RB 9/12

Hegemony happens behind foggy window panes. Johari Window panes. The Johari Window is a tool used to help understand interpersonal communication. The idea is that everyone uses his or her own window in order to make sense of the world. Four panes provide four points of view.

1. Open—The top left pane provides a view shared by both the individual (some guy named George, for example) and everyone else. Its view is of the apparent.
2. Hidden—The bottom left pane provides a view exclusive to George, filtered through his thoughts.
3. Blind—The top right pane provides a view exclusive to other individuals. Its view is of things George can't see.
4. Unknown—The fourth pane provides a view exclusive to God. Its view is of the things incomprehensible to humans.
















Communication develops when we share what we see in the Open window pane; intimate communication develops when we share what we see through our Hidden window pane. Intimacy wipes away some of the fog on our Blind pane and, ideally, provides a more comprehensive view of reality.

However, failure to communicate leads to ignorance. On a cultural level, the Johari Window applies to entire peoples. Neglecting the Blind pane is like a presidency with no legislature or judiciary to keep it in check. It’s like an administration that demonizes those who do not share its Hidden pane view and those who seek out ways to wipe away the fog from the Blind pane.

In its self-congratulating isolation, the administration relies absolutely on what it’s seeing through its Known-to-Self panes. There is no reality but its own because all other perspectives are filtered through its Known-to-Self panes. Through this filter, those who don’t share the administration’s Known-to-Self pane are rejecting reality itself.

Habermas’ definition of “neoconservatives” is akin to a group which not only demonizes the Blind pane view but also assumes that the view in the bottom right Unknown pane is the same as its own.

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“Lord, grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand.”—from Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi