What Shapes Our Desires?
Luke Burgis Discusses the Power of Fiction, Health of the Humanities, Mimetic Desire, the Woke/Anti-Woke Binary, and the Three City Problem
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure
is the only person to have graduated from both NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.I first encountered him through his book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which I read and reviewed in 2022. It was one of my top reads for the year. Then again, I was late to the party.
Based on the insights of philosopher René Girard, Wanting came out in 2021 to significant acclaim. Financial Times named it their business book of the month. Bloomberg listed it among the “52 New Books That Top Business Leaders Are Recommending.” Adam Grant called it “spell-binding,” and Andrew Meltzoff called it “revelatory.” It’s now been translated into two dozen languages.
Burgis is a serial entrepreneur and currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Clinical Professor of Business at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at The Catholic University of America. Last year he hosted the first NOVITĀTE Conference, which drew leaders from academia, science, religion, and business; Burgis will be folding it into an exciting new project this fall—details below.
He’s written for Wired, New Atlantis, City Journal, Quillette, among other publications, and hosts his own popular newsletter here on Substack. He’s coauthor with Joshua Miller of Unrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person. His next book, The One in the Ninety-Nine, comes out in 2025; I won’t be late for that one.
In this conversation, Burgis and I discuss the power of fiction, the health of the humanities, mimetic desire, the woke/anti-woke binary, and what he calls the Three City Problem.
You used literature to help reset your life after founding—and eventually walking away from—three businesses during your twenties. How did that work? Describe that experience.
I had almost exclusively read nonfiction for the duration of my early startup days—a dash of economics and finance books, a pinch of current events and cultural commentary stuff I plucked off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, and a large handful of hustle-culture stuff. At the same time, I had a creative outlet I was trying to exercise, but the creative spirit wasn’t finding expression in my work.
There’s a myth of The Entrepreneur as Creator; in reality, it can really narrow your creative outlets given how busy you typically are with operations—even if the company you start has a creative focus. I suppose it depends on what kind of creating we’re talking about. In my case, the operational grind was just soul-crushing.
I had a series of strange things happen to me which pulled me out of the pop psychology and nonfiction bestseller sections at B&N. I am really not trying to knock all of those books. They just weren’t the right books for me in that period of my life; they were not the books that were going to get me to the next stage in my development.
One night, I had a bit of an Augustinian tolle lege (“take up and read”) moment as I stared at an old family heirloom Bible on my bookshelf. I remember thinking to myself something along these lines: “Luke, you can cite the latest economic analysis at cocktail parties and have read Jim Collins’s Good to Great on leadership development. You know the cost of everything but the value of nothing, and you don’t even know some of the most fundamental stories of Western civilization (contained in the Bible). How about not reading any other books until you read the Bible?” It seemed like a reasonable proposition to me. I convinced myself.
On top of that, I had just bought a house in Las Vegas. My neighbor saw me working in the front yard one day doing some landscaping and struck up a conversation with me. He asked me if I had a good church to go to the area. That’s a weird thing to have someone ask you in Vegas, unless you’re getting married by Elvis on the Strip or something. So these things happened around the same time—within the same week—and led me down a pathway to rediscovering the Bible as literature. The experience of the liturgy and the scripture-reading went hand-in-hand for me; I don’t know if one would’ve been as effective without the other.
“Fiction fired my imagination—especially my moral imagination. . . .”
Luke Burgis
Around the same time, I started reading fiction. Nothing fancy. No Dostoevsky at that time, just some random novels I found on my bookshelves—mostly books my parents had gifted me from their collection some years ago to fill the bookshelves I’d installed in my home but didn’t have enough books to fill.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was one of them. Incidentally, I had picked this book up off my mom’s nightstand when I was like five and tried to read it, and at that moment I despaired of ever being able to read, ever, in my entire life. I was already the last kid in my class at reading, way behind.
Anyway, the fiction fired my imagination—especially my moral imagination—and this process of engaging with the Great Books, which I would eventually start working through, would feed my desire to learn more about human nature and myself.
What books helped you most and what role do they play in your life now? Some books are right for a season; others draw us back again and again.
Alexandr Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo was the first work of fiction that ever captured my imagination. I first read it in high school—one of the few books that broke through to me in those troubled years of my life when I disdained all school and didn’t read a single work of Shakespeare in my English Lit class. It wasn’t until years later when I read René Girard’s Theater of Envy, that my interest in the Bard was rekindled.
For whatever reason, The Count of Monte Cristo broke through for me. I think it was because it was a story of personal transformation. That is a topic that still fascinates me. My next book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is largely about that. Why do some people seem to have the capacity for change, while others do not?
It took me a while before I moved on to other classics like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tolkien, Cervantes, and C.S. Lewis. The latter two, Cervantes and Lewis, wrote two books that I come back to constantly. I think Don Quixote is the greatest book ever written—not just for its time (it was the first “modern” novel), but ever. It not only makes me laugh every time I read it, but I also find new layers of meaning to the stories nearly every time. Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of my favorite philosophers, had his family read it to him on his deathbed. It was one of his final requests. It made him laugh, but also filled him with joy. It’s like that for me.
“We commune with the things we read. . . . Powerful literature shapes our desires through the characters, even if they’re fictional.”
—Luke Burgis
C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces changed my life, and I come back to the story annually. I wrote a long essay about it in seminary. If I can ever find it, I’ll publish it.
Steinbeck’s East of Eden is the book that I tell the most people to read. It happens to be very Girardian, but that’s not at all why I like it. The writing is beautiful; the story is powerful. And it grapples with a fundamental question: timshel.
I was never big into fantasy, but an encounter with the Lord of the Rings films (yes, it was that late) led me back to the books. That is what introduced me into fantasy and the idea of world-building, which I then became fascinated with. This is the point in my life when I wept for my miserable childhood education. Why had nobody made me read those books? I was mad at adults. I was mad at my parents. I didn’t know what I didn’t know as a ten-year-old kid, but somebody else did.
When I was a kid, I went through my life carrying on a world-building effort in my head for years—there was continuity in the world-building, too, meaning I had made up a land and different creatures and types of people who competed in an epic race with one another. After I’d constructed one character or part of the race, I’d wake up the next day and begin the next. I never forgot where I left off. I carried on this imaginative project in my head for about three straight years, before the age of 10. I was too young, or maybe simply not confident enough to write it all down. But I had constructed one, and I had probably spend well over 1,000 hours doing so. So when I read LOTR, I immediately thought: I love being immersed in a new world. But also: damn, I lost the world I created.
“Why had nobody made me read those books? I was mad at adults. I was mad at my parents. I didn’t know what I didn’t know as a ten-year-old kid, but somebody else did.”
—Luke Burgis
I’ve read a great deal of nonfiction. Probably too much (relative to fiction). Obviously, Girard’s work has impacted my thinking greatly. The nonfiction that I come back to the most, though, are classic philosophical and theological texts, but especially what I would call texts for “spiritual reading,” which engage the heart equally as much if not more than the intellect, like Augustine’s Confessions.
What three novels have enriched your thinking the most over the years?
Who knows? But assuming my gut reaction is somewhat accurate: Don Quixote (Cervantes), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), East of Eden (Steinbeck). I think we often don’t know what has been most formative in our own lives, sometimes until the very end.
Here’s a tweet of yours that I think, barring specifics, every reader here can probably appreciate.
“I read Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Psychopolitics’ front to back on a beach in Tulum, Mexico, Christmas 2022,” you said. “I got so stimulated I was running my hand through my non-existent hair, walking up and down the beach looking for someone, a single soul, to talk to about it.”
Now, I know nothing about that book, but I know everything about that experience. I just want to hear you riff on having your mind engaged by a book in that way.
Man, books like that are really hard for me to read. Every sentence seems pregnant with meaning. There is no fluff. I feel like I want to put the book down and think for an hour after every paragraph, sometimes after every sentence, or I get up and start pacing.
I get massively overstimulated—intellectually and emotionally—by some books. Pretty hard to finish that way! I basically can’t read them. I can only handle so much in one sitting, kind of like having to pace yourself while you’re drinking or something; I get too intoxicated by the words and by the ideas.
In the case of that book: We were on vacation, so I was mindful not to start bugging my wife Claire to engage me in conversation about relatively dense philosophical ideas. I wanted to let her chill. I suppose that situation is what X (Twitter) is for, right? (Hence my tweet.)
I was fishing! On that beach, I was seriously looking around hoping someone else was reading the same book. But what are the odds of that? I’m a total weirdo, and nobody reads a book like that on the beaches of Tulum. The thing is: I believe in miracles.
“I feel like I want to put the book down and think for an hour after every paragraph, sometimes after every sentence, or I get up and start pacing.”
—Luke Burgis
My first exposure to your work comes from your stellar book Wanting, which I read and reviewed in 2022. It fundamentally involves how our desires shape our lives—and the forces that shape those desires. Let’s get specific for a moment: How can literature shape our desires, both positively and negatively?
First of all: Thank you for the kind words. That was a difficult book to write, because most of the people who heard about the idea told me I was crazy (you’re writing about an obscure philosopher?). And then it came out in 2021 and ended up selling a lot of copies and getting translated into twenty-three languages.
Nobody had ever written a popular version of his ideas before, at least that reached that big of an audience. And then over the past year some major writers have wondered and written stuff like: “There has been this mysterious resurgence of interest in Girard’s work since 2021. . . .” It’s very funny because one of the central points in the book is the idea of the Romantic Lie: that desires just magically “appear,” without any causality.
I believe we commune with the things we read, to greater or lesser degrees, depending on how we engaged with the work. Powerful literature shapes our desires through the characters, even if they’re fictional. I read Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and immediately my desire to be persistent in my long-distance relationship was kindled, as were many good and noble desires based on the heroic sanctity of one of the major characters, Padre Cristoforo.
Literature shapes our moral imaginations, for better or worse. I think everyone knows that. This is why there is such adamant debate about the kind of content which appears in children’s books. We’re ultimately having a conversation about the formation of desires. I’m not against big-time censorship of certain books for young children. When you’re an adult, you can read what you want. When you’re a child, you deserve to have content curated by people who love you so that you’re not consuming things that will harm you.
And if desire is truly mimetic, or imitative, then it doesn’t matter whether the model of desire is a friend or a fictional character. Sometimes a fictional character can affect our desires even more than a person we know in real life. Don Quixote is the story of how the imagination is formed in these ways: the entire story starts with Quixote reading an account of the fictional account of the knight Amadís of Gaul, and that starts the errant knight on his wild journey.
We are all him. I am like him.
If you were creating a program for that sort of positive effect, how would you do it? What would such a program comprise?
I suppose we could write a Black Mirror episode about the negative version of that story. For the positive version, I am attempting to build something like this in a project I’m announcing this fall (September 2024) called Cluny.
I can’t say too much, but I can say this: It involves more contemplation and less content; incarnational experiences in addition to screens; having the courage to reimagine form (for instance: I don’t think we need many more conferences featuring talking heads as the central form); and in general, using art and literature and the great beauty of our spiritual traditions help re-enchant the world one encounter at a time. (By the way, I’m hiring. One would have to live in the Washington, DC, area or be willing to move there to apply.)
“The world needs more mystagogues—those who know how to lead others into mystery.”
—Luke Burgis
There’s a treasure trove of wonderful literature and art and practices (like star gazing) that have existed for hundreds of years, and those traditions can be drawn upon. I think we just need to learn to do mystagogy a bit better, and the world needs more mystagogues—those who know how to lead others into mystery. That’s the crux of the project.
You’ve recently written here on Substack about the coming bull market in humanities. First, I find it interesting that you chose a financial metaphor for the point. Second, explain your optimism.
The financial metaphor was me being tongue-in-cheek. I also used an AI-generated image as the hero image. Some people didn’t get the joke. I think that, because my writing is pretty serious overall, when I drop those things in people aren’t sure. I have this problem with my wife, Claire, too!
My optimism stems from a general vibe shift that I’m seeing: people for several years now, perhaps from absolute exhaustion from the content juggernaut, have been turning toward the arts and the humanities and music to enrich their lives. As one piece of evidence, just look at how popular
’s work is—and it’s only growing.1
I think people have a tacit awareness of the things that AI is going to replace, and they are gravitating toward those things which can’t be replaced. People are remarkably perceptive.
One might argue: “Well, humanities majors in universities are really struggling.” Yes, but this revolution is going to happen outside of the universities. I’ve also seen the response to my own work, which has been more positive than I could have imagined. People need their desires awakened, including me. I am out here trying to put myself in front of the right artistic trains so that I can get run over by them. We want to be fully alive. There are just a lot of train tracks to choose from.
“People need their desires awakened, including me.”
—Luke Burgis
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has recently said AI favors language people over math people. Can you imagine a way in which AI serves—instead of undermines—the humanities? What would that be?
When he says AI favors language people, he means that it will not threaten the language skills as much as the math skills. (The latter AI seems to be encroaching on.) I always come back to the language of supplements versus substitutes, which I learned from my friend Dr. Josh Mitchell. Is AI a supplement or a substitute? I think it’s a supplement that we risk turning into a substitute. And it is certainly a substitute, and should be, for certain things.
But sure, I can think of a lot of ways that AI can aid and assist the humanities. I’m thinking, just off the top of my head, on the scholarly side: having an AI comb through a large corpus of someone’s work to do pattern recognition that would take weeks or months or years for a person or team of people to do. The AI can do that stuff in a matter of seconds. I could upload all of Shakespeare’s corpus to Claude AI and ask it to analyze for me any patterns in the way he portrays his characters wanting, and I bet that would yield some fascinating insights. (Okay, actually, I’m going to do that.)
On the creation side, I think of the massive benefits of AI listening to my audio notes. I let my imagination run wild when I go on walks. AI then transcribes these notes perfectly for me and pulls out major themes. This helps me organize my thoughts, and ultimately aids my writing. I could go on and on, but I am generally a fan of AI if it is used prudently. (That, of course, is the rub: who among us is truly using technology prudently?)
What do you say to conservatives concerned with the state of universities who think “humanities” is code for woke?
I say that there’s a lot of truth to the long-term degradation of humanities programs within universities, but I don’t understand how a reactionary and reductionist “woke” label being put on absolutely all of it solves anything. I know plenty of good people who work in the humanities at universities, including my own. I acknowledge the concerns, but we can do better than that. Besides, when I am referring to the humanities, I am no way limiting them to the universities. A lot of this movement will happen outside of them.
I think it’s a symptom of our time to throw around “woke” as an epithet at everything we are the least bit suspicious of. In some ways this behavior is a kind of mimetic double to forms of this that originate on the political left (being quick to label someone “racist”). I’m just so exhausted by the woke/anti-woke binary. It’s killing creativity. It’s killing real solutions.
The greatest tragedy about the word “woke” is that being woke can and should be a positive thing, in the sense of “alert,” or in the sense of having our greatest desires awakened. I lament the fact that the word has been hijacked to serve some political program.
“I’m just so exhausted by the woke/anti-woke binary. It’s killing creativity. It’s killing real solutions.”
—Luke Burgis
Describe what you call the Three City Problem.
I lay out the core problem here, in Wired magazine. The crux of it is this: I believe that Athens (the metaphorical city representing Reason and Science), Jerusalem (the metaphorical city representing religious wisdom and faith), and Silicon Valley (the metaphorical city representing technological innovation, often in utilitarian terms driven by money and power) are in a mimetic rivalry with one another.
People who are formed exclusively or predominantly in one of these three cities (this goes back to the formation of the moral imagination above) have different metaphysical commitments than the others, which makes conversation extraordinarily difficult. I believe in defining the problem well first before we can think about solutions. Project Cluny, which I alluded to earlier in the interview, will attempt to sit at the nexus of these three cities.
When I think of the philosophy of Silicon Valley—some of which, let me stress, I applaud—my mind easily jumps to people like Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruists who say books are a waste of time. Where does this faux intellectual anti-intellectualism come from?
I think it comes from having your brain formed entirely in Silicon Valley. It is exactly what I’m talking about with the Three City Problem. Taken to an extreme, it results in an extraordinarily utilitarian mindset.
At the same time, I think people like SBF are playing a totally different game: I don’t know if he believes half of the stuff he says, or writes. We live in a world now where people will simply say things to maximize engagement. I think that’s what SBF did. But that, too, is a tactic of Silicon Valley. It is an algorithmic spirituality.
I once overheard one of the biggest personalities on X say, at a cocktail reception I happened to be at: “You have to be willing to appear stupid, or even racist or bigoted, to other people if that means maximizing engagement. It doesn’t mean that you are. Stop needing to think about yourself as a good person.”
“We live in a world now where people will simply say things to maximize engagement. . . . It is an algorithmic spirituality.”
—Luke Burgis
What’s a good, concise reading list to understand the effect of the Three Cities?
The Wired article is the best place to start. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary would be next. Danielou’s Prayer as a Political Problem is stellar. And I think Taleb’s Anti-Fragile has a lot to say about the issue, too, since people who are citizens of only one city, or who have only had exposure to citizens of one city, are going to be more fragile than those formed in all three.
Final question: You can invite any three authors for a lengthy meal. Neither time period nor language is an obstacle. Who do you pick, why, and how does the conversation go?
I’ll put a constraint on myself and restrict this exercise to living authors, so I can dare to hope this will someday become a reality. Stephen Wolfram (Athens), Charles Taylor (Jerusalem), and Paul Graham (Silicon Valley).
How do I think that goes? Probably painful and somewhat awkward, but we’ll just keep drinking wine and see if anything changes. I believe in breakthroughs. I believe in transformation.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share it with your friends.
Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. It’s free, and I’ll send you my top-fifteen quotes about books and reading. Thanks again!
As an example,
recently published his twelve-month crash course on the humanities. Is the 250-pages-a-week reading list a problem? It doesn’t appear to curb anyone’s interest. The post has been hugely popular.