I need to go back and read Buber and see if he denied the validity of the I-It relationship.

If he did, I disagree with him. As important as I-Thou is, I-It cannot be reduced to a mere corruption of I-Thou.

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I-It is what mediates our I-Thou relationships.

In my view I-Thou deepens in the permanently expanding transfiguration of I-It to We-It. That transfiguration is synesis.

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I-Thou is the relationship I have with one who speaks.

I-It is that which I speak about.

If that which I speak about speaks, I must permit him to speak to me.

I must hear him and see for myself what he says about the world.

When he tells me about the world, much of what he shows me is I-It.

I must hear him as one who says something valid that may change my world.

If I accept the validity of his words, his I-It and my I-It gives way to We-It. More and more we speak out of a shared understanding and my world is drawn beyond itself.

If I deny his words validity, I withhold I-Thou from him. He is a talking, behaving object wholly contained in my world.

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Business wishes to establish an order where leadership has no reason to hear. It already knows.

Business wants I-It resources, not human beings. It wants the predictability of physics, not the insight of conversation.

Why the dehumanizing language? Resources, utilization, overhead… At minimum it is suspicious.

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At Auschwitz the Jews were not permitted to refer to Jewish corpses as “bodies”. They were to call them “puppets” or “shit”.

The Khmer Rouge taught the children to say to the urbanite New People: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”

And don’t forget Rwanda:

The director of the human rights organization, African Rights, Rakiya Omaar, was following the events from northern Rwanda.

“In Rwanda they referred to Tutsis as cockroaches,” explains Omaar. “They were not human beings. This is very important to understand, [there are] very close parallels to what happened in Hitler’s Germany. [They said,] ‘Don’t worry, you’re not killing humans like you. You are killing some vermin that belongs under your shoe. You’re killing cockroaches.'”

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If you believe Nietzsche, there is also a “benevolent” form of dehumanization.

Think about the people who love the helpless and seek them out in order to serve them… Are they connecting with them as people or as objects of benevolent feeling?

Much “service” in politics, business, education, religion, charity is just another form of reduction of human beings to I-It: helpless, mute, beloved objects. Neither love nor hate affects the fact that I-It is not I-Thou.

This is why Nietzsche had no respect for pity. Often, it is just one more mode of dehumanization, but one that allows the benefactor to have his cake and eat it, too. You can exercise power over a thing, but feel like you are doing something wonderful for a “person”.

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If you worship a man as God, proclaim the truth of his words, love him as your savior, but you don’t try to see his words as valid to you, in this time and place, within this everyday reality that you know as real haven’t you reduced him to I-It? To expect some magical end-time or after-life where the words become valid… isn’t that just a way to postpone understanding and applying until it is too late?

Worship dehumanizes. Superhumanizing deprives the object of affection of human meaning.

Exaltation is a defense against relationship.