Those morally competitive ones!

Morally competitive types, though, are the ones you have to watch out for. They will always be assuming you are saying something "between the lines". It's very hard to figure them out, because they generally assume that you are on the same wavelength as they are. You're not, but they don't have a set of emotional vocabulary that would register any meaning if you told them that. Rather, their emotional vocabulary registers only that you are trying to compete with them in a more obscure way than they would find to be usual.

These morally competitive types like to get close to you so that they can take notes. It all seems very innocent on the surface of it, but later on you can find that something you meant to communicate as a simple fact, without attaching any real importance to it, has taken on a huge and luminous meaning, in the eyes of the other person. Somehow it has gained moral significance, and now we are all too far down the road to warrant any going back, to try to make original intentions clearer.

In all probability, any attempt at clarification, at either point, would probably not achieve its goal. Differences in values can be astonishingly difficult to communicate, and all the more so when the other person assumes that all of the human race shares the same set of values. This assumption of commonality where there isn't any is what leads any attempt at clarification to be interpreted as "covert competition", or something similar. Instead of achieving clarification, you are more likely to mount up evidence for having nefarious motives -- that is, the more you try to fix the problem. This unfortunate result is because for some people there is no place "outside the box" of their particular ideology. We all have to think and sound alike, or else it is assumed that we are putting on a mask, pretending to be something that is impossible in terms of the other person's ideological system.

It is through not budging whatsoever from their assumptions about you that morally competitive people finally get other people to take their sides in life. They seem so wholly convinced by their own point of view, so rigidly fixated on the notion that there is only one true interpretation of life. And they are also very good at amassing evidence to support their ideological viewpoints. This is to say, they use empirical evidence in an odd way.

Consider the patriarch who needs to believe that all women are irrational. Should you happen to be a woman, you should avoid his company at all costs. On the surface of it, he may seem to be fairly ordinary, but beneath the surface of his appearance, he is motivated by a strong ideological need towards essentialising male and female natures along very rigid, categorical lines. So, he is lying in wait and collecting "evidence" that will allow him to justify in his own mind putting you into a particular category. Once he has achieved his goal of making your own actions seem as rigid and stereotyped as his own way of thinking is, he will congratulate himself in having transcended you through understanding you completely. It will completely escape his realisation that at best he has merely encountered his own thoughts about you. In any meaningful sense, he has not yet encountered you at all.

The experience of all morally competitive types returns to them only what they already assume they know. Their existing "knowledge" seems to be confirmed to them again and again. They are not capable of obtaining any new knowledge.

Thus, it is quite possible for even family members to co-exist year after year, and yet not know each other. On the one side there will be the illusion of perfect knowledge, and on the other side the absolute certainty that no real communication is even possible.

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Interesting how Bataille's theory of 'non-knowledge' stands in relation to those who possess dogmatic "knowledge". It appeals to such dogmatic stake-holders to let go of what they think they know about reality. Should they lose themselves in a state of not knowing, they may be fortunate enough to recover the type of self that does not feel the need to presume "to know" so much about anything, but is rather prepared to experience life with fresh eyes.