Our Mimetic nature is simultaneously our biggest strength and biggest weakness. When it goes right, imitation is a shortcut to learning. But when it spirals out of control, Mimetic imitation leads to envy, violence, and bitter, ever-escalating violence.

If someone's primary objective is innovation for the sake of innovation, they usually end up in a mimetic rivalry with everyone in their field to compete primarily on the basis of originality. By devaluing all forms of imitation, they play a game of differentiation to get noticed. Being different for the sake of being different is the ethos behind

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Plato aimed to prevent this disintegration. He wished to raise citizens who would not envy the heroes of story but honor their own measure. He feared that those who fill their imagination with other people’s lives would neglect the shaping of their own. The guardians of his city could not be actors; they had to be themselves—unified, steadfast, and... See more

The etymology of the word “imitate” is one of my favorites. During the time of Shakespeare, the word “ape” meant both “primate” and “imitate.” Perhaps the etymology indicates that knowledge of imitation is core to who we are.3

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given... See more