copycats

humans and their penchants for stealing what is not theirs

I read onE’s post on the guy she was involved with earlier from Substack and how he turned out to be a disappointment at the end of the day. I am glad she spotted it early, and she didn’t have to learn the hard way. Good on her.

Something stuck out for me, that sort of confirmed something that I have always thought. Humans are really not original.

It really is sad thinking about what happened to her, but I can’t help but see the girls who were messaging this guy as pathetic. I don’t have this viewpoint because I don’t blame the guy for actually pursuing these girls, quite the opposite actually. It is all his fault, because as a man, he is someone that doesn’t stand his ground, and he doesn’t have a strong moral foundation. At least on paper, based on what I know of him. He is not loyal, and he is not devoted to what he says.

That is besides my point.

These girls who subscribed to his page, and started messaging knew that this guy was in the early stages of a kind of public relationship with someone else, yet you kept putting yourself out there for him. I read Eno’s article, and the way she described him. Wow. And all of them took the bait. They all fell for the façade. Yeah you all want the date they went on. It is cute and all.

But you didn’t take the risk to find this man. His page was on Substack the whole time, and you never thought to message him. You saw his pfp and probably scrolled past it. He was just another man at that point. He was not a cobalt core that is rare to find. He was there, publicly displayed on Elon Musk’s internet for all to see, and you never once thought to send him a nude.

Noooooo

That part only came to you when you saw another woman take a punt on him, and you thought you could just eat the fruits of her own labour. Her own emotional stress, her mental calculations. She did everything on her own, and when the results were looking positive, you jumped on the bandwagon, trying to steal the treasure for yourself. Guess who the joke is on now?

We see this everywhere in our daily lives.

You see in a friend group, when someone starts a food business in a group of friends, and then starts making a profit from it, you begin to see all of a sudden everyone now has a passion of the culinary variety. Your friend gets a thousand followers on TikTok, and you are dancing on TikTok too. Someone in your circle starts driving, and you suddenly become Vin Diesel.

Everyone is into tech, one way or the other. The same people who laughed at you for staring at your screen all day see that you make a small living from it and then they are asking you for tutorials. When did you develop this passion, ehn Salihu?

We all know these people, they are lazy, greedy and always want the easy way out of every situation. They will easily call you their best friend and embrace you, and in the same breath leave you in tatters that would make you reevaluate all the choices you ever made up to that point.

Generally speaking, there are so very few ideas that humans can actually formulate from scratch, and we always circle back to the same basic pool of ideologies every few decades. Today, we want a free society. Give it time, and we want to live in a police state because we want to maintain the order.

We want freedom of speech one day, then we say people are rude for speaking up to us. We are unable to truly formulate new ideas in a supposedly modern society.

Socially, how many true systems do we have, and what can we create. It is the same story economically, politically and every other aspect as a society in general. We have had democracy since at least Athens. What has changed since then?

We have had democracy since Athens. Communism was not invented by Stalin or Marx, they just repackaged something older. Capitalism was not Adam Smith's original thought. Feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, none of it is new. Every system we have ever lived under has existed before in some form, failed, been forgotten, been rediscovered, renamed and celebrated like it was just invented. We are not building civilisation. We are renovating the same house over and over and calling it architecture. It is a tragedy that we recycle ideas and then we have forgotten we are doing it, so we never even try to think past the walls we inherited.

The part that pisses me off the most is the way we celebrate copies. We celebrate the sheep. We elevate people who did what they saw everyone else doing. One of those girls will marry that guy, and we will celebrate them like she didn’t just copy another person’s homework.

Even in this world of unoriginal ideas, we still have people who carve out their niche and work for it. There are people who sit alone with an idea and nurse it from nothing. These people are rare and they aren’t comfortable to be around. They speak without following a predefined script that fits societal standards, in a way that makes others nervous. And this nervousness makes society do what it always does with things it cannot categorise. It ignores them, then mocks them, and then eventually takes their ideas and copies them and then pretends it was always a group effort that everyone agreed with. I mean every white person says that they believed in civil rights now.

The worst part of it is that I don’t even blame the people that aren’t original all that much. The people themselves who consume things are not open to original things. You look at the state of the media today, and everything that is making money and making waves are sequels and remakes. The most streamed songs are still old songs. New albums don’t really have any staying power. Everyone is always raving about classic books that don’t really have any relevance in today’s society. We keep rolling in the rose-tinted view of nostalgia. We remember the times when things were another way and say it was better than it actually was. We do not want to move on from the past. We still want to reminisce about the good old days.

Our parents will talk to you about the good old days, but the good old days are the ones where we had military rule in this country, something we collectively have demonised. Is that what we classify as good old days?

I tried to rationalise this thought in my head by comparing it with the human condition. There is a comfort in what you know. The devil you know. It is rare that someone fearlessly leaves the fold, sits with an idea and nurses it from nothing. It is an uncomfortable proposition because these people do not follow a script. They do not fit into any mould and it makes people nervous. And when people are nervous, they will demonise you and then they ignore you, mock you, and then they crucify you.

Then they make you a symbol and all claim to have been supportive of you. This is a formula that has worked time and time again. It is a formula that ensures survival, because survival does not require originality. Survival requires you to watch someone else test the berry first, wait to see if they die, and if they do not, you eat the berry too.

That is the way of the forest. But we are not in the forest anymore. We are not trying to survive a predator. We have all the information we have ever had in our pockets, yet we still wait for another person to give an opinion before we make decisions. We still wait for permission. We still wait for proof of concept. Still waiting to see if she succeeds before you decide you want what she has.

That is a form of mental poverty that highlights a lack of personal agency. It shows a deficiency in imagination, the inability to want something before you see someone else want it first. It is passed down, society wide. It is cultured into you at every table you ever sat at. From the dining table, where you are asked to not talk when eating, to the classroom, where you don’t question anything outside the curriculum, to the boardroom where you don’t question your boss.

You cannot imagine wanting something on your own. You need to see it in someone else's hands first before your brain registers it as desirable. You simply are cautious because your imagination was beaten out of you before you even knew what it was. Every single time you were told to mow your expectations down, to outsource your desire and let others think and decide for you, you lose a bit of yourself, little by little. Until you become a background character in the overall sea of society.

I normally try to proffer solutions, but I don’t have a solution to this one. I am simply pointing out a problem. Most people are too polite to say it, and these people are also the spectators who occasionally run onto the field when they think the game is won.

Don’t be that person. Or you know what, you can be the spectator. To each his own.

I am not asking you to be a revolutionary. I am not even asking you to be brave. I am asking you to at least be honest with yourself about what you actually want versus what you decided you wanted after you saw someone else want it first. That gap between the two is where your real character lives. Most people never look at it. Most people are too busy waiting for someone else to go first.