Prestige as an Illusion
Metaphysical desire in human relations
Subject Area: Sociology
The car you will never ride – It is true: Miss World isn’t as half as beautiful as we think she is – Karl Marx hates billionaires – The fastest way to get cancer.
The car you will never ride
In my last essay, we briefly went through some examples of human mimesis, and I introduced some jargon that might otherwise make understanding Girardian philosophy challenging.
After re-reading the essay, I concluded I moved a little bit too fast, actually, more than a bit fast. But there is just so much to write about. So, to push the truck a bit forward, in this essay, I will focus on unpacking the word desire and make a clarification that wasn’t distinctive enough.
When you desire a thing, you want the thing, the object. In order words, there is something intrinsic in that object that you want. There are three conditions that this ‘ordinary’ desire satisfies 1) a tangible-material lacking, 2) an attraction towards an object to quelch the lacking, and 3) a satisfying state. In order words, you want the object for what it is.
However, the most problematic forms of our desires are not as such – they are what is called ontological or metaphysical desire.
And I will explain.
Suppose my friend owns a particular kind of car – the kind prominent people in town ride, and because I am most likely to be like my friend, I would desire such a car. And then the question kicks in. What is it about the car that I desire? Of course, I would tell myself all sorts of lies about the particular kind of engine this car has, or tires, or seat belts, which might be partly true. However, lurking behind the shadows is a metaphysical desire – it is a desire without the object.
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Metaphysical desire flouts all the three conditions for ‘ordinary’ desire. There is seldom any kind of real lacking, as such an attraction to an object will not quelch what was not lacking. It’s like wanting to put out a fire when there is none. As such, it makes sense that no satisfying state is reached.
Again, notice that it is not not having the object that gives desire its powers – it is not the lack of an intrinsic quality of the object. It is something else. This point will take us to another layer of the discussion, where metaphysical desire is exposed for what it is.
It is true: Miss World isn’t as half as beautiful as we think she is.
When something or someone is desired, the object’s value is magnified as much as there is a resistance to obtaining it. And the greater this resistance, the greater the value.
Suppose a bloke in a gang goes after a lady and isn’t very successful. The bloke might come back with the excuse that she was ”playing hard to get.” (Which might turn out to be true but perhaps on much less occasion than the excuse was given.)
This “hard to get” feature isn’t unimportant given that the value ascribed by the bloke to the lady increases given the resistance. However, it isn’t unusual for disappointment to occur after the resistance is over since the value ascribed (imagined) – more often than not – isn’t real. (Kahneman’s focusing illusion in social psychology is a valuable tool to think through this.)
It is even more sophisticated when multiple guys want to date, say a one-time Miss World or, even worse, the current one. The more guys are interested, the more the resistance; as such, the value of our dear Miss World would be through the roof. And, of course, this often leads to all sorts of drama.
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Let’s go back to the story of von Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther cited in my previous essay, where Werther fell in love with Charlotte, who was already engaged to Albert. In order words, Werther fell in love with another man’s fiancée.
The greater the resistance to getting Charlotte, the deeper Werther fell in love, which ultimately resulted in his suicide. But before that, Charlotte and Werther had a conversation that is very, very telling, and it is worth quoting at length.
[Charlotte starts by telling Werther:] “Be a man, and conquer an unhappy attachment toward a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” He bit his lips, and looked at her with a gloomy countenance.
She continued to hold his hand. “Grant me but a moment’s patience, Werther,” she said. “Do you not see that you are deceiving yourself, that you are seeking your own destruction? Why must you love me, me only, who belong to another? I fear, I much fear, that it is only the impossibility of possessing me which makes your desire for me so strong.”
He drew back his hand, whilst he surveyed her with a wild and angry look. “‘Tis well!” he exclaimed, “’tis very well! Did not Albert furnish you with this reflection? It is profound, a very profound remark.” “A reflection that any one might easily make,” she answered; “and is there not a woman in the whole world who is at liberty, and has the power to make you happy?
Conquer yourself: look for such a being, and believe me when I say that you will certainly find her. I have long felt for you, and for us all: you have confined yourself too long within the limits of too narrow a circle. Conquer yourself; make an effort: a short journey will be of service to you. Seek and find an object worthy of your love; then return hither, and let us enjoy together all the happiness of the most perfect friendship.” [1]
He failed to go on any journey; all he did was commit suicide.
Karl Marx hates billionaires
Let’s take on Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism, his critique of the political economy. It rightly points out the socio-supernatural quality of commodities that alienates the form of the commodity and the value-relation of people involved in producing it. In order words, a commodity has a quality apart from the one the labor had imbued into it – something mysterious. This is simply a mismatch between the exchange value and the use-value. [2]
This, Marx says, is a result of capitalism, but it’s deeper than that; it is a reality of human relations. It is driven by human mimesis: the more people (high-status model, say) want an object, the more the likelihood you imitate that desire. If it is limited, the scarcity leads to resistance, and the folks who have it are imbued with this high status, as is the object. At some point, the focus on the object is lost; it is now the prestige.
Does anybody ever think they would love to be a billionaire because they need the very last cents of the billions – because they need the money in and of itself? It is not the billion that is useful; it is the status of being a billionaire, it is the prestige, it has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of owning that amount of money. And to talk about money. Money itself doesn’t have any intrinsic value; can I eat it? for example. Granted, I can use it to buy pizza down the road, but I can also use it to buy things in the manner of the commodity fetishism that we are speaking to.
As Toynbee put it, “the components of human society are not the Humans but the relations existing between them.”
It is at this junction that we are now ready to talk about status anxiety. A lot of what we do is driven by status. When one is asked the question, “What do you do?” It is less of a genuine question and more of a status-enquiring one. We are more interested in their status than who they are or what they do in and of themselves. And we all know this, even though almost know nobody says it. As such, we get on with mimetic desire, continuing to copy, and it is not unusual to be buried in status anxiety – the anxiety that arises from constantly comparing oneself to another.
And perhaps I can quickly add that a young chap born in the year 2000 is more likely to be like Elon Musk (even though the chance of that happening is very low) than for a medieval peasant to be a king in 1243. The medieval peasant simply has no chance. On top of that, we have social media, which often reminds us of what we are not, and suddenly everyone is surprised that social media is making us anxious and depressed (see an abstract [3], documentary film, and there are many other evidences out there). In an increasingly egalitarian society – where we are told that we are equal except that we cannot be equal in all possible ways – anxiety and depression shouldn’t be surprising.
The fastest way to get cancer.
A big chunk of my Ph.D. thesis was on cancer metabolism, and I can go on for the next 50,000 words on the subject, but that will be more than an overkill. The point being that there are tumors, and there are tumors.
Tumor is an abnormal growth of cells that isn’t necessary – it doesn’t serve any purpose. It just grows. Now there are benign tumors, which is, to put it bluntly, benign. It does not spread to other tissues, and it is usually not a problem, especially if it’s not in a vital organ, and doctors generally put it on the category of ‘watch list.’
Conversely, there is now what we call the malignant tumor; this is when the tumor cells go rogue and continue to spread like crazy to other parts of the body. My academic research was on kidney cancer, and my research quest was to identify small molecules – using chemistry and computational tools – that coordinate this malignant tumorigenesis in such a way that will allow small molecules to be used as a biomarker.
Desire proper – that is metaphysical desire – can be likened to a tumor: it is unnecessary like a tumor is, only in the sense that it is metaphysical. [4] The desire is benign when you are not breaking yourself, when you are not run over by desire.
But it could be malignant if the subject isn’t careful. This is when we talk about greed, virulent envy to the point where harm is done to the other, deep-seated hatred, and the like. These are the worst of human nature, and they can be traced directly to mimetic and metaphysical desires. Wanting to be like or surpass another – where a model becomes the obstacle.
As Girard puts it, “desire is responsible for its own evolution…Desire is always using for its own ends the knowledge it has acquired of itself … [and] it is always becoming better equipped to reject everything that surrenders to its embrace.” [5]
If that is not the case, while would, for example, a former Head of State, the late General Abacha, steal at least $5 billion of a country’s money and stuff it in his bank account, and then had to die before spending the loot. Where they would physically move cash from the central bank to his house. Why would young Werther kill himself because of somebody else’s wife? Why should Cain kill Abel?
Unreined, metaphysical desire has the tendency to continue to grow, the way cancer will grow, and will never be satisfied because there is nothing to satisfy. As such, as I did with my research with kidney cancer, a person ought to have markers for malignant desires to detect them early on before falling into hell.
And so that I will be clear, the question isn’t whether we are immune to metaphysical desire or not; nobody is immune, in my assessment. On the contrary, the question is, where is your desire channeled?
As such, I must end on a quasi-normative note.
To know the usefulness of a thing is to imagine an absence of that thing. So what will the world look like without something like metaphysical desire? It is a much tricky question than I thought it was, especially if I try to think of the details of such a world.
All I can say is that progress might become impossible, and we will be living in a state of squalor.
As such, my conclusion in my previous essay is still in order here: “In far too many discussions of this kind, the point remains – what helps you can also hurt you.” An attraction towards a friend’s possession might spur you to do a better job at moving civilization forward, but hopefully, it wouldn’t turn you into a negative neurotic vegetable, or say, a psycho who will do anything for money, where anything means anything. Therefore, it is essential to know what kind of mountain you are climbing before you start.
PS: Fun fact, prestige – what metaphysical desire sorts – has its root directly from the Latin word praestigiae, which means an illusion or a mirage.
References/Footnotes
[1] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832. The Sorrows of Young Werther.
[2] Alexandra Dobra, What does Marx mean by the “fetishism of commodities”? E-LOGOS Jul 2010 Link
[3] No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
November 2018. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 37(10):751-768
[4] The analogy of tumor to metaphysical desire is solely to point out that it doesn’t solve any immediate or tangible needs; only in this sense is it ‘unnecessary.’
[5] Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Pp 304
Awesome read Bro…. Apt and exact!!!