How Social Media Has Made Us All Rivals

It’s a Chamber of Desire from which there is no escape

In the isolation of the pandemic, our need for social media has been especially acute. It helps us to make sense of who we are. We didn’t know what to desire. So we turned to other people, on our phones, to tell us:

Watch Tiger King, drink negronis, adopt dogs, avoid doing dishes, fight for justice, watch Bridgerton, support local bookstores, Zoom, take extravagant local getaways, take up bird watching, redefine self-care.

We look to other people — as flawed and volatile and contentious as some may be — in order to see ourselves.

There’s something buried deep within human nature — something we rarely want to acknowledge, and which the French cultural theorist René Girard called the “thing hidden since the foundation of the world”: our deep-seated propensity to covet our neighbors’ goods.

So perennial is the conflict caused by the concern for what our neighbor has that a prohibition against the desire itself was enshrined as the Tenth Commandment.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house: neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.”