Advertisements often show very little of the product they're selling. Consider car commercials. The product itself is often almost background noise. They will show you stylish and chic men or women portraying all the trappings of success in a culture, and the car, well it's there, sort of. What is actually being presented to you is a certain quality of life to be desired it is subtly implied that you can have it if you only purchase the car. The aim is to make you unconsciously desire, not the car, but that quality of life, the quality of "being" it supposedly gets you. This is far more powerful and pervasive than a need for mere physical conveyance.
Whether or not you can afford a car the mechanism causes one to think that you may not attain the quality of life the world tells you you must possess to be accepted and successful. The inability to attain it can lead to anxiety, depression, or could simply lead to being enslaved to debt to possess it. Is it any wonder that consumer debt is wreaking havoc on so many people. Passions, borrowed from often unseen and unexamined sources, draw people into the abyss of crushing financial burden. But this only skims the surface.One root of this pull is a longing for validation that is often denied in a world of inequalities of every sort. It's not "do you possess" but do you possess that more, other thing or sense of being? There is no end of the objects or measures of meaning presented to us by others. The masses would deny this reality (even if it were told to them) because it creates disonance with the illusion of having a form of "individuality". Blindness to this further exacerbates internal conflict and rivalry with others.
The Apostle Paul wrote in Phillipian 4:11 that in whatever state he found himself in to be content. This is one real way of contending with the problem of imitated human desire. Why are so many not content? Because there are models of desire everywhere around us promising fullfillment and meaning. We feel the draw and all to often either internalize this "lacking" or blame others for it. The first leads to anxiety and depression, the other to anger, discontent and ultimately violence either in word or deed. All the while consciously oblivious of the mechanism and how we are being pulled along like driftwood in a stream.
Once we have what we need we don't know what we want; we want what our neighbor has because if he desires it it must have value. We always desire what we do not possess, once we possess it it soon loses value as it ceases to arouse desire in us and in those around us, which validates our choice and ourselves. It no longer "functions" for us and interest wanes.
The Decalogue closes with what begins as an enumeration of desires to be avoided only to be realized by the writer, at the end, there is no end to the desires for "your neighbor's" anything. There is never an indication that desire originates anywhere else. This prohibition is problematic because we don't even understand the way in which our desires are not our own but are "modeled" for us by our neighbor and appropriated as our own. This dynamic invariably both puts us at enmity with some and binds us to others as our competition for objects of desire ultimately result in rivalry and hatred.
We want, or more appropriately need, others to validate our choices or the pleasure of having the object of desire diminishes and we discard that which at an earlier place we would have fought over. Value is wholly dependent upon and subjective to whether or not somebody else desires it. Consider the adolescent ploy of "making someone jealous". There's a break up, the one who is rejected may seek out a partner, not because he/she desires the partner, but because it is a form of self-validation and that it will show the other that he/she is, in fact, desirable. If this fails the patsy will be discarded, or a pseudo-relationship will be formed but will be, in time, doomed as this false desire, a mere manipulation of another, has no real or lasting power.
The dual purpose is both to reaffirm his or her value and to make the other desire anew. In repeated stories of crimes of passion someone kills the one they supposedly love. This is merely a way of possessing the other, and if one cannot gain possession of the object of their desire then possession is gained by taking that life; literally, possessing their life by a violent perversion of love. This is too often also a characature of the "love" of God; a god after our own image.
The dynamic and pervasive nature of imitated desire does however play a crucial role in human advancement. We can and do pass on, through imitation, an incredible amount of knowledge and learned experience in a very compressed time frame from an evolutionary standpoint. Desire is a gift that has formed us and powers advancement. But it also holds the capacity to destroy us utterly and completely.
Therefore, whatever state we find ourselves in we should be content or we may, in due course, find ourselves extinct.
