4 March

Humans copy one another. They imitate. Not just sometimes, it’s ALL they do. I remember seeing that suggested, and at first thinking no, it can’t be everything. It really is everything. Everything humans do is the imitation of other humans. And they do it to belong, to have status in some group. Here, the little girl imitates dad to ‘be like a grown up’. The great French thinker Rene Girard noticed that this gets very nasty, very fast. What he called ‘imitative rivalry’. Because when we imitate, we form a group. What I call a ‘team’. And that group then comes into contact with rival groups. They fight for status. Even within each group, this rivalry occurs.