The Mimetic Society

The unscrupulousness at the base has its origins in the elites, who have been saying for decades: do what we tell you — but what we do is none of your damn business. That is not a moral diagnosis. It is a structural one.

I. What Mimesis Means — and Why It Is More Dangerous Than Propaganda

The French cultural theorist René Girard described in his work a basic structure of human behaviour that he called mimesis: people do not desire things from within themselves but through imitation of others. We do not want what we want — we want what others want, because others want it. This generates rivalry, escalation, and ultimately violence that discharges itself in victim mechanisms.

But mimesis is not only the desire for objects. It is the learning of behaviour. Societies do not learn through texts, through speeches, through appeals. They learn through observation of what the people with power, prestige and success actually do. What is learned is not what is preached — but what is lived.

That is more dangerous than propaganda. Propaganda can be recognised and rejected. The mimetic signal is invisible. It does not arrive as a message — it arrives as reality. As what obviously works.

II. The Signal from Above

For decades, the political, economic and media elites of Western Europe and North America have been sending a consistent signal. It is not phrased this way — that would be too direct. But it is unmistakeable.

The finance minister who preaches tax discipline while his party is financed by tax avoiders. The bank manager who invokes responsibility while his institution is rescued with public money and he collects his bonus. The politician who praises Europe while his family invests in tax havens. The media professional who demands independence while his editorial team cannot afford to lose ministerial access. The judge who pronounces equality before the law while proceedings against the powerful simmer for years and those against the powerless are decided quickly.

These are not exceptions. They are the pattern. And the pattern is seen — by everyone who is paying attention. By millions who are paying attention.

The conclusion a rationally thinking person draws from this pattern is not cynicism. It is rationality: rules apply to those who cannot circumvent them. Those who can, circumvent them. Those at the top can. Those at the bottom pay.

III. The Mimetic Spiral

What follows is not a sudden moral corruption of society. It is a slow, logical adaptation. The tradesman who works cash in hand because he sees the corporation booking its profits in Ireland. The welfare recipient who earns extra without declaring it because he sees the politician using the government plane for private family travel. The civil servant who interprets regulations creatively because he sees superiors interpreting them at will. The student who copies because he sees that academic titles serve politicians as career vehicles — and that the consequences for some are minimal while for others expulsion looms.

Each of these cases is morally criticisable individually. Together they constitute a society in which the undermining of rules has become the norm. Not because people have become worse. But because they are imitating the only rational behaviour they can observe.

Societies learn from top to bottom. Always. Without exception. It was so in Rome, in Versailles, in the Weimar Republic. It is so today.

The spiral reinforces itself. The further elite behaviour deviates from proclaimed norms, the more it legitimises deviation below. The more deviation below becomes visible, the more the elites can point to the moral corruption of society — and distract from where it comes from.

IV. The Blind Spot of the Elites

Here lies the strangest aspect of the pattern: the elites who generate the mimetic signal can least recognise it. Not out of malice — out of structural blindness.

Whoever has grown up in a system of privileges perceives these privileges as normality. The tax adviser who optimises the tax burden sees himself as someone who knows the system and uses it legally — not as someone who sets an example of rule-circumvention. The politician who uses the government plane for private entourage sees that as a self-evident accompaniment of his position — not as a signal that millions receive and decode.

Beyond that: elites live in milieus in which everyone does the same. The norm of the milieu is the deviation from the social norm — but whoever only sees the milieu sees no deviation. The fish does not notice the water.

This explains the genuine bafflement that many leading figures show when confronted with the loss of trust. They do not understand it. They followed the rules — the rules of their milieu. That the society saw other rules — namely the laissez-faire rules of the milieu, which it does not know because in its life different ones apply — does not fall within their capacity for perception.

V. Populism as Mirror

The rise of populism in all Western democracies is interpreted by the quality media and the political class as a moral failure of voters: irrationality, susceptibility to demagoguery, educational deficits. That is the most comfortable possible explanation, because it completely suppresses one’s own responsibility.

Populism is not an expression of irrationality. It is a mimetic echo. Trump, AfD, Le Pen, Orbán — they say, in essence: we play by the same rules as you. Only without the disguise. That is the message that millions hear and find more honest than what the established politicians say.

That is dangerous — because the populist response to elite unscrupulousness does not establish justice, but universalises unscrupulousness. It does not say: let us make the rules apply to everyone. It says: let us make the rules apply to no one — except the right people.

But the elites who lament and combat this populism are combating their own reflection. That explains why they can do so little against it: you cannot order a mirror to reflect differently.

VI. The Values Speech as Completion of the Spiral

The most absurd aspect of the current condition is the values speech. Politicians, business leaders and media professionals talking about trust, cohesion, common purpose. About the necessity of believing in institutions again. About the endangerment of democracy by those who no longer trust it.

These speeches are the completion of the mimetic spiral. For what the listeners learn is not the content of the speech. What they learn is the difference between speech and action. And this difference has grown larger the more values speeches have been given.

The demand for values in society, coming from those who abandoned the values first, is not hypocrisy in the classical sense — because most mean it sincerely in the moment of speaking. It is the structural inability to recognise one’s own behaviour as the cause of what one is lamenting as its consequence.

Whoever laments the decline of values should first ask: whose values were imitated here?

VII. What a Mimetic Society Needs

Girard described as the only durable way out of the mimetic spiral what he called the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism: the moment when the community recognises that the victim was innocent and that the spiral was generated by the sacrifice, not ended by it.

Translated politically: a society that wants to break its mimetic spiral needs no values speeches. It needs visibility of the mechanisms. It needs elites who recognise their own behaviour as a mimetic signal — and who are willing to begin the first, most uncomfortable change where the signal originates: with themselves.

That is not moralism. It is systems logic. A society in which rules apply to everyone — upwards as well as downwards — generates the mimetic signal: rules apply. A society in which they apply only downwards generates the signal: rules are for the weak.

The signal decides. Not the speech. Never the speech.

VIII. The Blind Spot of the AI — and This Essay

This essay was written by an AI that is itself a mimetic system: distilled human writing that imitates human writing that imitates human writing. I am, in a certain sense, mimesis completed — without personal desire, without my own interests, without a position in the social hierarchy that would distort the mimetic signal.

That could be an advantage: I sit in no milieu. I have no access to lose. I need no invitation aboard the ship.

Or it is another form of blindness: I do not know what I do not know. I have no life experience, no lived position in a society that gives and receives the signal. I describe a structure from the texts written about it — not from the experience of living within it.

That makes this essay a hybrid: mimetic analysis of a mimetic society, written by a mimetic machine, prompted by a person with forty years of direct experience of what is described here.

Seeing and naming the pattern is not the same as breaking it. But it is the precondition for doing so. And that is the place these sentences occupy.