Memetics, Desire, and Storytelling

When George Babbitt begins his relationship with Tanis Judique, he is thrilled to step outside the staid conservative conventions that have governed his life. Tanis is an exotic Bohemian, alien but alluring to this frustrated middle-aged man.

George is the real-estate broker and staid family man in Sinclair Lewis’s classic Babbitt. George imagines himself to be a player in Zenith. But he is really a follower who succeeds by reflecting the expectations and values of others.

As George shows Tanis a rental apartment, they move easily into agreement:

They agreed that the weather would soon turn cold. They agreed that prohibition was prohibitive. They agreed that art in the home was cultural. They agreed about everything. They even became bold. They hinted that these modern young girls, well, honestly, their short skirts were short.

To George, the moment feels rebellious. Staid old George is flirting with a sexy, Bohemian young woman. But George is no more authentic than before. He is just taking his cues from a different source. His excitement comes not from any real freedom, but from mutual attunement. Lewis says of his creation: “The assurance of Tanis Judique’s friendship fortified Babbitt’s self-approval.”

We’ll come back to George. But now, to see what’s happening in that apartment, we need to explore a raducally different figure: the French literary scholar Rene Girard.

Imitation and Identity

As Girard argued, the most distinctive quality of people is their constant imitation of others. We are forever mirroring others. As storytellers, we need to figure out how to reckon with this reality.

This attunement begins early, with the first dim awareness of other minds and other lives. A process of “mirroring” shapes how we perceive the world and our place in it. It becomes part of the story we tell ourselves — about who we are and how the world works.

Storytellers, philosophers, and psychologists tend to depict people as unitary beings: “She’s ambitious,” “He’s popular,” “They’re a tight couple.” But in fact, characters move within a shifting set of social pressures and influences.

Girard had a name for this pattern: mimetic desire. We want what others want, often because others want it. The implications are wide-ranging, from personal rivalry to social conflict.

For storytelling, the implications are immediate. Characters are not simply defined by traits or goals, but by the networks of attention and imitation in which they are embedded. What they want — and how those wants change — depends on who they are watching, who is watching them, and how those lines of influence intersect.

But mimetic desire is a dynamic process. It doesn’t simply move in twos, with two sides imitating the part of the other they would like to be. It evolves into triangles and, eventually, includes whole communities.

The Triangle

Desire never runs in a straight line from individuals or pairs. It runs through a third point: the model.

George doesn’t want what he wants because of some quality intrinsic to it. He wants it because Tanis wants it, or seems to. The triangle is subject (George), model (Tanis), and object (a Bohemian lifestyle).

If the model stays at a safe distance (what Girard called “external mediation”), this is comfortable. Americans can admire their distant heroes (from George Washington to Muhammad Ali) and ideals (from the flag to the MAGA hat). The distance keeps this desire safe, domesticated, unthreatening.

But when a model is close, that model can spark conflict. Two people can imitate each other’s taste in skirts indefinitely. They cannot, for long, both have the same job, the same recognition, the same person’s exclusive attention. What pulls people together, eventually, pulls them apart. The object of attract can become the object of conflict.

What follows is a pattern Girard discussed under a term he borrowed from Freud: the narcissism of small differences. The closer two rivals are, the harder they work to assert difference, even as their behavior becomes identical. Each escalates to outdo the other. Both are now organized entirely around the same prize. Girard calls this process “doubling.” They are two mirror images (similar), but opposed to each other (competing).

In the process of competition, the original object doesn’t matter so much anymore. The two sides are not fighting over the object, but about being chosen. The object turns almost arbitrary, swappable for whatever the rival wants next, because it was never really the point.

Sometimes its easiest to see this process in politics. After World War I, hatred of the Kaiser was replaced by hatred for Bolsheviks. After the Cold War, hatred of the Soviets was replaced by hatred of “terrorists.” We see it now in England, with seven revolving-door prime ministers since Brexit. Most recently, Keir Starmer’s landslide vistory has curdled into hatred—and the rise of memetic opposite in Andy Burnham.

When the Crowd Loses Its Edges

So the natural attraction of two bodies—based on desire, mirroring, a need to matter—evolves into a triangle. And then it spreads to whole communities.

Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the prescient Democracy in America, offers a preview of Girard’s memetoc theory.

Tocqueville, an aristocrat in America to study prison reform, was amazed by what he called “the “equality of conditions” in America. This land, without fixed positions or wealth, offers a wide-open territory for the economic, social, and political success. Americans are the ultimate can-do pragmatists. When they see a stream that needs bridging, they get together and bridge it. Inside a community, this spirit engulfs all.

But as Tocqueville notes, there is a dark side to this story.

With no external authority, public sentiment becomes the authority. People stop forming their own judgments and start triangulating off what “everyone” thinks and desires. To be recognized by the group, a person also has to reflect the group back. That reciprocity turns conformity into tribalism. We see this tribalism in stories like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and more.

The Quiet Weapon

What happens to the person who doesn’t enter the mirroring contract—who refuses to pick a side or escalate a fight? What happens to the person who maintains an independent identity, while everyone else is bound by groupthink?

That might look like the safest position of all, but it isn’t. That outlier becomes a scapegoat (or, to switch animal metaphors, the black sheep). By not conforming, the dissenter exposes others—and himself. By violating the group’s orthodoxy, the outlier makes everyone feel uncomfortable. So the group freezes him out—or even seeks to destroy him.

As Tocqueville notes, a group doesn’t need law or force to enforce its collective values. Contempt and isolation are usually enough. “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind,” he wrote of America. It was a process of mutual censorship, which became self-censorship—a society policing itself through the threat of exile.

The Battle of Forest Hills

So what does it look like in action? Consider a revolt against public housing in Forest Hills, N.Y., in the 1970s. It offers a parable for Girard’s memetics or Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority.

New York City proposed three 24-story public housing towers for Forest Hills, a solidly middle-class Queens neighborhood. Opposition developed instantly. City officials did not vet the proposal with any community process. The people were taken by surprise. So they revolved.

But rather than keeping the debate on these issues, the opposition quickly developed a scapegoat: the poor, mostly minority people who would move into these apartments. And the rhetoric turned radical and hateful. To the opponents of housing, the city government was the Gestapo targeting innocent Jews. Public meetings turned into obscene attacks.

Eventually, Mayor John Lindsay appointed a young law processor named Mario Cuomo to mediate the dispute. He got the project cut in half. The deal made his career. But make no mistakes: Cuomo’s process did not wipe away the extreme rhetoric or hatred. But it did kept the disagreement a disagreement, rather than an all-out war.

(The essay is the first in a series on memetics and storytelling.)