"What is society? I have answered: Society is imitation." —Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation

Mexicans Are Alike/West Seattle/Sun July 24/1:05 am: Officer B. A. Wind reports: "I was flagged down by a frantic white female on a pay phone (she was on the phone with 911). The female said that a 'Mexican guy' in a dark SUV, who had 'tried to kill her,' had just now turned around at the intersection [next to us]. I spotted the SUV and notified police radio of a possible kidnapping attempt. Shortly thereafter, other police units stopped the vehicle I had just seen.

"I continued my investigation with the victim. She told me that she had been at the street fair in White Center earlier in the evening. Toward the end of the evening, she accepted a ride with a Hispanic male in a dark SUV. The Hispanic male told her he was going to get some friends and pick up some cocaine. This did not turn out to be the ride she expected. She asked to be let out of the car, and the suspect refused. When the suspect stopped at the light at 35th Avenue SW and SW Holly Street, she jumped out of the car and ran to 35th SW and SW Morgan Street, where she found a payphone. She called 911 for help. While on the phone, she noticed a dark-colored SUV make a U-turn at the intersection. She assumed it was the SUV she had run from.

"As we drove to the scene of the stop in an attempt to identify the vehicle and the occupants, the victim asked me not to take her there. I continued and we arrived at the stop. Before looking at the occupants of the car, the victim turned to me and said, 'All Mexicans look alike.' I asked her to try to identify the driver. She took a moment, and said she could not identify the driver. 'One Mexican is the same as another Mexican,' she said. The occupants [four in all] were identified and released."

The woman/victim in this report is correct: All Mexicans do look alike. The same is true for Swedes, Chinese, Zambians, and so on. A given society is made up of people who look and act alike. The 19th-century French sociologist (and criminologist) Gabriel Tarde built a convincing social theory on this very idea: that a human being is nothing more than an assemblage of imitations; that we, as individuals, imitate others and others imitate us. And so the people within a specific society (Mexican in the case of this report) are the same because they are made up of the same imitations.

Early in his marvelous book The Laws of Imitation (1890), Tarde makes the argument that when you arrive in a new country and the people there all look alike, that is in fact the correct way of seeing things. Only when we get used to the strangers in a strange land do they start to individuate, to look and act differently. This, he believed, was the illusion.

The problem then is innovation. If we are all the same, how is it that a society changes its habits, how do new ideas begin? Tarde is less successful at explaining this. Nevertheless, he correctly points out that imitation is the substance of a society.