and I'm creating this video am I a bad person the truth is you don't know enough about me to decide and you will never know from social media but if I look different if I had a gold chain and ran some real

estate business and I was eating some meat your opinion of me would change and you would automatically think I'm an evil person because years of movies stories your aunties talking about some corrupt real estate person that would be sitting in your head another way Society solve mimetic desire is through distance through hierarchy when I was 21 years old and running a company I found it very tough to run it because everyone was my age or older and we'd constantly get into ego conflict I was also a noob I didn't know what what I was doing

but now that I'm 31 that rarely happens because everyone is either younger than me or they know I have a lot of experience doing things that they don't have now I understand why world leaders should be reasonably old so that the average youngster doesn't keep comparing themselves to them and the roles and hierarchies are very important there's a reason flat organizations don't work it creates too much mimetic desire among supposed equals in the past you would envy your friend but you would not envy a king that's why in the past in order to be a

king you needed to be a descendant of royalty there was a reason for this if the common man found out that Royal Blood was a scam and that anyone could be king they'd all fight for it with Royal Blood being the condition only the royal family would fight for it thus limiting communal damage limiting Revenge Etc desire was kept limited to just the sons of the king the granting of power needed to feel div it needs to feel Divine that's why the Trump assassination was an important event for some of the people that follow him

even though I think it's mostly luck it shows a glimp that he has some Divinity in him at least for his audience for that bullet to miss by such a small margin it tricks the brain right to look at an event like this it eventually shows the brain okay this person has some divine blessing on them whether that's true or not irrelevant I personally feel it's luck like I said but people won't believe that it's luck it's also why today's legal system gives immunity to the prime minister Minister and a bunch of people at the

top if we keep scapegoating them and throwing them out nothing good would get done and it's so easy to scapegoat the prime minister or the heads of state you can't run a country like that on the other hand and notice the subtle difference it's different in a company even though the CEO of a company needs enough power without the threat of being scapegoated in most companies especially in public companies the board which has the real control can scapegoat the CEO to pacify the crowd if something bad happens if the crowd turns against the company you

take the CEO throw them out you say everything was that person's fault now the stock price will appreciate because we found a new person we see this all the time the CEO or a senior executive being fired for the company's mistake in the TV show succession it's called a blood sacrifice but someone close to the Core Business family gets thrown out or removed but in the meantime that CEO or that executive is paid really well and given power so that the fall later means something [Music] now one other interesting human tool against mimetic desire is

capitalism while the effects of capitalism which is increased consumer desire is supposed to create Envy it actually also reduces it yes more people desire things but capitalism has this unintended effect of creating a very specific Arena to compete in competition is limited to money-making and not violence no knives no guns just what's in your bank account money is the best best alternative we found to violence compete to make more money buy out competitors Conquer New Markets basically play the mimetic desire game but limited to the corporate world it reduces the damage to the world and

it reduces real world Violence by keeping violence to competition but with capitalism all that fighting is for this one object money and the side effect is reduced price of goods and services for all consumers today the best devices the best watch let's say the Apple watch is something that almost everyone can get because of the price drop whereas in the past having the best luxury watches with the best features that was only available for a select few today those same expensive watches they don't have the best features they're just handcrafted or they have to go

with some other narrative but they're not the best product for us because the best product for us has been created by so many of these companies fighting to bring that price down because they are trying to win that war among themselves when open Ai and Google fight to bring down the cost of AI it's good for us it's the best way we can use mimetic desire now instead of us bringing back gods and scapegoats and religion and whatnot the best way around this is to understand what's happening and deep dive into the ancient wisdom instead

of canceling people online the morals not the stories don't show off as much don't take your desires too seriously they're not yours remember the role of luck and Circumstance in everyone's successes and good moments is important too instead of looking at someone and saying why is that person so successful you can ask what were the circumstances that led to that person's success and also a little bit of Detachment of remembering that ultimately you me were all going to die and we're going to carry nothing up it's very useful to think like this to have that

Detachment complaining on Twitter about how Amani's son has done nothing and therefore you are much better than that person how is that person so lucky it's just going to make you more bitter try some philosophy take breaks from the comparison showroom called social media and finally and a little bit selfishly make sure you subscribe we'll keep making videos on this to try and show you the bigger picture so you don't get caught in the smaller games that's it for me bye