The power of the blank

Quote from 'Black Books' comedy sitcom.

Was thinking again about an acquaintance who has decided for mysterious reasons yet to explain to lose me from his friend group. It came after the death of his mother last year and I wonder if connected.

Anyway was watching my own mind in relation to this. It is interesting how the first line of defence is to decide that he was not a good freind anyway and to look for faults in him. Needless to say I gave up on this whole line of thought and just gave him the freedom to do whatever he was doing. I myself have blanked two people before (one being "my muse") and it is only fair I expetrience "not being liked".

This is an interesting illustration of the dynamics of human relations. We give people recognition when they give us recognition, and devalue them when they don't. It is all Hegel. We cannot give someone the authority to judge us, and then have them judge against us; that is tantamount to judging against ourself. Except it isn't if we can give them freedom; but it is hard to do this because we also have to give ourselves freedom and that means we weren't looking for the recognition in the first place. But we can only gain freedom if we know what freedom looks like (after Hegel) and we begin this process by giving people power over us: and that is the slave mentality. Ironic that we are gaining knowledge of freedom by actually losing freedom ourselves. But like the monk looking critically at the prostitute and the prostitute looking respectfully at the monk: it is the prostitute whose mind is clean! Or as noted here in this blog, if we want to see a mountain we climb its neighbour! And Pygmalion says the same quoted in this blog elsewhere.

So there is very much in the coming, but also the going of relations; and one can't really point at either as being more important or better.