The Raven Foundation

I have gotten a reputation in my family as a re-gifter. I accidently gave some monogrammed hand towels back to my daughter and a snowman appetizer dish to my daughter-in-law in two memorable senior moments. Luckily, they both laughed heartily at my mistake and thought I was adorable rather than tragically stupid. Doesn’t everyone know you are not supposed to re-gift to the giver but to someone else? I tried to soften my mistake by protesting that this didn’t mean I didn’t want or like their gifts – I liked their gifts so much, in fact, that I thought they would make great gifts for them! They weren’t convinced but at least I tried.

I mention this because I want to talk a little bit about the things we want and what that says about who we are. It’s the perfect time of year for it. We just got through December when everyone is asking each other, “What do you want for Christmas?” and we are in the middle of January when we are all asking ourselves, “What self-improvement resolution should I make – and break – this year?” What we want and who we want to be are as closely tied to one another as December is to January. Let’s take a quick look at how.

Most of the year we happily live with the delusion that our desires arise spontaneously from within our deepest selves. But in December that delusion is harder to maintain because advertisers are in an all-out, full court press operating on the opposite premise: that our desires can be influenced and manipulated from the outside. Think about your Christmas wish list for a minute – how did you come to want what you wanted? Did you see an advertisement that got you thinking about jewelry or a new coat? Did a celebrity interview entice you to see a movie or buy a book over the holidays? Maybe you saw someone using a new phone or overheard a conversation about a trendy restaurant for New Year’s Eve and you found yourself texting on your new device from the restaurant bar.

I bet you can connect each item on your list to the source of your desire, a source that lies somewhere outside of you. Even things that seem to be deeply personal don’t originate inside us. For example, this year what I wanted most was not a thing at all, but to feel happy during the holidays. Sometimes the season goes by so quickly and I am so stressed out that I don’t enjoy the parties and the family time very much. Clearly, sometimes I don’t even remember who gave me what gift! But I worked on it this year and I’m happy to say I got my wish. But where did that wish come from? I wish I could say that I was smart enough to know that the most important gifts aren’t things you can buy in a store, but not so. The truth is that I learned this from some great teachers over the years – Ebenezer Scrooge for one, Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and so many other holiday movies for another, and my spiritual disciplines of yoga and daily prayer are great teachers, too. All those influences somehow combined together so that this year I wanted to be more like Jimmy Stewart than the gal with the new diamond necklace in the Kay Jewelry commercials.

You see, advertisers have got one thing very right – our desires are suggested to us from the outside. The tricky part is that when they nestle inside it feels as if they have always been there. But that’s just a convenient delusion that preserves our sense of independence and soothes our easily bruised egos. It’s really much healthier to let go of all that ego gratification and accept the truth that all our desires originate outside of us. Having unattached desires is what allows human beings to learn and grow and be the most innovative of all species. Other animals have instincts, but we have free-floating, unattached desires – yeah for us!

The trick of life is to be really smart about who and what we let our desires get attached to. The big mistake we often make at Christmastime is that we let advertisers and others we think are smarter, prettier or sexier than we are direct our desires for us. The important thing to remember is that our desires don’t take a direct path to objects – our desire is always deflected toward an object by someone we want to be like. That’s how the advertisers do it – they show us smart, pretty, sexy people with the objects they want us to buy. It’s genius, really. But allowing advertisers to dictate our desires is not genius. They are the worst kind of models because they don’t want what’s best for us, they want what’s best for them, which is for us to open our wallets and fork over the cash or swipe the plastic, as the case may be.

Fortunately for our souls, January follows right on the heels of this month of marketing mania. Making New Year’s resolutions forces us to take a hard look at who exactly we want to be like: the skinny girl, the ripped guy, the powerful boss, the smart professor, the sexy friend, the popular celebrity, whoever! These are our models of desire. Before you make any resolutions, you might want to ask yourself if you are happy with your models. Can you trust them? Are they truly unselfish models, wanting for you only what is best for you? If not, you might want to shop around for different models. They may be fictional, historical or spiritual; you may find them in books or plays, at church or work or close to home. The best models are the ones who truly love you or inspire you to live a joyful, fulfilled and peaceful life. At least that bit of wisdom is the gift my models have given me, and I guess this blog is my attempt to share that gift with you. No senior moment this time, no accidental re-gifting. Learning the truth about desire and how to choose models is a gift worth re-gifting – pass it on!

“Guiltiest guilty pleasure.  Reality T.V.”

So began last night’s episode of ABC’s “20/20” called “Reality Rules.”  Anchor Deborah Roberts continued by claiming “America’s appetite for reality TV is extreme.  In 1998 there were zero hours of reality tv in primetime on broadcast networks.  In 2011, there will be as many as 15 hours per week.  Meanwhile, reality has dominated the cable channels for nearly a decade.”

The second segment of “Reality Rules” focused on Bravo’s hit reality show The Real Housewives of New Jersey.  They showed a scene from this season’s premiere episode.  Melisa and Joe, a couple on the show, had their baby christened.  A brawl between Joe and his brother in law, who also happens to be named Joe, broke out at the after party.

“This is one of the hottest reality shows around and it’s changing the television landscape,” Roberts claimed.

Andy Cohen, the executive producer of the Real Housewives series, started out skeptical about the authenticity of the show.  But in filming the series, he found that when he “scratch[ed] below the surface, [these women] were somehow really human.”

And that anthropological statement is where I want to begin this examination of the reality show that is “changing the television landscape.”

Real Housewives New Jersey is full of drama and violence and it’s tempting for us to avoid discussing reality television.  We could easily view it as the lowest form of pop-culture. But maybe Cohen has a point.  As much as we may criticize reality television for being fake and constructed, there is something very real about it.  It is the reality behind these shows that make many of us uncomfortable with them; that, indeed, make us scapegoat them.  We want to believe that we are nothing like those fake and excessively dramatic people.  But maybe we are more like the stars of reality television than we want to admit. For example, I fear that 85% of family reunions fall into the same cycles of family drama.  Please, no cameras at my house during Thanksgiving.  Okay?  Thanks.

Instead of scapegoating these shows, maybe we could view them as a study in mimetic anthropology.  For example, the main stars of Real Housewives of New Jersey are Teresa Giudice and her husband Joe Giudice.  Teresa’s brother Joe Gorga and his wife Melissa Gorga are also stars in the show.  What makes the show so compelling is the mimetic rivalry between the couples. 

What is a mimetic rivalry?  When we are in a mimetic rivalry with someone, we want what our rival has.  Our rival is also our model for success.  Here’s a great example from the gossip magazine In Touch. (Have I hit a new low by quoting In Touch?”  Okay, let’s not scapegoat gossip magazines!)  The article “Fame Destroyed My Family" (June 6, 2011) starts, “There was a time when Teresa Giudice found strength in the love of her family – and knew that no matter what life handed her, she could count on their unwavering support.  But that was before Teresa became a star on The Real Housewives of New Jersey – and achieved the type of fame that her younger brother, Joe Gorga, and his wife, Melissa, desperately wanted for themselves.”

That’s the formula for mimetic rivalry.  We desperately want what our rival, who is also our model, has.  Joe and Melissa Gorga desperately want fame, not because they are necessarily bad and greedy people, but because their sister and brother-in-law has it.

When we are in a mimetic rivalry, we want what our rival has, but we also want to become our rival.  In other words, we want to possess the essence of our rival.  Joe Giudice points this out in the article.  The article claims that “Melissa and Joe Gorga love the cameras and wanted a taste of the spotlight badly.”  The next sentence quotes Joe Giudice as saying, “They want to be me and they obviously want to be Teresa …  Go find your own life!”  The drama continues in the same paragraph.  (Oh boy.)  Melissa “claims on her blog that Teresa tried to keep them off the show so that she could be the more successful sibling – which Teresa and Joe Giudice deny.”

So much drama.  But I do think there is an anthropological truth here.  In rivalry, we always want what the other has, and we always think that we deserve what the other has more than the other deserves it.  We blame and demonize our rival, while at the same time think we are the innocent one, the good one.  But the truth is, when it comes to rivalries, no one is innocent. 

So, we’re left asking, “What’s the way out of a mimetic rivalry?”

For the Giudices and for the Gorgas, the only way out of a mimetic rivalry is to let go of the shared desire. If they really want reconciliation, the Giudices and Gorgas need to release their shared desire for fame.  In order to do that, they need to find a new model that will lead them away from rivalry and toward compassion.  That’s a difficult and painful spiritual transformation, but that's the transformation they need. 

And, in a world that breeds rivalry, that's the transformation we all need – unless you happen to live in a monastary . . . a desert monastary.