Hating Other Minds

On the loneliness of anti-solipsism

There’s a certain wall we all crash into eventually.

You probably already know what I’m talking about.

It’s that moment in any new relationship wherein you first discover which aspects of yourself cause the other person to register an intractable disgust response.

It’s the moment you realize your parents don’t approve of or properly understand the person you’re becoming, and for all their unconditional love remain locked into loving what feels like a small and increasingly performative fraction of your total self.

It’s the moment you realize your best friend can’t have your back in some high-stakes situation without also compromising his own sense of dignity.

It’s the moment it dawns on you that someone you care about immensely—and who by all appearances feels likewise—will never appreciate the art you experience as your deepest and truest emotional grammar.

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Most of us learn in early adolescence that it’s best to move past these moments and never dwell too long in the mire—that no one person can ever give you everything, and that it’s silly and immature to even want that from someone.

Even still, many of us will at some point in our youth torch an otherwise rewarding connection because at the moment of impact the crash feels intolerable; thankfully, the regret that tends to follow such moments is among the most potent civilizational adhesives binding us together long-term and preventing a collapse into anomie.

Sometimes, though, we learn that lesson more gradually, in fits and starts and half-measures, and if we’re lucky the dyad just absorbs the crash—whereas if we’re not lucky, the well gets poisoned irrevocably; just not enough to kill the thing for a good long while. And then in other cases, the bond will simply pickle, becoming far less innocent and a lot more provisional yet still fundamentally intact, and durably so.

Whatever the case, we all learn ways of forging through—and to that end, it helps a great deal that we also all acquire lots of experiences on the other side of the equation, which assuming we have basic theory of mind enable us to keep things in perspective whenever we’re the one getting flattened.

It never feels good, though—does it?

On some level we really are all just alone in the universe, and quite literally everything we experience of each other boils down to a perpetual affective war of All Against All: force pushing up against force, disgust crusading against disgust.

At its most granular level—and also most enduring—the Friend-Enemy Distinction amounts very simply to your own interiority versus everyone else’s. It’s about your right to maintain your own individual preferences, allegiances, vulgar bigotries, and private interpretive grammar amidst a world that will never stop trying to sand off your rough edges while resisting any and all attempts by you to sand off shit that you don’t like.

And clearly that’s not all there is—not in the slightest. It goes without saying that we also all experience love, lust, friendship, camaraderie, humor, admiration, and simple coalitional alignment, and in the vast majority of cases one of these things will prevail.

But the wall never goes away.