When did people first look in the mirror and why it is causing our world to collapse
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When did people first look in the mirror and why it is causing our world to collapse
A loose timeline of worldviews and dystopia
Hi! Radya here.
I continue to write notes with hopes it will be good enough for my website. This time we’ll dive into depths of history and self evaluation. I need more info on this matter, so if you know some materials on mirrors, I’ll be more than happy.
We know how we are looking at almost every moment of our life. We are used to start the day with watching at ourselves while brushing our teeth. We make selfies. Some of us has pocket mirrors. The streets are filled with mirrors. But it was not always like this. And it shaped reality in different way.
Collectivism
The worldview of collectivism prevailed in pre-industrial societies. A person's value was determined by their social position, by their reputation among people. To be ridiculed in public was a dreadful humiliation. So it was common to defend one's honor with the blood of the humiliator, for example, in a fight or a duel.
The environment and the lifestyle reinforced this worldview. As Yuval Noah Harari described in Sapiens a young son of a baron was not given a room on the top floor of the castle, where he could lock himself away from his parents and cover the walls with pictures of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur. No, he slept huddled with his peers in the great hall. He was always out in the open, always mindful of what people would think and say about him. A person who grew up in such an environment naturally comes to the conclusion that a person's worth is determined by his place in the social hierarchy and by how others judge him.
Up until the Renaissance there were no mirrors as we are used to see them. People had panels of polished metal or obsidian, but they reflected only 20 percent of the light hitting them. And such panels were unaffordable for an average person, they could only look at themselves in a dark reflection in a pond. It was difficult to see one's reflection clearly and understand one's distinctive features. So people relied on what others think and talked about them.
Individualism
At the beginning of the Renaissance, around 1300s, a convex glass mirror was invented in Venice. At that time only a king could afford such a mirror, but by the 1500s it was already available to a prosperous merchant. Flat mirrors also appeared at the same time. The distribution of mirrors helped people see themselves, and that encouraged people to order portraits.
Before the Renaissance, religious motifs were prevailed in paintings, and there weren’t so many portraits. Now that you know what you look like, you want to capture your fading beauty, and at the same time show others that you are a respectable person with money.
For example, one of the most famous paintings of the 15th century is "The Arnolfini Wedding" by Jan van Eyck. The back wall depicts a convex round mirror — the Arnolfinis flex.
If van Eyck's Portrait of a Man is a self-portrait (people did not decided yet), then it means he also had a flat mirror by this date, and he took one of the first selfies in world.
I don't know what influenced it, but around the same time a worldview of individualism began to form — when people began to place personal goals and independence of the individual from society in the forefront. This is a turning point, without it it would have been difficult to arrive at the capitalism we live in.
New (black) mirrors
We received some kind of self-awareness shock not so long ago with the spread of social networks and selfies. From understanding ourselves as the center of (family) attention, we have come to realize that there are a lot of people around who we portray as better or worse than us. On the one hand it's good, it is less shocking to leave the family nest and learn that the world doesn't revolve around you. But on the other hand the increase in time spent online and the lack of privacy there, when your personal data is continuously collected
and used for profit, can affect once again the understanding of your own self and the relation of a person to society and the state.
An example of this impact
would be the spread of the surveillance camera system in China, which identifies a person by facial image and links a person's actions to the system of social credit, which determines how useful a person is to the state. On the one hand, a person's actions in a public place are evaluated, one has to behave on the street. On the other hand, one must build an image online that will command the respect of his friends and attract the attention of his future partner, which may be not the same.What kind of “self” will be formed in such an environment?
Mozilla's frightening presentation on how apps recognize facial expressions. To sell advertising, of course.