Part of the point of hierarchy is to create a system in which dependency is separated from intimacy.
And just to be sure, we will also separate power from dependency…so the people furthest from the point of interaction and relation – from the risks of dependency – to need have the greatest concentrations of power. Yet their only real domain of influence is how the hierarchy – how variously you can express the separation of dependency from intimacy – can be expressed.
And this needs to be does constantly – since anyone in power who looks up – realises that without dependency, intimacy is meaningless; and without intimacy, dependency is powerless. So, their experience of power will tend to bleach their lives of meaning.
So, many many organisations need to keep their customers/patients/staff as far away as possible to prevent any illusion of intimacy arising (since that would mean that power was no longer one sided, but had become multi-sided); yet on the other hand, if dependency were actually acknowledged, we would have no choice but to see how intimately involved we all are.
Part of the huge power of communications technology is that it has externalised this process – in my relationship to the www, or social media, or my iPad-ness, I can be (more) fully relaxed in my relationship with both intimacy and dependency – since the design of the technology platform is personalised, and the communities of which I am a part are all outside me. So I can face how intimacy and dependency interact as I observe it and ‘like’ or not; accept connections, or not etc
But the experience of a virtual world in which I have an avatar complicates this – like Second Life – the seeming anonymity gives these interactions their full power; in this version of reality, I can both control my dependency and act-as-if-I-were being intimate.
Slingshot