A Sustainable Society Means Making a Shift in What We Desire

The key legacy of French social philosopher Rene Girard is the concept of “mimetic desire,” i.e., that we borrow our desires from others.  While we may think our aspirations are authentic and self-created, in truth, we generate our wants from our perception of other people.

I don’t dispute this, as I’m not sure it’s possible to prove or disprove the idea.  I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my daughter just yesterday when she remarked how much our family dog (“Batman” – pictured here) loves us.  “He sure does,” I agreed, “Though it’s never been clear to me what actually motivates that.  For instance, isn’t it possible that dogs are simply smart enough to know how to treat the people in their lives from whom they want affection (and food) in return?”

In any case, I often think about our human society and what it’s going to take for us to survive the next 100 years, given that our exponential growth in resource consumption has shoved us right up to the cliff-edge of unsustainability.  Thus far, our mimetic desires – or whatever mechanism is actually at work – have most of us wanting more and more stuff – bigger houses, faster cars, and more gadgets. The resulting water and air pollution, depletion of our farm lands, over-fishing of our oceans, climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, social injustice, etc. simply won’t permit the train to stay on this track indefinitely.

Perhaps we’ll experience a shift in what we desire.  What happens when it becomes “cool to be green?”

Some ridicule the idea, but such movements in public consciousness are not unprecedented. When I was a little boy in the early 1960s, my mother and her friends went out to their dinner parties in mink coats. A year or so later, you couldn’t FIND a mink coat in American women’s closets. In a ridiculously short period of time, this entire demographic had realized that the fur industry constituted an unnecessary brutality, condemning lovable animals to short and painful lives. People started to look inside for the first time on this point and ask themselves, “I wouldn’t wear my dog, would I?  So why do I think it’s cool to wear this mink/chinchilla/fox/etc?” Literally millions of Americans, and, I presume, people all over the globe got the message: Decent people don’t act this way.

We vote with our wallets.  What does our society look like when those who drive Cadillac Escalades are ostracized and these 7100-pound obscenities-on-wheels disappear?  What happens the moment we stop eating at fast food hamburger places because they’re the single largest cause of Amazon deforestation, and stop wearing clothes from people whose supply chains are rife with child labor and other forms of exploitation?  The answer is clear: we change the world around us.

It will be a terrific moment when we mimic the people who actually care about the world around them – and that day can’t come too soon.