06 Limitless desire

We live in a world full of consumer goods, for those who can afford them, and with a seemingly limitless desire for more consumption. But are our desires in fact limitless? Our desires for goods stem from the way in which we play the social status game: our contradictory longing to be part fo the social group and yet to stand out as an individual. This means that most of our consumption is symbolic. And our desires are mimetic, in that they always involve the desire of someone else. But we can choose how to play the status game; as a culture, as a society, and also as an individual. In a world of abundance, we can focus limitless possibilities on what gives us joy.

Transcript

 Limitless desire

Welcome to cornucopia, the podcast where we examine what it means to live abundantly. My name is Karim Benammar. And in this episode, let's look at limitless desire.

Limitless desire, that sounds quite fascinating. But the real question is: do humans have limitless desire? Because what we're trying to do is trying to understand what drives people to consumption of goods and articles and experiences, and whether that drive for consuming things for producing things for buying things, is in itself limitless. 

Why is this an important question? Well, if you think of the investigation that we're doing into scarcity and abundance, you could see quite quickly that if you have limitless desires, if humans have limitless desires, then we will have never-ending scarcity. And the reasoning is quite simple. If we are never satisfied with what we have, if we always want more, we are always in a situation of scarcity. We always feel scarcity. And not just for the moment, we also realise that we will always feel scarcity in the future. Because let's face it: our desires are limitless now, they cannot be satisfied on principle, they will never be satisfied. So, our desires will be just as limitless in the future. 

This is not just a question of examining whether our desires are in fact limitless. I'm not sure that I, as an individual can say very much about this for other people, maybe not even for myself. But I'm trying to understand, and I have been trying to understand for a couple of decades now: what drives people to consumption? There is a fundamental question at the heart of this debate, which is: why do we consume? I think that if we explore this question, we can come up with some surprising reasons why we consume, and also perhaps with some surprising ways in which we can deal with our consumption, with our need to consume, with our capacity to consume. 

if we take the question of why we consume, and the question about limitless desires, there is a very basic position. And that is to make a distinction between our needs and our wants. Or, sometimes the language is a little bit different, between our needs and our desires. The word “wants” as a noun, as opposed to a verb, is actually a technical term in economics: the things you desire, the things you want to acquire. 

This distinction between needs and desires is a classical one. The idea that, in order to survive, we have a number of basic human needs, and that these are different from our wants or our desires, which can go in all directions, which can be limitless. And this is a basic distinction not just in economics, but also for the people who examine and perhaps criticise consumption. Adam Smith, who is seen by many as one of the fathers of economics, already made this distinction in his work The Wealth of Nations. He asked whether a linen shirt was a basic need or a want, or a desire, a luxury. 

A linen shirt at that time was already a rather sophisticated garment. And he argued that, even though technically you don't need a linen shirt - you can wear all kinds of other clothes to protect you from the cold or to hide your nakedness - that linen shirt is required to show up in society, to have a certain standing, to be taken seriously by your fellow citizens. In order to show up in a city, a linen shirt is actually a basic need. And so, even though he makes the distinction between basic needs and luxuries, he already shows that it's quite tricky what we assign to one and what we assign to the other.

There are other perspectives. Ghandi, for example, said that there is enough in the world for everybody's needs, but not for everybody's greed. And a lot of the scarcity thinkers, or the people that I believe start from a scarcity framework, argue this. The argument would be that if we all just took for our basic needs, then there would be enough for everybody. If we held back on our desires for luxury, then we could all have the basic needs to have a good life.

You can see why this perspective would be attractive. There's a sense of deep fairness, a deep sense of treating every human being in the same way. If we just stick to our basic needs, then there is enough for everybody. We don't have poverty. We don't have rich people either. We don't have luxuries, but we don't need luxuries. And there's a number of systems, such as the communist political system, or communitarian systems, which follow that rule: we share everything equally, everybody has access to what the group produces, and everybody has more or less the same level of wealth and welfare. 

I confess that part of that argument seems very attractive to me. Deep down, I believe that every human being should have access, should have the possibility to have access to the same goods to fulfil their needs. I believe that there's no real reason why there should be enormous differences, especially at the level that we have today, when there is extreme poverty in the world, people who are suffering for lack of the most basic things, when there's also plenty of rich people who, frankly, don't know what to do with all their wealth. There is a deep sense that the system as we have today, and the system as it existed in the past, was very skewed. Whatever system we have invented to distribute the goods that are on this planet, or to allocate the different goods to speak in economic terms, is a system which is out of whack, a system which is quite distorted.

[music]

So, I’m out of breath because I tried to run after what I thought were wolves, in fact they are two boars, still quite spectacular in the mist. Now there's a pale sun hanging in the sky, behind a cloud, it looks more like a moon, really. I think we're heading into the darkest day of the year, the shortest day of the year. So, back to the argument. 

Now, unfortunately, I don't think this works. It doesn't work for practical reasons, but more importantly, it doesn't work because of the psychology of human beings. It doesn't work because of who we are as human beings, what we want out of life, what our experience of being alive is. And if we seek to understand that experience, the experience of being alive, especially the experience of being alive in a society, as a member of a community, or a global community, then I think we can better understand whether our desires are limitless or not, and how we can deal with these desires. 

Now, there's three important points that I'd like to make. And the first is by examining what it means to live in a group, what it means to live in a community. I think there's a tension, a deep tension, fundamentally, for human beings to live in groups, in communities. And the tension is between their individuality, their own person, and the needs of the group, the belonging to the group, the protection of the group, if you will. That tension finds itself in the way that we want to belong to a community. We want to be like the others. But at the same time, we want to stand out from the community, we want to be different, we want to be special, we want to be unique, we want to affirm our own individuality in this community. 

This system, which exists in most groups, is status and status games. So status is the position you have, the position “high” or “low”. And status games is the things that we do to acquire status, or to keep status, or to show our status, and in a way to compare ourselves to others. What is our position or our standing in a group?

As you've probably guessed, one way in which we show status is with possessions: special feathers or colours, or more elaborate clothing than regular people. It's with a bigger house, a bigger place to live, more space. It is with carriages and horses and castles in the past, it is with owning things, it is with the foods that we eat, it is with the experiences that we have, the trips that we take, the travel that we do, it is with the level of education that we have, that we can acquire. It is with cultural capital. There are infinite ways in which the status game is played. And one of the fundamental ones is with possessions, with things, with consumption. 

So, perhaps, to illustrate, think of your school days. Now, if you went to a school where children could choose what clothes to wear, you probably remember that there were different groups. When I grew up, there were people who dressed in a punk way, there were people who dressed in a preppy way, there were people who dressed in a casual way. With the clothing, and the price of their clothing, and the care that they put into their clothing, they signified a number of things: I belong to this group. Within this group, I have this status. And, as opposed to the other people, I also have a different status.

Now, if you went to school where there was a uniform, the uniform is designed precisely so that there's no differences between the students, so that everybody has to wear the same thing, so that this status game can't be played at that level. But you will probably remember that people always seek to wear this uniform in a slightly different way, to loosen the tie, or to have slightly different socks if they're allowed to have them, or to wear their hair in a different way, always with this idea that they want to show their individuality, and at the same time, show their allegiance to a group or to a subgroup. So to recap, there is a deep need that we have as individuals to be part of a group, and yet to stand out from the group, to stand in the group in a certain position. And this deep human need is played out in status and status games, and our consumption of goods.

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Now the second thing to notice, which follows from this first point, is that most of our consumption is symbolic. And what I mean by that is that we use the things we consume to play the status game. And this has some serious consequences, especially for this distinction that we're trying to make between basic needs and luxury goods, between needs and wants, between needs and desires. I think that distinction is untenable: we can't make that distinction. 

And the reason we can't make a sharp distinction is that it's not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. If there was a difference in kind, we could say: these are basic needs, and the rest are luxury needs. But if we look at our consumption, they always contain an element of both. Everything we consume these days, everything we buy, everything we own, is a mix of basic needs and luxuries. And the function of most of that consumption is symbolic. 

To take a simple example, think of the things that you drink. Now, everybody needs to hydrate; if you don't drink, you'll die within a couple of days. In order to hydrate, clean water is sufficient: clean water is a basic need. And therefore, it's such a scandal that so many people on Earth still don't have access to this basic need. But most of us, of course, don't just drink water, we drink all kinds of things: we drink soft drinks, or juices, or tea, or coffee, or beer or wine, or other kinds of drinks. The things we drink serve the basic need purpose of hydrating us, but they also have another function. A function which is pleasant, a function which is joy, a function which is a cultural function, like societies where tea is drunk together, or coffee is drunk in a certain way in a certain place. And it also has a symbolic function: the things that we drink say something about ourselves, about the group that we belong to, the culture that we belong to, the habits that we have.

And apart from this cultural element, there is of course, the whole marketing element. We may drink a certain brand of soft drink, a certain brand of beer, we may drink expensive wine, as opposed to cheap wine. Think of all the branding and all the exclusivity involved in marketing. And so you could have a fluid that ranges from much less than $1 cent a litre if we're talking about clean water, to hundreds or 1000s of dollars for a litre if we're talking about a special wine or a special liquor. So that's an enormous price difference where something is worth or is sold at 100,000 times the price of something else, where one litre of fluid is worth or sold at 100,000 times the price of the other.

If you look at your own consumption of fluids, what is it that you drink every day? What are the different drinks that you drink? How do you purchase them? Are they brands, are they not brands? Do you drink them for cultural reasons, or for reasons of taste, or to be part of a group? They would fall somewhere in between: part of the fluids you drink still have to do with hydration. But that's only a small part. The largest part of the price and the effort in what we drink is symbolic, either culturally symbolic, but also symbolic in terms of the group and the community: establishing your individuality, while at the same time establishing your allegiance to the group. You want to belong to a specific group, and at the same time, you want to stand out. 

Now think of all the other things that you own: cars are a good example. If the purpose of a car, the utility of the car, the need of a car was transport, then any car would do. Something with more or less four wheels, a place to sit, an engine to push it forward, some safety features and we could just make it as simple, as light, and as cheap as possible. And then we could have private transport to go from point A to point B. And of course, anybody who knows anything about cars realises that's not what the car industry is at all. There are so many different models and makes of cars. The development of the car has always been about status, about showing that you could afford one, or two, that you could afford a bigger one, or a more expensive one, or a more luxurious car. The status, the achievement that you have in life, in some societies is measured by the price of the car that's in your driveway. And this is not just on an individual level: we could design very light cars, which don't consume a lot of energy or petrol. But the trend, in fact, is in the opposite direction, to have ever more heavier vehicles, where everybody is driving a form of modified truck. And that seems to me quite a silly status game of size and weight.

[music]

Which brings us to my third point, which is that our consumption and our status games are mediated by a third person. What do we mean by “mediated by a third person”? This is a slightly tricky theory called mimetic desire. It comes from the French thinker René Girard. Mimetic desire argues that there is not just a relationship between an individual and an object, but between an individual, the object and a third person. 

Think about the car that you own, or a piece of clothing that you own. You could argue that the relationship is between you and a certain kind of shirt: you like this shirt, or you like this particular pair of jeans, and that's why you're wearing it. But imagine that you were living on a deserted island, or that you were in a form of complete lockdown, and you didn't see anybody else, or you just saw them through a webcam, which was just the upper part of your body, to find a much more common example, these days. Now, nobody could see what you're wearing as trousers, nobody could see that you wearing these special jeans, which had a certain design or a certain colour, or a certain special tear in them or whatever. What would be the point? I don't think you would enjoy these jeans if nobody could look at them, if nobody could see them. 

The idea of mimetic desire is that what is reflected in the eyes of the other, when the other person, the third person, looks at our trousers, then we get the satisfaction. When they desire the jeans that we're wearing, the jeans have value for us. When other people see us driving in our spectacular car, then we enjoy driving this car. If we had a fantastic luxury car, but we drove it in a world without people, what would be the point? You couldn't impress anybody with a car like that. You couldn't make a statement with a car like that. You couldn't affirm your status because there'd be nobody to affirm your status to. Perhaps a simpler way to put it would be to say that in order to affirm status, you need other people. And in fact, the other people are the main reason, and perhaps even the only reason, the only way that you can affirm your status. Without other people, status is meaningless. 

Now, this theory of mimetic desire is fascinating. And when you first hear it, it might seem a little bit strange. And I'm actually going to do a separate episode just about mimetic desire. But for now, all we need to understand is that we can't do things in isolation. It's not just about us and objects. It's about us and other people, and the objects that we consume. 

Let's recap our three points, and then come back to our initial question about limitless desires. The first point is that because we live in groups and communities, we have status and we play status games. Some of those status games are played with consumption. There are actually other ways to play status games, such as titles, positions, etc., but we'll talk about it some other time. The second point is that when we look at the consumption, the things that we consume, we can't make a distinction between basic needs and luxuries, because it's not a distinction in kind. It's a distinction in degree. Most things we consume, like food, clothing, shelter, transport, experiences, are both basic needs and to a certain extent luxuries. Most of our assumption is, to a large extent, symbolic. It has a symbolic function: it shows who we are, where we stand. It's part of our identity. It's part of what we say about ourselves. It's part of how we look at ourselves, and how we want other people to look at us. Which brings us to the third point, which is that we need other people to make sense of our status. We can only play the status game and the consumption game and the symbolic consumption game, when there's other people involved. We can't establish status just with ourselves and with an object. Now all of this, of course, is pretty theoretical. But I hope that by the examples that I've given you, you have a sense of how this is working in your own life.

[music]

Now let's return to the question of whether desires: the desire for luxury goods, the desire for consumption, is limitless or not. I think the answer is: not necessarily. They don't have to be. Because when we examine our desires, specifically our desires for consumption and goods, we realise that they are desires for status. They are moves in a status game: a game which is cultural, which is different at different times in history, which uses the symbolic value of consumption in order to play a game. And this game, this social status game that we play through consumption, is a game that we can play in lots of different ways. 

The game itself, I think, is limitless. We want and we need to make sense of our standing in a group, in a community. We are going to keep playing this game. The game doesn't end because it's part of our living in groups as individuals, it's a deep part of the human condition. But we do have a lot of choice and a lot of freedom in the way in which we play that game. We don't have to play it in a certain way, we don't have to play it the way we have played it over the last decades, over the last centuries. We can choose and decide to play it in a different way. We can choose communally to play it in a different way, but we can also choose individually to play differently. Once we understand that the consumption of goods is largely symbolic, and largely serves to play the status game, we can make different choices.

For example, at the moment, we rank the richest people on the planet. The game is about owning as much as possible, owning the biggest or the best or the most exclusive product, it's focused on owning shiny things, on bling, whether you're talking about yachts, or watches ,or mansions, or specific clothing. But that is just a choice. You can also imagine that status would be acquired, and that the status game would be played very differently. Perhaps we would make a list of the people who give most of their money away. These are the most generous people in the world, and it is these people who we attribute certain qualities to. Perhaps we would give status to people who do interesting things with their lives, to people who have contributed to humanity. 

Taking the price of something, in terms of a dollar amount, is in fact a rather lazy way to play a status game. It's not a very imaginative way. It's very straightforward, somewhat uninteresting, and actually also quite a sad way to play the status game. Status is something which is conferred by the group, by the society, by global humanity onto people. It's not something that the people can decide for themselves. It is the group, it is the society that confers status on a specific type of behaviour, or ownership. And it is the other, it is society, it is the global community, it is us who can make different choices about what we confer status to. For this, of course, we would need a shift in culture. We can contribute to this shift in culture. We're only one player in this game, which we're playing with thousands, with millions, even billions of people. 

How does it affect your own life now? What can you do in your own life? Well I think if you realise that your own possessions, the things you buy, the things you consume are, to a large extent, symbolic. If you look at the things you own, the things you want, the things you desire, the things that you're upset or sad that you don't have, the things that you envy other people for having while you don't have them. Look at all of these things and ask yourself: how much do I want these? And how much do I want them because they're part of the status game that I'm playing? How do they help me get my position in the world? How do they help me feel part of a specific group that I want to be part of, and also stand out enough so that I have a sense of my own individuality, of my own uniqueness? 

Do this with the things you already own, but also with the things that you want to own in the future, or acquire in the future, with your desires. Perhaps, at the moment, you have limitless desires: you would like to have this and that, and you think you're never going to acquire all of it, unless you win the lottery. So you live in this sense of scarcity. You can always look at somebody who's richer than you, or a lot richer than you. There are endless TV programmes about the lifestyle of the rich and famous. And you can feel miserable. 

But once you see this mechanism of how owning things is related to status games, you can also change it. What is the status that you need in a certain group? What is the group that you want to acquire status in? Once you understand the mechanism at work here, the mechanism that links your consumption, your desires, your feelings of inadequacy, or your feelings of envy, or your feelings of belonging and not belonging to the group, you can change that dynamic. What is it that you want from the group? Would you like to belong to a different group? Would you like to start your own group?

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What does it matter what people think about the way you dress, the kind of car you own, where you live, what you possess, or the type of holidays you go on? This is a very reactive approach, where we let ourselves be defined by other people. We care what other people think about us, we care for their judgments about how we look, what we own, how we behave, and so on. At the end of the day, you're also an individual, you're the only one who has access to your experience of being alive. You have preferences, you have things that give you joy, you have things that you want to do, you have things that you want to try out. You know what makes you happy. And if you don't quite know what makes you happy, then you can find out what makes you happy. Deep down, you know what makes you happy. And when you know that, you know which possessions you need, which experiences you need, what you need to buy, but also, you know what you don't need to buy, what is irrelevant, what is not going to add any joy to your life, which you're only really doing for other people, which you're only doing because of a status game. You have control over that status game, so you have control over your desires. 

I think you'll find that if you follow your desires, some of these will involve possessions, and objects, and experiences. But I think you will find that they are not necessarily limitless. The desires are only really limitless when they're used in an endless game of status, when we're always competing against everybody else, and everybody always tries to have more than everybody else. That is an endless game. If we're playing that game, then yes, our desires, individually, communally, globally, are limitless. And in that sense, we're living in a world of scarcity. And that scarcity will never end. But we don't have to play that game. We're already surrounded by objects. We have access to an enormous amount of goods. We're living in an age of plenty, in an age of abundance. 

The feeling of abundance is you have more than you will ever need. You only have one life, and there's a limited number of things you can do in a single lifetime. You have all the resources to allow you to do that. Life then is not a game, or a battle to get more, to get more than your neighbour, more than the richest people on Earth. It's a different game. It's a game of enjoying your life. It's a game of finding a path in your life where you do the things that matter to you, and you decide what you need in order to achieve that. What you need from all the things that we've produced, and all the abundance that is on offer. You have so much more than you need. What you need to do is to choose from all this abundance, and decide what you need in order to achieve what you want to achieve, in order to live the way you want to live, in order to live the life that you want to live. That's a very different game. It's a very different task. In a world of scarcity, if you define status games as limitless desires, you will be fighting forever, and it will never stop, and you will never win. In a world of abundance, you're playing a different game, a game where everybody can win: it's not a zero-sum game. That game is much more individual. It is much more about the question of what you want to do with your life. 

In conclusion: are human desires limitless? Well, they are if we play a certain status game, if we decide that this is the only game worth playing, but they need not be, and they certainly won't be if we decide to play a different status game, if we realise there's been a shift to abundance and the game has changed. Thank you for listening. Good luck with applying some of these ideas in your own life, in your own decisions, and hope to see you on the next episode of Cornucopia.