A First Note on Travel and Mimetic Desire
The mimetic desire to write about mimetic desire - though it's an idea I've been searching for ever since I started seriously travelling.
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An Introduction to Mimetic Desire
At some point over the past while I’ve come across an idea for which I’d been searching for a long time.
Something to describe how I felt shortly after moving all the way to the other side of the world, in large part because I ‘wanted to travel’.
The idea might have even been stirring well before that.
But I was never able to name it, or at least didn’t think it was a ‘thing’, more just a collection of thoughts I had, a mood, a negative attitude towards others’ behaviour which was more reflective of my own self-doubt than an objective observation of the world.
This idea, I found out, is something called ‘mimetic desire’.
Luke Burgis’s Wanting is a book about mimetic desire, inspired by the life’s work of French philosopher René Girard. Girard’s fundamental discovery was that once we go above the first couple of steps of Maslow’s hierarchy, we don’t have needs so much as we have desires (or ‘wants’). And while our needs are instinctual and internal in origin, our desires are driven by something – or someone – outside of us. The origins of these desires are models we find in others, either from our immediate social circle, the wider community, or in the culture at large.
Most of our desires, including our desires to travel are not our own. And not only are these desires not even our own, we usually don’t even know where we got them from.
Mimetic desire is the unseen force driving the world, and is the unconscious source of conflict, war and, Girard believed, the impending apocalypse.
Girard concluded from his lifetime of study and writing on the subject that mimetic desires lead to mimetic rivalries, where two individuals or a culture becomes so embroiled in their envy and desire for what those around them want, that often the only foreseeable outcome is annihilation and death.
Shakespearean tragedies and breakdowns in interpersonal relationships arise from the envies of mimetic conflicts and rivalries, and ultimately wars break out for the same reasons.
But surely going on holidays – whether the traditional couple of weeks, a lengthy backpacker’s journey, or the extended working holiday of the type whose enjoyers are commonly referred to as ‘ex-pats’ – to attractive and trendy destinations couldn’t have such catastrophic consequences?
The Cult of Travel
Everyone’s at it, the ol’ travelling. And not just travelling for its own sake – that simply won’t do these days. Scroll through any social media or app and the dominant modern cultural currency becomes apparent, not just in the photos but in the proclamations (which any wise observe throughout history will have been aware are usually indicative of an individual’s mimetic, rather than authentic, desires) of travel’s necessity, not just as a pastime or interest or means to get from A to B, but of its centrality to people’s very identities. Travel has become for some a basic necessity like food or shelter (though of course, people love going without on their travels for the sake of a good story), or so they claim anyway.
And travel where, exactly?
Oh, it doesn’t matter where. Somewhere far away though, preferably a plane ride away, or maybe two. Somewhere exotic. Somewhere well-known. Somewhere you’ve seen online. Somewhere your friends have been, or better yet – somewhere your friends haven’t been yet, but want to go to. Ideally there’ll be a highly recognisable sight – known worldwide, from blogs and social media pages – that you can line up to stand into, a more sophisticated version of the carnival photo stand-in, where instead of putting your face through a wooden board and assuming the comical identity of an old-timey fairground strongman, or a Disney character, you stand in just the right spot – the top of Machu Pichu or the bottom of the Eiffel Tower or on a more local level, at the top of the same mountain, or on the same swing in the same nightclub – and assume the identity of worldly traveller.
Sometimes people take off on journeys simply so that travel can be an end in itself, without much regard for where they’re going.
Anywhere will do.
Mimetic Models
What is driving this cult of travel, where everyone and their dog has to be seen to be a globe-trotting adventurer and/or connoisseur of world culture?
The world is more connected than ever, and everybody’s watching each other.
In the past we had to look over the neighbours’ wall to see the things they had in the house in order to get our mimetic consumeristic desires. Now the internet ensures we get play by play updates of the movements of our peers and the world at large, not just the rich and celebrated but our peers, people more or less like us, and in and around them we see the glimpses of worlds we never could have known existed in past lives.
The new consumerism is for experiences, and going places is a simple way to claim to collect experiences, particularly now as it’s all verifiable by taking a photo with your phone of you in the place, doing the thing. We’ve rinsed out our supply of attention and now instead of staying in one place and going deep on one or two or three hobbies or crafts, we simply go as many places as we can, substituting breadth of experience in lieu of developing some depth to our personalities.
If we can fill our time with space, then maybe we won’t have to fill our space with time.
The would-be worldly-and-vaguely-new-age-travellers have, like all sub-cultures (your goths, your skaters, your punks, your indie kids, and so on) been consumed and their roles inverted. Over the past decade and a half, anything vaguely counter-culture – and therefore unique and interesting – has been consumed and assimilated into the global mono-culture. In the past, to travel was to abandon your home and the identity of your local or national culture, to go out to explore and to forge your own path, as none around you suited your own unique trajectory through the universe.
No longer do travellers strive for uniqueness in their experience, but to do the same thing as everyone else. Taking photos in strange places is now like a version of Pokemon Go, where you must collect everything on a pre-determined list.
Bored tourists line up to fit into an existing form, the future, present and past of their experience being already mapped out and shaped in advance by Trip Advisor, Booking.com, and Instagram, being documented and soundtracked in real time. Not alone are these paths planned, but they’re synchronised and co-ordinated, and if you miss out on the Big Thing or the Cool Place, the veering off course is regretted as a missed opportunity, rather than celebrated for the adventure it was, as it should be.
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Examining our own mimetic desires
Have you ever wanted something just because that’s what you’re ‘supposed to’ want – whether it’s a holiday destination, a job, a place to live, a partner or a particular type of person as a friend?
Have you ever gone somewhere just because you felt like you ‘should’?
Why do you travel? Where have you been and where do you dream of going next?
And why?
What places and things are on your bucket list?
Why do you even have a bucket list?
And what happens as you tick the places off it, one by one, just as you’re supposed to – just like everyone else is doing?
Many of us go through our lives without ever really questioning where we get our desires from.
What are the consequences of this? What happens to you when you extradite your body and soul, in a very real and deep physical way, and travel through places you never knew existed, for reasons that were never yours to begin with?
The Consequences of Mimetic Travel
At best mimetic travel results in boredom and a descent into a cliched, carbon-copy existence, one that’s drawn to visiting tourist attractions and city districts populated solely with other travellers and merry-go-round riders, herded around and looked upon by locals as zoo animals, using the country like an amusement park before getting off, exhausted and unfulfilled. Not to mention having spent time and money feeding the mimetic part of what’s supposed to be your personality.
At worst, following the crowd leads to anything from ignorance to contempt, confusion to resentment, loneliness to alienation.
Girard’s thesis led him to the conclusion that civilisation is on course for a certain apocalypse.
Nobody wants to betray themselves, least of all to others. It’s no wonder that mimesis leads first to rivalry, and then conflict.
Ultimately wars are fought between worlds.
But our betrayals begin in our own hearts.
The corruption of the soul begins one vacant selfie at a time, taken at the end of a long queue.
Travel has always been a means with which to explore oneself, a journey which mirrors our journeys through the outside world. Mimetic rivalries are mostly unconscious, and this is how the objects of our desire remain so intrinsically linked to our own identities.
What happens when you take a heroic dose of adventure, one that shatters every preconception you ever had of both you and reality itself?
It turns out that where you travel to and how you go about the world matters an awful lot more than we’d assume. At all times we move through places that are, spiritually and metaphysically speaking, either ours or not our own. It is not appropriate to treat these movements like any old trip to the cinema. To go to the wrong places for the wrong reasons is a betrayal of the heart, driven by the desires of others. It’s also a betrayal of the world.
It’s one thing to buy a pair of expensive shoes or another shitty oat latte because you’ve been tricked into believing you want it by the models of your desires, but what happens when you go to the other side of the world, in a journey through space and time that exposes every corner of your own soul, for the wrong reasons?
All art is as much a journey of discovery for the creator as it is one of depiction for the consumer, and something I’ve suspected all along is that so much of our motivations to ‘go travelling’ are socially driven, unconscious, and inauthentic. And so much modern travel is an attempt to appear worldly and adventurous when we are anything but.
A large part of what I’m trying to get to the bottom of in my writing is exploring the purpose, motivations and consequences of the modern backpacking-as-a-rite-of-passage, Instagramming-as-social-obligation, travel-as-personality-trait and free-spirited-with-a-gun-to-their-head traveller.
Because some years ago I turned around and it seemed like everyone else was travelling, and I wanted to go travelling too.
And when I learned about mimetic desire I realised that the reason I’d been searching for this idea for a long time, was that I’d always known deep down that the forces driving me to move to the other side of the world and devote my entire existence to travel, were not entirely my own.
I haven’t yet, though I’m looking forward to diving into the work of Girard himself.
Why do you travel? If you enjoyed reading this or if any of it resonated with you then please leave a comment, I love hearing your feedback and respond to all messages.