On diversifying mimicry

And two and a half arguments against higher education

1

I read a piece from a former classmate in Slate today. It laments how most students at Harvard treat management consulting, finance, and big tech as their professional default.

This argument has been forwarded publicly for quite a while. In fact, type into Google the search term site:thecrimson.com “consulting” + “finance” and you will see about four or five comparable opinions in the paper every year going back to 2010. Alternatively, read enough Hacker News and you will see much of the same that is written about other schools.

I think such truisms are unhelpful. Not because I think they are wrong or even tired, but because they do not produce any meaningful deltas of change. I also think most of the people who forward such an argument should first read the many decades of thought which have been published about it.

Particularly, people should read Deceit, Desire and the Novel. The central thesis there is the assumption that human desire is broadly mimetic, which is a verbose way of saying that we want what other people want. It argues this because imitation is necessary for cultural fidelity, which in turn enables human survival.

Beyond the rote observation that undergraduates vie for ‘prestigious jobs’, this explains why, and then establishes the thought that all desire is a function of imitation. Girard then argues that any attempts to escape games of mimesis simply result in alternative games of mimesis, and are akin to futile attempts to escape society.

2

This understanding, in my view, produces a much more interesting conversation. Surely we can talk forever about how meaningless institutional finance is or how boring it is to be a software engineer moving buttons on a screen for Amazon or how awful management consulting can be. Again, people have since at least 2010 and probably much longer.

But this is not a particularly productive conversation and we could talk about it for many hours and the world would be in the exact same place. Instead, we should accept that mimetic competition is inevitable and manifests itself everywhere and seeps into every pore of life, which opens up a more practical discussion.

Simply, if we accept that…

1. high-achieving students want consulting/finance/big tech jobs because other people want them; and we simultaneously accept that

2. these are not particularly meaningful or prosocial professions; then

we ought to stop complaining about this specific status competition and start searching for a higher quantity of more meaningful status competitions.

This is just a long-winded way of saying that humans will always want to compete for what is broadly desired, so complaining about such competition is unproductive and we should just change the type and availability of competitions. If playing stupid games leads to stupid prizes, maybe we should find games that are invariably less stupid than bemoaning the fact that humans inevitably play games.

3

For those who do not have the context, the following will catch you up to speed. When you get to Harvard I think you are broadly presented with two career termini: pre-professional and academic. They are simultaneously both the world’s largest status competitions. In the former you are trained to be a doctor or a corporate lawyer or an analyst or an associate, you are gifted with the lingo and the connections to do so, and you pound application after exam after coffee chat after superday. In the latter you are trained to be a professor and all of the above applies, plus a dash more of political correctness.

This is precisely why we should ask ourselves which alternative mimetic games are more meaningful for said students, and how we encourage them towards taking those counterfactuals. With the exception of being a doctor, which is probably at least somewhat meaningful despite being quite boring, these are all pretty ridiculous professions to be putting our most privileged minds towards. And even medicine seems fairly compromised these days, because are you really helping people by fixing their kidney and then forcing them to sell it? I think if people are going to beat this dead drum, they may as well say the quiet part out loud and not censor their judgments on those fields they very carefully and inoffensively lament.

But I think the most commonly touted alternative is perhaps the most unrealistic of all. Public service, public interest, and other altruist-adjacent fields are often promoted as the third way, but this too ignores that most humans are pretty self-interested and status-driven, and it tries to pretend like mimesis does not exist. I knew exactly one guy at Harvard who was truly interested in it, and he was both a personality and intellectual outlier.

Regardless and again, the problem is not within the fact that we have an inclination towards imitation-based competition. Or maybe it is, but then it is a problem that is so inevitable and deeply entrenched into the species that it is not worth mulling over. It is that the default is both rather narrow in options and senseless in meaning.

4

If we buy this assumption, the solution is to diversify and increase the number of status games which can be played. What is most potent about the two existing types of competitions is their underlying machinery. For all the disdain people have for Goldman or McKinsey, their games are airtight. You know how to start, how to move up, how to talk, how to win. Competitions by definition have rules, win conditions, prizes, pathways, status loops, and so on.

So the solution is neither bemoaning how finance is bad, nor is it encouraging people to adopt a monastic attitude towards nonprofit work. Albeit arbitrary, the solution is in establishing a third, fourth, and fifth category of status competition, and making them very playable. These are not easy to come up with, and historically, they have come in the form of the clergy or warfare, which contemporary thought probably does not permit the re-emergence of. And they would require significant work to build the type of infrastructure and collective desire which the pre-professional and academic fields currently command. But there seem to be three fairly obvious areas which we should formalize competition within and devote more resources to.

The first are the fine arts, which have been neglected in recent years. The game loop is broken here because there is no real reason to desire something which has a very narrow payout and minimal social admiration, even if you really enjoy doing it and also happen to be very talented at it. We should thus try to revive an extensive system of patronage, which should provide seemingly-excessive amounts of capital to fund residencies and such and nurse the field back to its status of centuries prior.

The second is the civil service. I think we should establish outposts in government which pay seven figures and rely on rigorous examination. This would be pragmatic insofar as it would filter out many of the self-important, overly sensitive, pencil-pushing bureaucrats we have today, and convince the sharks of every generation to work on politics instead of leveraged buyouts. The failure of the public sector to compete with the private sector for labor is why American government is in such disarray, and the purist view on government has failed and paved way for right-wing populism. We ought to admire our bureaucrats, which is hard to do when the bureaucrats are of low competence, because we failed to appeal to those with high competence, etc.

The third is in venture. We should formalize contrarian paths to outsized economic gains. It is incredibly sad that Y Combinator, which in and of itself is a declining institution, is the only real catalyst for this right now. Every billionaire should create their own Thiel Fellowship, and we should make visible the process of building companies. For those in this environment, the status competition is very clearly defined, and it is incredibly rewarding and well-structured. It is just rather opaque. Now, it is probably true that those who need the formalization are probably not going to create decacorns, but they may very well still create smaller tools of value.

These sound like relatively far-fetched alternatives, and they are things that the general public would never agree with, because it is optically unsavory to suggest that a painter should make ten times what a nurse makes. But that is a small price to pay for salvation. Talent is concentrated in a power-law distribution, and so are cultural returns. If we can optimize for the latter by fixing the incorrect allocation of the former, the edge case of bad optics are an afterthought. Those who have the capital and power to do so should take it upon themselves to make this happen and formalize better status games around them, and we ought to build our modern noblesse oblige around these principles.

5

I think there are generally two and a half problems that result the limited quantity of mimetic competitions right now. This simultaneously reflects the most convincing arguments against the current state of higher education, given it is the stadium in which these games are played.

The first is on signal bloat. The very real game of career Jenga, stacking test score on top of internship on top of degree on top of position, ends up prioritizing the accumulation of nominal achievements over the creation of real value. As an employer of about a dozen people, and having gone through hundreds of applicants who are excellent on paper only to be bricks in actual screenings, it is ridiculous how cluttered most students’ resumes are. It is equally ridiculous how poor of a conduit achievements are to skill nowadays. And in most cases, the veneration of signals prevent people from actually developing skills because they burn all their time on developing said signals. I don’t think I need to belabor this point because I’m sure we’ve all seen it. I know this because I was very good at it.

The second is the incorrect allocation of talent which higher education is causing, as mentioned. To flesh this idea out a bit more, take the example of John Coltrane, and imagine he had become a conservatory clarinetist. He probably would have been great at it, but he would not be my example here, free jazz would not exist, and the music we listen to would be quite different. This is akin to what is happening at elite institutions. Poets become bankers, painters become doctors, all the people who would be great at politics end up in the pre-professional bucket, and the people who obviously don’t have the skin for politics end up inheriting the Democratic Party.

On the flip side, this also makes losers out of winners. Even for those who are truly meant to be doctors and lawyers and bankers, there exists an artificial competition where they get crowded out of these fields by people who are holistically more competent than them. If you have incredible political intuition, you would probably be nasty at corporate law or M&As, and someone who would otherwise be properly allocated to law or finance is now displaced. In this way, there is a multiplier on every misallocation.

The final half is in the miscalibration of interests and values. Independent of the loss to society, there is a loss to the self when one decides to pursue careers that they are not truly interested in. The loss of a poet to banking isn’t just sad for the poetry that we miss out on, but the general satisfaction of that individual’s desires. Each status competition is also pegged by a specific cardinal value, and having two status competitions forces all people to subscribe to one of two; rationality with pre-professionalism and intellectualism with academia.

6

It is fairly evident why diversification of status games solves these problems. In the first problem, increasing the number of competitions reduces the number of players per status competition, which relieves the need for as much signal bloat.

In the second problem, if you presume there is some natural distribution of talents, then increasing the number of games allows such a variance to express itself. There is currently some overbinning which exists, since all multi-talented people must pick between two relatively defined buckets. If you increase the number of buckets, you increase the chance that the median individual may sort into a bucket that sits closer to their highest talent.

And in the final half-problem, there is just a greater surface area for your interests and what is collectively valued to intersect. It also closes the gap between individual values and collective values, because there are simultaneously more buckets of values which exist beyond rationality and intellectualism. Perhaps one prefers to live prioritizing aesthetics, or prudence, or courage as the highest target. The expansion of the third, fourth, and fifth competitions permits these respectively.

All that remains, then, is to construct new, flattened, and diversified hierarchies of desire. There is no reason to rail against the aspirants because they are the way that they are. Most people, no matter how privileged and intelligent, will never have the disposition to override mimesis. It is a fact and not a failing. And you certainly do not give them this disposition by means of continuous criticism, nor can you manufacture it through complaints. Cultural capital, like any other form of capital, flows where returns are visible, legible, and endorsed. Change those returns, and the preferences will follow.

— SJY, 07.22.25