#repostin with better formatting

[jinruihokankeikaku]

It's really interesting to talk to and/or be around people who have experienced shit similar to what you have but not the same, because on one hand you want to relate (because of course you do, because we all want to relate, because there is love for one another intrinsic to our soul/species-essence.) But then the more you learn about one another's experiences the more you realise they no longer want to relate, because they no longer see you as one of their kind. They can Empathize or Sympathize, for sure, but that's categorically different. Because empathy and sympathy are morally loaded processes in a way that simple recognition of the self through another ain’t; you can express sympathy out of a sense of duty - heck, I’d even say it’s maybe usually right to do that - but you can't express Identification. Because identification is not a kindness and more surely, than that it ain’t a social norm. In fact, I think some on this blue webbed site here have described it as (quote) mortifying. But this puts both participants in this interaction in, uh, a quandary. Because now the relation taking place is no longer - if you'll pardon the loaded term - "natural". The care one has for one's fellow persons is altogether different from the care one has for one's fellows per se. The first is basically voluntary, the second basically Isn't. It's more nuanced than that, but i do think that's what it comes down to in the last case. And that brings us to a third sort of caring which is - and I hope this is uncontroversial - the hardest one, or at least the most complex. And that is of course relating to the Other as such, a connection borne of difference rather than formed in spite of it. I'm kind of spitballing here but my guess is that a big part of the difficulty here is intrinsic and not just social conditioning. Because to care for the Other as such is to, uh, is to recognise one's own incompleteness, to recognize one's own otherness. One's own identity as a Human rather than the Human. Nobody thinks of their experience as complete until they're asked to call it fundamentally, permanently, and essentially incomplete. It's one thing to say “Obviously I Don't Know Everything” but it's another altogether to say, them, “...and I must live and love and Act in the world with the knowledge that I am partial.” (Pun intended.) We're all fragments of a panoply, y’know? Chips off the old block. Whether that's random selection or design doesn't matter in this case, cos - cos the thing here, the big thing that it all boils down to, is that we all come from the same place but we're not all the same anymore. That's a pretty heavy fact. It's also definitely a fact in just a8out every ontological framework out there. Were I wiser and slash or less crazy this'd be the part where i'd drop a satisfying moral punchline but, alas, no. I’m fresh out of those. I’m just as clueless as you, dear reader. Shit sucks. What else can you do, then, but Hope.

#long post #repostin with better formatting