Our identities are determined by three agencies; ourselves, others, and a mysterious Third Thing sometimes called society. What is mysterious about this Third Thing is that it’s a kind of disembodied knowledge. Its knowledge isn’t determined or controlled by any one person or group of persons; it lives independently of people, even though in the minds of people is the only place where it can live.
Imagine you’re a girl in high school. Your friends are talking about someone named Amber, who you don’t know. You ask “Who’s Amber?” Suddenly the conversation falls silent. Your friends are staring at you looking shocked. “Don’t you know? Amber is like the most popular girl in school! Everyone knows that!”
You didn’t know Amber was the most popular girl in school, but now you do. You don’t feel like you’ve learned something new, you’ve only discovered that there was a gap in your knowledge. This is caused by your friends’ assertion that everybody knows that Amber is the most popular girl in school. This assertion implies that “everybody” is not meant literally, as the collection of all people, since you are part of that collection and you didn’t know, making the statement “everybody knows” obviously untrue.
“Everybody” is not a collection of people, it’s the Third Thing. Your high school has created a local Third Thing that knows Amber is the most popular girl in school. All the boys and girls in school, including Amber herself, have to deal with this fact whether they like it or not. If you don’t know about it, you can never be fully part of your school’s ecosystem, your school’s mini-society. You just don’t “get it”.
Another example is the fat woman. Even if you personally think that fat women can be super sexy, at the same time you know that “objectively”, fat women are unattractive. Nobody explicitly told you, but it is simply known. Of course, it is known by women as well. If a woman is fat, she can feel unattractive because of it, even though everyone around her always tells her how beautiful she is. She could have a boyfriend who wants to have sex with her everyday, but still feel unattractive, because she knows that “everybody knows” fat women are unattractive. She also knows that despite her boyfriend’s affection, he also knows that “everybody knows” fat women are unattractive.
So how does this knowledge come to be? Surely it’s not because actually, objectively, fat women are unattractive. Anyone who has ever seen a Rubens painting knows that in a different culture, a few healthy rolls of fat can be a sign of beauty and eroticism. What is considered attractive is subjective, but in this case on a societal level instead of a personal. The subject here is again this mysterious Third Thing.
Maarten Schumacher 