Sunday Deep Read: Mimetic Resistance
Escaping the Trap of Simulated Dissent
The word "resistance" has been hollowed out. It trends, and sells, and it’s a way you can let people know you’re on the edgy ‘rebel’ side. It’s a real strategic danger. If we don't define resistance with precision, we end up performing it instead of practicing it.
recently made this point with force in his article, "The Mimetic Nature of #Resistance Politics". He laid out the framework: in an age where every opinion is expected to fit within algorithmically generated scripts, most resistance is just tribal signaling. You say what you’re supposed to say to prove you're on the right team. Girard called this mimetic behavior. Adubato maps it onto modern cultural discourse, and he’s absolutely correct.To illustrate what he means, you can simply look at who claimed the resistance label based on who was president at a given moment.
Obama: Militias and patriot groups
Trump: Antifa and other leftist groups
Biden: Militias and patriot groups, with some QAnon thrown in
Trump: Antifa, La Raza, and other pro-illegal immigration groups, etc.
My most voracious readers could literally change depending on who’s in the Oval Office—not because I’ve changed what I say, but because they’ve changed who they think I am.
These are simulations of resistance. These are forms that look like disruption but function as containment.
As Guy Debord would add, they are part of the spectacle, or substituting representation for real experience. Adubato rightly calls this theater what it is: mimetic distraction.
To further break it down:
Mimesis (Girard): You don’t adopt a position because you investigated it. You adopt it because someone you admire or fear did. The result is a script: ideological templates passed around like fashion trends. We see this on both sides. The left and right have their champions, and woe to those who do not toe the ideological line.
Elite Capture (al-Gharbi): Once a political stance becomes popular, institutions hijack it. They elevate token figures who speak the language but protect the system.
Controlled Opposition (Shullenberger): Resistance that's too visible or aestheticized, is usually resistance the system allows or even creates. Remember that next time you see it’s time for the annual Big Gun Rally Where They Really Mean Business This Time(tm).
But here’s where I need to plant a flag: when I talk about resistance, I’m not talking about any of that. Real resistance doesn’t care who is in power, or what side is ‘winning,’ because it recognizes that the system is what is corrupt and must be resisted.
I don’t stand against left or right tyranny; I stand against a system that seeks to control what I have access to, what I believe, what I think, and even how I go about thinking it.
I don’t stand for or against a person or party. I stand for truth, and I do not care who says it. This means I have positions, but they’re grounded in truth and a constant refinement as I reorient.
I stand against dishonesty, regardless of who’s doing it, and I resist any system that sees it as a feature instead of a bug.
This makes me a “divergent” of sorts, to steal a movie term. That’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it? Seeking truth at all costs is an outlier position. Instead of a country focused on truth, we have crowdfunded validation.
In order to understand this, we need to understand the mimetic trap.
Agreeing for Belonging
One of Adubato’s strongest points is that most people aren’t resisting anything; they’re just aligning with a crowd. What looks like moral conviction is often mimicry.
Ask yourself:
Did you arrive at your view or absorb it? Can you explain it? Can you defend it and source it? Or when challenged, do you immediately default to an ad hominem attack?
Does your position help you signal virtue, or does it help you accomplish a task?
Is your enemy a real, tangible threat, or just the villain in your ideological fairy tale?
This is the heart of the problem. A mimetic script gives you an identity, but it doesn’t give you power. That’s why we’re surrounded by theatrical resistance but very little actual change.
Here’s a hard truth. When it comes to political alignment (and a whole lot of other areas too):
We tend to make decisions about whether to trust someone based upon how they make us feel, not on whether they are doing trustworthy things.
This makes it all transactional. Here’s how it works.
We don’t join movements solely for the ideas. We join because the group gives us something we need: identity, certainty, protection, a sense of being wanted. What gets sold to us as “conviction” is often just a high-trust emotional exchange. You make me feel seen; I’ll echo your beliefs. You affirm my goodness; I’ll adopt your enemies.
We saw that in the Lightfoot Infantry case study.
Someone might call that solidarity or group cohesion, but it’s actually psychological outsourcing.
The “resistance” is the product. But the real commodity is validation, or the sense that I matter because this group says I do. It’s a loyalty economy, and in many cases, action currency is the proof.
The transaction model goes like this.
1. Signal Need:
You feel alienated or outraged. You post, comment, attend something. By doing so, you are openly or subtly signaling: I’m available for belonging.
2. Get Noticed:
A crowd, group, or ideology takes you in. The entry price is that you adopt the aesthetic, language, and enemies.
3. Receive Validation:
You’re now part of something. Your beliefs are affirmed. Your sense of self is reinforced. Maybe your social media posts get likes, thereby increasing your emotional investment in the transaction. By this point, the feedback loop is complete. The group gives you meaning, and you give it obedience while thinking you’re operating out of moral clarity.
4. Conform to Retain Belonging:
If you ask the wrong questions or start to poke at the sacred cows, you will immediately notice a difference in the exchange rate, so to speak. You’ll feel the cold shoulder or worse. In response, you have two choices: you can either conform to keep the validation coming, or you double down and exit the transaction.
5. Mistake the Belonging for Conviction:
Eventually, you believe you chose this path. But really, you were selected, and the transaction remains ongoing.
At some point, it can become like an addiction. You’ll do anything to keep the validation, and it can cost you dearly.
Conversely, when you have validation from a healthy source, you don’t engage in the mimetics; you recognize them from a mile away. It not only frees you from the transaction, but it frees you to operate from a position of truth instead of identity-seeking.
THAT is where real resistant power is found, and the system knows it.
Ending the Transaction
There are two steps to breaking out of this mental model.
First, recognize you’re engaging in transactional validation. Second, stop paying.
Starve the Algorithm:
Don’t engage for applause. Don’t say things because you’re expected to. If you can’t explain your position without using someone else’s language, you don’t own it.Audit Your Belonging:
Ask yourself who you’d lose if you told the truth. If your group only accepts you when you parrot the script, that is merely compliance.Build for Function, Not Optics:
Real resistance doesn’t need to look radical. It needs to work. It should move resources, protect people, disrupt systems. You need to be able to ask yourself what the goal of the group is, and whether the things you are doing are actually moving the needle.Chase truth. That’s it. Seek it, research it, study it, and stand on it when you find it.
Explore why the transaction was so attractive to you in the first place, and do the mental work to fix it. The cause may be rooted in childhood trauma, dysfunctional ideas or beliefs you picked up along the way, or something else that only you can find.
Your value is not tied to resistance, regardless of what thing you are advocating for.
If resistance is just mimicry, then it isn’t resistance. The only exit ramp is truth, and that doesn’t come with validation.
This is part of my ongoing work on building resilient, non-mimetic frameworks for actual resistance. If you're tired of script-chasing and want truth with teeth, become a paid subscriber here.
Additional Resources:
Stephen G. Adubato, “The Mimetic Nature of #Resistance Politics”, Substack, July 25, 2025.
René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1978.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967.
Musa al-Gharbi, essays on institutional signaling (various).
Blake Shullenberger, critiques on liberal containment (various).
Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, 2021.