Chapter 1
HIDDEN MODELS
Romantic Lies, Infant Truth
Caesar’s Self-Deception … Love by Another’s Eyes … The Invention of PR … Why Playing Hard to Get Works
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
—Milan Kundera
When people tell you what they want, they tell a version of the Romantic Lie. It goes something like this:
I just realized that I want to run a marathon. (Like all my friends when they turn thirty-five.)
’Cause I saw a tiger, now I understand … (From the song “I Saw a Tiger,” written by Vince Johnson for Joe Exotic, the Tiger King, for whom seeing a tiger seems to have been a mystical experience that made him want to start a big-cat zoo.)
I want Christian Grey. I want him badly. Simple fact. (From Fifty Shades of Grey, which is full of these simplicities.)
Julius Caesar was an excellent Romantic liar. After his victory at the battle of Zela, he declared, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). The line has been quoted thousands of times by people taking Caesar at his word: that he saw the place and decided to conquer it. Magician James Warren suggests that we reframe Caesar’s words in the language of desire so we see what he’s truly claiming: I came, I saw, I desired. And therefore he conquered.1
Caesar wants us to think that he needs only to lay eyes on something to know whether it’s desirable. But Caesar flatters himself.
The truth is more complex. First, Caesar revered Alexander the Great, the Macedonian military genius who conquered nearly all of the known world in the third century BCE. Second, at the battle of Zela, Caesar’s rival, Pharnaces II, had attacked Caesar first. Caesar didn’t just come and see. He had long desired to conquer like his model, Alexander, and he was responding to his rival, Pharnaces.
The Romantic Lie is self-delusion, the story people tell about why they make certain choices: because it fits their personal preferences, or because they see its objective qualities, or because they simply saw it and therefore wanted it.
They believe that there is a straight line between them and the things they want. That’s a lie. The truth is that the line is always curved.
Buried in a deeper layer of our psychology is the person or thing that caused us to want something in the first place. Desire requires models—people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.
Models transfigure objects before our eyes. You walk into a consignment store with a friend and see racks filled with hundreds of shirts. Nothing jumps out at you. But the moment your friend becomes enamored with one specific shirt, it’s no longer a shirt on a rack. It’s the shirt that your friend Molly chose—the Molly who, by the way, is an assistant costume designer on major films. The moment she starts ogling the shirt, she sets it apart. It’s a different shirt than it was five seconds ago, before she started wanting it.
“O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes!” says Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hell to know we have chosen anything by another’s eyes. But we do it all the time: we choose brands, schools, and dishes at a restaurant by them.
There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life.
* * *
You may be wondering, then: if desire is generated and shaped by models, then where do models get their desires? The answer: from other models.
If you go back far enough in the evolution of your desire, through friends and parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, all the way back to the Romans, who modeled themselves after the Greeks, you will keep finding models.
The Bible contains a story about the Romantic Lie at the dawn of humanity. Eve originally had no desire to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree—until the serpent modeled it. The serpent suggested a desire. That’s what models do. Suddenly, a fruit that had not aroused any particular desire became the most desirable fruit in the universe. Instantaneously. The fruit appeared irresistible because—and only after—it was modeled as a forbidden good.2
We are tantalized by models who suggest a desire for things that we don’t currently have, especially things that appear just out of reach. The greater the obstacle, the greater the attraction.
Isn’t that curious? We don’t want things that are too easily possessed or that are readily within reach. Desire leads us beyond where we currently are. Models are like people standing a hundred yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see. So the way that a model describes something or suggests something to us makes all the difference. We never see the things we want directly; we see them indirectly, like refracted light. We are attracted to things when they are modeled to us in an attractive way, by the right model. Our universe of desire is as big or as small as our models.
* * *
Dependence on models isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Without models, none of us would be speaking the same language or aspiring to anything other than the status quo. George Carlin might have spent fifty years telling jokes about the weather had he not been in the audience at a 1962 Lenny Bruce performance. Bruce modeled a new way of doing comedy, and Carlin used it to break out.
The danger is not recognizing models for what they are. When we don’t recognize them, we are easily drawn into unhealthy relationships with them. They begin to exert an outsize influence on us. We often become fixated on them without realizing it. Models are, in many cases, a person’s secret idol.
“René could remove an idol from another person’s eye like it was an act of reverence,” Girard’s friend Gil Bailie told me. Mimetic theory exposes our models and reorders our relationship with them. The first step is bringing them to light.
* * *
In this chapter, we’ll see how an early twentieth-century hacker named Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations,” made use of carefully placed and hidden models to manipulate a generation of consumers. In the 1950s and ’60s, his descendants were the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue. Today, they are more likely to be embedded in large tech companies, governments, and newsrooms.
We’ll also see how mimesis affects financial markets, and why finding and naming hidden models helps us understand the movement of stocks and the humanity of bubbles.
But we’ll start by looking someplace where models operate in the open: the lives of babies.
Secrets Babies Keep
Babies are brilliant imitators. Mere seconds after birth, they start imitating other humans. As newborns, they’re capable of imitation to a degree that surpasses even the most highly developed adult primates.3
Researchers have found that a baby’s imitative powers start developing even before birth. “After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb,” wrote Sophie Hardach in a 2019 New York Times article detailing new research by German scientist Kathleen Wermke. By the third trimester, babies can hear the tones of their mother’s voice. Shortly after birth, babies born to Mandarin-speaking mothers (Mandarin is a highly tonal language) tend to cry with more complex intonations than babies born to German- or Swedish-speaking mothers, for example.4
These and other recent discoveries have challenged the theory of the asocial infant—the view held by Freud, Skinner, and Piaget that newborn babies are like unhatched chicks, cut off from external reality until adults socialize them. Freud even proposed a distinction between a physical birth and a psychological, or interpersonal, birth, implying that a baby is not a full person until socialized.5 But any mother who has held a newborn in her arms knows that this is false. Babies are born social.
Few scientists have done more to refute the myth of the asocial infant than Andrew Meltzoff, whose work in childhood development, psychology, and neuroscience over the past several decades has lent support to Girard’s discovery. Meltzoff’s work suggests that we don’t learn how to imitate; we are born imitators. Being an imitator is part of what it means to be human.
In one of his best-known experiments, conducted in 1977, he went to a hospital in Seattle (along with his co-researcher, M. Keith Moore) and stuck out his tongue at newborns. While the mean age of babies in this study was thirty-two hours, an infant as young as forty-two minutes mimicked his facial expressions, mapping onto them with surprising accuracy. It was the first time one of these babies had ever seen another human being stick out their tongue or make funny faces, yet she seemed to realize that she was “like” this creature before her—that she had a face, too, and could do things with it.6
A. N. Meltzoff and M. K. Moore (1977). Science 198: 75–78. (Photo courtesy of Andrew Meltzoff.)
I traveled to Meltzoff’s office at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, which he co-directs along with his wife, Patricia K. Kuhl, a specialist in speech and hearing sciences. “Babies come out of the womb seeming to have the ability to imitate,” Meltzoff tells me.
We can understand our mimetic nature by seeing babies as teachers. “Babies hold a secret about the human mind that has been hidden for millennia,” Meltzoff wrote. “They are our double. They have a primordial drive to understand us that advances their development; we have a desire to understand them that propels social science and philosophy. By examining the minds and hearts of children, we illuminate ourselves.”7
* * *
Between 2007 and 2009, Meltzoff met René Girard several times at Stanford and once at Girard’s house in Palo Alto. They probed one another’s insights into the development of human life and culture.
“René was fascinated by the science—the way that infants follow gazes, which draws them into the orbit of adult goals, intentions, and desires,” Meltzoff says. Girard appreciated that a scientist of Meltzoff’s stature was corroborating and elucidating his theory in a different domain.
“And he suggested some novels I might want to read.”
“Novels?” I ask.
“Yes, like Proust.”
“What about Proust?”
“He was really interested in a concept in my research called joint visual attention: when two people are focused visually on the same object. Babies follow the gaze of their mothers. He pointed me to some wonderful passages in Proust about people paying attention to other people’s eyes and reading things about their intentions and desires.”
Throughout Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, characters strive to know what others want by paying attention to the slightest signals. “How had I failed to observe long ago,” writes Proust in volume 5, “that Albertine’s eyes belonged to the category which even in a quite ordinary person seems to be composed of a number of fragments because of all the places in which the person wishes to be—and to conceal the desire to be—on that particular day?”8 Characters in Proust pick up on cues about what others want, sometimes even from a glance of the eyes.
We do the same thing. Meltzoff explains: “A mother looks at something. A baby takes that as a signal that the mother desires the object, or is at least paying attention to it because it must be important. The baby looks at the mother’s face, then at the object. She tries to understand the relationship between her mother and the object.” It’s not long before a baby can follow not just her mother’s eyes but even the intentions behind her actions.
To test that idea, Meltzoff staged an act in front of eighteen-month-old babies. In the experiment, an adult acted as if he was trying to pull apart a dumbbell-shaped toy made from a central tube with a wooden cube on each side. As the adult strained to pull the toy apart, he let his hand slip off one end. He tried again, but this time let his hand slip off the other end. The adult’s intention was clear: he wanted to pull the toy apart. But apparently he failed.
After the adult’s performance, the researcher presented the object to the infants and observed what they did. The babies would pick up the dumbbell and immediately pull it apart—forty out of the fifty times the experiment was conducted. They didn’t mimic what the adults did; they imitated what they thought the adults wanted to do. They read beneath the surface behavior.9
The babies in the experiment were pre-linguistic. They were tracking the desires of others before they understood or had words to describe them. They didn’t know or care about why other people wanted something; they simply noticed what they wanted.
Desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it. The motivational speaker Simon Sinek advises organizations and people to “start with why” (the title of one of his books), finding and communicating one’s purpose before anything else. But that is usually a post hoc rationalization of whatever it is we already wanted. Desire is the better place to start.
* * *
Children seem surprisingly altruistic. In 2020, Meltzoff and his colleagues observed that nineteen-month-olds will help an adult obtain an out-of-reach piece of fruit. The children in the experiment readily, repeatedly, and rapidly helped others fulfill their desires more than half of the time—and they did this even if it meant handing over a piece of food to an adult when they were hungry.10
This natural and healthy concern in children about what other people want seems to morph in adulthood into an unhealthy concern about what other people want. It grows into mimesis. Adults do expertly what babies do clumsily. After all, each of us is a highly developed baby. Rather than learning what other people want so that we can help them get it, we secretly compete with them to possess it.
I ask Meltzoff how deep the imitation of desire goes. He jumps from his chair and leads me into a special room that contains a $2 million machine called a magnetoencephalograph (MEG). A MEG has extremely sensitive magnetometers that allow scientists to locate the sources of the magnetic field in the brain. When the brain is active, it produces a magnetic field in and around the head. The machine detects fluctuations in the magnetic fields that someone naturally produces by perceiving, wanting, feeling, and thinking about the things around them.
While the earliest forms of MEG have been around since the 1970s, Meltzoff’s MEG has customized software, including some designed specifically to analyze learning and brain activity in infants. His machine looks like a hair dryer for giants. It’s plastered with stickers of colorful aquatic creatures.
In a 2018 study, Meltzoff and his team found that a child’s brain maps onto actions they see in the world around them. “We discovered that when a child sees an adult being touched by an object while the child is in the MEG, the MEG shows the same part of the brain activate in the child as if the child was being touched themselves.”11 The imaginary divide between self and other—the foundation of the Romantic Lie—has been exposed.
Copyright © 2021 by Luke Burgis
