🪟 19 - Relations of mirror frames
Frame & Axiom #19 (Part 5): Framing the self relative to others.
Table of contents
PART 1: Where All Begins
PART 2: The Moving Being
PART 3: The Court of Reality
PART 4: The Canvas of Reality
PART 5: The Realm of Others
Relations of mirror frames
Dear Reader,
We are exactly as others say we are. The mind is susceptible to forces many times greater than it, and spread over the great sum of others, there remains little to restrain them. The answer to the question “who am I” is left ultimately to hearsay. But that most fail to recognise this tendency nor its origins, let alone examine them, is pitiful, for it is out of this ignorance that the most troubling of issues arise — that which we like to delineate using language such as “self-worth”. What do we mean when we allude to such elusive conceptualisations? “You are enough”, relative to whom? Among us there exists no valuer of human beings per se, nor any objective measure of worth we can confidently agree upon. No, the discourse on “self-worth” dabbles on surfaces blindsided to the depth beneath. It analyses on a premature level. Only in peering through the veil does one come to the realisation that such language points to a deeper matter: that the cause of all pertinent issues is how one sees the self relative to others.
🪟 19 - Relations of mirror frames
Narratives, of which the community acts as purveyor, present a force orders more potent than the layperson will assume. The imaginative and manipulative among us learns over generations of labour to pander to psychical vulnerabilities — our secret desires. From this mastery of artful manipulation, of reason in seductive dress, the specialisation of storytellers (artists and propagandists) arise and take up arms to give content to our ultimate ideals. Do many of our ideal-bearers, celebrities, not arise from the most direct form of pandering? Those of them who are not accidental seek no less than to embody the mystical ideal selves of the masses and parade it — they are the beautiful, the desired, the differentiated, the wealthy, the free, the happy. Their highest pursuit is to wear the dress of Envy itself.
Is it not absurd that so many uphold a select few so highly as to worship them as living ideals, unable to look past the illusions that pandering necessitates and the triviality behind it all? At the sight of the famed one, she can only fall to her knees in awe and clamour for so much as the touch of a hand. Is that sort of behaviour not reserved for gods? A mere equal assumes divinity! One finds the heart drawn to the business of appearances, where her proneness to such grand superficiality comes at her own cost and reproduces. Over mighty leaps of human progress, we are only left more effectively gamed by ideals, aided by there being fewer rules and traditions to protect it. Ideals of the masses, as long as we are free above all, will always tend to the childlike, impulsed towards cheap pleasures, towards the gratification of the flesh — mostly anything but matters worthy of ultimate concern — wherein the glamour of heavens will reveal itself at the final hour to be the gaping abyss of emptiness. For reality remains ignorant to the defiant flames of youth, appointing the same court as eternal judge over the ideals of all epochs.
Here, ground is lost on the just framing of oneself to another. A felt equality is traded for triviality as sold by illusions of grandeur, wherein our measures of value become twisted beyond recognition, as one begins to worship false gods or their own self as a false god. The mind ought to be fortified against temptations to such shallowness. I reiterate, know thyself to be not a god, and it follows: know others to be not gods.
Now, I wish to strip it back from relations between us and false gods, to us among our immediate fellows. There is an amusing experience of mine I recall vividly. About five years ago, I packed my bags and relocated from Malaysia, my home country, to the promising and artful city of Melbourne. Only a few weeks in, I became inordinately conscious of my Malaysian accent. I thought it to be a peculiar form of English, what we colloquially call Manglish, so heavily riddled with informal and cryptic nuances that in a Western country I felt like I was forced to speak a different language altogether. My speech was to me, unfashionable and alienating, and so I did everything in my power to assimilate into the Australian manner of speech, to appear as local as possible, so rigorously that it began to hamper the quality of my articulation. Indeed, it was on bare occasions that I found myself satisfied with what I said or how I said it. I was livid with my performance. Yet, over many months of contending, I came to the realisation that the matter had little to do with the meritocracy of accents and everything to do with how I framed myself (accent included) relative to the community I was being inducted into. 1 By that, I mean this: the heart of the matter lay not in the outward-looking, but in the inward.
One might suggest that I had an issue relating to “self-worth”. What does that mean, if anything? To me “self-worth” is only an expression, for it has no logical grounding, and in peering deeper there awaits the revelation of framing. I wish to now push along the metaphor of mirrors, as it provides an interesting viewpoint. A person is a mirror, reflecting oneself in another at all times — seeking to learn about oneself through the other, and to make oneself complete in the other. The reflection of the mirror is contained and bound by a frame. Effective framing precedes the effective meeting of mirrors. Now, what sort of framing should lead one to reflect most rightly? This is what I have learned: effectiveness in this regard lies in a framing that makes one as big as possible, for size provides for robustness, yet certainly no bigger nor smaller than the other, for that deforms one’s reflection of the other and thereby the reflection of oneself through them. As soon as a man sees himself bigger than the other, he finds his bosom heaved up by pride, which as Solomon’s Proverb warns, “goes before destruction”. Or if he sees himself smaller than the other, he finds himself swallowed by pangs of inferiority, which causes a paralysing inability to conduct himself meaningfully.
A just pursuit here is to reflect oneself in another as clearly as possible. Clarity necessitates that any excessively prudent or performative tendencies ought to be done away with, for that is a form of unevenness. A rawness of conduct, what I call a deep honesty, ought to be forefront. All mirrors are after all of the same type, pressed upon by the exact same forces, and concerned with their own reflections to the point of self-obsession. Generally, a felt equality appears to provide for the most effective meeting of mirrors — as, in the consequent treatment, the treasure that awaits in communal life lies most readily accessed. We exist equally seeded by Nature, only manifested in relatively immaterial variations, so it follows that one ought to grant weight to the other accordingly. 2 Humility, mercy and justice follow as logical consequences — as Confucius had elucidated, “do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself”, and Christ five centuries later, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Reflection bound to this frame, there are no gods nor peasants, only fellows. Even in cultures where hierarchies are enunciated, demands of filial piety and respect, towards the reverence of wisdom in the long-lived, may co-exist in the inward with a felt equality, towards the sameness in which each is seeded. But this too remains an ideal to be pursued, for forces arising from present and past heave blows upon us such that we have to battle in order to remain in a manner just. But here is one road from where the maturity of soul ensues. Through the stages of life too will those frames evolve without prompting.
So, let us seek clarity above all — that we may see one another eye to eye and bask in the solace offered by humility, in the congregation of feeble seeds equally alive in us all.
Till next time,
Euwyn
Of course, many matters attributed to “self-worth” run much deeper, plagued with complexity, but I argue that the nature of the problem remains the same — only compounded.
On what basis ought one be equal to another, where all beings ought to be no more than fellows? Not long ago, variations were enunciated, and one could be held superior or inferior in value to another. To that question, I cannot provide a robust argument other than that human nature does not discriminate, or it does to a level immaterial. Culturally speaking, it is provided by way of the Judeo-Christian imago-dei ethics that all are created equally in the image of God and therefore to be treated equally. To go against this is to go against a critical foundation of modernity (in the West, at least), which one will be hard-pressed to live effectively spiteful towards, and so I work with this as a given without endeavouring any further.