The trajectory of societies through history is anything but linear. There are rises, plateaus, and declines, all intertwined and overlapping. Each of these phases leaves marks not just on economic indicators but on the very way people think, what they find beautiful, how they see the world, and how they understand themselves. And there's a particular phenomenon that emerges during periods of impoverishment, one that's both striking and deeply revealing: societies begin abandoning values, forms, and habits that arose from within their own traditions. They turn their gaze outward, particularly toward civilizations that are powerful and wealthy. Today, we often call this orientation "Western emulation."
This isn't just about admiration or cultural curiosity. It goes much deeper than that. The core argument here is this: the turn toward the West isn't really a matter of taste or conscious preference—it's a necessary psychological consequence of losing power. People and societies imitate the powerful because power doesn't just provide material advantages; it produces a sense of being right, of representing the correct path forward.
What we're witnessing isn't superficial cultural borrowing. It's a fundamental reorientation that happens when a society loses confidence in its own capacity to generate solutions, to create meaning, to chart its own course. And understanding this requires looking beyond simple explanations about "cultural inferiority complexes" or "globalization." We need to examine how economic decline transforms not just what people can afford, but what they can imagine.
Impoverishment is commonly understood as a drop in income, declining production, or a falling standard of living. But that's a severely limited view. Impoverishment is actually a much more comprehensive process of dissolution. Economic contraction might initially seem to affect only the material realm, but it quickly seeps into mental and moral domains as well.
When income drops, people don't just consume less—they dream less. The horizon of possibility contracts. The capacity to take risks diminishes. Long-term thinking gives way to a survival reflex focused on getting through today. When this psychological state spreads throughout a society, collective ideals weaken and the sense of "we" begins to unravel.
At this critical juncture, people lose faith in solutions emerging from within. The idea "we can do this" gets replaced by "nothing good comes from us." Once this psychological threshold is crossed, eyes naturally turn outward. It's not a deliberate decision so much as an almost automatic response to perceived inadequacy.
But here's what makes this particularly insidious: the society experiencing decline starts to reinterpret its own past through the lens of its current weakness. Traditions that once seemed valuable now appear as evidence of backwardness. Customs that once provided meaning are reframed as obstacles to progress. The entire cultural inheritance gets reevaluated—not on its own terms, but in comparison to whoever currently holds power.
This is where we need to talk about what power actually does. Throughout history, no society has been imitated purely because of military might or economic wealth. The powerful don't just dominate—they produce narratives about how life should be lived. From clothing styles to urban planning, from educational philosophies to entertainment culture, everything becomes an aestheticized expression of power.
Rich and powerful societies have the privilege of presenting their way of life as "natural," "modern," and "inevitable." Sometimes this is conscious propaganda, but often it's a process that unfolds organically. Power doesn't need to prove itself; it convinces through its mere existence. Success becomes its own argument.
The impoverished society experiences the exact inverse. Its own customs now remind it of poverty, backwardness, and failure. Cultural elements that were sources of pride during periods of wealth can transform into sources of shame during periods of poverty. The same practice, the same tradition, the same aesthetic choice carries completely different meanings depending on the society's economic position.
Think about how this operates in practice. A wealthy society's traditional architecture gets celebrated as timeless beauty, worthy of preservation and study. An impoverished society's traditional architecture gets dismissed as primitive, something to be replaced with "modern" structures (which inevitably means imitating whoever is currently powerful). The buildings themselves haven't changed—what's changed is the economic position of the society, and with it, the entire framework of judgment.
This brings us to a crucial point that's often misunderstood: imitation doesn't arise primarily from an inferiority complex or lack of self-confidence. Those are individualistic psychological terms that reduce what's actually a collective social condition. What we're really seeing is a state of systemic desperation, not personal inadequacy.
When a society watches its own institutions cease to function effectively, when it witnesses its own moral codes failing to produce order, it looks for solutions elsewhere. Taking methods from the powerful becomes, past a certain point, not "emulation" but a survival strategy. People aren't choosing to imitate out of some aesthetic preference—they're grabbing at whatever seems to work, and what seems to work is whatever the powerful are doing.
This is why imitation often isn't even a conscious choice. People don't wake up one morning and decide "Today I choose to be Western." Imitation infiltrates daily life gradually: vocabulary shifts, gestures change, the ideal human type transforms. It happens in small increments that feel natural in the moment but accumulate into wholesale cultural transformation.
And here's what's particularly telling: the aspects of Western civilization that get imitated most enthusiastically are often not its deepest intellectual achievements or most sophisticated cultural products. What gets copied tends to be the most superficial forms, the easiest to consume and quickest to adopt. Why? Because an impoverished society has already largely lost its capacity to produce complex thought. The mental infrastructure required for sophisticated cultural production has eroded along with economic capacity.
So you end up with situations where societies rapidly adopt consumer brands, entertainment formats, and lifestyle markers from the West while remaining largely ignorant of Western philosophy, literature, or serious intellectual traditions. It's not that people are stupid—it's that genuine engagement with complex cultural achievements requires resources, time, and institutional support that impoverished societies no longer possess. Surface-level imitation becomes the path of least resistance.
Language and education are where this dynamic becomes most visible and most consequential. As impoverishment deepens, educational systems transform. Local knowledge production weakens, and externally sourced knowledge becomes sanctified. Foreign languages cease being merely communication tools and become status markers, symbols of sophistication and modernity.
But language carries much more than vocabulary—it carries ways of thinking. When a society begins thinking in another civilization's language, it borrows that civilization's framework for making sense of the world. This might provide short-term practical benefits, but it generates long-term mental dependency.
I've seen this play out in numerous contexts. In countries where English becomes the language of elite education, something subtle but profound happens: the questions worth asking start getting imported along with the language. The terms of debate, the priorities, even the methodology of thinking—all of this gets shaped by the linguistic framework being adopted. Eventually, even the problems worth solving are determined by external reference points rather than internal needs.
This creates a peculiar situation where highly educated people in impoverished societies can discuss global issues with sophistication while remaining oddly disconnected from local realities. They've been trained to think in frameworks developed elsewhere, for different contexts, addressing different problems. Their expertise is real, but it's often misaligned with the actual challenges their own societies face.
And this linguistic transformation has another effect: it stratifies society in new ways. Those who master the foreign language gain access to opportunities, status, and power. Those who don't are relegated to an increasingly marginalized sphere. Knowledge itself becomes divided into prestigious (foreign-language) and parochial (local-language) domains. Traditional knowledge systems, regardless of their actual value, get coded as backward simply because they exist in the local language.
The pattern of imitation doesn't spread evenly across society—it starts at the top and trickles down. Social emulation begins most rapidly among elites. The governing class, intellectuals, and urban populations adopt the lifestyle of the powerful both to get closer to that power and to protect their own positions within the domestic hierarchy.
But over time, this spreads to the broader population. Because when power-holders speak a certain language, live in a certain way, and endorse certain values, the rest of society sees that as the path to success. The mechanism is both obvious and insidious: success gets defined by proximity to the powerful, so imitating the powerful becomes the rational strategy for advancement.
During periods of impoverishment, defending indigenous values becomes risky. Why? Because indigenous elements have become associated with failure. The logic is crude but powerful: we tried our way and ended up poor; they did it their way and ended up rich; therefore, we should do it their way. This syllogism might be full of historical holes and logical gaps, but it has enormous emotional and practical appeal to people experiencing decline.
So imitation stops being merely an individual tendency and becomes a systematic orientation embedded in social institutions. Schools teach it, media reinforces it, the job market rewards it. Parents push their children toward it not out of self-hatred but out of love—they want their kids to succeed, and success requires conforming to the standards set by the powerful.
But here's where we need to be careful, because not all cross-cultural exchange is harmful. Throughout history, societies have learned from each other, transferred techniques and ideas, been enriched by contact. The problem begins when this process becomes unidirectional and unquestioning, when it stops being exchange and becomes wholesale substitution.
A society in the throes of impoverishment lacks the power to transform what it adopts. It can't take foreign elements and adapt them to local contexts, can't synthesize external influences with indigenous traditions to create something new and fitting. Instead, imported elements sit awkwardly alongside remaining local practices, creating a fragmented and incoherent structure that's neither fully Western nor authentically indigenous.
This patchwork doesn't generate new sources of power—in fact, it often accelerates existing dissolution. You end up with societies that have abandoned their own templates without successfully adopting functional alternatives. Legal systems borrowed from elsewhere don't work because they're disconnected from local social realities. Educational methods imported wholesale produce graduates trained for economies and labor markets that don't exist locally. Political forms copied from powerful nations operate as hollow shells because they lack the underlying social conditions that make them functional in their original contexts.
I've watched this happen repeatedly: a country adopts some institutional form from the West—maybe a particular model of central banking, or a specific approach to university education, or a certain type of electoral system—with great fanfare and optimism. And then, over time, the borrowed institution either fails to function as intended or gets captured and distorted by local power dynamics until it bears only superficial resemblance to the original. But instead of recognizing this as a mismatch between form and context, the failure gets interpreted as evidence of local inadequacy, which reinforces the impulse to imitate even more thoroughly next time.
This creates a tragic cycle: imitation fails, failure is attributed to insufficient imitation, more thorough imitation is attempted, which also fails, leading to calls for even more complete adoption of external models. At no point does anyone step back and ask whether the entire premise might be flawed.
Here's what history actually shows us: the identity of the imitators and the imitated constantly shifts. The West itself—that collection of societies we now take as the model—spent centuries imitating, learning from, and trying to catch up with other centers of power and sophistication. Medieval European scholars studied Arabic texts and borrowed Arabic numerals. Renaissance thinkers excavated Greek philosophy. European military leaders studied Ottoman tactics. There was a time when "going East" meant accessing superior knowledge and culture.
The point isn't that Western emulation is uniquely problematic. The point is that any society unable to generate its own power will find itself compelled to emulate whoever currently possesses it. When power shifts, so does the direction of imitation. Values once dismissed as backward get rediscovered and celebrated by new audiences once the society that produced them regains strength.
This is actually somewhat encouraging in a strange way, because it suggests that the current pattern isn't permanent or inevitable. But the flip side is sobering: as long as a society remains mired in impoverishment and powerlessness, the compulsion to imitate will persist regardless of how much cultural authenticity rhetoric gets deployed.
And this is where a lot of nationalist and traditionalist movements go wrong. They correctly identify the problem of excessive, unthinking imitation. They see the cultural dissolution, the loss of distinctive identity, the replacement of indigenous forms with foreign ones. But their proposed solution—usually some version of "return to tradition" or "reject foreign influence"—misdiagnoses the root cause.
The problem isn't that people have somehow forgotten their culture or been brainwashed into abandoning it. The problem is that the society has lost the economic and political power necessary to make its own forms viable and attractive. You can't solve that through cultural messaging or educational campaigns or nationalist rhetoric. Those might make people feel temporarily better, might provide some psychological comfort, but they don't address the underlying dynamic.
What actually shifts the pattern is the regeneration of power—economic, military, institutional, intellectual. When a society begins producing wealth again, when its institutions start functioning effectively, when it can offer its people not just survival but genuine prosperity and opportunity, something interesting happens: people stop automatically deferring to external models. Not because they've been convinced by nationalist arguments, but because they have living proof that indigenous approaches can work.
This doesn't mean isolation or rejection of all foreign influence. Powerful societies are actually quite comfortable borrowing from others—but they do so selectively, transformatively, from a position of confidence rather than desperation. They take what's useful and remake it to fit their own purposes. The borrowing flows in multiple directions because the power differential isn't overwhelming in any single direction.
Think about how this operated during periods when Islamic civilization was ascendant, or when Chinese dynasties were at their height, or during the peak of the Ottoman Empire. These societies freely adopted useful techniques and ideas from others—Hindu mathematics, Greek philosophy, Persian administrative methods—but they did so as acts of confident acquisition, not desperate imitation. They took what served their purposes and ignored the rest. Nobody in Baghdad during the Abbasid golden age was worried about whether they were being "too Byzantine" or "too Indian." They were powerful enough to be themselves while learning from everyone.
That kind of confident, selective engagement is what impoverished societies can't manage. They lack the position of strength necessary to borrow without being overwhelmed, to learn without being colonized intellectually. So we end up with this paradox: the societies that most need to learn from others are the least capable of doing so productively, while societies that are already successful can borrow and adapt with ease because they're not doing it from a position of weakness.
The aesthetic dimension of all this deserves particular attention because it's both highly visible and deeply revealing. A society's sense of beauty, its standards of elegance, its judgments about what's sophisticated versus crude—none of this is independent from power relations. What counts as refined, what's dismissed as vulgar, what's celebrated as progressive, what's derided as primitive—all of these judgments are entangled with who holds power.
In an impoverishing society, local aesthetics gradually get labeled as "dated" or "provincial." Music, architecture, fashion, even humor—everything shifts to align with the tastes of whoever is powerful. And it's not just that Western forms get adopted; it's that the very criteria for aesthetic judgment get imported. People start evaluating their own traditional arts using standards developed elsewhere, for different purposes, embedded in different cultural contexts.
I've seen traditional art forms dismissed as "unsophisticated" by people who couldn't begin to explain the actual aesthetic principles operating within those forms. The judgment isn't based on understanding; it's based on association. Traditional equals powerless equals backward equals aesthetically inferior. Western equals powerful equals modern equals aesthetically superior. The reasoning is circular but emotionally compelling to people living through decline.
This aesthetic colonization might seem superficial compared to economic or political domination, but it's actually quite profound in its effects. Aesthetic sensibilities shape how people experience daily life, what brings them joy, what feels like home. When those sensibilities get uprooted and replaced, something fundamental about lived experience changes. People can end up feeling alienated in their own environments, uncomfortable with their own cultural productions, always looking elsewhere for validation of what counts as beautiful or worthwhile.
And because aesthetic judgment is so tied to identity formation, this has generational effects. Young people growing up in these conditions absorb the message that their own cultural heritage is aesthetically deficient. They don't develop the perceptual skills or conceptual frameworks necessary to appreciate indigenous art forms on their own terms. Instead, they learn to see their own traditions through the dismissive gaze of the powerful—as quaint at best, embarrassing at worst.
There's a particularly painful irony that sometimes emerges in this process: elements of the impoverished society's culture that get abandoned domestically sometimes get discovered and celebrated by the powerful. Western museums fill with artifacts that local populations have learned to dismiss. Western scholars study traditions that local elites consider backward. Western audiences sometimes develop appreciation for art forms that have lost prestige in their places of origin.
This creates bizarre situations where cultural elements flow out of impoverished societies as exotic curiosities while power-marked substitutes flow in as necessities. A nation's traditional textiles end up in Western museums while its people wear fast fashion from Western brands. Its traditional music gets sampled by Western artists for "world music" albums while its own young people listen exclusively to American pop.
But even this represents a kind of tribute to the original culture, however twisted. The bigger tragedy is when cultural forms simply disappear because there's no longer any social space for them to exist. When the institutions that sustained them have collapsed, when the knowledge necessary to produce them has been lost, when the audiences who understood them have died off or been reeducated to dismiss them.
You can't rebuild that overnight, even if economic conditions improve. Cultural knowledge is fragile; once broken, it's extraordinarily difficult to restore. You can revive performances, reconstruct techniques, but the living tradition—the one embedded in daily practice, passed naturally between generations, continually evolving in response to contemporary conditions—that's much harder to resurrect.
So when we talk about the costs of impoverishment-driven imitation, we need to include this cultural erosion in the accounting. It's not just about economics or politics; it's about the loss of entire ways of being in the world, whole systems of meaning-making that won't be easily recovered.
The question that haunts all of this is: can a society reverse this process while still impoverished, or must economic power be restored first? The historical record suggests power comes first—that cultural confidence is more a consequence than a cause of economic and political strength. But that's a dispiriting conclusion for societies currently experiencing decline, because it suggests there's no shortcut, no way to think or educate yourself out of the dynamic.
Maybe the most honest thing we can say is this: awareness helps, but awareness alone isn't enough. Understanding that Western emulation is driven by power imbalances rather than Western superiority doesn't automatically provide an exit from the pattern. But it at least clears away some illusions, provides a more accurate diagnosis of what's actually happening.
And perhaps, if enough people understand the mechanism, it becomes possible to resist some of the more destructive aspects of imitation even while the underlying power differential persists. You might not be able to opt out entirely, but you can at least make the process less total, preserve some spaces for indigenous forms, maintain some institutional memory of alternatives.
Because the current configuration of power won't last forever. Nothing does. And when it shifts, societies that have completely abandoned their own templates will find themselves doubly vulnerable—having lost their indigenous forms without successfully mastering the imported ones. Those that maintained some continuity, even under difficult conditions, will have resources to draw on for regeneration.
That's the hard truth underneath all of this: you can't wish away power differentials through cultural affirmation or nationalist rhetoric. But you also can't afford to completely surrender to them. The path forward, such as it is, requires something more subtle—a clear-eyed recognition of how power operates, coupled with strategic resistance to its most totaling effects, while building whatever economic and institutional capacity circumstances permit.
It won't be emotionally satisfying. It doesn't offer the comfort of easy answers or inspiring slogans. But it's probably the most realistic stance available to societies caught in the gravitational pull of stronger powers, trying to maintain some degree of autonomy and distinctive identity while lacking the raw power necessary to fully chart their own course.
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