When mimetic desire has spread through a community (always in Freshmanistan) leading to tension and rivalries that change rapidly and lack a clear direction, resulting in chaos that threatens to tear the community apart socially. A mimetic crisis is the part of mimetic theory that most closely dialogues with the crowd (or mob) psychology branch of social psychology, proposing that the essential feature of a crowd in a mimetic crisis is the elimination of difference (mobs tend toward sameness) due to the mimetic nature of desire. The crisis of sameness that ensues leads the mob to notice and amplify differences to the maximum degree which, if not diffused, activates the scapegoat mechanism.
