Mimesis

November 29, 2025

If you’ve ever been advised to “[not compare yourself to others]”1, you’ve been given an impossible task2.

This is because the analysis of the behavior of other humans is how we make sense of the world3. It gives us a baseline idea of “what direction is up”, of what behavior is “right”, what behavior is “normal”, and generally how to conduct ourselves.

This baseline of social knowledge can be described loosely as a set of “social axioms4”, which help us ground ourselves.

Such as:

This list is tricky to produce, because we take most of it for granted. It’s asymmetric and random because it’s hardly feasible to explain or enumerate all such social axioms. In fact, every item on the list only makes sense if you already understand it.

AxiomDomain Knowledge
Make eye-contact when conversing, but not too muchWhat is eye-contact? How much is too much? With whom?
It is wrong to kill another humanExcept in self-defense, and maybe euthanasia or if the person is a serial killer or rapist
You should wear shirt and shoes when going to a fancy restaurantWhat is a “restaurant”? What counts as fancy? What is a shirt/shoes? Does a dress count as a shirt?
Don’t be a jerkWhat is a jerk? Even real humans are conflicted on this. There are millions5 of reddit posts deliberating this.
Don’t cut in lineWhat is a line? If a new line opens, what counts as cutting?
Adults should have jobsWhat counts as a job? What about stay-at-home-moms? What about people with disabilities?
Most adults get married and have children“have children” => raise children together as a nuclear family
Cheating is badWhat is cheating? What counts as cheating?
Sharing is goodWhy doesn’t this apply to romantic partners?
Be kind to your neighborsWhat is a neighbor? What is kind? What if your neighbor is a jerk? What is a jerk?

The bottom line is that these are ideas that we use to orient ourselves in society, and, though they seem natural to us, they are actually really complicated and can only be learned by living in a social world and analyzing behavior of others and ourselves.

Mimesis

Since, in most cases, the following of these axioms is imperative to conducting oneself favorably in a society, we tend to mimic (mime) social behavior that we see, even before we analyze it.

This tendency to mime is built into our nature6. It can be incredibly strong in certain situations, but a lot of times we don’t realize it nor give it a name.

Crowds

Mimesis is often most obviously observed when people are physically together (in a crowd).

I visited my old high school for a basketball game, and I noticed it immediately. Not only was it a sporting event with a dense crowd and like-minded people, but it was also high-school, which is probably the most chargedly mimetic environments I can think of. Where everyone is trying their hardest to look cool or at least fit in.

Things I noticed:

Textbook mimesis; going with the crowd is natural and easy, going against it is unnatural and difficult. Thus the crowd behaves as one, unthinkingly (to a degree).

Here are a few more fun examples of herd-mentality / mimesis in crowds:

Wanting

We also tend to mimic others (or at least use others as a frame of reference) in the things we desire. This should come as no surprise, because mimesis infests all of our behavior, of which desire is a subset.

The classic example is that of the jealous child8. You (an adult) feign interest in a toy, and the child immediately is interested. You begrudgingly surrender the toy to the child and go find some other toy to feign interest in; the child immediately drops the original toy and now desires the toy you just picked up, interest in the old toy completely forgotten.

The point is, of course, that the child doesn’t really desire the toy because of some inherent property of the toy; they desire it because it is a desirable toy (it’s the one that you – the adult – show (feign) interest in).

Adults do the same thing, the toys are just grander and more expensive.

Such as:

The lines may blur here, because, in some of these cases, the desire likely isn’t entirely mimetic – perhaps the child would play with the toy, even if the adult lost interest. However, would that very specific toy have been chosen if not for the adult’s feigned interest?

The problem with mimetic desire is the scarcity induced by everyone wanting the same thing and the overshadowing of non-mimetic desire. A hoard of of vicious children brawling to play with a single toy – while the toy itself is being tossed around and nobody gets to enjoy it. And, while many other toys, of equal inherent desirability, lie untouched in the toy-box.

So What?

Mimesis is a big part of who we are, and understanding it can help explain why we behave the way we do. I hope that, in striving for a better understanding of it, we can better assess how to conduct ourselves. Mimesis can have bad and good effects. If we are able to recognize mimesis in our own behavior and desires, then we may be able to short-circuit some of its evils that we may have otherwise been aloof to.

  1. This advice has good intention – making value judgements on yourself and others based on one-to-one comparison seems icky and certainly cannot be good for the soul. However, it is impossible to make any judgement whatsoever of yourself without using other humans (or at least values derived from understanding/observation of other humans) as reference. This is because, in my theory, all values come from social observation (though perhaps some of those observations were done by observations of your ancestors and given to you genetically). And making value judgements of yourself is necessary, since you cannot strive be a “good person” if you cannot check in on your progress. And you can’t know what a “good person” is if you don’t have examples of other people. In practice, people probably judge their own value relative to a mental “average person” they construct from knowledge they have gathered from real people. ↩︎

  2. Assuming you want to keep living anything resembling a human existence (Which I doubt would be possible, even with major lobotomy). ↩︎

  3. In an abstract, social/moral/ethical sense. Of course you could imagine a lone baby surviving an apocalypse and teaching itself math or something. So perhaps that baby could understand the world in a superficial way, like noting that the sun rises every day, or that the square-root of two is irrational. But what would the baby think of good and evil? (Excepting any built-in neural circuits inherited from ancestors – perhaps the notions of good and evil only matter because of (and are emergent from) society.) What would it dream about? ↩︎

  4. The “axioms” are concrete, but still abstract to some degree, and almost always subjective. We won’t necessarily follow all of them, but their existence is the important important (an axiom we break can ground us just as much as one we follow – in either case it gives us reference and helps us make sense of what we are doing). ↩︎

  5. There are probably millions of posts on r/AITAH, but don’t quote me on this, I’m not about to verify this claim. The actual number is irrelevant, but “millions” flows better than “lots”. Both flow better than this footnote. ↩︎

  6. You can argue that some of the axioms are also built-in, but not all of them are because they change too quickly for biology to keep up. Mimesis is basically the dynamic coding for fitting in, while baked-in axioms are the static, compile-time coding for fitting in. ↩︎

  7. I don’t really think this is entirely mimetic, but I do think it’s an interesting example, because it kind of shows why mimesis is important – outliers are dangerous. If you don’t match the speed of traffic (whether you’re going too slow or too fast), you are an obstruction. Similarly, in society, if you don’t behave predictably, you are a hazard (both to yourself and others). ↩︎

  8. Dogs are no exception to this behavior, in my experience. ↩︎

  9. Or facebook, for the older/less-hip adults. ↩︎