Back in September 2019, a plane crashed in Turkey, Texas (yes, there is such place). The two passengers suffered only minor injuries. Hooray for that. Not so hooray-ish: the reason for the crash. It was caused by a gender reveal stunt gone awry. (For those unaware, a “gender reveal” party is a public announcement by expectant parents of the sex of their unborn child—kind of insurance against abortion. You have to go farther north and east for “abortion reveal” parties.) Apparently the pilot was flying at a low altitude, in order to release 350 gallons of pink water for the reveal, which caused the plane to slow and stall. The plane ended up slamming into the ground. Thankfully no one died, and 350 gallons of free water in Texas can be a bonus.
We can’t say the same thing for the fifty-six-year-old woman who, a few weeks later, was killed by a flying piece of debris, caused by an explosion that was part of another gender reveal party.
I’ve been circling a topic for some time: mimetic theory. Like everything that sounds super important, the phrase comes from a Greek word—in this case “mimesis.” According to my buddy Google, mimesis (pronounced “mim-EE-sis”) means “imitation and representation,” which says that “people are influenced by each other and the world around them.”
Mind-blowing, right? I’m not sure we needed Socrates for that, but whatever.
Well, it kinda is. Because once you see how much behavior is copied—you can no longer mentally escape it. It’s everywhere. And we’re not talking good behavior, but mediocre behavior, and even awful crap, like crashing planes in order to announce the gender of someone’s potential brat. We copy each other, and we can’t stop.
On The Five, I ban phrases that reach the threshold of annoying repetition. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’ve always been grossed out by mimesis—and my distaste for it has gotten me fired three times from great occupations (I’m sure the Greeks had a word for that, too). Because I didn’t want to do what other magazines, or editors, or publishers did—and because I thought that the usual public relations kowtowing was garbage—I would inevitably get the heave-ho. So, now, on The Five I direct that energy into banning phrases like “let’s unpack this topic,” “you can’t make this up,” or “at the end of the day.” But there’s something unfair about my hatred. Everyone has an innate nature to belong, which fuels the desire to replicate behaviors that seem advantageous. But my real hatred isn’t for you, it’s for the mimetic media whose desire to belong ends up fueling bad ideas and stupid causes. Look at the media who fell all over themselves, slipping on their own drool, chasing the creepy litigious lollipop known as Michael Avenatti. Every anchor (except the FNC ones) saw him as their answer to Trump—which created a moral blindness that would have been comical if it weren’t so grotesque. So where is this media’s next great hope, as I write this very word? In the same prison cell once occupied by El Chapo. And where are all of his media lackeys, who like mimetic lemmings rushed to get selfies with him, while bathing him in gooey praise?
They’re nowhere to be found. True media friends! He went from lover to leper in seconds.
It’s clear that the natural human desire is to belong: a survival mechanism to get our genes into its next iteration leads us to imitate each other. Fitting in keeps you from being killed. People who deviate from acceptable behavior are ostracized—thrown to the wolves, tossed over the wall, chased to the woods, forced to create Goth bands and do inventory in the basement of the local Hot Topic (I got fired from that, too). The “imitating of the horde” makes those who don’t (for either mental or moral reasons) seem especially weird.
High school (and now college) is one big mimetic magnet, where we learn to do three things:
Once, imitation meant survival. Which is why, right around fifth grade, I lost all my friends. (I wrote about this in an earlier book, Not Cool.) When I refused to join a gang in which all members would behave like sharks, I was ostracized for a year, maybe longer. I know you’re wondering what this has to do with “gender reveal.” Well, how does something as idiotic as dumping gallons of pink water while putting assorted lives in danger actually happen? It happens mimetically. And it grows mimetically. One person sees the favorable attention received for one reveal. He likes the idea, then decides to replicate it—only making it better, bigger, more memorable. And any stunt involving an airplane is by definition a bad idea. We should all know this by now.
So you begin by popping a balloon filled with pink or blue glitter (which itself is problematic these days: how dare you assign such oppressive colors, which is nothing more than a social construct born of the patriarchy!), then progressing to slicing a cake to find pink or blue filling. And, voilà, thanks to mimetic competition, you end up with a plane flipping over in a field. Thank God it missed heavy traffic. This stupid “event” risked ending the lives of many whose gender was already fairly established—that is, the people walking around below it. All of them likely couldn’t care less about the baby in question. I mean, talk about self-important. This will be the most self-important child since that Swedish kid who’s always going on about climate change. (Shouldn’t she be off yodeling or something?)
I suppose I could have used the “Tide Pod challenge” as an example of mimetic idiocy, but that has one extra variable: smaller, adolescent brains. And I’m not entirely sure it took off as a trend, except among the attention-addict YouTubers. It may have been more media hysteria than anything.
Sadly, though, there are adults doing this stuff—which shows you the sheer power of mimetic desire, and the weakness of modern adults. Our culture creates psychological Benjamin Buttons, adults reversing in maturity as they try to imitate teenagers more and more.
This desire holds more control over us than sex and food. Because imitation is the key to getting both. In order to get sex and food, we gotta be accepted. Why do you think God made letterman’s jackets?
I’ve written about low-slung jeans before, but it remains a unique example of how mimetic behavior’s charm transcends utility. I mean, it’s hard to run with a waistband at your thighs, and it’s hard to carry anything when your left or right hand must continually tug at the belt loop of your sagging pants (it’s why I had to leave the Crips). This behavior won’t get you a job, except maybe making license plates. And everyone will blame “societal factors” instead of that invisible internal drive to belong.
Facial tattoos might have initially meant some sort of daring rebellion—but not now that every mediocre white hip-hopper is doing it. I mean, when some kid named Corey is getting a teardrop below his eyelid, and a spiderweb tattoo on his neck, maybe that is progress. There was a point in time when a teardrop tattoo meant, “I killed someone in prison.” Now it means, “I get to my tech job on a Razor scooter.” (I came across a great headline this November morning in the New York Post: “Sarah Hyland shares painful experience of having butt tattoo removed.” In that headline alone you are left with one question: Who is Sarah Hyland?)
Tattoos used to be the bastion of warriors, soldiers, and bikers, but now they’re the product of a drunken actress intent on spicing up her Instagram. Problem: barbed wire biceps mean so little when the guy down the block has Satan on his face. Mimetic desire kills all rebellious action by simply spreading the behavior so it’s no longer rebellious, which only encourages more intense attempts at outdoing each other (you got a face tattoo? Ha—I just pierced my uvula!).
This is something super important to note when you’re on social media, or on campus—or hell, anywhere—in which a mob is taking hold of the conversation. Mimetic action is contagious, but you never really saw it before. Now you do. And that’s good. For it tells you not to engage. To combat the excesses of mimesis, the action is simple: Do not join. And if possible, offer support to those who are being harpooned by the joiners.
When you see one person surrounded by many, remember that your action makes it easier for others to follow. And harder for others not to. You have the power to reverse mimetic gravity. You can turn it on itself. Which is really what this book is all about.
To fight mimesis, it’s pretty simple.
Ask yourself, are you copying someone else’s behavior? Be honest with yourself. You may not even know you’re doing it until you ask yourself that question (asking yourself this question because I asked you to is not mimesis!).
If three or more people are doing X, and you’re compelled to join—step back and consider why. If X is expressing an opinion, it’s only because the barrier to entry is low in agreeing with that opinion, which may not even be a real opinion, or one held strongly. Maybe it’s just a “thing” that is an opinion in a gaseous state. Walk on by: nothing to see here.
But if what a group is doing appears to be a good thing (like lifting a car off a trapped pedestrian), I wouldn’t worry too much about the flaws of mimetic desire! Copying good behavior ain’t a bad thing, in general. (We are doing it now in this countrywide lockdown.) Unless it’s perceived as good by the media—then it’s just vacuous virtue-signaling in order to appear superior and grab some easy attention.
How do we fight mimesis, when it’s really all over the place? Well, think about how it informs our behavior growing up. How much of it is constructed to keep us from being ourselves, and from taking risks that might make us better people. Now it’s bigger because it has a friend in social media echo chambers, and it’s why adults are now not growing out of the behavior.
But let’s go back to where it really begins. In that hellhole called the classroom.
In November 2019, Kamala Harris made a bold promise—that if she were elected, she would try to lengthen the school day for kids, in order to match the schedules of their working parents. When I heard it initially, I offered an agreeable nod. I mean, keeping kids in class until 6 p.m.? That means fewer punks on the street between three and six—and there’s nothing more frightening than marauding brats roaming the road, looking to unload their uncaged energy on world-class celebrities like myself. (The worst part about teens in a group? You punch one in the face, and suddenly you’re the bad guy! I maintain that when one teen becomes two teens, this negates any age difference, and you can hit them if they come at you. Just make sure you’re not just seeing two teens.) If I had my way, school would be twenty-four hours, seven days a week, held in a meat locker one hundred leagues under the sea.
But then I had an epiphany—sparked by a brilliant random tweet by a chap named Frank J. Fleming, in response to Harris’s idea. He tweeted: “If your only job was to learn for the next 16 years, you’d expect to come out of that like Batman. For kids, we’re happy if after K-12 plus college, they have one marketable skill. Most of the school time is already just wasted busywork, but they want to increase it?”
So, there was more wisdom in that small pile of words than shelves of books on education and homeschooling. I imagine myself at eight years old, and some mysterious man (me, from the future) walks into my room and asks, “What three things really interest you? For the next sixteen years, you will devote six hours a day to that.”
Well, I loved TV talk shows (Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore, Mike Douglas, Fernwood 2 Night) and I loved horror movies (anything with Vincent Price). I worshipped punk rock (it was the mid to late 1970s, after all) and crank calls (I wrote my own). I also loved boxing, and had a pair of gloves when I was eight. Finally I also had the strange habit of setting my alarm for 5 a.m. so I could lie in bed until seven and think about the world. (I did that every day for years. Now I get paid to do it.)
Now, we know how much sixteen years really is. You can do more than learn one thing—you can be a master at a few things—if you choose wisely and according to your desires. Think about a six-hour day of “classes” that begins at eight years old and is designed to teach you just three things:
Sixteen years later, at twenty-four, what would you, or I, have been—barring any tragic accident, debilitating disease, or drug addiction? And also, without the filler of standard education to eat up your days, and years?
Well, sixteen years of that curriculum would yield a Bruce Lee/Jimi Hendrix/Yoda hybrid. You or me could kill a man three times our size, play “Purple Haze” on a Strat behind our necks, while positing the differences between the world’s major Sophists.
In a very real sense, as Fleming says in his much simpler tweet, you and I would be Batman. We, in fact, would be a nation of Batmans, and Batwomans—Bat-folk.
Instead, the average twenty-five-year-old panics over whether he has the aptitude for a job interview in pharmaceutical sales.
Don’t make goals. I remember the mistakes I made in life—and they’re a combination of goal-making and time-wasting. At eighteen, I told myself that in a decade, at twenty-eight, I would be X (a renowned writer). Ten years seemed like enough time to reach that goal (which it is), which also made it an easy amount of time to goof off. The more time you have, the more time you waste (look at any drum solo). And it may not be a bad thing. I read about research on procrastination that said it’s life telling you that whatever you’re putting off, you really don’t have to do. If the bullet’s coming at you, you probably won’t hesitate to think about ducking.
Fact is, death is the bullet and it’s on the way. So move it.
Like most people, you probably don’t reach a goal unless you start doing stuff bit by bit—staring at a goal from far away offers you little beyond an intimidating sense of possible failure.
Scott Adams has made this point first: outsize goals suck because you’re bound to fail. Start with easy success. You don’t need to rule the world before lunch. You just need to make your bed, as Jordan Peterson keeps reminding us.
I wanted to star in a TV show when I was in second grade. I did a puppet show based on the Watergate hearings and no one laughed at either version. I wrote a game show play for an eighth-grade talent show that offended the audience of moms and dads, but also surprised my parents (it was called “Up Your Income,” and I wore my mother’s wig when I played the host; at the end of the show, the contestants either beat me up or kill me—it’s a matter of interpretation; oddly, now that I think about it—I haven’t traveled far from that). I think that was the first time I revealed to the outside world what was inside my mind. I was a smart, moody kid (girls would call me “weird”)—I could ace a spelling bee in my sleep, especially if the words was “zzzz”—but this was the first time I walked in front of a group of people and took a real risk in revealing who I was. I was coming out as a madman, in my mom’s wig.
I wish that someone had come along and said to me at that age, “Hey kid—you’re twelve. You wanna do that for a living? Sixteen years from now, we’re gonna do that every day for two hours. If you lose the wig.” I would have cried with happiness. Instead, I took courses in geometry. And I lost the wig, too.
If my dreams had matched my education, who knows how things might have turned out? If I’d played my cards just a little differently, I could have had a talk show at thirty, a drug addiction at thirty-five, and been dead at thirty-eight. Instead, I started my TV career full-on at forty-two. And that was thirteen years ago. If he’d known what was coming, that little Greg sitting in his room in the 1970s watching Fernwood 2 Night would be over the moon.
Be bad. The secret to becoming great at anything isn’t just wanting to be great, but a willingness to be bad, and to keep being bad for a long time. It took me years to figure that out. In fact, I took a roundabout path of being good (editing magazines) before I risked being bad (hosting TV shows). Weird thing: it was my job in publishing that threw me under the TV bus. At a certain point, publishers had enough of my reverse mimetic obnoxiousness. I started doing guest hits on Headline News, MTV, and VH1 (“Paris Hilton—what’s up with her?” was my go-to line; and yes, I’m aware it doesn’t resonate like it used to), and it became clear that even though magazines were not prepping me for the camera, my ability to run meetings did—especially when I decided to hire “little people” to liven things up a little. Everything I did at the annual meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors (google it) on Red Eye or The Five and on The Greg Gutfeld Show was about passing the ball, teasing each other, and giving people something to talk about.
So, now I’m fifty-five. Christ, I can’t believe I’m not in jail or dead. But you have to believe in something. But in another sixteen years, I’ll be seventy-one and looking forward to a stent. So now I’ve started playing guitar again, and by the time I’m seventy-one, if I’m not an Ensure-drinking, Stairlift-using Eric Clapton, I’ll eat my Life Alert.
That’s the answer…
Our education system has sold us one way of learning, and it’s a waste of precious life. The only way to combat American education is to start your own education department. We’re doing it now—at least I’m doing it now. The Internet is the world’s biggest, free college—and no one has figured that out yet. (This includes, of all places, YouTube. The moment they start a deal with accreditations, it’s completely over for Harvard, which couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of bullshit artists.)
How do you think I’m learning the Cramps catalog on guitar? Do you think I actually have a teacher? No, I have YouTube. I’m learning philosophy; the ins and outs of artificial intelligence and how to play the “Free Bird” solo (which is way easier than it sounds but not easy to do simultaneously). I still can’t play speed metal (neither can most speed metalists—that’s the point) but in a month, I’ll be doing the entire Anthrax catalog—and I’ll know how to properly frame the selfie I’ll take while bungee-jumping off a 747.
The experts are now there for the clicking, and anyone can learn from one, to become one.
So the answer is to create your own curriculum. It’s easy as one, two, three:
Maybe Monday is stoicism. Tuesday is beginner guitar. Wednesday is public speaking.
Set your own pace, so that at your leisure, by 2050, you’ll be a fearless stoic who can explain why you are going to play “Layla” in front of thousands. You’ll be Batman. And you never saw it coming.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TURN SCHOOL FROM A MINUS TO A PLUS?
I no longer watch the Grammys, because like my receding hairline it reminds me how old I am. I know none of the nominees—except the young woman who basically and historically swept all the major categories. Billie Eilish and her older brother Finneas O’Connell cleaned up at the Grammys.
In an interview with “Your Teen Media” (my go-to for all things teen media), O’Connell had this to say about (gulp) homeschooling: “Being homeschooled is all about self-discovery. It’s something that I’ve really enjoyed and thrived under. I’m not at a high school where I have to base my self-worth off what other people think of me.… I think that’s an enormously positive thing.”
What is he talking about? He’s talking about escaping the pressure of mimetic desire, which forces everyone to belong, and do the same thing, even if you’re better at something else. He rejected that. And he was able to carve out a unique education for himself that made him and his sister stars.
“Everybody’s always out doing things, traveling, going places, meeting for classes, and organizing field trips.… You take what you want, where you want it, and you find what you need…”
With that kind of control over life’s curriculum, maybe it’s not such a surprise he and sister hit upon such monstrous success so early in their lives. Think about it. They were allowed to chase their dreams, not chained to crappy little desks and told what to believe and what to memorize.
Maybe that’s where the answer lies. Who needs school?
According to Reason magazine, about 3.3 percent of K–12 students are homeschooled, or about 1.7 million. The most common reason for homeschooling is worries over safety, drugs, or peer pressure. As writer Michael Malice often says, and I paraphrase, school is probably the only place you will ever encounter violence in your life. Does that ring true for you? It did for me. (I once arm-wrestled the school nurse for painkillers.)