Every misunderstanding, by definition, feels like an understanding. To argue that you do not misunderstand in the basis of the fact that you do have an understanding, only demonstrates that you are unaware of what understanding involves.

*

To look someone in the eye and tell them, despite their protests that you have misunderstood, that you do in fact understand them: this is despicable. The more powerful you are the more able you are to avoid being confronted with this fact. The powerful can enlist yes-men to reinforce their delusions of comprehensive mastery.

*

Some people are at their worst when they are weak. They lack the strength to live up to — or sometimes even to remember — their own ideal.

Other people are at their worst when they are strong. They lack the constraints necessary to bring them into line with any persistent ideal. Such people have never known a reason to be principled except to avoid punishment. Escaping the possibility of punishment is tantamount to escaping obligation.

*

It takes a long time for people who have been unfree to realize that freedom is neither anarchy nor is it holding the power to enslave.

Being free means being free for one’s own responsibility.

Being responsible means to be able to respond to one’s situation.

To be able to respond to one’s situation requires that one understand it.

To understand one’s situation is to recognize that every situation involves both objects and other people.

To recognize that every situation involves both objects and other people, requires that one know the difference between I-It relationships and I-Thou relationships.

Far too few people in positions of power know anything other than I-It.

I-Thou means: “You can change my world if I hear you.”

*

The mania for quantification, scientificality, objectivity and its consequent objectivist reductionism of human beings to resources to utilize in order to meet one’s own objectives… this is the consequence of a species of intellectual vulgarity.

So far, the field of User Experience has allowed itself to be utilized as a tool for behavioral manipulation. At the heart of User Experience, though, is a principle opposed to this use: that a person should be understood and related to not as an It object but as Thou. The techniques of User Experience are further along than its self-awareness, which is a good thing. Sometimes ignorance serves as a protective shell. The seeds have been planted, now they can grow and establish themselves. The flowers and the fruit will come. Gradually, as more and more businesses learn that genuine human relationships with customers and with employees (that is, I-Thou relationships) work better than I-It manipulations that seek to simulate humanity, a different class of business leader will emerge.

At first, the shift will be strictly utilitarian, but I hope eventually we will acquire a taste for it, and I look forward to the day when we look back and shudder at this time of technical control, misguided servile work ethics, neglect of community and children, and the ugly, meaningless and stressful work lives so many accepted as normal.

We will be amazed that we treated workers and students for depression rather than treating workplaces and schools for depressingness. “It was so obvious that it was the workplace that was mentally ill. Why didn’t people see this?”

(This is my practical “metastatic expectation.” It’s not a prediction, but an ideal to pursue.)