A business woman talked to me recently about how some people know just how to bring women to tears, how precisely to plant doubts in women about their competence, how to let women know unmistakably they don't belong, and this in face-to-face conversations, each party addressing the other in the 2nd person. It's a form of manipulation, but done with a smile, or an expression of concern.
I was a bit shocked at the shock I felt; after all, we all know about close-quarters verbal battle. I'm not unpracticed myself. But how far short of the freedom and generosity and mutuality that good 2nd person interactions offer. Instead, too often, we engage in something like the guts-spilling assassination of Abner by Joab while leaning head together together as if to confer.
In human affairs, motives like the desire for revenge or the assertion of superiority can and do taint our 2nd person encounters with exploitation, but in such situations, I think 'you' has functionally fallen away into 'I versus it.'
Of course, our interactions are vastly more complicated, full of genuine interest, appreciation and trust as at the same time there are dagger thrusts below the fifth rib. And either party can weaponize an encounter.
Still, what is this use of God-in-love's 2nd person mode of interaction to continue the disempowerment, the discouragement, the insidious self-suspicion that plays on the vulnerabilities of people, all the while wearing a face of responsible sincerity. Betrayal.
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