Two People, and a Thing Neither of Them Will Put Down

Two people live together. One of them holds that a household is a place where things get decided together — that anyone routinely gone around ends up being treated as though they were not there. The other holds that a person who has to ask before doing anything ends up losing the standing to do anything at all. Neither of these is a mood. Each has been arrived at, over years, by the person holding it; each organises how that person actually lives.

Most days this costs nothing. Then comes a week when the electricity bill is due, and one of them just pays it, and the other one goes quiet. And then it is not about the electricity bill any more, and it is also not about anything else they can name.

This treatise is about that. Not about how to argue better, not about how to compromise, not about how to get to yes. About what happens when two laws that each belong to their own bearer meet in one situation and require actions that cannot both be taken — and about how a person handles that without the handling itself taking away the position from which they hold a law at all.

Two Gates

A collision has to pass two gates to fall here. The first asks about its structure: are there in fact two already-formed laws, each its bearer's own, requiring incompatible action in one and the same situation? The second asks what handling it will touch: does the way this gets handled put at risk my being able to go on making first-person revisions, and my being able to go on being questioned?

A collision that touches that position no matter how it is handled can still be a nuisance, a loss, something genuinely sad. It is not what this treatise calls a conflict. Some accounts settle. Some things dissolve once said. Some things one person gives way on, and nothing is taken from the person who gave way. All of that is fine, and none of it needs what follows.

Both gates have to be passed together, and from that follows something counter-intuitive. The size of a collision does not decide the scope. A very small thing, handled by suppression, can touch that position; what those two people have frozen over may only be who pays the electricity bill. A thing that looks very large can, if both sides have room, never once touch it from beginning to end.

The second gate is anchored on my side, and there is a reason for that. Leaving conditions open for the other runs through the whole of this treatise. It bears on what is done at every step, and on when to stop. But it does not belong in the gate that screens cases. Write the other's side into the entry condition and the whole treatise shrinks to one sentence: first I judge whether you are worth it, then I decide whether to deal with you. And that is precisely the thing being dismantled here.

The other's side can enter this gate in only one form: does handling this case make it possible for me to occupy the position of constituting on his behalf? That question is still a question about me.

Four Names That Look Like They Set the Scope, and Do Not

Difference of opinion. Competing interests. Misunderstanding. Confrontation. Not one of these is enough on its own to rule a collision in, and not one is enough on its own to rule it out.

Whether interests can be measured is left open here; some convert and some do not, and that has nothing to do with whether they are the object of this treatise. A misunderstanding that dissolves once cleared never passed the first gate to begin with — and a conflict can sit there whole after both sides have understood each other completely.

Confrontation needs a sentence of its own. It is one of the moves by which a conflict is handled, not one of the kinds of thing a conflict is. A conflict can reach confrontation; it can also go from beginning to end without one. Listing confrontation as a type of conflict mistakes a move for an object.

And so what can be diagnosed is this operation, this time — not this person. Your Own Law established it: there is no finally-judged evil person, but there are diagnosable evil operations. The immediate consequence here is that this treatise gives no test whatsoever for determining which layer the other party is running on.

What the Object Gate Actually Says

Two already-formed laws, each its bearer's own, require incompatible action in one and the same situation, and three things hold at once: the two cannot certify each other's arrival, neither can legislate for the other, and neither can settle the account by unilaterally walking out.

Left standing on its own, that sentence locks. If I must first confirm that the other end really is a law of his own before I have standing to begin, then I never have standing to begin, because certifying the other's arrival is exactly what gets prohibited. And if I may begin without confirming, then the two laws in the sentence are not an operational gate at all, only a description.

The lock opens by separating two layers. At the layer of the object: what is treated here is, in fact, two separately formed laws requiring incompatible action in one situation. At the layer of operation: I can confirm only my own end. The other end appears as a requirement the other person bears in the first person and by which he goes on organising his action. I do not certify whether it has attained the standing of a law of his own — and I do not cancel it on his behalf on the ground that I could not certify it.

With the layers apart, both sentences hold and neither trespasses on the other. Handling begins on the principle that no one can stand in for anyone. If it later turns out the object type never obtained, then one exits — one does not reverse-judge the other party. Exiting says this thing does not belong here. Reverse-judging says the other end was not good enough. The first is about scope; the second is about a person, and this treatise has no standing to make it.

The First Narrowing: No Certifying Each Other's Arrival

Two first-person positions each running at 15DD in this domain may derive the very same rule, and that is not consensus and not sharing; it is each arriving separately. I cannot take my arrival to certify his, and I cannot take his to shore up mine.

The consequence here is that between the two laws there is no position anyone can stand on and say this one is truer than that one. Not that the position has yet to be found — the very existence of such a position contradicts the first-person source of each of the two laws.

There is a very courteous-sounding version that fails in the same way: let us not say whose matters more, let us say both matter equally. Equal weight is still two marks on one ruler. It has not removed the ruler; it has only put the two readings at the same place on it.

A boundary has to be drawn here or the sentence gets read far too wide. What cannot be compared is the source standing of the two first persons — not every fact about action. Safety risk, harm, the edges of a right, legal authority, procedural priority and resource conditions can all still be compared, and can all still be adjudicated. Those adjudications arrange action. They cannot write backwards which law is truer in the first person.

The Second and Third: No Legislating, No Settling by Leaving

A law may say you may not crush the other. A law may not say you should give way. The second is legislating for the other, and that is colonisation.

This one needs a distinction right behind it, or it seals off what should be left open. I may state reasons. I may make a request. I may set out a boundary. I may propose a course of action. What is actually forbidden is something else: my law cannot, on its own strength alone, acquire the authority to settle you must give way on your behalf. Taking my reasons to be already established for you — that is legislating for you. Without this distinction, reasoning and requesting and consensus and outside arbitration all get sealed off in advance, and that is not what the clause forbids.

The third has to be written precisely. It does not say one is physically unable to leave. It says that no one party can, by walking out, thereby settle this incompatibility as regards their first-person responsibility, the shared relation, third-party responsibility, or institutional consequence.

Written that way it holds intimate relationships, shared parenting, organisational roles and public responsibility — and it also does not contradict the later allowance that both sides may leave. Leaving can happen; leaving does not thereby settle those responsibilities. And simply not wanting to leave, sunk cost, or the sheer momentum of a relationship, is not on its own enough to open this gate.

Is This End Mine?

The object gate has put two laws into the object. This next step checks only my end — because one thing is possible: what I take to be mine may not be mine.

It may have been installed. It may be the shape left by some stretch of a relationship. It may be a requirement that keeps coming back and that I have never actually claimed. How the Inter-Ontic Is Possible §3.1 handles this structure and gives three clues.

First: with the external conditions removed, does it still hold? When nobody is watching, when nobody will praise or blame me for it, is it still there? Second: can it coexist with my other important ends without eating all of them? The real one tends to stand alongside other things; the installed one often demands that everything else be cleared away. Third: when I interrupt it for a while, what shows up — regret and wanting to go back, or the feeling of a whole person collapsing? The first supports its being an important thing of mine. The second supports my having been propped up by it, which is another matter.

Three clues can support or weaken a judgement. They are not necessary and sufficient conditions, and they do not guarantee getting it right. All three also require a first-person internal reading: whether the thing is still there once external conditions are removed can be read only from inside. That a subject holds an irreplaceable first-person reading position does not mean he necessarily reads it correctly, or that he already knows. And taking these three to check whether the other's law is real is legislating for him.

Three registers have to be kept apart here, because the same shape returns later. There are clues. There is no criterion guaranteed to close. And there are traces visible from outside. The first register is those three checks. The second says: giving no criterion is not the same as having no clues; what is denied is only the guaranteed-to-close kind. The third, on this question, is this — in the available material, does that requirement appear only when a particular person is present, when it can be seen, or when it will be evaluated; does it vanish when a relationship ends; is there evidence of its being carried out unobserved. These are inferential traces. They support or weaken a judgement; they do not rule true or false, and they see only conditional correlations in available material, never anything nobody knows.

If confirmation of this end does not hold, what one does about it matters. Do not declare the requirement false. Do not start the four constraints. Register one thing only: the object type has not been attained in this case. Then move to the diagnosis of colonisation and introjection, which is a different piece of work. This is not some of the theorems failing. It is the whole thing never having started.

Conflict Cannot Be Exempted

Two laws form internally, arrive separately, and are not produced by one and the same procedure. That being so, there is no reason at all to guarantee that their action-requirements will always be compatible across every concrete situation.

And the residual remainder after mutual chiselling is not necessarily smaller than before. Positive-Sum made this point with the fractal coastline: the finer you trace it, the more edge may appear. The deeper two people talk, the fewer faces there are to collide on — not necessarily.

From this one can say what avoidance is. Avoidance is not a way of settling a conflict that has been handled. The incompatibility has not been cleared by being avoided; it stays in the shared field. It may be deferred, it may change shape, it may go dormant. Nothing is predicted here about the outcome being worse. Only this one thing: avoidance has not settled it.

And cannot-be-exempted is not the same as should-not-be-avoided. Where there need be no conflict, let there be none. Changing an arrangement so that the step never has to happen is a good thing. But the tense matters, and the same move gets a different name on either side of it: changing conditions before the object obtains is prevention. Changing conditions after it obtains, so that the current incompatibility lifts or goes dormant, is an action arrangement — and that is one of the ways a conflict gets handled.

One Cell Marked Off

A person with two things of his own that he cannot put down, which in some concrete situation require incompatible action — that is a different matter and is not treated here. The clearest kind of it, conflict between two already-claimed value contents under one and the same bearer, has been treated in Value Theory P5. Where the two requirements cannot both be reduced to claimed value content, the remainder is expressly left open here and handed to the theory of action.

And one more boundary. Value Theory P6 established three limits on the value side — not readable to the end, not comparable, not closable — and expressly refused to give a procedure. What is handled here is the law side: what to do when two already-formed laws require incompatible action in one situation. Those three limits are not re-established here and are not borrowed as premises. The two sides hold separately and do not stand in for one another.

So: back to the two of them, and the electricity bill. Nothing so far has told either of them what to do. All that has been settled is that this is the kind of thing the rest of the treatise is about — and that neither of them gets to decide it by deciding what the other one really is.