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Replying to
The need to be "respected" is a big part of the inability to like. Respect is a toxic and useless hangover tribal concept in modernity. Wanting to be effective and taken seriously is adaptive. Wanting "respect" is a recipe for failing at both.
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Replying to @vgr
You're on a corporate team and senior engineers are disrespectful. Do you still try to like them?
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Liking tends to be granular. You pick up on random partial aspects of people that seem alive and generative to you and like that. Trying to like "whole persons" or wanting to be liked as a "whole person" is beyond stupid. Nobody is entirely likable in all their aspects.
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A "whole person" relationship is properly the domain of "love" and that's a much narrower set. If you want random people outside your intimate circle to know and like the whole of you, you're setting yourself up for mutual contempt and hatred.
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Not coincidentally, the people I find it hardest to like are the ones who attempt strenuously to be Whole Integrated Personas to everybody. They refuse to be in bits and pieces. "You either like ALL of me, or you like NONE of me" is their demand of the world.
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Love is a project. Typically a lifelong project. Seeing the whole of someone in ways that positively harmonize with the whole of how they see themselves -- that's an Apollo project of interpersonal relationships. Save it for like 3-4 people tops. Expect it from 1-2 people tops.
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Liking is much easier. Almost everybody has at least a tiny foothold for likability. Even the extreme Integrated All-or-Nothing types tend to have slight cracks in their facade.
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Even Trump, among the public figures I have been most unable to like, had his few seconds in four years where a slight foothold of likability showed through the Integrated Scream Void.
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For liberals, GWB is a good litmus test. Yes, WMDs, Iraq wars, and various illiberal governance things. But if you can't find a foothold for likability even in his earnest and not-terrible paintings of people and pets... your liking-ability needs work.
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Replying to
Just speaking from anecdote here, but as a guy who worked for Bush-Cheney '04 when I was young, and now find myself a member of DSA, liberals are far less flexible on "liking" or seeing the personality of their opponents than any leftist I've met.
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Replying to and
Plenty of socialists are willing to contemplate and grant that they might personally like GWB if they met him, they just refuse to let that fact impact their political goals, their demands, or their rhetoric. Seems far more mature than the frosty pettiness of liberals, imo.
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