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Comment by francisofascii | Hacker News Reader

You can still compare yourself to others in your age group. There needs to be a realization that there are always people better and worse.

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Have you encountered mimetic theory? It's worth a read if you haven't yet. To boil it down: we measure ourselves by the people around us, and the more homogenous the peer group, the greater the pressure on each individual. We're all busy copying each other without consciously realizing it, but simultaneously we are mortally afraid of anybody thinking we are copying them. Here's a random overview: https://violenceandreligion.com/mimetic-theory/

Mimetic theory sounds like a very middle class (in the pejorative sense, as an ever-anxious externally-measuring person: in german we would say "spear-carrier", in french "tiny urbanite", etc.) approach to life.

Aha yes, in America it's often referred to as "Keeping up with the Joneses"

I'm curious about your phrasing, however. In your view, is a middle class approach to life a life that simply conforms to the predictions of mimetic theory without awareness, or a life informed by its understanding and application?

The former. (again, only in a pejorative context! Compare "épater la bourgeoisie", shetexe da sut inya.)

Note that in this century, the mimetic middle class is much closer to the statistical middle class (the modal hump of the poisson distribution) than to the more historical middle class (those with enough property to weather a few years not working, but not enough for permanent leisure. Go back another century and one has the classes of Jane Austen, who wrote mostly about the upper middle, with a smattering of lower upper characters.)

As to scapegoating: I'm reminded of Solzhenitsyn, who said that it's tempting to try to excise evil and separate it from society, but the attempt is doomed, as the line between good and evil runs not between ideologies or countries or factions or people but through all our hearts...

Sili to deng fo decho da nagut, deng to mebi mowsh shetexa kori milowda, kowmang.

Edit: also, conspiracy theorists may enjoy the double-scapegoating in the Passion, as told in Master and Margarita.

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