“One could show—and this is one of the worst signs of all—how men will buy by the hundred thousand anything at all which has the hall mark of an established reputation, quite careless as to their love of it or their appetite for it.”
—Hilaire Belloc, On the Decline of the Book
Belloc didn’t need to stop at books.
The same pattern shows up everywhere, even in the smallest things. My kids were recently asking why a popular phrase repeated constantly a year ago had suddenly become “old,” and why no one says it anymore.
They found it strange.
But it’s hardly strange at all.
What Belloc describes is not a failure of taste so much as a structure of desire. We do not begin with what we love. We begin with what is already marked as desirable, what already carries the “hallmark of an established reputation”, and we follow.
And when the mark moves, we move with it.
A phrase becomes popular not because it is especially meaningful, but because it is widely used. And it disappears for the same reason. Its value was never in itself.
This is consumerism in miniature, but also something deeper: the imitation of desire itself.
A celebrity, as Gil Bailie puts it in his Famished Craving series, is someone who is famous for being well known.
Whether a phrase, a product, or a person, it’s the same loop. Reputation becomes both the cause and the justification. And so we learn to want what is already wanted, often without ever asking whether we wanted it at all. The danger is not that we imitate, but that we forget to ask what is worth imitating
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