High performers routinely conceptualise their ambitions as self-authored: the product of discipline, insight, and individual will. Drawing on Girard’s (1961/1965, 1972/1977, 1978/1987) full mimetic theory, including dimensions of the theory under-used in the existing literature on ambition and achievement, this paper argues that this conceptualisation is systematically misleading. High-performance ambition is structured by mimetic desire, in which wanting is mediated through the desires of rival models rather than generated autonomously; by mimetic doubling, in which sustained rivalry renders competitors structurally interchangeable even as each experiences the other as a unique threat; and by the scapegoat mechanism, in which the accumulated rivalrous tension of a competitive field is periodically discharged through the public expulsion of a single figure, restoring a provisional and false peace. Together these dynamics produce what this paper terms the originality illusion, the sincere but mistaken belief that one’s ambitions are self-generated, and what Girard termed metaphysical desire explains why achievement cannot resolve the insufficiency that drives it: the high performer wants not the object of success but the very being of the rival, and no acquisition of objects can deliver that being. The paper develops these claims through Oughourlian’s (2010) interdividual psychology, which dispenses with the assumption of a pre-existing self that mimetic forces merely compensate, and closes by considering the conditions, drawn from Girard’s own account of conversion and reconciliation, under which acquisitive mimesis might give way to non-acquisitive imitation.
Keywords: mimetic desire; Girard; doubling; scapegoat mechanism; metaphysical desire; interdividual psychology; high performance; ambition.