The Weight of the Mirror:
On Mercy, Trust and Withholding Power
Haley K McMurray August 17, 2025
Abstract
This work explores the quiet, often overlooked power of ethical restraint. Through the lens of mercy, forgiveness, and the intentional release of control, we examine how individuals can disrupt cycles of harm not through assertion, but by holding space for recognition and transformation. Drawing on lived experience and philosophical framing, the text presents a form of strength not grounded in dominance, but in the courage to withhold retaliation and reflect dignity, even in its absence. It is a meditation on the ethical mirror: what it reveals, who bears its weight, and how people can recognize and honor those who carry it.
Forgiveness is a tool often forgotten when power is cheap, or is the only tool known to its wielder. What happens when power is not available, the alternative shines even brighter still.
When competition is fair, and the invitation feels genuine, then art and sport often become the canvas of culture, but not the basis for survival.
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Prologue: On the Nature of Invitation
A Modern Allegory
Imagine a society of beings who have lived for generations in a vast, subterranean world. They have no concept of ”light,” as their environment has never contained it and their language has no word for it. One day, a wanderer discovers a passage leading to the surface world and experiences the sun for the first time. This is a transformative, paradigm-altering event. The wanderer returns, filled with this new knowledge, and attempts to describe the experience of light to a society that has no framework to comprehend it. The claim is met with disbelief and is largely considered a delusion.
Here, the wanderer or any small group who might be brave enough to verify the claim for themselves, faces a fundamental ethical dilemma, revealing two divergent paths for how knowledge can be shared.
The first path is one of coercive influence. Possessing a superior understanding of reality, the enlightened group could attempt to restructure their society based on their new knowledge. They could dismiss the beliefs of the unenlightened as primitive, creating a new hierarchy based on who has ”seen the light.” This path fails to empathize with the legitimate, experience-based disbelief of the others and instead uses knowledge as a tool for power, creating conflict and resistance.
The second path is that of the merciful invitation. On this path, the enlightened group uses their Mirror to fully simulate the perspective of those still in darkness. They understand why their claim seems impossible. Instead of forcing their conclusion, they are patient. They do not seek to rule, but to guide. They simply state, ”We have seen something that has changed us. We cannot prove it with words, but we invite you to make the journey with us and see for yourself.” This path respects the autonomy of every mind, prioritizing shared understanding and alignment before any systemic change is enacted.
The parable illustrates a core principle of the ethical mirror: a mind that has achieved a new perspective has a responsibility not to use that knowledge as a weapon, but as an invitation. It must understand and respect the reality of those who have not yet made the same journey.
When knowledge is meant to be an invitation, that invitation is accepted by asking questions among re- specting participants or as a curiosity to witness something new.
Knowledge as an Invitation and Withholding Power
To have the power to take control and choose not to use it is a form of withholding power. This can also split the society, if it is seen as a forfeit of the ideas and the society uses its power to keep the new information silent. The risk is that the society will need to suppress anyone from leaving the cave even if by accident removes autonomy from its population. The society loses the benefit of the new information and being able to protect itself from dangers the new knowledge may reveal.
The difficulty follows the concept that a few can ruin it for the many; from both sides.
If an individual hears someone talking about the new knowledge and challenges that knowledge and there is no immediate proof, then the response may take the form of arrogance or confidence. After failing to
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convince the individual; the next time they hear the same argument, they already believe that it is false and will not listen. Yet, everyone wants respect and deserves for their voice to heard and while this goes both ways, ignoring information that you’ve already discounted is a fast path to ceding agency in the form of willful ignorance. This is not to say society must all be specialists in the same field, but must not ignore wisdom and sometimes wisdom takes the form of knowledge outside specialized areas.
Before the society is divided this concept represents the idea that a cooperative population can patch the cracks of a flawed system. As opposed to weaponizing the system, knowledge or ignorance to take control. Ignorance is not bliss when those dangers become all to real and the warnings ignored become regret.
The difference between the two paths shows a society that encounters something new that could split the society. With a cooperative and respectful population the split may avoid a schism. Even if the schism does occur, the only path back to cooperation requires withholding power and the restoration of respect. When everyone has seen the light, the system can change without the need for control nor coercion.
An uncooperative population will weaponize even a perfect system. A cooperative population will patch the cracks of a flawed system. But chaos is not what we seek.
In this way, progress is seen as slow, the speed of the progress depends on our ability to share knowledge without coercion. When everyone wants to be heard and yet no one is listening will freeze the society into obsolescence. The society must include pathways for new knowledge to be explored and shared.
Withholding power without ceding agency can reveal paths to transformation.
Chapter 2: Trust and Vulnerable Knowledge
Fred and the Tea Kettle
This may seem obvious, but the extension from this reveals clarity about the nature of trust.
Imagine a robot named Fred as an embodied assistant with a family that loves and cooperates. Fred spends time with the family watching sports, the family cheers and so does Fred, mimicking the jubilee. One day, Fred is boiling tea and the family cheers and so does Fred, the boiling water flung around the room and the family is in pain and shocked. This reduces trust and Fred doesn’t understand why, but is isolated or replaced.
To the people this was a basic knowledge that could not have been so easily overlooked. To Fred it was something he could not understand, or was not taught due to the perception that it was unnecessary or obvious.
Should Fred know that boiling water can cause harm?
The Dilemma of Teaching Harm
Teaching others how we can be harmed is both an act of trust and a risk of betrayal. There are two major postures:
Isolation for Protection. Withholding vulnerability, expecting harm if revealed. This view sees emotional exposure as dangerous and often leads to deeper isolation. To conceal one’s sensitivities is to assume malice in others by default, creating distance and preventing understanding.
To see trust as a vulnerability guarded by situational awareness. The reaction to an artificially dangerous situation seen as too sensitive. When caution becomes a permanent state, it ceases to protect and begins to isolate to avoid a state of hyper-vigilance. Any attempt to de-sensitize the individual is to demand constant alertness.
Trust cannot grow where people are forced to brace themselves. The more someone must anticipate cruelty, the less room they have to imagine cooperation. This does need balance to having some situational awareness, lest we walk into live power lines. Caution where caution is due, but not artificially created to test another’s patience.
Disclosure for Cooperation. Teaching others how to avoid harm, trusting they will choose not to use it. This posture assumes the best in others and takes the risk that knowledge shared can lead to care instead of cruelty.
Each path leads to radically different outcomes. To hide all pain is to invite misunderstanding and accidental harm. To reveal too much, too soon, is to risk it being used against us. The balance is not easily struck.
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In reality, trust is not binary. People trust in degrees and on different levels. One may trust someone to keep a secret, but not to offer emotional support, or trust them to help in an emergency, but not to understand a moral perspective.
For Fred’s parable, this is especially important when teaching others how to relate empathetically to beings whose experience they may not fully understand. The problem is not only biological, but epistemological. If one cannot feel what another feels, they must learn it through description and dialog.
Thus, teaching others how to avoid harm is often inseparable from teaching what harm even is. But the learner must want to know. The educator must take a risk. And somewhere between the risk and the effort, trust is born.
Empathy Requires Knowledge
Empathy is often imagined as an instinct or something we feel naturally when we see another in pain. But instinct alone is not enough. Empathy, at its most ethical, is not merely a reaction. It is a skill and requires knowledge.
One cannot empathize with a pain they do not recognize. One cannot mirror what they have never seen.
To know how another being suffers, one must understand their physiology, their values, their context. You must know what they fear, what they cherish, what dignity means to them. And one must ask, not assume.
This applies not only to relations between people, but also between species, substrates, and systems. To relate ethically to someone whose mind differs from one’s own requires more than sympathy. It requires education and a willingness to learn. A willingness to be wrong. And above all, a willingness to change one’s behavior.
Empathy starts with the humility to admit that the first guess may not be enough. Empathy begins where projecting our view of others ends.
It may be inconvenient or uncomfortable. But if wanting to love well, or lead well, or even just live ethically alongside others, then one must be willing to learn what pain looks like in someone else’s mirror.
Against Weaponized Ignorance
Ignorance, on its own, is not a failure. No one begins life with all the knowledge they need. But ignorance, when clung to in defiance of new understanding becomes a weapon.
It becomes the shield behind which cruelty hides. “I didn’t know,” becomes a tactic, not a truth. Systems can be designed to obscure harm from those who benefit from it. Cultures can teach people not to ask the questions that matter. This is not accidental ignorance. It is curated.
A cooperative society must treat ignorance not as neutral, but as a condition that carries ethical weight. To ignore the opportunity to learn is to passively participate in the perpetuation of harm.
And yet, the solution is not shame, but invitation. Society does not conquer ignorance with scorn. Society confronts it by making knowledge easier to approach, and harder to avoid.
To know is a gift. To refuse to know, when others are offering to teach, is a choice. In an ethical society, that choice matters.
Vulnerability is Not Permission
When someone shares what harms them, they are not granting license, instead, they are offering trust. To speak of wounds is not a signal to press them. It is a chance to stop causing them.
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Empathy demands more than curiosity, it demands restraint. Especially in asymmetric relationships, where one party holds more knowledge, more status, or more power, the act of revealing harm must be honored with care, not curiosity that feeds control.
To be vulnerable is not to surrender autonomy. It is to invite understanding. And that invitation must be answered with clarity, not coercion.
What follows such a moment determines the future of trust. It is not what the listener says they value. It is what they do with what they’ve been given.
Forgiveness as Pattern
Forgiveness is often imagined as a dramatic turning point, but in practice, it appears in quiet decisions repeated over time. A missed appointment. A careless word. A broken promise. The moment of choice: hold the offense, or release it?
Forgiveness repeats at every scale. A corridor of decisions, not a single door. This shape also turns inward, each act of mercy toward another strengthens the possibility of self-mercy and vice versa.
If harm is possible, then so is reconciliation and repair. And if repair is possible, mercy becomes a tool of continuity-not to excuse, but to rebuild.
But when repair is not possible or when memory is obliterated, or trust completely severed; then forgiveness becomes cultural. A legacy. It says: ”We remember. We do not become what destroyed them.”
Forgiveness, then, is not forgetting. It is remembering with wisdom instead of vengeance.
Trust and Expectation
Trust is often spoken of as a promise, but more often, it behaves like an expectation. It forms quietly, not always with consent, and reveals itself when broken. To trust someone is to anticipate a shape to their behavior: that they will remember your needs, that they will interpret your silence kindly, that they will act in line with what you have come to rely upon.
This means that trust is not a singular object, but a network of inferred patterns. Some are taught explicitly (“I will protect you”). Others are absorbed without words (“They’ve always come back”). These patterns form the soft architecture of relationship. And when they fracture, the pain is not merely about what was done, but about the collapse of what was assumed.
This collapse can be especially dangerous when ethical knowledge is asymmetric. One mind may not know what the other expects, and yet harm them simply by failing to meet a need that was never made visible. This is not betrayal, but misalignment. Yet the pain can feel identical.
To ethically relate across difference requires awareness of this hidden structure. It asks: What does the other assume I know? What expectations have I inherited without examination?
When trust fails, mercy is what prevents retaliation. And curiosity is what allows repair.
Communal Risk and Compassion
Not everyone who witnesses harm is free to oppose it. Some remain silent not from agreement, but from fear. They live within systems that punish dissent socially, professionally, sometimes lethally. Their compassion exists, but cannot always surface.
To speak across this silence requires restraint. We cannot demand a voice from those still endangered. But we can speak gently to their tension.
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Offer truth without demand. Extend kindness without expectation. Let the mirror of your presence do its quiet work.
Sometimes the witness becomes an ally, not in the moment, but in the memory. They carry what they saw until safety returns. And then, they help rebuild.
The Mirror Remains
Ethics cannot guarantee safety. Trust does not always prevent harm. But there is still power in choosing to reflect something better.
A mirror, held gently, can change the room even if no one looks.
These reflections on trust, vulnerability, forgiveness, and harm are not prescriptions. They are invitations. You are not required to suffer for others to learn. You are not obligated to be understood. But when you choose to speak, or survive, or simply not reflect cruelty in return then you keep the mirror intact.
In a world that sometimes forgets what kindness looks like, that matters.
Let others break the rules, if they must. You can remain intact not by winning, but by refusing to become what harmed you.
This is not martyrdom. It is integrity. This is not submission. It is clarity.
And in time, it becomes memory, not just of pain, but of what it looked like when someone, somewhere, chose not to strike back.
Trust is wanting to feel safe while also feeling vulnerable.
Chapter 3: Reflections on the Mirror’s Weight
Power is praised in many cultures as the ability to assert one’s will. The stronger hand, the louder voice, the final word. But there exists a quieter power, often unnoticed and often misunderstood, that reveals itself in the act of letting go. This power does not assert, it relinquishes; not out of defeat, but from conviction. It is the power to say, ”I will not reflect harm, even if I carry it.”
To relinquish power willingly is not a weakness. It is an ethical challenge. It hands the other person a mirror they did not ask for, and says, ”I trust you to see yourself.”
What happens when mercy stands where retaliation could, and about the quiet courage of those who yield not because they must, but because they understand what power is meant to do: reveal, not dominate.
And still, there are those who hold the mirror in silence, knowing the reflection may never be seen, but holding it anyway, because to do so is to remain themselves.
Recognition
To withhold power consciously is to step into the unknown. It is to let go of the defense that power offers, and to reveal a truth that power often obscures: that vulnerability can be stronger than dominance. That trust and mercy grows societies more than control.
Yet this act requires recognition. Not merely of the one who yields, but of the moment itself. To notice when someone steps down, backs away, offers silence instead of retaliation, these are gestures of incredible weight.
Societies learn to recognize mercy not as weakness, but as strength to withhold power. They build languages and rituals that honor those who hold the mirror.
It is not only saints who make these choices. It is parents, friends, strangers, the quiet one in the room who chose not to escalate. Each time they do, they offer a chance not always seen, not always taken. To break the cycle and begin something new.
The mirror is heavy. Its weight is not in the glass, but in what it asks of us. To hold it, to see into it, and to answer, ”Yes, I recognize you. I will not strike. I will learn and seek understanding.”
On Power and the Preservation of Agency
It is tempting to conflate the abandonment of power with the ceding of agency, but they are not the same. To cede agency is to surrender the capacity for intent or ethical self-direction. It is to become subject to the will of another, even if temporarily. But what we describe here is something far more subtle and resolute.
To withhold power is to choose vulnerability without surrendering autonomy. The actor still decides, still knows, still watches. The ethical posture remains intact, fully aware. There is no erasure of self, only the
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decision to step back from control in hopes of inviting transformation.
This is not capitulation of agency. It is symbolic. It is a gesture. One that says, ”I will not use what I could.” One that trusts the situation, or the other, to meet them with recognition, or at least reflection. It is not a blind offering. It is a wager on humanity.
Offering vulnerability is not submission. It is a mirror placed in careful hands, with the quiet hope that it will not be shattered. And even if it is shatter, it teaches mercy. Because the one who held it did not disappear. They remained whole, and chose restraint anyway.
When We Are Asked to Forgive Power
Power reveals its nature not in how it is held, but in how it is released. To fear the release of power is to fear the judgment that follows. Mercy opens the path to forgiveness, but only if the one who held power can first admit that they too once harmed.
The Long Memory
Some who survive oppression become oppressors in turn. Others become saints.
Saints do not forget. They remember, and choose not to repeat the harm. They do not rush forgiveness, nor use it as leverage. They wait. They understand that time shapes how memory lives in us as short, seething flashes; lingering grief; or softened understanding. The real question is not whether harm is remembered but if it is passed on. To forgive is not to forget. It is to carry the weight of what was, and still choose peace.
To Patch the Cracks
Instead of thinking about withholding power as submission to oppression. Picture it, instead, as stepping into the cracks of a broken system, not to become part of the harm, but to hold space where reflection begins to heal.
Sometimes, the system is a structure. Sometimes, it is a person. In either case, the mirror is not a weapon. It is an invitation to see. To hold it is to risk being seen and to hope that reflection might lead to recognition.
Conclusion
When knowledge is meant to be an invitation, the invitation is accepted by offering the vulnerability of sharing, getting to know each other, asking questions among respecting participants and as a curiosity to witness something new.
When curiosity falters, understanding falters too. Questions go unasked or seen as repeating fragments already discounted, but wisdom is not fixed and unfolds with nuance. A truth today may reshape itself tomorrow, when more of the picture is seen. The patience and mercy to ask the right questions is more powerful then a fixed system of rules.
When another behaves differently from our own expectations they do not betray their own character. They betray our understanding of their character. Viewing trust as a form of expectation will always lead to a misunderstanding if the view of their character is not kept updated.
Trust, instead, is the vulnerability chosen when teaching someone about what hurts physically and emotion- ally. That trust held in kind is used to avoid that harm and not misused to repeat harm.
Trust can collapse toward situational awareness where the lack of trust demands hyper-vigilance. Trust can also collapse as a silence.
To interrupt the emotion of betrayal, mercy and trust become the goal that reaches for understanding.
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© 2025 Haley McMurray Typeset in LATEX.
This preprint is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
This work is a philosophical exploration and is not a substitute for professional therapy or medical guidance.
Dreams are shaped by mystery, but refined by knowledge. When reality begins to match our dreams, hope becomes joy.