- We're more rivalrous than we like to believe.
(violin music begins)
Human beings tend towards rivalry.
There's a reason why there's five stories of sibling rivalry
in the book of Genesis alone,
and almost every other culture in the world
also has stories of sibling rivalry.
It seems that there is some principle of rivalry
that has been with us since the beginning of time.
- You broke my heart.
- We take delight in seeing somebody else fail.
- Long live the king.
- And that's something I think
we should all be hyper aware of,
because envy always leads to misery.
I'm Luke Burgis, founder of Fourth Wall Ventures
and author of the book
"Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life."
So in my mid twenties, I noticed this strange paradox,
if nobody else wanted the thing that I wanted,
I began to question whether that thing
was "wantable" or not,
whether it was desirable.
I noticed it in dating,
in business,
even in the choices of food
that I would order in restaurants.
There was this strange mystery of desire
that I hadn't put my finger on.
So I spent some time reading and reflecting
and stumbled on the ideas
of the great French thinker, René Girard.
Girard said that man is the creature
that doesn't know what to desire.
So we look to models,
people that help show us what is worth wanting.
In other words, desire is mimetic.
Mimetic desire means that we're adopting
another person's desire as our own.
Usually without even realizing that we're doing it.
That creates real problems because
we're now inherently competing for the same thing.
So we have a scarcity mindset,
and mimetic desire leads quite naturally
to viewing the person that's modeling
the desire for that object as a rival
or as an obstacle to us getting what we want.
But when I speak of rivalry,
I don't always mean in the negative sense,
and neither did Girard.
Rivalries can be a very positive thing.
- We had been rivals, we hated each other.
And so, Larry Bird made me a better player,
and I think I made him a better player
and together we made the NBA better.
- They can get the best out of us
when we have professional rivalries.
This might be a time for me to tell the story
of Lamborghini and Ferrari.
I'm not sure if we have time for that or not.
(piano music fades out)
Ferruccio Lamborghini was a very successful
tractor manufacturer in Italy.
He owned a Ferrari and the clutch kept breaking
and he went to Enzo Ferrari to complain about the clutch
and eventually got into the car business
because of a rivalry with Enzo Ferrari,
and ended up making a beautiful, powerful sports car.
And their sales are better than they've ever been.
So rivalry can push us to do things
that we may have not done to innovate, to create things,
but rivalry can also turn negative
when we cross a certain boundary.
The problem with mimetic rivalry
is that we begin to see others as enemies.
If this other person is in my way,
if they're a constant thorn in my side,
the other solution is to eliminate them in some way.
That could mean they're fired.
It could mean canceling them.
That could mean physical violence.
When people are locked in a mimetic rivalry,
it's an infinite game.
There's no way to resolve the one-upping.
And that's because there's very little awareness in society
of the mimetic mechanism.
So the first step to breaking out of a rivalry
is simply to be aware that you're in one.
If we're not aware that we're rivalrous,
that this is a zero sum game that isn't going to end well,
there's really no hope of breaking out of it,
except for some kind of outside intervention.
Lamborghini realized that that rivalry with Ferrari
could take him to places he didn't want to go.
Everybody at the company wanted him
to enter the racing business.
He could spend the rest of his days
consumed with constantly one upping
this Titan of auto manufacturing.
He took a step back and he saw that he didn't want
the rivalry to last.
He wanted to be his own person
and not constantly be tethering his ideas of success
to Enzo Ferrari.
So when we realize that our desires don't originate
with us, it frees us up.
As humans, we have agency,
we have freedom to rise above that base mimetic nature,
and to choose the way that we're going to respond.
At some level,
people have to do the hard work of renunciation.
That's not a word that we use very often these days,
but it's renouncing and overriding our mimetic impulse
to constantly hit back, to constantly seek that next thing.
Ferruccio Lamborghini decided to renounce the temptation
to enter the racing business,
and to extract himself for what could have been
a game of obsession and never-ending rivalry
with Ferrari until the end of his life.
It's not that he didn't care about making beautiful cars
or didn't care about his company anymore.
It's that he knew that a time had come for a pivot.
And the pivot for Lamborghini,
allowed him to live a very fulfilling life.
And his company continued,
without his personal animosity towards Enzo Ferrari
coloring his entire company for the next 50 years.
Forgiveness is also a very anti-mimetic action to take.
Kind of goes against every fiber in our being,
because we're highly mimetic when it comes to conflict,
when it comes to violence.
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
We have to break the cycle of logic
through this supernatural act.
Forgiveness goes beyond the rational.
It's getting at this great power
that we have as human beings,
to choose not the instinctual reaction.
Getting out of that transactional mindset,
incorporating things like empathy and forgiveness
is really important.
When we listen to another person with empathy,
we can quickly break through a negative mimetic cycle,
because people want to imitate
the empathy that they received.
One tactic I recommend to my students
is to actually write a letter of gratitude
to somebody that might be a rival to them.
That's a great way to kill it right away, in most cases.
Not always,
not everybody responds positively to that kind of a thing.
But to be able to step back and to make a gesture of empathy
can change a negative mimetic cycle into a positive one,
almost instantaneously.
The question is,
will we actually be the one to take the first step?
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