"A man can estrange himself by mystifying himself and others. He can also have what he does stolen from him by others.
If we are stripped of our experience we are stripped of our deeds: and if our deeds are, so to speak, taken out of our hands like toys from the hands of children, we are bereft of our humanity.
We cannot be deceived. Men can and do destroy the humanity of other men, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent. We are not self contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections.
We are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men; and we are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways.
Each of us is the other to the others. Man is a patient-agent, agent-patient, interexperiencing and interacting with his fellows.
It is quite certain that unless we can regulate our behavior much more satisfactorily than at present, we are going to exterminate ourselves. But as we experience the world, so we act.
And this principle holds even when action conceals rather than discloses our experience
We are not even able to think adequately about the behavior that is at the annhilating edge.
But what we think is less than what we know;
what we know is less than what we love;
what we love is so much less than what there is.
And to that precise extent, we are so much less than what we are."
- R.D. Laing -
