As organisms, we human beings survive by performing our vital functions, as well as by facing and overcoming what threatens it. This continuous process is overwhelming, leading to realizations and frustrations. Moreover, it humanizes by allowing transcendence of limits, or dehumanizes - animalizes - by transforming these limits into behavioral determinants.
The humanization process depends fundamentally on the existence of the other who accepts what is before him/her, that is: a human being with infinite possibilities and circumstantial needs for his/her daily survival. This simple, effective, and evident moment - finding and being found by the other - is crucial, definite for structuring acceptance or nonacceptance, with its consequences of availability (openness to what happens) or emptiness (closure due to survival parameters).
Being accepted for what one is, or for what one may or may not be, determines different processes. Sons and daughters, for example, when perceived as an obstacle or as a way out of one’s own limitations and considerations, are transformed into instruments, things that can be used for improvement, for the fulfillment of dreams or, on the other hand, as things that urgently need be destroyed, donated, denied - they are unwanted, unreasonable fruits. Sometimes one is perceived as an unwanted and embodied hindrance, and so this becomes his/her reality. This perceptual, relational configuration establishes consistency, even if apparently unpleasant in face of what is imagined to be the son or daughter, the new being.
Perceiving aloneness definitely builds autonomy, but it can also destroy the possibilities of autonomy when one constantly develops omissive, fearful, needy attitudes, begging for something and generating submission, accepting to be something that deserves kicks and alms and thus surviving. Often the experience of being rejected and disregarded by the other - mother, father, or the social niches in which one does not fit - creates observers who learn how to please, how to survive, how to succeed. They are educated and thrill families on graduation day or wedding day, for example. When winners, they turn everything into a podium, structuring their motivations to achieve, to win.
This opportunism, this excellence in attitudes, adequacy and adaptation creates authorities, masters in the drawers of fragmented, managed, and stored knowledge. It consists in the transformation of possibility into necessity. The individual is dehumanized in this process, but has acquired the condition to dress up as a human being. The appearance - the mask - can decorate everything. This also displaces emptiness since feelings, motivations, and excitements result from what one has achieved or can achieve, from what can be gathered.
This process empties the individual because perceptions, discriminations, satisfactions and frustrations take place through polarizers of the good result, of these guaranteed and gratified future and past. The existing is set up from the reflection; the result determines the validity of the action, the validity of the existing. Thus, one fills emptiness with characteristic platforms of envy, fear, anger, attachment, fervent dedication, and commitment to what provides him/her power and protection. When one dedicates oneself to the satisfaction of survival needs, one sleeps, drinks, eats, and multiplies into countless children who are equal, opaque, and similar to him/her.
Structuring life and relationships based on results - avoiding failures and achieving successes - is an emptying situation.