Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[7Wannabe5]

If this be true, why 7 not be 5 yet?

[Stasher]

Hard for me to engage in these conversations but I can certainly dumb it down with my personal feeling/example from real life for what you just shared J&G. I race/ride a lot and very wired into the local mountainbike/gravelbike/bikepacking community. From what friends are doing, what the local bike shops are showing, what is happening at the races and of course wathcing elites on youtube etc form a serious dose of influence on my decisions. 100% legit it is the hardest part of discretionary spending I try to resist as my bikes cost a lot and I want to ride them for years without upgrading them or adding unnecessary trick new parts. I could justify as this is my recreation/health/wellbeing investment wrapped up in one budget line item but that would just be finding a way to enable excess consumerism.

If we assume that this theory of mimetic desire is correct, that all desire is socially constructed, then, I suggest, that identity is the product of iterative mimetic desire.

Here's how I think it works: We learn what to assign value to and desire from our families and peers as well as our cultural heroes and role models. When we see them desire something, we assess it as having value and imitate that desire*. At this point, it enters our internal reward and emotional system.

[Lemur]

Interesting @J+G

If mimetic desire is true, then it supports why social conformity appears to be a mostly built-in human feature. Yes, these are certainly psychological needs for love & belonging but these needs could also even be based in physiological and security needs. Standing out too much, and being different, can get you socially outcasted at best or even killed in some cases at worst. So it stands to reason why its easier to rationalize an identity that doesn't drift too far off from the culture around you. Seems to me most people socially conform without too much of a second thought but given that roughly 15-20% of the population is estimated to be neurodivergent....this may be a cause of why neurodivergent people learn to strategically mask as they're simply outnumbered.

I suppose some good news is that standing out, having original thoughts, and proposing "radical" ideas is much more acceptable today then it was in years past, but humans are still going to human.

[theanimal]

If this be true, why 7 not be 5 yet?

Mimetic desire does not mean that one realizes or achieves all of their desires. It’s more of a means of explaining where desires come from and what can happen sociologically when we act upon them. So in your case, it would explain why you want to be 5, or why some tech bro wants to be the next Zuck, or why many on the forum want to be like Jacob. But wanting alone does not necessarily lead to doing or even fulfilling those desires.

[Jean]

Also, their is still something that need to decide who to mimic.

[jacob]

From a needs perspective, this idea implies that all non-physiological needs are social. We first form desires by seeing what others desire and imitating them.

To put this in a bit of context, for

Kegan1 - our desires are reflexive and driven by physiological needs like hunger, thirst, fear, ...
Kegan2 - our desires are impulsive and based on whatever idea just popped into our head or caught our attention, ...
Kegan3 - our desires are the desires of our group; we follow the vibe. The value of a decision is ultimately judged by others (ultimately the most popular person in the group) and we try to follow that.

(This covers about 70% of adult human beings.)

All these stages are not yet aware of how increasingly complex mimetic effects influence what they want. Mimetics is still the water they swim in.

However, the idea that "needs are 100% socially constructed" is too simplistic to explain why people demonstrate different levels of enthusiasm for satisfying these needs despite living in the same social soup. It's almost as if they value those socially inspired needs differently. Why is that?

One popular explanation is "individual history" (lived experience, childhood, trauma,...) and another more theoretical explanation is that people have different innate temperaments so that a given "mimetic desire" is rewarded differently. I prefer general theory over personal narratives, so I'll go with that.

Temperament explains why individuals in a group don't find the same memetic [socially induced] desire equally rewarding. Depending on their ability to imagine other desires (level of intelligence) or their experience/exposure with other social groups whose mimetics they find more rewarding, they enter a level of tension that can play out both internally and externally.

This in turn explains why social groups can fracture and realign. In particular, it explains which kind of individuals are most likely to do this. It also explains how "mimetic desire" is subject to evolutionary pressure in terms value transmission.

[7Wannabe5]

So in your case, it would explain why you want to be 5

Actually, that was mostly a misunderstanding on my part. A 5 is usually either an INTJ or an INTP, and I'm already pretty close to being an INTP, because virtually balanced in E/I. So, if I actually wanted to make/earn more money/GTD, I would have to move my P towards J, but I don't want to do that directly, because ENTJ and ENTP =totally different world-view, also I will simply never be able to muster up that much primary Te BDE. What I actually want to do is move more towards ENFP, flipping out secondary Ti for secondary Fi and then tertiary Fe for tertiary Te. IOW, I now wannabe more like Doechii rather than more like Jacob. However, this is obviously all more intellectualized than simple mimetic desire.