When I was a kid in pre-school, I only wore superhero costumes and didn’t speak English. Only Tagalog was spoken at my house at the time, so me not speaking English made sense. As for the superhero thing, I still don’t have a clue how I steamrolled my parents into allowing me to wear a superhero costume 5 days a week at school.
But over time, things changed. I shed my superhero costumes for a standard uniform at my Catholic grade school. Meanwhile, I became fluent in English nearly as quickly as I lost my ability to speak Tagalog.
By the age of 7, I was just like everyone else.
And isn’t that just our natural human tendency? As kids, all we do is imitate. We learn to speak by mimicking those around us. We associate emotions with facial expressions by observing how people around us act when they’re jovial, frustrated, or sad. Even when we’re adults, our personalities can often be traced back to people we were subconsciously imitating in our formative years as children.
This desire to be like others doesn’t just go away as we grow up. We like to dress like those around us. Our political beliefs will converge towards the beliefs of our close friends. In some ways, my personality is a bunch of minuscule copy-pastes that have been haphazardly stitched together over the past 27 years.
This copy-paste functionality of human beings is powerful for a reason. Ancient humans were able to survive in the wild by collaborating in groups. Naturally, humans who were more inclined to gravitate towards group consensus were more likely to thrive and reproduce. Those who weren’t able to meld into the group consensus were outcasts who never had the chance to reproduce before getting mauled by some sabretooth tiger.
While mimicry was essential for humans to get through the caveman-meat-on-a-stick days of humanity, its benefits are more dubious now.
In high school, my freshman history teacher Mr. Porterfield asked each student what car that the student wanted. Every answer was some variety of luxury vehicle: Lamborghini, Porsche, you name it. We all wanted the same class of luxury vehicles, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. When thousands of years of natural selection has pushed us to mimic others, we’re going to want the very same things that other people want.
And it’s not just cars either. Think of all the people that want a marriage, a house, and kids. How much of that desire is truly yours as opposed to other people’s desires that you’ve been subconsciously imitating?
Rene Girard observed babies to answer this very question. He put a group of babies in a room full of toys, and he observed their interactions. Rather than finding their own toy to play with, children gravitated towards toys that others had. We don’t want what we want. We want what others want.
In a world where everyone copies each other’s desires, we all end up being on the same treadmill, endlessly running towards the same lifestyle: a single-family home and a 4-year college education for our kids. It shouldn’t be a surprise that these things have become unaffordable for so many Americans. After all, we’re all bidding against each other.
Girard saw mimicry as a force of destruction that we need to break out of. To him, mimicry breeds competition for the same resources, which breeds tension, and eventually violence. Girard, a Catholic, believed that the only way to break out of this mimetic cycle was through selflessness as epitomized by Christ’s death on the cross. In a world where we all mimic Christ’s selflessness, mimicry doesn’t become a destructive cycle, but a positive one.
I think Girard’s point is valid because there definitely are positive applications of mimicry. Surround yourself with nerdy friends in school and you’ll get good grades. Regularly hang out with selfless people who volunteer a lot, and you’ll find yourself in a soup kitchen every Sunday.
If you buy all this mimetic theory stuff, the implications are pretty important. You aren’t you. You are the people around you. And if you want to change who you are, the most important thing you can do is to surround yourself with people you admire.
So choose wisely.