Copying Me, Copying You

(In the Style Of Sweet Caroline) (An Asymmetry Porn Primer)

While avoiding finishing my “based Christianity” piece I think I found a way to generally redefine politics using an entropy model (yay), so before I lay it all on you I thought I’d insert a light primer. You can also ^listen to me read this piece^ (the above too-dim and too-gray player) or do both simultaneously if you want to impress someone (the text and audio are not identical, appropriately).

It’s trivial to note that social movements and the trends they generate are mimetic¹. People copy one another. Someone does something interesting or novel or disruptive or exciting or otherwise inspiring, and others awake to the same possibility and begin doing the same thing. It is trivial to note that social movements and trends are mimetic—so long as it’s not the social movement you are currently enamored with. No. If it’s the social movement YOU are currently enamored with, what explains the sudden deluge of new behaviors and beliefs and feelings and language codes and dress codes and sex codes is NOT mimesis. You are NOT copying anyone else, nor are any of your movement’s fellows. Your codes are not the incidental features of a movement, but essential features of spirit! Your movement is different. Because unlike other movements in which participants have merely been wooed into a topical ideology, your movement runs much deeper.

“And what explains the curious suddenness with which you all began changing your identities?” 

“Morphic resonance!” 

“So all at once, you were ALL suddenly within a spiritual shift?”

“Yes!” 

“…Weird, because it didn’t occur all at once. In fact, it occurred just as all trends do—it spread.” 

“Yes, fine. But! Our first and the brave are not here being copied or something so trite! Our truer truths were revealed, our truer forms made available—and so we seized them!” 

“Ah. So after you saw someone else do it, you did it, BUT, you were not copying them?” 

“Correct!”

Of course, we cannot escape the rash-y-ness of behavior. That about half of Substack writers copy the tone of @astralcodexten² cannot be helped—and I’m not admonishing you for being a ripoff artist. What I am saying is that the force and power of our mirror neurons should be not so cloaked in arrogance that we disappear them altogether. We may be lions and bears and monkeys and weasels, but we are all copy cats under the sun. We are a largely unoriginal beast, but Lo! The tedium of pretension when we pretend we’re not. And so back to you, you essential baron of unmolested genius. You original, you. (This proverbial “you” includes me, your humble auteur).

Have you—in all your originality—noticed that you wear a uniform as regimented as that of the world’s armed forces? That the more “individualistic” or “heterodox” or “queer” or otherwise free-from-normativity, the more predictably homogeneous? Almost as if… there were… a code of membership… a group to which you were intent on appeasing… to which you owed fealty… to which you were almost desperate to seem to belong to… as if you were afraid of not presenting in the proper manner… for fear of excommunication from that group…

The more asymmetrical the grouping, the more intense the requirements of membership, the more deeply frothed the identity. Duh. And so we become vigilant. Not merely to keep ourselves within the good graces of our tightly-bound cluster, but to keep others OUT.  

“We’d just keep pretenders out.” 

“Don’t you want to expand your little asymmetrical bundle into divine symmetry?”  

“Uh… prolly not.” 

“You don’t you want everyone to join you?”

“Uh… It would be lame if normies tried to act like us.” 

“Yes, but what if they see you out there and they say ‘MY SPIRIT WANTS TO COPY THEM! What I see in them feels true in me! I suddenly feel what they feel!’” 

“Sure, I guess.” 

“Great! The CEO of Dunlop, the plumber, Ted Cruz, Dad and Mom—EVERYONE has turned. Inspired, they’re all now copying you! (With all their heart). They all now dress like you, talk like you, behave like you, sex like you!”

“…Sure.” 

“…What’s wrong?” 

“…Nothing’s wrong.” 

“Aww, c’mon, you can tell me.” 

“…I dunno. I just…” 

“Yeah?” 

“I just… It doesn’t quite have the same vibe anymore.” 

“You preferred it when it felt special, asymmetrical, didn’t you…” 

“…Yeah.” 

“Yeah.” 

I was 7 years old when I saw those three black men in leather jackets towering over me. RUN-DMC in megalithic print, like stumbling into God. Who the fuck are they. I convinced my mother to get me my very first cassette, Run-D.M.C.’s King Of Rock. 

The year was 1985 and I never looked back. I never got into any of the hair metal or whatever was happening behind my lily white back. I was so into hip-hop that my friends jeeringly monikered me “Hip Hop”. So what. They were on the outside of an inside too fresh. And when hesher Gabe Harmon started listening to rap 10 years later, saying things like “Ebes, have you heard to the new Busta Rhymes? So Dope!” Dope? I rolled my eyes into my pockets. And when preppie Ben Ronnie suddenly came to school with a gangster rap makeover, I hazed him mercilessly for a straight year. Sorry, Ben, but I was gatekeeping. Hip Hop was not a fucking STYLE to be bought. Hip Hop was an ESSENCE to be known. You couldn’t just bump The Chronic in between your Pantera and expect to get a pass, and I made sure of that. But then… what was the difference, actually, between Ben and I?

The difference was only that I was early, and he was late. And for that, I loathed him. Not that I wished he was early, but that my earliness was being diluted by his lateness. The essence I had felt began to disappear. As Rap’s rupturing asymmetry ascended into the pat congestion of popularity (symmetry), Hip Hop became a simulacrum, a copy of a copy of a copy, and I found myself out of love …and moving on. WTF? Was I ever truly in love, then? Was Hip Hop  ever truly essential to me? Or was it merely circumstantial, contingent on the excitement of an ascendant asymmetry… (Yes, I’m beating these words into stiffer life).

Ah! Ascendant asymmetries are the best, aren’t they? When something is just beginning? Christ and the apostles. Early punk, early new wave, early brutalism, early vaporwave, …early Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. Yes, when I started that band earnestness was asymmetric, long banished to lameland by the irony-clad gatekeepers of Cool. But for a brief, hot second, we made it ascendant, ruptured the crisp mud, and it felt like breathing fire (to me).

…And now it’s just a good way to sell a Honda (to you). (The proverbial you).

Its trivial to note that social movements and the trends of behavior they generate are mimetic. It’s trivial until it happens to you. What was essential turns out to have been so easily imitable that you’re no longer sure it was essential at all. And you mourn. 

There is not merely a correlative function between increasing popularity and decreasing potency, there’s a causative one. It is my favorite law of phenomenology: That which becomes ubiquitous disappears. And whatever was distinctly special about it can no longer be located. It is lost to its own saturation.

And so I ask you—you with your intense devotion to your asymmetric movement, you with your absolutely predictable patois, with your terribly regimented behavior; you asymmetric trail blazers of individualistic idiosyncrasy who (totally randomly) happen look indistinguishable from your fellows:

Are the features of your movement essential to your spirit, or incidental to your need for asymmetry?

1. Fancy term I copied from fancy people.

2. Too gucci to allow mentions.