When opening up to someone else, from a specific perspective, anything that arises will be a good thing.
Here’s the perspective: in any given moment of relating, there is an opportunity to connect or to reflect.
Where there is similarity there’s fellowship, compassion, oneness-through-shared experience, which is a basis for unity.
Where there is complementarity there’s partnership, attraction, wholeness-greater-than-parts, which is a basis for collaboration.
And where there’s difference there’s contrast, which offers a new point of reference to view oneself from, and through it, offer a new self-awareness along the specific axis of contrast.
Fear of transparency originates entirely in loss aversion, where it’s associated with the down-side risk of two classes of difference: judgement and conflict. This is really what the bunk of this essay is about — the upside benefits of transparency are easy to enumerate, the downside risks are the perceived hard part, and by the end I’ll illustrate how even judgement and conflict are part of an all-win scenario.
The reason judgement is hard to hold is simple. From the cultural assumption of Objectivity, there’s a sense that anything “bad” is within the object of observation. Objectivity pretends that the observer-subject can but outside the experiment provided they maintain enough distance from the object. A kind of Objectivist Dunning-Kruger effect gives a false confidence that if we appear sufficiently logical and dissociated it means our relationship to the object goes away, giving a kind of self-righteous confidence in one’s position. But this is impossible, the subject is inherently part of a dynamic, and within a dynamic, responsibility is always joint.
Situated Objectivity makes the position of the subject explicitly part of a relational dynamic, and from this, conflict and judgment emerges from a relationship between the subject and object of observation. And this is now where a lot of value is unlocked. In the case of judgement, much of the emotional charge of it originates in internal judgement; not accepting a pattern in someone else can be a reflection of a part of myself that’s currently disowned or rejected. Beneath this disowning is often a fear that makes that part or possibility unbearable to accept; there’s some kind of embodied panic response to it, and resistance to even mentally entertaining it.
This panic response is not rational, it is entirely emotional, and from an Objectivist standpoint it’s important to find a path to understanding and acceptance to ensure this response is not being projected onto the object of observation, and mistakenly pushing out the burden of responsibility. The possibility and awareness of projection softens the edge and emotional charge of judgment and makes space for curiosity; is this within the object, or actually within me?
In my anecdotal experience, once the internal, projective component has been acknowledged and brought back into connection, what’s left for the object of observation to hold is grounded and without emotional charge; by and large the emotional charge originates in the projective component. This makes sense, given that that internal component is actually a way of relating to the situation is a very personal, specific, historically-conditioned way, which often determines the kind of emotional charge it has. In the process of bringing that part back into connection, the embodied panic or reflexive response is massaged into ease, and an internal blockage of sorts is dissolved. This “massage” work is very valuable, it prevents future judgements, aversions, triggering, resistance, self-deception in the unblocked area.
A final class of difference is conflict, which is the hardest to hold. Conflict has a similar projective quality to judgement, but with even more charge. If past conflict resulted in rupture and loss, this emotional conditioning may be imposed onto present conflict. Moreover, if the conditioning provokes an ungrounded response, spiraling can occur, where fear, aggression, disconnection can beget fear, aggression, and disconnection. This has a self-fulfilling aspect to it which superficially justifies the conditioning around the conflict, when in fact, the conditioning itself is the culprit — the issue wasn’t inherently the “what” (conflict) but the “how” (an ungrounded, reactive, self-fufillingly self-defeating race-to-the-bottom response).
Analogous to judgment, from an Objectivity standpoint, in a conflict the “other side” is often judged to be irrational, dumb, alien, to have their own preferences. In fact this becomes a justification to stop trying to meet the other side, and pigheadedly anchoring and protecting one’s own priorities and needs. Its from this defensive posture that often compromise becomes the only conceivable option. But as I discuss in Compromise vs Alignment, compromise guarantees a lose-lose scenario, which in turn superficially justifies fear and triggering around conflict; if the only conceivable option delivers lose-lose scenarios, no wonder there’s judgement, aversion and fear of loss whenever conflict arises.
Doing the self-reflection work for judgment acts as kind of practice for conflict; if judgment is the minor leagues, conflict is the major, because the stakes are inherently higher. From a Situated Objectivity, relational, perspective, conflict represents two internally coherent experiences that are put into certain relationship, and out of that dynamic conflict arises. The causal weight of the conflict isn’t within the “nodes” but the “edge” between them. A common dynamic that produces conflict is perceived scarcity. Individual needs are legitimate, they’re just facts, but a dynamic of perceived scarcity may force needs to be prioritized in a zero-sum way, which then provokes a defense fear-of-loss posture. If the perceived “burden of responsibility” is put on the “node” it’s very easy to blame each other rather than recognize that perceived scarcity is the joint enemy; all parties have an aligned motive to “free up” or “unwind” the dynamic of scarcity.
A fantastic and culturally endemic example of this is nuclear family. As I discuss in Nuclear Family Was Never Enough the nuclear family has scarcity built into it, structurally. There simply isn’t enough attention, care, money, capacity, resource, slack, whatever you want to call it, to meet everyone in their full needs. When this intersects with an Objectivist Dunning-Kruger perspective, it means parents blame each other in conflict, they act out against children, children act out at parents, they all blame each other, rather blaming the dynamic which structurally ensures scarcity is inevitable. In recognizing that the dynamic is the culprit, it becomes completely common sensical to make adjustments in social structure, vis-a-vis re-communalizing, so that needs can actually be collectively met. A relational framing enables rescoping which can see the forest instead of the trees.
Another fantastic and totally endemic dynamic is mutual triggering. In a conflict there may be two (or more) emotionally charged conditionings which meet in such a way that trigger each other. From an Objectivist Dunning-Kruger perspective, each side blames the other for being triggered, irrational, stupid, whatever. But this does nothing to address either trigger, it just ensures spiraling accelerates into rupture. From a relational standpoint, the dynamic is the problem, and the only solution is to unwind one or both triggers. This process is the same “massaging” as before, but now there’s a discernment component of slowing down, pausing, reframing the conflict to re-orient around the triggers, and the ability to hold both triggers in parallel as equally valid, rather than remaining locked in a lose-lose race-to-the-bottom. Again, a projective awareness is incredibly helpful here: is the trigger within the object, or actually within me? This opens up space for curiosity and collaboration.
Once the attentional frame moves from “node” to “edge”, from object to dynamic, the stakes fall enormously, as it creates the ever-present possibility that there’s a joint enemy, a bad dynamic, and a collaborative orientation to realign on. And even if a particular dynamic is intractable, eg there’s fundamental scarcity which does prevent an all-win solution, at least there’s an understanding that the misalignment wasn’t inherent, the “nodes” can all still be valid even when the “edge” sucks. This is very important because it means that temporary misalignment doesn’t require permanent rupture — you can still interpret the situation has as a kind of joint long-game where the short-run is a mess because of a bad dynamic, rather than any bad actors. This means that when a good dynamic is found, you can always remeet others as friends.
The ever-present possibility of a bad dynamic inherently de-risks conflict; pretty much always the “enemy” is at the level of the dynamic and never at the level of the node. With this framing, transparency even in its “worst” scenario, conflict, is never at fault, in fact it’s required to ever discover a better dynamic. When Relationality meets transparency, it becomes an all-win scenario.