Imitation and Innovation

Why they are basically the same thing

Introduction

Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One was probably how I first heard of René Girard. I don’t quite remember. It was probably 2018. It was a time of peak optimism about globalized economy, right before the first Trump administration declared the trade war on China. I had just switched from teaching high school math and economics to starting my own business based on a misbegotten mobile app that I managed to keep on life support for about two years.

Thiel made a sensation with a contrarian argument. “Competition is for losers,” he wrote, arguing that instead, smart money looks to monopolize niche markets. Rather than imitate its competitors, a firm should look to innovate ex nihilo. It should look to go from “zero to one,” rather than from “1 to n,” which stands for taking something that’s already been invented by others and replicating it.

It was in support of this argument that Thiel brought up Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and its harms. I was intrigued right away. So much so that, after devouring Girard’s books one after another, I ended up spending the subsequent two years of Covid lockdowns slowly morphing from a normal human being into a Girardian essayist (and a fiction writer).

To this day, I remain fascinated with how Girard’s concept of imitation relates to the modern imperative to be authentic and innovate. No doubt, this is a major stumbling block to many who first pick up Girard and are scandalized by his insistence on the primacy of imitation in human affairs. We are repeatedly told that innovation is essential for progress and even survival. Individuals, organizations, nations, and whole species must innovate or perish. Imitators are late to the party; they’re followers, not leaders. Yet here’s Girard insulting us, basically, with his claims that we’re all hopeless imitators. Speak for yourself, bro!

Peter Thiel retains the reverence for innovation, insisting on the need to push it to its radicalized zero-to-one form. In this, he departs from his mentor Girard, who expressed no such ideas. Girard laid out his own theory of innovation in a masterpiece of an essay titled “Innovation and Repetition.” If you’re even tangentially interested in this topic, you must read it. I discovered it on that obscure webpage, where it says that the text had been transcribed from a SubStance periodical (Johns Hopkins Press) from 1990.

In what follows I will share insights and inferences from the essay. I’ve already done this in a Boreas Podcast episode, and here I’ll try to lay it out in a condensed essay form.

At the heart of Girard’s understanding of innovation is the idea that innovation arises from imitation. He rejects the common notion that innovation and imitation are opposites. To the modern mind at least, this appears as a blunt paradox, but Girard resolves it brilliantly, revealing in the process a significant blind spot of modern culture.

To show the depth of the link between imitation and innovation, I will follow Girard’s approach from his essay and go over some history.

A History of Innovation and Imitation

The word “innovation” comes from the Latin elements in-novare, which originally meant renewal or rejuvenation from the inside. Later, it came to mean basically what it does today: novelty. In Medieval Times, its usage was mostly limited to “technical discussions of heresy in Latin” to signify “a departure from what by definition should not change — religious dogma.” Starting from the 16th century, the word gained wider usage and retained the negative connotation. To innovate with anything was to err, to commit heresy. As Girard puts it, “a taste for innovation is supposed to denote a perverse and even a deranged mind.”

Enlightenment philosophers Hobbes and Montaigne have quotes condemning innovation as a source of evil. Cromwell, the English revolutionary who beheaded the king, attacked what he described as “designs laid to innovate upon the Civil Rights of Nations, and to innovate in matters of religion.” Even Calvin, the radical church reformer, denounced “the appetite to innovate, change and stir up everything.” In those days, even the most radical dissidents didn’t see themselves as innovators but as restorers of some original and natural state of affairs.

The Renaissance art of Michelangelo and his peers is beloved today by the same creative types who sing praises to Steve Jobs, the modern Patron Saint of Innovation. But the Renaissance happened right in the heart of the era when innovation was a dirty word. If you went back in time and told Michelangelo how innovative he is, he’d probably get offended. The masters of realistic painting and sculpture of his time were rather in intense pursuit of imitation. To them, great art was great imitation of nature. Moreover, they imitated the achievements of Ancient Greek sculpture.

Michelangelo was praised as a great imitator by his contemporaries. One of them, his biographer Giorgio Vasari, writes: “He dearly loved human beauty which could be imitated in art, where the essence of the beautiful could be separated from beautiful things, since without this kind of imitation nothing perfect can be created.”

Outside of the arts, all pursuits of knowledge and skill were understood to be pursuits of imitation. To become a great master, you first had to be a great apprentice, which meant that you had to be a great imitator of your master or the model from whom you were learning your craft. This was true for theologians and philosophers as well as for writers, artists, and craftsmen. To compete – from Latin cum petere, meaning to seek together – did not imply attempting to differentiate from your competitor, as it does today, but to outdo him in imitating the same transcendental model.

Galileo showing his innovation to the pope.

To understand why this worldview is no longer held in our times, and how it happened, Girard offers his concept of triangular desire. According to it, people don’t desire things in themselves, but the transcendence that the things are supposed to bestow on their possessors. People choose what to desire by looking up to models, people who seem to live out some kind of transcendence. The models are imitated in their behavior, thoughts, and desires; from them the subject learns what to desire and pursue, hoping to acquire some of that transcendence for himself. One way or another, children imitate their parents, students their teachers, lovers their beloved and their rivals, etc.

To Girard, triangular mimesis is the source of learning, inspiration, and love, but if the relationship between the subject and the model becomes conflictual, the imitation becomes an occasion for rivalry, envy, and violence.

All premodern cultures carried a much higher risk of violent collapse compared to our modern culture, with its unprecedented surveillance, policing, and material comfort. Therefore, all premodern cultures had what to many moderns appears as an excessive fear of rivalry. To avoid rivalry, they enforced strict hierarchies. This means that they needed stable models whose status must not be questioned. The models needed to be clearly distinguished from their students or admirers. To imitate these ideal models was to reinforce the hierarchy and thus create harmony. To innovate was to question the legitimacy of the models, destabilize the hierarchy, and put the whole community at risk of chaos.

Girard writes:

[This world] fears the loss of its transcendental models. Society is felt to be inherently fragile. Any tampering with things as they are could unleash the primordial mob and bring about a regression to original chaos. What is feared is a collapse of religion and society as a whole, through a mimetic contagion that would turn the people into a mob.

The reversal of imitation from a good thing to a bad one, and of innovation from bad to good, was part and parcel of the transition from pre-modern times to early modernity. The transition meant the disappearance of stable models, or, if you prefer, of unquestionable authority. It happened in theology, philosophy, science, and politics.

In my book The Modern Malaise, I develop Girard’s thesis that the root cause of this goes back to Jesus Christ, who with his Passion destroyed the legitimacy of violent gods, and by extension, of violently enforced hierarchies. I called it the “recession of the violent sacred.” In Biblical terms, Christ destroyed the princedom of Satan over this world. However, the impact was neither immediate nor without harmful side effects. One rather delayed repercussion of it was that, due to a confluence of historical circumstances, Christian cultures around the Age of Enlightenment began to openly challenge immutable hierarchies.

Girard points out in his essay that the switch from innovation–bad to innovation–good was enabled by the rise of technology in the First Industrial Revolution (steam engines, rail, etc.). People observed the endless stream of technological novelties improving material comforts and could no longer think of innovation as something pestilent.

While previously, the fear of innovation spread from theology to all other endeavors, now technology did the reverse and spread the desirability of innovation to the fields of science, arts, and politics. From the 19thcentury to this day, innovation is almost synonymous with progress. The opposite of it is stagnation, which brings forth imagery of decay and death.

The Modern Problem of Imitation

Today, we are implicitly aware of the close connection of innovation to technology, but not so much of its relation to the disappearance of permanent models and the rise of managed rivalry that defines the modern era. Girard calls external mediation the type of mediation where the subject is definitively separated from his model, either through impregnable hierarchy or perhaps because the model is no longer among the living. External mediation is innocent, even childlike, in that it allows the subject to openly imitate a model he admires as someone unquestionably above him. Hierarchal societies are marked by external mediation.

An example of external mediation would be that of a king upon his subjects, or a great or ancient saint or philosopher upon scholastic monks, or, in literature, between Don Quixote and Amadis de Gaule, the ideal hero of chivalrous fiction whom he imitates. The ultimate model of external mediation in traditional monotheism would be God, who, as Girard puts it, was understood to have the exclusive monopoly on pure, ex nihilo innovation, and who invited the humans he created to imitate his perfections.

In my podcast, I stumbled upon an interesting example of external mediation today – in Iran. The highest-ranking Shia clerics in this country are given the title Marjaʿ al-Taqlid, which translates to “Worthy of Imitation.” Our liberal culture can hardly comprehend such an honorific, averse as it is to imitation and hierarchy. In its boundless competition, imitation of the highest cleric would swiftly produce a plague of contending Marjas.

In fact, our innovative culture already produces such plagues in every arena of competition, but imitation is never confessed but always masked behind some innovation. Think of any fashion trend.

Though hierarchies may wobble, the mediation of desire doesn’t. People still choose models they regard as their superiors. The big difference is that now the hierarchical boundary between the model and the student is blurred, making it that much easier for the two to become rivals. They may end up reciprocating each other’s imitation. This is the unstable form of mediation that Girard calls internal mediation. He writes:

All imitators select models whom they regard as superior. In ‘internal mediation,’ models and imitators are equal in every respect but one — the superior achievement of the one, which motivates the imitation by the other. This means, of course, that the models have been successful at their imitators’ expense.

The hallmark failure of modern social theories is their blindness to the dangers of internal mediation. Marxism recognized the instabilities of liberal competition, but it blamed them on capital as an artificial generator of oppressive hierarchies. It failed to understand that without hierarchies, competition does not go away but becomes internally mediated and, sooner than later, unhinged. It remains unhinged until it re-establishes some kind of hierarchy – that is, some kind of capital.

Marxism’s traditional opposite, classical liberalism, makes the same essential mistake. It believes that individuals liberated from restrictive traditions will achieve organic harmony through the pursuit of rational self-interest and innately unique desires. But individuals liberated from fixed ideals turn to emulating one another, creating undifferentiation and mob instabilities we’ve seen repeatedly in popular democracies.

In external mediation, innovation is interpreted as incompetence or, worse, sedition. In internal mediation, innovation becomes unavoidable. It is the means by which each rival attempts to differentiate themselves from the other. Competition is no longer “striving together” towards an agreed ideal, as it was in hierarchical cultures, but an attempt to establish a permanent difference from one’s rival, in the absence of agreed ideals or stable hierarchies whose aim used to be exactly that kind of difference. Innovation takes over the role previously held by hierarchy. Innovation is revered by modern society just as hierarchy used to be revered by traditional ones.

We can see now why innovation is essential and unavoidable in a liberal or non-hierarchical society, and why such a society must even obsess over it. Innovation becomes the way to establish one’s distinct position in society and thus give meaning to one’s life.

The Industrial Revolution.

The Modern Rise of Innovation

Girard was interested in the pros and cons of this modern system of differentiation by innovation. It’s important to note here that in Girard’s lexicon “differentiation” was nearly synonymous with “social order,” “peace,” or “harmony.” In some way, he was fascinated by how modern liberal culture can withstand levels of rivalry and innovation that would collapse any premodern society, and even channel them in ways that produced unprecedented wealth and prosperity.

The two great victories of liberalism in this sense, historically at least, were popular democracy and market economy. Both these systems are types of managed chaos where rivalry and innovation are set free, or “liberated,” though loosely fenced by law to prevent naked aggression. Girard often defended them in the face of socialist-leaning interviewers and colleagues. He would credit the historical influence of Christianity for the fact that these radical deconstructions of coercive hierarchy did not lead to cultural collapse.

However, Girard also had examples of modern innovation gone wrong. Fashion can be cited as a relatively benign case – people forever trying to differentiate by consuming the latest new clothes and gadgets, which promptly go out of fashion once everyone’s bought them, and the cycle then starts over again. More malignant cases, to Girard at least, would be modern arts and humanities. The mania for innovation here drives people into dark places of inanity and incoherence.

If you think about it, competitive innovation becomes more dysfunctional the less fixed the hierarchies and ideals. It gets worse in endeavors where it’s difficult to have what we now call “objective standards.” Girard links the collapse of modern arts and humanities, rather subjective endeavors, to the imperative to reject and differentiate from traditional models.

Even philosophy succumbed to the ‘terrorism’ of innovation. When French philosophers began to look for an insurance policy against the greatest possible ill — fidelity to the past, the repetition of dépassé philosophies — one of their inventions was la rupture épistémologique… Very quickly, however, one single rupture épistémologique for all times and for all people seemed paltry. Each thinker had to have his own, and then the really chic thinkers had several in a row. In the end, everybody turned themselves into a continuous and monstrous rupture, not primarily with others, but with their own past.

Going up one circle of hell from modern philosophy, we get to modern science:

Even the history of science has developed its own counterpart of Foucault’s épistémé. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn tells us more or less that the only scientists worth their salt are those who make themselves completely unintelligible to their colleagues by inventing an entirely new paradigm.

Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, at least in its popular interpretation, can mislead from the reality of scientific innovation. Newton and Einstein, responsible for two of the greatest “disruptions” in science, were both deeply immersed in the theories of their day and, obsessing over unanswered questions, delivered great syntheses of the scattered insights they uncovered in their studies. Neither man was unintelligible to his colleagues. The myth of the innovative oddball (an autist) who crashes the party of respectable authorities panders to the emotional needs of modern internal mediation.

Here we see a continuity with the genial imitation of Michelangelo. We see that Newton and Einstein, to innovate in the rather honest and objective field of theoretical physics, had to imitate first. Innovation arises out of imitation.

Modern Art: far from Michelangelo.

But the most representative example of “mimetic inventiveness,” the place to see the dynamics of internal mediation in their fullest expression, would be the battlefield of modern business competition. Girard gives it a prominent place in his essay.

In business competition, we have a powerful and perfectly objective common aim for all competitors: profit. Yet this aim can be achieved through an infinity of innovation of products and services subject to technological changes and the whims and fashions of consumers trapped in their own mimetic struggle. This means, on the one hand, that business competitors have as much incentive to innovate as any modern artist. But on the other hand, the incentive to imitate a more successful rival is also strong. Doing so is often the difference between riches and ruin.

An upstart or struggling business will imitate a successful rival in an externally mediated manner. Imitation will be open. It may be accompanied by open admiration of the successful model, or, as, Girard writes, it might be “rigid and myopic” as it pursues bare survival or easy money. But, if successful, imitation will inevitably add its own mark to the product. This mark is innovation at its best: first, you imitate what is already excellent, and second, you cannot but leave your own mark, because you are not an identical twin living in identical circumstances as your competitor. This is why Michelangelo after all was innovative, too, though he strove to imitate.

If you look carefully into the biographies of famous innovators, modern or ancient, you will inevitably find the childlike imitator first. Though many business analysts who obsess over creative disruption hate to admit it, this rule holds for business, too. Steve Jobs was fascinated by and imitated Japanese minimalism. Japanese themselves imitated Western design.

Inevitably, the childlike imitator of today becomes the great innovator of tomorrow.

Geopolitics of Imitation

Girard writes in 1990 and remarks how Japanese companies were admired at the moment as great innovators. More than that, it was feared they would dominate global markets. Yet, a decade earlier, they were dismissed as slavish imitators of Western technology, incapable of true creativity, or hopelessly deprived of it by their harsh hierarchical culture.

He then mentions how, a that same moment in history, the Koreans and Taiwanese were considered backward imitators of the Japanese, but he expected them too to transform into the innovators of the future. History proved him right. In 2008, when I was living in South Korea, most Koreans themselves felt like their champions Samsung and other chaebol made cheap versions of Japanese products. But that year was already at the inflection point when that perception was rapidly dying and firms like Samsung and LG becoming global leaders.

Girard, the great historian that he is, extrapolates back in time, too. This same dynamic recurred several times before. “Not so long ago in Europe, the Americans were portrayed as primarily imitators — good technicians, no doubt, but the real brain power was in Germany or in England. Then, in very few years, the Americans became great innovators.” And even before that: “Hadn’t something similar already occurred in the 19th century, when Germany first rivaled and then surpassed England in industrial might?”

He then concludes: “Public opinion is always surprised when it sees the modest imitators of one generation turn into the daring innovators of the next. The constant recurrence of this phenomenon must have something to teach us… The metamorphosis of imitators into innovators occurs repeatedly, but we always react to it with amazement. Perhaps we do not want to know about the role of imitation in innovation.”

Today, China is the disruptive upstart. We are living through the same inflection point I saw in Korea in 2008, but on a much larger scale given China’s much greater size. For the past three decades, Made in China evoked images of cheap junk that falls apart two weeks after you buy it. Over the years, even as China developed stunning infrastructure in products, we hear proud creatives in the West insist that it’s all thanks to copying and stealing Western IP property. “They’re communists, they’re not even allowed to innovate!”

However, the dismissive hand-waving is hard to keep up. The world is getting taken by the storm of Chinese technological and business power. Countries are scrambling to protect their markets from them. Communism may be a brake on innovation, but what if in their mimetic ardor, the Chinese end up imitating Western creative culture, too? Japanese and Korean cultures were also very hierarchical; one heard the same pessimism regarding their ability to overcome that hurdle, but then one day, it was overcome.

It's fascinating how tables turn, even spin. It has come to my attention that Western industrialists are abandoning the system of intellectual property protection. Elon Musk calls it outdated and encumbering and claims not to take advantage of it with Tesla. At the same moment, I hear from my cousin, who works for an American multinational law firm, about Chinese obsession with accumulating IP claims, their firms registering millions of patents around the world and collecting billions of dollars in IP damages.

There’s always been a tendency among academic mandarins to set up absolute differences where there are none. Theoretical explanations of the fateful clash between the East Asian and Western way of thinking have been many, and often ridiculous. Years ago I saw a documentary arguing that American children grow up to be creative because their parents let them choose which cereal to eat for breakfast, whereas Japanese children, condemned to having breakfast served without being asked for their input, are thus doomed to a lifetime of rote office work. As it turned out, the main difference produced here was that American kids had a higher likelihood of becoming obese diabetics, whereas Japanese kids were more likely to stay slim and live to a hundred.

On a more serious note, Byeung-Chul Han, a very popular Korean-German philosopher, laid out his own theory as to why Chinese culture emphasizes refinement (“1 to n”) over originality (“0 to 1”). He wrote a book about it titled Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. Shanzhai (山寨) literally means “mountain fortress” and in modern slang refers to counterfeit goods or knockoffs. Han dives into the depths of Chinese tradition to tell us how it lacks the sacred respect for originality that Western tradition supposedly does, and how it rather focuses on refinement and process.

All this stuff that ChatGPT told me doesn’t sound wrong, but isn’t this just a more veiled explanation for what Girard lays out so simply? Isn’t Chinese traditional emphasis on refinement and process, i.e. on imitation of stable and universally recognized ideals, exactly what traditional Western art was doing during the Renaissance? I explained all this above – we’re talking about external mediation characteristic of hierarchical cultures. Chinese tradition is not so different than Western tradition – it’s different than Western modernity, or just modernity, period. (Living for years in China, I have not once met even an educated Chinese person who fully grasped the fact that the Modern West and Western Tradition are not one and the same thing.)

The blatant imitation of the West by East Asian countries has two distinct reasons. The first is that East Asian countries entered modernity later, and suddenly. The fact that they entered it later means that they had to play technological catchup. The fact that they entered it suddenly meant that they were still living in a traditional, hierarchical culture, in which there is no shame to openly acknowledging and imitating superior models. External mediation is the norm; it is encouraged. Moreover, these were very functional hierarchical cultures, otherwise even the externally mediated imitation would have failed. But it was so functional, and so effective, that it even ended up imitating the West’s anti-hierarchy-ness, or liberalism.

The second reason is that, until very recently at least, East Asian countries were far enough from the West not to think of them as rivals. With rivals, we are reluctant to imitate them openly, because we thus “acknowledge what we would prefer to deny — their superiority.” But when our model is far away, mediation is external, and we imitate in a carefree and childlike way. This is precisely the way the West imitated East Asian cuisine and arts, including martial arts (see Orientalism).

However, in today’s globalized world, no one is far enough for innocent imitation any longer. We are all rivals now.

History gives us examples of how internal mediation in geopolitics can go wrong. To find them, you must look for cultures that are rivals with one another. In my podcast, my primary example is Russia’s mimetic rivalry with Western Europe. Modern Russia was established by Tsar Peter the Great, who openly emulated Enlightenment Europe and refashioned the Russian Empire in its image. But the transformation was never complete, giving Russia a permanent identity crisis and placing it into internal mediation with Europe.

I argue that the victory of communism in Russia was partly due to resentment that parts of its society held towards the perceived civilizational success of Christian Western Europe. This resentment that was shared by many Jews and Slavs of the empire (giving them, for once, a common cause). Communism, then, is a great case study in internal mediation turning self-destructive.

Again, let’s hear a little from Girard:

Unlike external mediation, the internal variety is a reluctant mimesis that generally goes unrecognized because it hides behind a bewildering diversity of masks. The mimetic urge can never be repressed entirely, but it can turn to counter-imitation. The losers try to demonstrate their independence by systematically taking the course opposite to that of the winners. Thus, they may act in a way detrimental to their own self-interest. Their pride turns self-destructive. No political or Freudian ‘unconscious’ is necessary to account for that.

Our theoretical framework, I think, can shed light on many geopolitical conflicts, if not all of them. For homework, consider the rivalry between the Islamic World and the West, and amongst East Asian countries themselves.

Conclusion

In closing, I would like to address the question of how we navigate the future of imitation and innovation. The insights here should point the way.

First, we should be aware of the dangers of internal mediation with rivals, which often goes unacknowledged and becomes destructive. This holds for personal life as well s politics. Second, we must recognize the need for some fixed models and have absolute values, otherwise we descend into the incoherence of wokism. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus Christ is the ultimate model who leads men away from destruction.

Third, we must acknowledge our models and imitate them openly. We thus pay them respect and create harmony and peace through external mediation. Moreover, by full-heartedly imitating what is excellent, we achieve excellence too, and we innovate as well when we leave our organic stamp on that excellence. Watch personal interviews of highly successful people, and you’ll hear their childlike acknowledgment and admiration for their models.

Only losers pretend they are innovators. Imitation is for winners.