Spencer and Jeff explore "social mirror properties"—traits like beauty or power shaped by others’ reactions rather than self-perception, using a thought experiment of a mirrorless world to question whether attractiveness stems from external validation (e.g., flirting with married individuals) or persists despite it. They compare this to dictators testing influence through escalation (e.g., purges, cults) and incremental corruption (like a forklift driver stealing cigarettes until caught), arguing power consolidation mirrors the same pattern across politics. Recognizing these dynamics reveals how societal norms distort self-awareness, yet the drive for validation remains unavoidable. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and here today again with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Pretty good.
I keep remembering to do this when I'm on the podcast with you and forgetting with everyone else, but I have to get around that topic.
So, or that habit.
So, any comments, concerns, feedback, all that stuff, please send it to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And now that that's out of the way, let's get down to the fun stuff.
I want to talk about something that I came up with and I named social mirror properties.
Now, I am not any kind of sociologist or psychologist or anything.
It might be that in actual real sociological and psychological training and learning, there is a different thing for this, but I've never heard of it and I don't know anything about it.
So, I'm okay just coming up with it and naming it myself.
So, that's fine.
So, this starts with a thought experiment.
It's one of my favorites.
And we're going to do it a little bit here today with you, Jeff.
How do you feel about doing a thought experiment?
Oh, we've done these before.
Let's go.
Sure.
All right.
So, this is a good one.
At least I think it's a good one.
So, picture yourself living in a world that has no mirrors.
There's no reflective surfaces.
Water doesn't reflect light.
There's no cameras of any kind.
You know, there's no way to have any kind of playback or image of any kind.
It's just not available in this world.
So, absolutely no way for you to perceive your own physical appearance.
You can see your body, right?
You can see your hands, you can see your body, but you can't see your face at all.
Okay.
Right.
So, do you think if you lived in this world, if you constructed it in your mind, do you think that you would be more self-conscious of the way you look or less self-conscious of the way you look?
I would say probably less.
Okay.
Just because you would have less immediate feedback.
I mean, like within the confines of the thought experiment, philosophically constructed environment.
If the only way you have of perceiving whether or not you're attractive is whether or not other people are attracted to you, and you were able over years of practice through cause and effect, I guess, practice.
When I do this, I'm more attractive.
When I do this, I'm less.
Like, it would take a great deal more, I think, effort, would it not?
Well, perhaps.
And premeditation and like extended cause and effect reasoning.
Would we not just move to defining what is attractive by what we could quantify?
Well, picture this.
So, in neuroscience, my favorite amateur topic, you have an image of yourself in your mind, and you have images of other people in your mind.
You have a model of them.
Right now, you have, when you picture yourself, you probably don't even picture your face.
You picture some more abstract version of yourself that's probably sits inside you.
It probably has other things attached to it based on what you could do or what you could interact with.
But when you look in a mirror, you do expect to see your face.
You know your face very well.
If, for example, you had, as does happen to each of us once in a while, let's say you were doing something and you got a smear of some kind of like dark grease or something on your nose or your face.
And, you know, you weren't around anyone else.
So they couldn't tell you and you didn't know.
And then you went to a mirror and then you saw this image, this dark thing on your face.
You would be surprised because the image you would see doesn't match the image you have in your memory of yourself.
Right.
So you have this idea of what you specifically look like.
And it's maybe a difficult, you know, when we construct, try to construct a world where you don't have that, does get a little weird, right?
And I do ask the question in relation to whether you're self-conscious, because that's a thing that's of great interest to me, whether people are conscious of their level of self-consciousness.
Because everyone is to some degree self-conscious, I think.
Even people who aren't very self-conscious have some awareness of themselves such that.
Yeah, but there's a myriad of factors affecting how self-conscious someone is or is not, other than just how physically attractive they are to other people and how aware they are of that, which is kind of what your can't see your own face thought experiment is diving down into, right?
Is the idea specifically of presuming that working with the presumption that we can't see our face, but an attractive face is something that gets us mates and that's something that we want to care about.
Would we be more or less self-conscious of how attractive our face was?
Right.
I mean, the first thing you would notice when you're in this world is that you would have other people in the world around you.
And among those people, there would be some among them who appear more attractive to you.
Think about the high school in which there is no mirror.
First of all, no one's wearing any makeup, probably.
People might dress up, but they probably aren't dressing their face up because they can't apply the makeup to their own face.
And are you going to trust other people to apply the makeup to your face?
Because they might be inclined to make you more attractive, but they might be inclined to make you less attractive.
And you don't know unless other people tell you and they might not tell you, right?
So it might be just that in a world where you can't see your own face, no one ever comes up with the idea of wearing makeup and trusting another person to make themselves look more attractive because you can't be sure that you're trusting anyone else to make you look more attractive, which is an interesting thing to think about is that we are probably more so in our society, women are pressured to be more attractive, especially what they look like in their face.
And so already we get this weird thing.
And we, you know, I noticed in high school, some of the girls were, you know, doing more with the makeup than others and some were better at it than ways I couldn't understand.
It's still kind of a mystery to me.
And it also seemed like there was sometimes some level of jealousy or envy of some kind about the girls who could apply the makeup to make themselves look more attractive.
You know, and this is seen when we look at people in magazines, you know, well, you know, probably less attractive when they're not made up for the camera and all these things, you know, probably touched up by the people.
I think we're diving or sliding off topic a little bit.
I think the thrust of your thought experiment is keeping it more philosophical and theoretical rather than trying to drill down into, well, if I touched up my face, would it do anything or would I need someone else to do it for me?
Just drill down to in a world where you can't perceive your own face, would you be capable of telling if you're attractive based on the reactions of other people towards you?
And would that make you more or less self-conscious about your face?
Yeah.
I think, I think once you began to measure this as other people's reaction to you, the self-consciousness would come back.
I mean, I think you're right that the immediate feedback is gone.
There's no mirror for you to judge your own.
But as soon as you're seeing it in other people, that self-consciousness would all still be there.
So there's an argument to be made that we're already doing this.
We live in a world with mirrors and with cameras and pictures and images of all kinds, and that we aren't really seeing our own level of attractiveness, even when we have mirrors.
So yeah, it's, it's a, I don't, it's probably a name for it.
I don't know what the name is, but.
Well, I, I, and like, and like to, and like as a caveat, and we invite any viewer who takes offense to two white dudes discussing the trials and tribulations of the Western female population.
Sure.
Please educate us because as a prefix, we admit that our worldview is informed by our own experiences.
And I'm not a woman.
But anyways, you see it in fashion and specifically women's fashion all the time.
Like traits for hair or shape of face or figure that can be perceived one way as unattractive or perceived given another label and it's attractive.
One excellent example, my wife and I were recently fortunate enough to go to Mexico on a vacation.
And my wife has very fine hair and it's incredibly humid where we were staying.
So she was griping daily about how her hair was so frizzy.
And I was like, babe, your hair has body.
Like back home, you spend money on products all the time to try and make it look like it's looking right now just because of humidity.
And pardon me if there's a detail there about personal grooming that I'm ignorant of being also bold.
Like it's just, it struck me as like two sides of the same coin, right?
Like just two interpretations of the same thing.
So yeah, like we absolutely have grown accustomed to voices outside of our own telling us what is and is not attractive or should or should not be attractive.
Right.
And not just that we have other people telling us this, but that it's difficult to see that level when we look at ourselves in the mirror.
That's a, that's a particular thing that's been noted among a lot of people that a lot of people who, to the majority of us, are what one might usually be called objectively beautiful have very difficult time when they look at themselves seeing that same thing that everyone else sees about them.
And that's a, it's like a weird distortion effect, sort of, but it's a real effect.
It's really there.
And, you know, there's a lot of reasons why it's felt that maybe that's happening, but we're not going to get into any of those today.
I don't really care about that particular.
I think it's interesting that much more than anything else, this is a like beauty itself, attractiveness is a thing that I would call then a social mirror property.
It's a property of a person whose value is only really known when you can judge it by the reaction of other people to you.
In other words, using the social interaction as a sort of mirror.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And this is why some people judge their level of attractiveness based on who they could attract, the difficulty that it would be to attract them.
Some people incessantly flirt with married people.
It's a thing that's been seen in our world.
One could say that they maybe are thinking that the married person is safe, but another view is that it's more difficult to get them to turn their eye.
So they get a little more an extra thrill or charge out of that.
I mean, that's maybe.
I know that I'm dancing on some delicate ground here, but I'm going to.
Well, I think you're also probably drifting off topic again.
Again, this is about brass tags, beauty being in the eye of the beholder.
Right.
Like the idea that would you know you're attractive and do your best to make yourself attractive if the only way of judging whether or not you're attractive was the reactions of other people around you.
That's your social experiment.
That's what you're thrusting at is that, and even sort of in the real world, we only really have what our culture and our society, the collective gestalt consciousness tells us is attractive to judge our own level of attractiveness against.
So a great deal of whether or not I have confidence in my level of attractiveness as a person depends upon the reactions of other people to me, right?
Yeah, that's where that sits.
That's where it ends up.
So I'm going to introduce another property that I'm going to say is another social mirror property.
We kind of defined beauty.
Beauty is the most obvious example of one of these properties.
And I'm going to say that another one of these social mirror properties is power, social power.
So you weren't here when this occurred.
This was a podcast that I did with someone else about occults.
And I mentioned at that time, I mentioned a thought experiment that I call the Persian Emperor thought experiment.
So switching gears here, new thought experiment.
You wake up tomorrow morning and everyone in your life starts agreeing with everything you suggest.
Enough so that it could be said that they are relentlessly agreeing with everything you suggest.
Build that world in your mind.
And what does that world like for you?
What do you think about that world?
So like basically wake up the next day and everybody I interact with, whatever I tell them to do, they do.
Pretty much.
Corrupt by noon.
Right.
So the idea being that perhaps that you at first, you know, you have great fun getting your family to, you know, fetch the newspaper or make a coffee or whatever.
That's fine.
Might seem a little weird at first because probably they're not doing that now, right?
You're not living in the 1950s on a TV show, which is probably the only place in the 1950s where that really happened, really.
But pretty soon, I think the idea will start to form in your head that you have sort of a new power, new ability, and that maybe you're wondering what are the bounds of this ability?
How far does this go?
What are the limits?
What happens when I have complete power and freedom of choice and absolutely no responsibility or consequences to my actions?
Well, there might still be consequences.
I'm not going to say there isn't that, but every action has some reaction.
It's not really in the social world, it's not really happening in the Newtonian world where every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there's going to be some ripple going down the chain, right?
Yeah.
But I think it's a very natural reaction to something like this to start to wonder how far you can take it.
Yeah, exactly.
It's Grand Theft Auto, the game.
Like you want to know how people would behave in a Persian emperor scenario?
Look at Grand Theft Auto.
Yeah.
And this is why I call it the Persian Emperor, because when I'm reading about Persian emperors, this appeared to be their life to me, is they came to think that they were gods because they just, every time they suggested something, it appeared.
Everyone did whatever it took to get them that thing.
And what a life that would be.
Of course, you would start to think you were God.
You know, you're immortal.
You're temporarily on this mortal plane and then you're going to be somewhere else.
But you're always going to be all-powerful.
Of course, they're going to think that.
So this is a social mirror property because in the same way, to test the bounds of your social power, your newfound ability, where it seems like everyone is just relentlessly agreeing with you, doing whatever you say, You only know the limits of that if you keep getting people to do more and more extreme things.
So when we look at...
So again, only by judging people by their reactions and apparent loyalty to you, can you prove what kind of power you have over them.
Right.
Much like only by judging how many people are attracted to you and try to sleep with you, can you tell how attractive you are physically.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so when we look at, it seems really strange to us to see the behavior of some of the totalitarian dictators in our, that we read about in history and maybe exist in our world now.
Except that when you look at it through this lens, maybe it's a little less strange because they are living, you know, cult leaders are another example of this.
They have great power over the people who follow them in these cults.
And I think some part of them is led down that path because they find some ability to have power and they want to see how far it goes.
I mean, it was brought up in the in the podcast about cults with Stephen Mather that he feels, I mean, he's studied them a lot more, obviously than I have, but he feels that the leaders very often don't have a plan of any kind.
They don't think far enough ahead to have a plan.
And yet they still come to very similar conclusions for most of these scenarios, especially the ones that are like a single charismatic leader.
There really isn't just one leader in almost all these cases, but there usually is one focus for the power.
And in those situations, the focus for the power usually ends up in a very similar spot in almost every one of these.
And I think it's because they're all doing the math and coming with a very similar conclusion in that they discover at some point along the way.
I mean, none of them are probably even really trying to do what they end up doing.
They are opportunistic.
They discover that they have some power and then they want to see how far that goes.
It's like small steps and they just kind of curious about it.
And that curiosity and the charge that they get from experiencing it, there must be some kind of feedback loop there where they feel really good about it.
They take steps to take more control, take more, exert more power to see how far that power goes.
And in doing so, they either find the limits of that power really quickly and never ever form a cult because the people they're trying to control, you know, unravel it for them and pull the wool out from under them and they fall down, which I'm sure undoubtedly also happens to many would-be cult leaders and totalitarian dictators.
But some of them go along and they slowly exert more and more control and they don't really have a plan.
They don't really know what the final shape of it will be.
Well, I mean, they either get burned out in a purge or they wither away from lack of worshipers or they become a successful religion.
Like, what is what is a cult?
Religion in its infancy.
What is religion, a successful cult?
Like the relationship of an established state to a terrorist group is the same as the relationship of any current organized religion to a cult.
Sort of.
But you see the same thing happening with a lot of totalitarian dictators.
Many of them are just using brute force instead of coercion, but a lot of them are still using a lot of coercion.
And it's a similar place that they end up.
It's not something that lasts long.
Very few totalitarian states last all that long anymore.
It used to be that they would last for a longer time because of the way empires worked and the more or less general acceptance that the children of the emperor should inherit the empire and on down the line, they're somehow more special.
But usually that would last for three generations, kind of on average.
Some lasted more, but surprisingly few compared to the number of empires there really were in history, right?
Usually by the third generation, they're just so poorly attuned to what needs to happen to run the nation, run the empire, that the mismanagement just increases.
Individuals in the empire, the corruption increases because individuals in the empire get their own power and they want to see in turn how far that can go.
They have an emperor that's probably not paying attention.
This is sounding uncomfortably prescient.
Like, is the thrust of this that that's maybe where we're at politically right now?
Are we in a late stage empire right now?
Is that where this is going?
I don't.
Do we have politicians in power in the Western world who are introducing policies whose sole purpose is to just test the waters and see how much power they have?
I think almost everyone who gets to that top spot is doing that to some extent.
Very few who've ever reached that spot are really selfless enough to give up any power.
It's happened so rarely in history that a person had that insane amount of real social power and just volunteered to give it up.
And in almost every case, it was a person who was extremely humble to begin with, had a strong base of humility to begin with.
And there's always a reason for it.
Like when we were growing up in the 90s, we had largely conservative Western governments.
And we were part of a very vocal young left-wing movement.
But like really, we were just vocal.
We didn't really do anything as gen Xers.
We just bitched.
So conservative governments touting usually the boogeyman of the brown-skinned terrorist restricted our rights and freedoms.
Any number of acts that anyone could point to, Patriot Act in the United States, other similar legislation passed in Canada and Australia.
And now, then more recently, we find ourselves with more largely left-leaning, quote-unquote, woke governments and a very active right-wing working class movement that is vocal against them.
And we're having rights and freedoms stripped away.
And the boogeyman this time is disease or COVID or social wellness.
And so we have to censor you online.
Like the point that I'm sort of clumsily stumbling my way towards is regardless of whether the government in power is right-wing or left-wing, it always seems that at the end of a term of government, the government has more power.
Well, like sort of the purpose of power is to secure more power.
And regardless of who's in that role, it just always seems to inch ever upward.
That's a thing that's been sort of touted as an idea that it doesn't matter who you vote for.
They're all working for the same side at the end of the day.
And I, I'm not close enough to even be close enough to be close enough to be, you know, to really say what might be happening behind that curtain.
I mean, I'm not even in the city where the play is happening.
You know what I mean?
To be outside the building, to be inside the building, to be close enough to peek around the corner at what's behind that curtain where that play is happening.
But what I'm suggesting here then, if that's the case, my retort is then that it's still perfectly possible and there's a perfectly plausible social dynamic that would cause both left-leaning and right-leaning government styles to try to consolidate power in that way without their need for there being a shadow government above that's directing them to do so.
Oh, and like, like to be clear, I'm not, I'm not trying to tout some next next level conspiracy theory that there's some people do, though.
And I think it's useful to talk about at some point is that these are just natural human reactions to power.
Exactly.
That's exactly my point is like, regardless of whether you have a blue or red politician in the seat of power, once he's in that seat, he will find ways to justify securing more power for himself.
Yes.
And almost always a himself.
Or he will exercise or he will exercise that power just to see it exercised and see that he got away with it.
And then we'll try it a little bit harder and always have a good reason for it.
Yes.
I think this also leads to things related to corruption, sort of an social anti-mirror property.
I just had this idea just now.
Let's see if it sticks.
So in the way that power can only be measured, really, by the reaction of other people to you, when it comes to doing these sort of rule-breaking things, you can only tell if you're really getting away with it when you're doing them and there's no reaction.
When you're breaking rules, like things that would involve corruption in that case, but also just when you're stealing candy in the candy aisle, you only know if you're getting away with it when there's no reaction.
When you're still getting away with it.
When you're still getting away with it, when you do it a little bit more.
So I don't think it needs an anti-mirror.
I think it's the same concept, but you're looking for the opposite of the thing.
It's the opposite of reaction.
Yes, yes.
You're looking for there to be no one who, the water's undisturbed.
So I for several years worked in a warehouse in Vancouver that shipped largely groceries, but also tobacco products.
Sure.
And one day one of the forklift drivers was just suddenly approached by the shift manager and his foreman and two RCMP officers and put in handcuffs and escorted off site.
And we never saw him again.
And when we asked about it, the foreman kind of got a little loose-lipped about it.
This guy had apparently been stealing cigarettes out of the tobacco cage for months, like by the cart.
And, you know, started like he just, he started innocently enough.
Like he, a case of 50 cartons fell off a skid and busted open and one fell on the floor and he pocketed like a couple packs and no one said anything.
So then the next time there was an open one, he took a full carton for himself and no one said anything.
And then he tried a little more and a little more and pretty soon he was making two or three laps per shift upstairs with full cartons that he was lifting out of orders that he was shipping to stores.
Like when the pallet of product passed through his hands, he took the tobacco, he skimmed tobacco product off and took it upstairs and then bootlegged it and sold it for profit.
And I noticed like after he was taken away, you know, hindsight being 2020, oh, yeah, he was, you know, lately bragging about a lot of new electronic toys that he had and things that I didn't think he should be able to afford on a forklift driver's salary.
But the manager said, like, they knew they had him from the time, like they had him on camera because everything in that warehouse was recorded.
We were just never told.
Right.
Like it was part of one of the forms you signed when you, when you started like this, the Reese AND Reese AND Reese forms that no one ever is you signed up that that you're aware that there's video recording used, closed circuit television recording used for security purposes and your image may be used, and blah blah, blah.
So they basically just gave him enough rope to see how far he'd hang himself and I don't know what the line was, but it was like they wanted the level of theft to get to a threshold where it was like slam dunk criminal charges based on value, and then they just arrested him, charged him, provided all of the video evidence, provided receipts totaling the amount that he'd stolen, and he hung for it.
Right, so yeah, just like.
An interesting example of how like, seeking the, the absence of a reaction might not always get you where you want to go, I guess.
Well yeah, I mean, but that's, you can see the logical steps that that forklift driver took to get where he got.
Oh yeah, absolutely right.
And this is.
I think this is a similar thing whenever we see instances, which is why entrapment is considered a thing.
Well yeah, legally right right, you're not supposed to let them steal more and more and then you get them with the big one yeah, which you know.
I don't want to get into that conversation today about what those people at the warehouse were doing, why they didn't just talk to him and say look, dude.
But you know, when we have government scandals here, I think that in almost every case they started with something smaller and then they worked into something bigger.
I think that had to happen.
In every case they didn't start with.
You know, when you get these really labyrinthine sort of scandals, it doesn't happen like an Ocean's 11 heist, where they start with the overly complicated plan.
It works up to a complicated plan, it works up to a level of complication, and the level of complication is usually how to still get away with it while making it larger.
Because they're greedy right, and that those small steps toward what you know on the path that they see as being a better outcome for them, you can sort of understand.
Those small steps is is.
Is the thrust of your thesis, then?
That like, if we rely entirely on external stimulus to judge or gauge our level in a particular attribute, be it attractiveness or power or ability to get away with committing a crime, if we rely entirely on other people's reactions to determine our opinion of gauging our level on that then, human nature being what it is, we will always push for more.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as say always, but it's let's just say it's part of the software.
And I would even go then, so far as to say as, in order to avoid it, you have to have something else in there that pulls you away from that, whether it's some other level of uh, morality that you feel.
Personally, you don't want to be part of a certain thing, or whatever right that's, or a law.
Well yes, some people are bound by laws.
That seems weird to say.
We should all be bound by laws, but everyone knows, not everyone is bound by laws.
When there's no one there watching them, they will readily break some of those laws, and I have in the past myself.
I'm not going to tell you which ones, Those files are locked and sealed, but I didn't always stay within all bounds at all times.
And most people have not.
I would argue, I would argue nobody's made it into adulthood and not broken any laws.
Generally speaking, based on the people I knew in high school, no one did.
And I'm not telling you about those things either.
Those files are also locked and sealed.
But this is part of human nature.
It's part of being selfish.
It's part of, you know, the drive for more is part of us.
And that's baked into all the components.
It's there at a base level for all the stuff.
And you actually have to work to pull back on it if you're going to be not tipping over into that spot.
When you find yourself able to, you know, attractive enough to bed every supermodel, you have to put something in place that pulls you back from just rampantly going to bed every supermodel, right?
I mean, you know, there are people who've just not been able to hold themselves back.
Yeah.
And they pushed for more, in fact, right?
That's what they did instead of pulling themselves back and restraining themselves.
And I think that's where we are.
We have to recognize that this is a part of our software and it's not inherently bad.
It's not inherently good.
It's only as bad or as good as whatever we do with it.
So we just have to recognize that it's there and that it's a thing we have to work around and use appropriately.
And that's it.
You're going to be opportunistic.
You're going to look for other opportunities.
You're going to judge people based on how they look and they're going to judge you based on how you look.
And that seems unfair.
It seems like something we shouldn't do, but we do.
Even if we're not going to talk about it, we're still doing it to some extent.
And so we just have to realize that it's there consciously and then just consciously work around it.
And that's all we can really do.
And that's kind of the whole thing is that, yeah, I came up with that whole corruption part.
That was just in that moment.
I saw it right there.
And it was like this extra thing.
And I reached for it just the same way anyone would reach for power and more knowledge.