Mimetics, Memetics, and Culture Control

Grant Katz

August 9, 2024

With the publication of his first book in 1961, philosopher and anthropologist René Girard began a life-long obsession with what he asserted to be the foundation of religion, interaction, and culture, that being his theoretical concept of mimetic desire. Deriving its name from the Greek mimos, the theory states that what ultimately motivates man’s actions and wants is his desire to mimic what he sees, namely other people. As Girard’s theory of imitation began to burgeon as a respectable concept among academics, a closely-related, similarly-named field sprang up as well: biologist Richard Dawkins’s memetics, itself more focused on what exactly it is that is being imitated. In this essay I intend to explain how the concepts of mimetics and memetics allow us to understand how culture proceeds, and how that mimetic/memetic process of procession has become increasingly expedited and governed by contemporary media forms.

"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires," Girard once claimed, in briefest fashion describing his social theory. Originally a literary theorist, he observed in the behavior of the literary canon’s characters, and subsequently in humanity as a whole, a common characteristic: the tendency for one to imitate what he called a “model.” While the act of desiring is generally understood as centered around a desired something, an object, Girard thought it was more accurate to say that desire had to do with someone, a “model,” who an onlooker wishes to emulate. The onlooker witnesses someone in possession of something, whether an item or a characteristic, and while they consciously decide that they want that something too, in reality, Girard said, what they truly desire is the same ontological reality as that person, the model, who possesses it. They are thereby, through a process called mimesis, influenced to imitate their model in an effort to achieve that reality for themself. So, while a young child may at first have no interest in, let’s say, a toy train, when he sees another little boy playing with one, and looking very happy and contented at that, he may begin to desire the train in order to attain that same happiness. He may steal the toy train, or ask his parents to buy him one of his own, but either way he succeeds in his purpose of acquiring, yes, the toy train, but in some way the happiness of the other little boy as well. Girard claimed this phenomenon, extending far past simple infant psychology, was in fact the driving factor of human change, being the impetus for commerce, violence, culture, and the desire for anything beyond basic animal needs entirely.

If Girard’s mimetics studies the concept of mimicry, Dawkins’s memetics studies what is being mimicked itself. Richard Dawkins, formally educated in evolutionary biology, adapted his knowledge of the biological concept of genes into what he called “memes.” Dawkins posited that memes, like genes, are replicators, units that propagate themselves competitively among a broader pool and transmit their data into the makeup of organisms. But instead of replicating and transmitting biological information from one organism to another, memes transmit cultural information, and as Dawkins said in The Selfish Gene (1976), “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” One might simply call them ideas; they can be fashion trends, jokes, words, political systems, abstract concepts, or anything else that can be passed from one individual to another as information, and though the concept may sound simple, it is undeniable that some memes, such as, for instance, democracy, have shaped the progress of human civilisation entirely. Memes are powerful; being ideas themselves, they have the ability to augment our epistemological knowledge of the facts of reality. Their success in doing this, though, depends on their capacity to “survive.” Like genes, memes succeed and survive when they carry enough tangible advantage to successfully replicate among large populations. The religion meme, as an example, provides the advantage of reassuring its hosts of a life after death, which has, evidently, made it extremely popular and allowed it to replicate across large swaths of the world's population. Successful memes can thus effectively control people, and have been doing so for all of human history.

Memes make up culture, and thereby define how a society thinks of themselves and the world, influencing how they act. As old memes change and new memes are introduced, culture changes with them, as does society as a whole. But where do new memes begin? This is where Girard’s theory comes back into play. A synthesis of mimetics and memetics together would posit that a meme-carrying Girardian “model,” when witnessed by an onlooker who wishes to emulate them, transmits their meme to their observer, thus elongating its lifespan. This formula can be used on a wider scale to, in a basic way, explain the spread of culture and ideas throughout the world. Originally, this process of cultural diffusion and change was slow, relying first on word of mouth, then written word, then printed word. However, with the rise of mass media, and more recently, algorithmic, instantly-accessible media, this process has become dramatically expedited, and, more concerningly, manipulated. Media corporations now have well-developed systems that exploit the mimetic and memetic processes of human thought to subsume much of the world’s population in a controlled consumer culture, using digital content that act as models to spread influential and action-provoking memes across the world’s online population. The short-form video platform TikTok, a service with over 1 billion active users, is especially conspicuous in this regard. With an expertly-crafted algorithm that diligently accounts what each individual user watches, clicks on, shares, scrolls through, and replays, the service is then able to provide each user with content that is specifically curated for them, and specifically intended to keep the user on the platform, generating revenue, for as long as possible. These curated posts, along with providing them with the memes they empirically respond to, also target users’ mimetic response, as the app offers a mechanism for users to easily emulate and reformat the videos they watch (models) into their own posts, posts which then get shared in a memetic fashion to more people with similar interests, allowing the memes to survive and reproduce further. Through these mechanisms, users are continually fed content that is tailor-made for their consumption and consequent reproduction unto others, fueling an endless cycle where corporate products and ideas are constantly being propagated amongst the unwitting masses, influencing and augmenting how they see the world entirely.

Bleak as it may be to think that our perceptions of the world are increasingly being distorted by insidious media efforts, Richard Dawkins does offer a solution to the meme problem. Just like genes, memes, he says, are inherently blind. Though they masterfully replicate and foster themselves within our minds, they are not thinking beings, and thus, unlike us, they have no foresight. We, though, if we become conscious over both our inherent mimetic tendencies and the strong influencing power of memes, can develop the power to critically examine where our ideas are coming from, and if they have any basis in our own rational thought, or just our tendency to copy. “We,” Dawkins said, “can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

References

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