An authentic meeting with the Other requires discarding the Everyone Else

Ruining the joke of Orcbrands legendary paradox of racist tolerance

You have heard this expression “An authentic meeting with the other”, often in relation to discussions of clashes of civilisation, multiculturalism, and the challenges and social questions of our age. It conjures an image of a man meeting someone from a different culture, and seeing the “shared humanity” underneath their individual “cultural” affections, that are supposed to be seen/revealed as arbitrary and an obstactle to our true fundamental shared humanist human experience. Can’t we just all get along? Yes, but only if you have an Authentic Meeting With the Other, and discard your primitive superstitions.

Orcbrand’s famous tweet, describing the multicultural international coalition of nationalists, racists, and other undesirables, somehow all getting along online, and forming a shared understanding or ad-hoc team, seemingly in total contradiction with their own principles, is a good jumping off point to explain a concept I like to call the “Everone Else”. I say that the simple reason for this strange apparent contradiction, is that the people in question are not defined by their political or racist convictions, but by their intuitive or formally expressed grasping of the Everyone Else.

I name it the Everyone Else, from the following illustration:

"Of course I know what I mean by X, and everyone I know understand what I mean, and I know You understand what l mean, and I know everyone you know understand - everyone understands! But everyone else...”

The Everyone Else is by definition an abstraction. It starts where any connection to real people stops. It’s every human being beyond Dunbar’s number, represented in the human mind. It’s not quite the Big Other of Lacanian fame, because it is not “the collective symbolic order”. It is in fact entirely disordered.

The Everyone Else is experienced as a wild beast, a force of nature, blind and cruel and indifferent, something you can only run from, and never confront. It is a Tyranny of the Everyone Else, which you are totally powerless to confront directly, but can only sneak around, trick, or exploit. It’s a wild mob or warband in bloodlust, which cannot be reasoned or bargained with, but is hellbent on trampling everything in it’s path.

It is also non-existent, and exclusively a kind of delusion, a product of the human mind, that does not actually relate to anything in the real world. It is a kind of waste-product of the mind, a malformed category, that is the product of the limitations of the human mind, which, due to the infinite hall of mirrors of representation we have created with information technology, has grown into a metaphoric conceptual tumor, in the mind of the vast majority of currently living human beings.

The difference between a “twitter racist” and everyone else :^), is that the twitter racist recognizes either intuitively or cognitively, this construct, and rejects it as the nonsense it is. This is also what enables them to be authentic, have genuine communication, and create friendships. You can never let your guard down around other people, and exchange vulnerability, if you are constantly worrying about Everyone Else suddenly jumping out of nowhere to get you, catch you with your pants down.

The Everyone Else is, worrying about “how it sounds”, instead of saying what you mean. It is a deep fundamental distrust, and a prey-mentality.

Regime apparatchiks live entirely within the Everyone Else, always worrying about “how it sounds”, living in a total deranged solipsism. Their much discussed strange language games and language policing and so forth, are all products of this particular derangement. “Everyone else” is going to get me, if I provoke them.

“Of course everyone I know knows I’m not a racist, but….”

We have all experienced people talking to “someone they made up in their head”, at you, or talking to themselves, but at you. They are talking to the Everyone Else, and trying to avoid being trampled by it. I think it is useful to say they are possessed by the E.E.

Like a wellful authentic meeting with the Other requires discarding of the E.E., so too does an unwitting authentic meeting exclude the E.E. Authentic Contact dispels the possession, and in coming into true contact with another Other, in the undeniable revelation of experience, they can be, at least momentarily, snapped out of it.

You can think about it as a kind of virtual laying on hands. Authentic contact dispels the possession - if you touch them, in the colloquial sense. Make them feel something, make them feel human, feel seen, feel touched. This can be done in a myriad of ways. I prefer making people laugh. This is also why I always say “everyone can see what you’re doing” when I partake in pointless internet fights. It’s an attempt to rouse them from the E.E.

Many are of course so far gone that they revolt at genuine touch, and do everything in their power to avoid being dragged out of their derangement. My much referenced friendship test requires wilful vulnerability, and when you are in the grips of the E.E., you feel that you are in constant danger, and any concession would be suicidal. Because Everyone (else) is Out To Get You. At a fundamental level, I dont believe it can be forced on someone. I don’t think you can free them against their will. It always has to be their choice, and for those deep in E.E. possession, the choice only ever gets harder every day. All you can do is offer them your hand. First hundred times, they might flinch thinking its a fist coming to strike them, and snarl and bite and snap, but we have tamed worse animals historically. It should be doable. Really the determining factor is how much work you’re willing to put in to each particular case.

On a lighter note, The Everyone Else is also what makes people bad writers. When you write for Everyone Else, you, by definition, write for no one.