The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So…
The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work.
So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, processing information about the world to optimise their individual outcomes.
Both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have…
Teams have no necessary connection with reality. Their existence is driven by social rivalry, for status.
It’s the model used by team sports, extended to all areas of human life. It’s why I have less than zero interest in Left/Right framings of the world.
Because an…
And leads to fundamentally different interpretations of what we see happening around us.
Humans are SOCIAL animals. Nobody denies it. Which means the fundamental basis of every *individual* is social.
How does this different model of individual humans look?
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The fundamental human act is to IMITATE. To emulate other people, of higher status, to in turn give ourselves some of that status, as part of the emulated person’s ‘team’.
This is of course the basis of Girard’s mimetic theory. But its implications go beyond even that.
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It creates a social model that actually matches societies. Networks of imitative groups, organised around hubs, constantly shifting as what is imitated ‘trends’ in different ways, what ‘goes viral’.
Societies look like the diagram, whereas the other social model of individual… https://t.co/TuAM9rM9so
At times of social unrest or crisis, the individual reasoning agent model assumes ‘authoritarians’ of some kind are taking over the reasoning crowd. The ‘fascist’ takeover of ‘democracy’.
The imitation model on the other hand sees that as an automatic reflex action of a social…
Under the mimetic model, which again actually matches the social structures we live in, the greatest danger-KPI for collective life is when it is driven by social trends, when imitation loses any sense of emulation to structure it, and everybody just begins copying everybody…
When societies seem more ‘equal’ is when crisis is imminent. Because as Girard spent a career trying to show us, imitation is at root a *rivalry*. Imitative rivalry.
Everybody imitating everybody else (welcome to the social media age) is a society riven by conflict and…
Surely we see this, today? The way social media, which has actually replaced society, we live inside it, transforms every public issue immediately into a rivalry, fought by always shifting teams? Everything is viral trends.
Most fundamentally this is a society that has lost all…
Under Model 1 (individuals as reasoning agents), hierarchy of any kind is poison. A subversion of the ‘optimum’. In Model 2 it’s what regulates status rivalry. Transforming imitation into emulation, suppressing the extent of imitative rivalry.
I’ve posted a lot about how what…
Trying to restore kings, or their equivalent, because people are sick of the perpetual rivalry and violence, the fight for basic status/identity.
I’ve also posted about how things like monarchies and churches are the emergent ‘solution’ to status rivalry that societies stumbled…
Monarchs and their networked ‘courts’ of higher-status aristocrats were the continually re-invented solution to mass violence. Other solutions have also been tried, like diversifying the ways in which status can be found, for example through civil service institutions (the…
If you live in a society of viral trends, you’re living in a time not of fascist takeover. You’re living in times of social collapse driven by mass imitiation.
Humans copying each other widely is the root of social collapse.
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