What If the Culture Is the Model?
Cultural Formation and Mimetic Saturation
What if the culture isn’t just a background noise, but the model itself?
That’s the question we must ask in an age where the mimetic environment has become ambient, algorithmic, and inescapable. While mimetic theory has long emphasized the interpersonal nature of desire—how we catch our wants from others—it must now reckon with a deeper question: what happens when the “others” are not individuals, but a pervasive, unexamined culture?
We often think of models as people—parents, peers, mentors, celebrities. But what if the dominant model isn’t a person at all? What if it’s a system of cues, a curated field of desires, a narrative of what success and meaning should look like? What if the culture itself is the model?
Desire by Atmosphere: The New Mimetic Field
Traditionally, the mimetic environment was mediated through relatively stable structures—family, faith, neighborhood, tradition. One absorbed desire slowly, over time, through repeated exposure to a limited number of models. Identity formed within a mimetic ecosystem with boundaries.
But today, the mimetic field has no perimeter. Culture is streamed directly into the psyche through personalized devices and algorithmic curation. In this new regime, we no longer observe others from a distance—we’re immersed in a curated storm of images, affective signals, micro-celebrities, and digital tribes. The result is not just a multiplication of models, but a saturation of desire.
Desire used to have time to breathe. Now it scrolls.
When Culture Becomes the Composite Model
Each of us carries a composite model: the layered internal architecture of desires inherited from those we’ve imitated—parents, peers, enemies, saints. But in the age of mimetic saturation, this architecture is increasingly shaped not by individual models, but by cultural aggregates.
We no longer say, “I want to be like my father,” or “I want to be like that teacher.” Instead, we want to be the kind of person the culture celebrates. We imitate types, not people—archetypes manufactured by marketing firms, influencers, political identities, and therapeutic self-brands. Our desires are shaped not by known others, but by atmospheric pressure—what feels desirable based on visibility, reward, and recognition in the cultural sphere.
In this way, culture becomes not merely the setting of desire, but its primary model. And that culture—because it is not embodied in any one person—cannot be confronted. It cannot be reasoned with. It cannot be forgiven. It can only be followed or resisted. And either response becomes mimetic.
Resistance Is Mimetic, Too
We may be tempted to think that rejecting the dominant culture is an act of autonomy. But mimetic theory reminds us: even rebellion is a form of imitation. The countercultural activist, the ironic skeptic, the minimalist dropout—they all reject the cultural model in imitation of other models. Their opposition is often shaped by admired resistors, or by a longing to escape the dissonance of contradiction within the cultural field.
This is the problem of internal mediation on a cultural scale: the model becomes too close, too omnipresent, too contradictory to escape. The result is not liberation, but rivalry—internally, relationally, and socially. The culture offers too many models, all contending for attention, none stable. We end up not free, but fractured.
The Perfectionist Composite Model
Today’s cultural saturation produces what might be called the perfectionist composite model—a Frankenstein desire made up of incompatible parts: the hustle of the entrepreneur, the serenity of the monk, the glow of the influencer, the passion of the activist. This model is not embodied by any one person. It is an amalgam created by the mimetic algorithm.
The result is psychic fragmentation. We feel drawn in many directions—each pulling on a different layer of our composite model, none able to hold it together. We suffer from what Charles Taylor calls “cross-pressure”—a tension between conflicting sources of meaning. But mimetic theory takes this further: we’re not just conceptually cross-pressured; we’re mimetically divided.
Cultural Models Without Bodies
In past generations, models were embodied: you could walk with them, eat with them, learn their rhythms. Today, many models are disembodied—broadcast from screens, curated into perfection, lacking the friction and limitation of real presence.
And yet we imitate them.
This is a recipe for longing without fulfillment. We mimic personas that don’t actually exist in the flesh. We form desires based on illusions. And when reality fails to match the script, we turn on ourselves or others—scapegoating anyone who breaks the fantasy. This is mimetic frustration at scale. It is not accidental. It is cultural.
The Way Forward: Discernment, Not Denial
We cannot escape the mimetic nature of desire. But we can become aware of it. We can name the models who live in us. And we can ask the deeper question: is the culture forming me toward rivalry or toward love?
St. Paul’s exhortation strikes at the heart of mimetic saturation:
“Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2).
In the original Greek, “Do not be conformed to the aion”—the spirit of the age. This is more than a warning against fashion or moral drift. It is a command to resist the dominant mimetic field—the ambient cultural model that shapes desire without our awareness. Paul invites us to step out of the imitation cycle, not by asserting autonomy, but by undergoing transformation. Formation, not escape. Renewal, not rebellion.
Christ poses a similar challenge, in two questions that strike like lightning through the heart of mimetic confusion:
“Who do the people say that I am?”
“But who do you say that I am?” (Matt 16:13–15)
The first question names the cultural model: the gossip, the speculation, the collective voice. The second demands personal discernment: not the crowd’s answer, but your own. Not who they say Christ is, but who you believe Him to be—after the noise, after the imitation, after the rivalries.
This is not a psychological exercise. It is a crisis of formation. Because the answer to that question—who do you say that He is?—will shape every other desire. Every imitation. Every model you choose to follow or leave behind.
If the culture is the model, we need a new question. Not just “What do I want?” but:
“Who do I say that He is?”
And: “Is He the model around whom my desires cohere—or just another voice among many?”
Because in the end, every cultural crisis is a mimetic one. And every mimetic crisis is, ultimately, a Christological one.