Girard is the anthropological philosopher and communications theorist par excellence.
He spent his considerable career laser-focused on the core of human condition, on the very essence of what makes us human. Why is it that we want what we want?
Want does not follow logic or reason. Desire is not what we think it is. Girard saw that our choice of consumption is not determined by the object itself, as we normally believe, but by the person we wish to imitate who happens to be using the object.
We want to imitate the person, the model. So we want what they want. We want it because they want it.
We watch, learn and take action by copying others. And the most important thing we learn from others? Desire.
Girard understands something critical about desire. So did Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. And Kanye West and Donald Trump.
Once we see it we’ll never see the world in the same way again.