Memetic Theory versus Mimetic Theory
Anthropologists have spent decades trying to explain the enormous diversity between different groups of people. How did tipping twenty percent become the norm in the U.S. but not in Europe? Why do Japanese business people greet one another with bows instead of handshakes? Why do some organizations have cultural “lingo” and others don’t? (And why is there so much lingo in the business world, period?) One of the few things they agree on is this: imitation is the primary transmitter of culture. Two separate theories purport to explain the role of imitation in the development of culture. Meme theory (or memetic theory—with an “e”) explains the development of culture through the imitation of things: ideas, behaviors, and styles that are encoded as memes so they can be easily imitated. A meme is the cultural counterpart to a biological gene. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins first coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He wrote that meme is a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” It’s worth pausing for a moment to explore the difference between memetic theory and mimetic theory because they represent two different approaches to thinking about how non-material things—like ideas and desire—spread in groups. Dawkins intentionally named it meme to sound like gene. A meme is an element of a culture that gets passed on by non-genetic means—by way of something broadly called imitation. “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs,” wrote Dawkins, “so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” Musical tunes (Happy Birthday), catch-phrases (“studmuffin”), fashion (men wearing ties), and even religious dogmas (eternal life) are memes in Dawkins’ view. Memes spread because people imitate them as closely as possible. According to Dawkins, there’s no human creativity in the spread of a meme. It has a life of its own. If a meme undergoes slight changes, that happens like the mutation of a gene—part of a mysterious and hidden natural process—and not by human choice. Likewise memes seek their own survival as if they were a living organism. The people who transmit them are merely their vehicles, no more important than a particular body is to a virus. But experience shows the opposite is true: people are models that endow random objects with value and make them worthy of imitation. Would people have been belting out the song “Shallow” in bars in 2019 if they’d first heard it from some busker in Santa Monica instead of as a duet between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in the film A Star Is Born? The film’s premise revolves around the idea that Lady Gaga’s character isn’t a star until Bradley Cooper models her desirability as a singer. A more immediate example is this: why do some people wear MAGA hats and why would others not wear a MAGA hat if their lives depended on it? This is an example of negative imitation. The determination never to wear a hat that says “Make American Great Again” has nothing to do with the color red, nor a political critique of the idea of American greatness. It has to do with the person modeling the hat: Donald Trump. By ignoring negative imitation, Dawkins makes no account of the harmful effects of rivalrous, destructive imitative behaviors. In meme theory, imitation is a positive force: the best memes are propagated through imitation. In mimetic theory, imitation can have—and usually does have— negative consequences. Because the imitation of desire causes people to compete for the same things, it eventually leads to conflict and sometimes collisions.
The Meme Machine — by Susan Blackmore
The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore is one of the best recent books on Richard Dawkin’s famous meme theory, which describes how culture is transmitted from person to person and down through history. Memes purport to explain the development of culture through the imitation of things. Memes are like genes: they are replicators, competing for space in our minds and in our culture. This book investigates the consequences. The famed Richard Dawkins, in his foreword to the book, writes: “The fact that we unconsciously imitate others, especially our parents, those in quasi-parental roles, or those we admire, is familiar enough. But is it really credible that imitation could become the basis of a major theory of the evolution of the human mind and the explosive inflation of the human brain, even of what it means to be a conscious self? Could imitation have been the key to what set our ancestors apart from all other animals? I would never have thought so, but Susan Blackmore in this book makes a tantalisingly strong case.”
Intersubjectivity
Closely related to the term interdividuality, intersubjectivity is used primarily in reference to mimetic theory and its dialogue with economics to differentiate classical economic agents—who normally have their economic preferences determined solely based on their individual decision-making—from mimetic economic agents who only make choices in a reciprocal (and mimetic) relationship with other economic agents and actors. Intersubjective influences have profound effects in market outcomes from financial bubbles to simple decisions about whether or not to purchase a dress at a clothing store. Intersubjectivity is related to the concept of reflexivity in markets.
Interdividual Psychology
Interdividual psychology is a form of understanding human psychology that is grounded in the mimetic relationship and mimetic reciprocity of a subject to a model. It is based on the notion that we are not individuals but interdividuals who are always in relation to other human beings. The implication is that one cannot understand the psychology of a person without understanding that person’s relationships—and the mimetic nature of them—at a deep level. Dreams, for instance, can give insights into a person’s psychology. But their content is somewhat meaningless without an understanding of the relationships that the person has with others. Dreams do not exist in a monadic subject as products of a brain that is in isolation from other brains. Interdividual psychology is still in an early stage of development with few practitioners because mimetic theory is not yet widely known or understood. The French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, one of the founders of this field of psychology, is one of the leading practitioners and has elucidated the ideas in his book The Mimetic Brain, among others.
Interdividuality
This concept, closely related to intersubjectivity, is a term coined by psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian (along with Guy Lefort and René Girard) in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World to express their conviction that a monadic, isolated subject does not exist and that the self can only be understood in relation to others. Therefore, there is no such thing as the modern notion of an “individual.” We are only interdividuals, our thinking and desires shaped by our relationships with others. The human person is, by nature, a relational being. Interdividuality refers to the dyadic structure of the human person in relationship to others and expresses this relational structure in a more accurate way. Through our interdividuality, mimetic desire is active in our lives in a dynamic way. The field of interdividual psychology arose from this understanding of interdividuality.
Texts of Persecution
Rene Girard identified what he called “texts of persecution,” or documents that recount phenomena of collective violence from the standpoint of persecutors—for instance, accounts of lynchings in the early twentieth century, or the medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut’s story Judgement of the King of Navarre, which blames the Jews for the Black Death and describes their mass murder—and compares these texts to ancient myths (like Oedipus), where Girard finds striking similarities. Both myths and texts of persecution hide collective violence because they have been written from the point of view of the persecutors. History has been written by the victors, not the victims. Girard did his own form of deconstruction of these texts by deconstructing the mythological structures that obscured the hidden truth of violence underneath. To paraphrase Girard: if you arrive at a crime scene covered with bleach and clear attempts to cover one’s tracks, you can be sure that a crime happened—even if direct evidence of the crime itself can never be fully recovered.
Mimetic Desire
Mimetic desire is desire according to another, or desire according to a model. Imitation is the force that shapes human desire. People desire things because someone else—a model—did first. When he was in early twenties, René Girard got his first glimpse into the structure of desire. During his university studies in France, he fell in love. After a short and intense period of courtship, he settled down into a stable relationship with his girlfriend. Then things changed in an instant. His girlfriend asked him if he wanted to get married. Right away, he experienced a decrease in desire. He quickly backed off. It wasn’t long before he ended the relationship. She accepted it, went her own way, and began dating other men. Then, suddenly, he was drawn back to her again. He noticed something that he found curious—and troubling. The more she denied herself to him, the more he wanted her. It was as if her desire for him somehow affected his desire for her. “I suddenly realized that she was both object and mediator for me—some kind of model,” he said. He became reattracted to her not because he suddenly saw some new quality in her that he hadn’t seen in her before; he became reattracted to her because she denied herself to him. She was modeling to him what he should want. Girard wouldn’t fully grasp what was happening until many years later when he saw this same dynamic playing out through human history and in current events. But even then, in his short romance, he saw that there was more to desire than most people believe—especially the hidden role of a model. The advertising and fashion industries have known this for decades. The creative agencies behind Superbowl commercials don’t simply show us the things they want us to buy. They almost always show us other people wanting the things they want us to buy. Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial doesn’t tout the technical merits of the new Apple computer; it shows a beautiful blonde athlete throwing a sledgehammer through the face of a man representing conformity (“Big Brother”). The woman in the commercial is a model—she makes it more likely that viewers will now want to battle conformity, too. (Of course, buying an Apple computer is the best way to do that.) People choose computers, food, and fashion at least as much with their mimetic brains, or imitative brains, as with their rational brains. Consider craft beer: did millions of amateur beer drinkers decide, almost simultaneously, that I.P.A.’s are (obviously) better than good Belgian ales? Not only do I disagree, but I don’t buy their illusion of autonomy. But these are just things. Far more important are the deeper mimetic desires to be a certain way—the desire for moral positions, recognition, spouses, schools, job titles and dreams. We’re immersed in it. A young girl posts a selfie to Instagram. She’s beaming next to her new boyfriend at a sushi restaurant. Her ex, who she hasn’t heard from in months, starts texting her the next day. A college guy with a new girlfriend introduces her to every guy he knows, secretly hoping that they’ll want her, too. When he senses that they don’t, he begins to doubt that he made the right choice. Five-year old Caleb finds a shiny red toy dump truck in the corner of his classroom that none of the other kids seemed to care about. As soon he expresses an interest in it, there’s an all-out war. Everyone wants to play with the cool new toy. Tim, a university freshman chooses to major in accounting because his friend (who seems like he has it all together) wants to be an accounting major. When he realizes later in life that he is miserable doing other peoples’ taxes—long after his model is gone—the mimetic nature of his desire to be an accounting major is revealed. Imitating a model is not dangerous if the desire is for something that is abundant and sharable—drinking a mass-produced wine, watching Game of Thrones, or getting into a large state school with a 90% acceptance rate. But things get more complicated when we imitate the desire for objects that are scarce and can’t easily be shared. According to economists, that’s a lot of things. For more a detailed, illustrated guide visit the page on author Luke Burgis’s website on Mimetic Desire 101.
Apocalypse
The word “apocalypse” in its original usage simply means unveiling. The book of Revelation in the Christian bible means an unveiling of things to come. The apocalypse has traditionally been associated with some violent ending to the world as we know it. In Girardian mimetic theory, the “apocalypse” is not something caused by God but caused by human beings through their own violence. The escalation of mimetic rivalries and the decreased power of the scapegoat mechanism in modernity (because it has been drained of its power through the revelation of the crucifixion) means that there are no “braking mechanisms” on violence. In this environment, an apocalyptic type of violence that wipes out all of humanity is possible. In short, an apocalypse is a form of mimetic violence that is escalated to the extreme: the scenario captured in Girard’s last book, Battling to the End.
Mirror Neurons
Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that “fire” when a person merely observes an action, mimicking the way that neurons would fire in the brain as if the person were actually performing that action. Mirror neurons were first discovered in maqaque monkeys in by Dr. Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, Italy, during his team’s studies in the 1980’s and 90’s. One day, when one of the graduate students walked into a research room with an ice cream where a maqaque monkey was hooked up to a machine that measured his brain activity, he was shocked to see the monkey’s brain imaging immediately light up as if the monkey were holding and eating an ice cream. This accidentally discovery led to the eventually identification of the now controversial idea of “mirror neurons,” which have provided biological support to Girard’s mimetic theory. Others have taken their research a step further and shown that the brains of young babies are “mimetic” in a way that goes beyond mere “actions.” Dr. Andrew Meltzoff showed that babies as young as 18- months-old were able to infer the desires of the people around them. In his study, an adult in the presence of an infant “accidently” failed to pull the end off of a toy dumbbell, acting out a game in which the adult clearly wants to pull the weights off the dumbbell but can’t seem to do it. When given the opportunity to play with the dumbbell, the infant would pull the end off of the dumbbell rather than mimic the failed action. Meltzoff’s study had a clear finding: the infants weren’t imitating actions; they were imitating desire. We only get better at it as we get older.
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most well-respected entrepreneurs and business investors. He is the founder and CEO of PayPal, and was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. He is highly regarded as a thought leader on the topics of business, leadership, and innovation. He is also an outspoken disciple of the late Stanford sociologist, Rene Girard. During his time at Stanford, Thiel came under the influence of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and discovery of cultural scapegoating, which fundamentally shaped Thiel’s understanding of human nature and business. After Stanford, these core insights gave Thiel an uncanny ability to spot business opportunities where others saw none. In fact, his Girardian outlook helped him become one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Throughout his career, he has maintained a close connection to his intellectual mentor. In his 2014 book on startups, Zero to One, Thiel describes a moment of mimetic enlightenment as he was building the company PayPal. He noticed how unclear job responsibilities were arousing internal rivalries and infighting among his employees. Therefore, using another Girardian insight, the power of distinctions and prohibitions, he made employees responsible for one thing, and one thing only. Result: the infighting ceased, which restored the company culture. Applying these principles across industries, Thiel continues to be one of the most effective investors and fluent practitioners of Girardian thought in the modern business world.