The Mug-Doctor Paradox: On The Steve Zaragoza Principle (Patreon)

The following is a response to the thought experiment posed by Steve Zaragoza in today's video, The Horror Movie Movie Game Returns. It has been carefully crafted over many years. Here is the video , which goes live later today, so you might enjoy it a little early. Because we love you. 

The Mug-Doctor Paradox: On The Steve Zaragoza Principle

By Elliott Morgan

On Thursday, October 25, a video will be uploaded to The Valleyfolk’s YouTube channel, and in it is a hypothetical posed by Steve Zaragoza, a digital comedian best known for his hit Comic-Con talk show, You Posted That. The hypothetical question is less of a hypothetical and more of a thought experiment, for it plays upon our society’s norms re: fear and confusion, as well as our understanding of the unconscious mind. The questions raised by this hypothetical are best left to the wood-paneled, smokey, sexy halls of academia, for to attempt to map out the ways the thought experiment’s implications are intrinsically tied to human nature would be a foolhardy venture for all but the most scholarly. The question? It’s simple, but its answer is highly contested, both inside the walls of The Valleyfolk office (by the rats) but especially my own mind. The thought experiment itself may never be solved, but perhaps through writing this piece, my own mind might find some peace. For those who do not dare tread into the murky waters of unconscious, existential dread, I suggest you turn back now.

It’s called the Mug-Doctor Paradox. Here it is: 

Upon waking, would you be more scared to see the pictured anthropomorphic mug floating before you or a doctor telling you that you have cancer?

The exact wording varies from text to text, as this thought experiment has spread like wildfire through humanities journals across Europe and most of Asia, as well as a few Tumblrs. For many, it is the doctor bearing bad news in the dead of night that rings scarier. For others, it is the mug floating ominously before you, signaling proof of the paranormal. Clearly, either of these scenarios are bone-chilling, both in how starkly contrasted they are, and also how mind-numbingly benign. It is as if the most terrifying scenario of all is not a mug or a doctor, but the sad realization that it takes so little for our preconceived beliefs about society and humankind to crumble. Is this a simple game of “What’s Scarier, Jeff?” or is it a paradox revealing some deep truth beyond our reasoning skills? It is not a question of whether we fear death, but a question of whether we fear a physical death over a spiritual one. It may seem unlikely that Steve Zaragoza, a Mexican, came upon this beautiful mind maze. But with four Ph. Ds, seven years of medical studies, and after having written sixteen e-books on the nature of farts and their relation to the Big Other, Zaragoza is actually the perfect candidate for this sort of cerebral pop fodder. 

Here Zaragoza is seen on his first day at SourceFed in 2012, having just stepped off a bus with nothing but a bag of sewing needles.

Let’s talk about the Steve Zaragoza Principle. 

The Steve Zaragoza Principle is a set of arguments used to justify the mug being scarier. Steve Zaragoza’s initial argument was a two-part throwaway he presented while filming a video for his terrible comedy troupe, The Valleyfolk. It’s important to note the free-flowing nature of the environment in which the Steve Zaragoza Principle was formed, for its very genesis is part of the argument itself. The Steve Zaragoza Principle is built upon the argument that the unconscious mind primarily fears unknowing, and for that reason, the mystery of the floating ceramic nicknack is more primal, thus scarier. 

The second part of the Steve Zaragoza Principle, and the primary psychoanalytic argument, is the parallel dynamics of sad clowns and jovial beer drinkers. Both are based on innocent archetypes, but both are somehow imbibed with menace. Therefore, the creepy-innocent appearance of the ceramic man is a painful reminder of the moment of ego formation, in which we are separated from our nature by the crashing and traumatic revelation that we are, in fact, alone. From this moment on, the human subject seeks solace from the trauma of being and ultimately seeks its own end via what Freud called the death drive. '

Therefore, the Steve Zaragoza Principle successfully incorporates elements of both evolutionary psychology, by way of inducing our biological fear of the unknown, and psychoanalysis, by deviating from the mechanics of evolution toward the existential. What springs from the fight or flight terror of the unknown, as propagated by our most basic evolutionary function and activated by the floating of the ceramic piece of trash, is met at once with an image that does not so much scare as us as it does temporarily jar our understanding of what we truly fear. And what could be scarier than not knowing what truly scares you? Is this not why we buy tickets to horror movies? So we can point to the screen and say, “Yes, it is this that I am scared of, and not the omnipresent tension of my inner world!”

Here’s how it works:

Upon waking from a stupor, the subject sees before it something foreign. This foreignness, combined with its discomforting proximity, produces a fight or flight response. Although a member of any other species would flee the scene or swing a fist at the mug— the human cannot. Instead, the human is caught in paralysis, its brain unable to comprehend the floating in tandem with the innocence of the figure. While its conscious mind is responding to the floating by way of an all-too-human freezing, the subject’s unconscious mind is registering the perverted innocence of the smiling, jovial archetype, and this head-on confrontation with the conflict at the center of human nature shakes the subject to his or her very core. 

Seen here is some nasty boi.

Consider the doctor. While the looming threat of a figure at night would be startling, it would immediately be registered as a threat and the fight or flight response would be successfully activated, likely resulting in a very injured doctor. This is where Steve Zaragoza’s legacy in the halls of academia may be slightly dirty-tainted. His flaw is as subtle one. It is the activation of the fight or flight response that saves the subject from his ultimate fear. This is contrary to Steve Zaragoza’s argument, that a doctor would be recognized as benign upon appearing over you in your bedroom. Clearly, this is not the case, as every article on evolutionary psychology will attest. The human brain does not default to trust. The instinct is not fight, flight, or assume the best. It is to leave that space, or to consume it. The foreboding silhouette would, despite its factual harmlessness, invoke the fight or flight faster than the ambiguous mug. 

So what are we to take from this paradox? 

Is it that that which scares us the most may, in fact, be a carefully constructed defense of our own design? In this season of Halloween, how fitting that we fill our brains with jump-scares? As we prepare for the holidays, will we not turn to wine and eggnog to dull ourselves, to distract us from the mundane? As daytime commercials sell us fantasies of home invasions and mesothelioma, and the 24-hour news cycle perpetuates overwrought narratives that paint our world in stark black and white, or blue and red colors, how is it that we have learned to seek the fight or flight response. It’s as if in the noble quest for survival, evolution played a practical joke on us, where survival has taken a backseat to surviving. At the end of the day, we’d all rather face the looming figure in the white coat than face the floating, jovial mug inside all of us— a dark, menacing figure we’ve been programmed to look after for some ungodly reason. 

What the Mug-Doctor Paradox teaches us is that maybe fear itself is a haven from our ever-looming responsibility— our responsibility not to defeat or run from threats, but to live alongside them. Just as we fear the shadow more than the monster, so too do we fear the mug more than the doctor. The real trembling comes from within, and it quakes the strongest in the dead of night, when there is no murderous doctor to save us from our confusion. Although the Steve Zaragoza Principle has been based on faulty reasoning at times, its ultimate truth is proven in its birth, just as our own is. As the subject is born into a world ready to manipulate it into its own image, the Steve Zaragoza Principle was manifested in a chaotic environment— the type of environment where the unconscious reigns supreme. 

For this reason, I must conclude that the Steve Zaragoza Principle, in having clearly arisen from the unconscious, must be an indicator of truth. It is not in need of support or rebuke. Rather, it is our own ways of thinking that must learn to adapt to the truth. What seems like a matter of opinion, then, is simply an exercise of coming to terms with the ultimate truth:

That floating mug is scary as balls, man. And ugh, CANCER?! No way, doc! You get outta here!