By: Cameron MacKenzie
I used to live in what was affectionately known as the "Tendernob" section of San Francisco, a little strip with Nob Hill style and Tenderloin prices. It was a sweet spot, a Goldilocks area, a perfect place for the new kid in town. And every afternoon as the fog would roll in from the west, the hedge fund managers would roar past my apartment in their Audi S5s trying to beat the traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge.
I imagined they all pulled into the same neighborhood in Marin County, where they undoubtedly lived in massive redwood chalets that overlooked the pounding sea. I'd be humping home with my messenger bag after teaching another college class on desire-versus-need while these low-slung rocketships blew past me and into the west. And man did I want one. In 2010 the S5 was the smoothest thing on the road, and those guys drove them like they stole them. Maybe in some sense they had.
The desire-vs.-need schtick that I pitched to my students usually went something like this: you need food, you desire a chocolate chip cookie; you need water, you desire a Lagunitas IPA; you need shelter, you desire the Nob Hill apartment. But of course, what happens when you get the Nob Hill apartment? Are your desires satisfied? Of course not. You want the Sea Cliff house, then the Marin County mansion. So on and so on. All the while, of course, the need has been satisfied, but the desire is unquenchable. Needs, then, can be met. Desires cannot.
That sounds good, but I was still pretty certain all of my problems would've been solved by a red S5. And then I was listening to Peter Thiel the other day and it made me think a little harder.
Thiel, if you don't know, is one of the aspiring masters of the universe: co-founder of Paypal, co-founder of Palantir, founder of Thiel Capital. Tall, thin, teutonic, well-dressed, master of chess, great cheekbones, huge Trump supporter. Current Republican kingmaker. René Girard enthusiast.
As I was doing research on Thiel, that last one surprised me. It turns out Thiel, multi-billionaire and deep-thinker that he is, is a huge fan of a relatively obscure French philosopher named René Girard. Now, I know French philosophy, and when any Silicon Valley whale starts touting theories about the human condition, I prick up my ears.
Girard's got a lot of interesting stuff to say, but what Thiel principally takes from him is the Frenchman's interest in the nature of desire. Desire, for Girard, is essentially mimetic; it's copied. People only know what they want because they see someone else want it first. In that sense, desire isn't aimed at a specific object, it's aimed at the person who wants the object. We want what the other guy has because we want to be like the other guy.
It's a simple principle that guides a whole host of behaviors from the cradle to the grave. It's how we learn to speak and walk. It's why we like the people we do; it's why we work the job we have; it's why we bought the house; it's why we're going to retire at the beach.
This sort of behavior breeds competition. If we take the mimetic idea and scale it, as Girard and Thiel are eager to do, we can see how it could explain the churn of the market, the prevalence of war, the shifting alliances of our age. And so Thiel's ultimate goal, so he says--why he has immersed himself in conservative politics--is to short-circuit the conflict that arises from mimetic desire. To disrupt the coming violence brought about by neoliberal policies that have resulted in the unequal distribution of opportunities and wealth.
So here I am back on Pine Street at 4:45 on a San Francisco afternoon watching the S5s explode into the west, and I'm wanting that car. Bad. But, if I really think about it, I don't want to be the guy with that car. I don't want to be the hedge fund guy with the hedge fund life. I met a few of those moneymen while I lived out there, and they were even more haunted by desire than I was. Were they happy? No. Did I want to kill them for their car? Of course not.
So what did I want so intensely on those lonesome afternoons that I can still remember it a decade later? I wanted a feeling. Not a feeling anyone else was having, not a feeling I wanted to copy, but a feeling so old and so ingrained in my brain that I had forgotten about until just that day, watching those cars get out of town before the devil knew they were dead, blasting off into the fog like Batman. I was afraid. I was starting a new life in a new city with a new job and a new partner and I didn't know how any of it was going to go. There was an unbearable tension in my heart that I couldn't even feel until those cars went roaring through it like an arrow that nearly brought me to tears.
It's personal. It's complicated. It's messy. And it doesn't quite fit with what the philosophers say. The problem with a big system like Girard's is that it's an abstraction. It ignores individual experience. It warps reality. At the end of the day, it's just a model. But there are some who seem to think that if you just push hard enough and loud enough and throw enough money around for the sake of a model, people are bound to listen. People are pretty malleable anyway, so long as you embody what it is they want: money, success, a tight waistline, high cheekbones.
But there are, however, things outside of our own desires. There are things even outside the systems that would try to explain those desires. There's more on the other side of the Golden Gate than redwood mansions. There is, in fact, the whole world.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.