In an age of influencers and online echo chambers, the French literary theorist and anthropologist René Girard (1923-2015) feels strikingly relevant.

His theory of “mimetic desire” begins from an uncomfortable claim: our desires aren’t really our own. We want what we want because we see others wanting it. We like to think of ourselves as unique, self-directed individuals. But even that idea of uniqueness, Girard argues, is borrowed from others. This is an uncomfortable topic. We feel quite protective over our desires, which seem to define who we are: our distinct, individual identity. Girard calls this the “formidable lie” of individualism: the individualist is unwittingly copying the very idea of individuality from some model.

The world isn’t short of models for the aspiring individualist. Not so long ago, the Marlboro Man was a powerful cultural archetype: he ruggedly lived by his own rules and forged his own way in the wild frontier. He inspired countless young men, and some young women, to go their own way. Conveniently for Marlboro shareholders, their own way happened to involve smoking Marlboros – individualism is always more derivative than it first appears. Advertisers have known about this for a long time. By failing to be honest with ourselves about it, we make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation.

But being honest about it shatters our pretensions. Girard’s theory is that not just desire but identity is always borrowed. The reason our desires are mimetic is that our identity is: we derive our very idea of what we are from others. Admitting this hurts; if even my identity is not truly mine, then what is?

These days, we can hide our mimesis in the complexity of our world. What seems quaint about the Marlboro Man today (other than the association of smoking with health and vigour) is his universality. Everyone recognised the Marlboro Man. Today our mimetic models swim in a teeming crowd of online influencers. Unlike the Marlboro Man, who sold a cigarette along with an image, today’s influencers often sell the very idea of influence. Watching someone review a new moisturiser doesn’t just tempt us to buy the product – it tempts us to film our own review, to build our own following. Influencers don’t just create consumers; they create more influencers. Each one spawns micro-influencers, who spawn nano-influencers, in a kind of mimetic chain reaction that spirals endlessly downward.

It probably goes without saying that this is a recipe for endless frustration. If I want to be an influencer, I want to influence others. But these others then want to be influencers themselves. Influencers by definition need “influencees”, but everybody wants to be the influencers, not the influencees. I create content to be received by others, who turn out to be too busy creating content of their own to attend to mine in any detail. Everyone is making announcements at the same time; we are all talking at the same time on the conference call from hell.

Girard is said to be influential in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, was mentored by him at Stanford. Some have suggested that his ideas inspired the creation of our social media technologies. If so, this is a bit like using Freud as a handbook for repression. Girard’s work is intended to help us recognise and escape from the chaotic and dangerous dynamics of mimesis, not to use as a way of making money.

Thiel’s book, From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, doesn’t instruct anyone to exploit mimesis. It takes on Girard’s warnings about it. But Thiel’s remedy is that entrepreneurial heroes should simply lift themselves above mimesis. They must stop imitating and create themselves as something brand new. As I read him, Girard would reject this as pure fantasy: we imitate precisely because we can’t simply create ourselves out of nothing. We find identities in others because we can’t create them out of nothing. Indeed, Thiel’s title, Zero to One, is upfront about promising a way to make something out of nothing; it wears its impossibility on its sleeve.

What we can actually do is address the impulse that drives us towards mimesis in the first place. This is our drive to possess a definite identity – to have a clear and confident sense of what we are. We should try to resist that impulse. But this message, which I find in Girard, leads to a lot of confusion. People ask me: “Are you telling me that I’m not Australian? Not a man? Not a Christian? Not gay? Not a parent?” etc. My reply is that identity isn’t just a set of characteristics. It is these, plus a sense that they define you.

Resisting the pull of mimesis, by resisting the pull of identity, doesn’t mean ceasing to be any of the things you are. It means resisting the impulse to define yourself too rigidly. If you’re always defining yourself by your occupation, religion, ethnicity, gender, class, political alignment, etc., then you take on the task of specifying precisely what it means to be someone of that occupation, religion, etc. To answer this, you’ll start looking for exemplary versions of the identity in question. Then you’ll be sucked right into the game of mimesis and ripe for exploitation by marketers, cult leaders and political opportunists.

Girard’s point is not that we should abandon identity, but that we should hold it more lightly. The tighter we grip it, the more we slip into rivalry – forever comparing ourselves with others, forever primed for manipulation. But when identity is held loosely, we can meet others as they are: not as models to copy or rivals to defeat, but as companions in a complex, contradictory human tapestry. What we learn from one another is not who to be, but that there is always more to everyone — including ourselves — than we can ever fully know.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.