577. Propinquity - Significance - Importance - 2

577.   Propinquity - Significance - Importance - 2

This continues entry 575.  

Significance is correlated with propinquity, importance is not and can have many reasons.

The difference between significance and importance determines the behavior towards others.   The difference between being important and being significant determines what behavior can rationally be expected.  
But this difference is too often blurred in too many people's awareness.  This is the cause of a lot of unhappiness and harm.  

The following are some possible constellations of this difference. 

Reciprocity

• Neither significance nor importance
  
  As long as people do not know of each other's individual existence, they cannot experience each other as significant or important persons.  
  
  
• Importance without significance
  
  People can be important to each other without being significant.  The bus driver is important for someone in need to go someplace, and the paying customer is important for the bus driver to earn his wages.    They can either have nothing in common or they are ignorant about each other's person.   In either case, there is no subjective propinquity and they are not significant to each other.  
  
  
• Limited significance
  
  Acquaintances, coworkers, sport buddies, pen pals and such can have a partial area of propinquity and a limited significance to each other. 
  Their propinquity is either limited, because they do not know each other well.   Or it is counterbalanced by some essential disagreement, which creates a mental ditch.   
   

• Predominant significance
  
  People can be friends, when the areas of propinquity are far bigger and more attractive than what separates them mentally, and when they can rely upon not being harmed.   The limitations of mere friendship of not sharing the home, nor all hazards of life nor the full intimacy including the body allows some tolerance for differences.
  
  
• Ubiquitous significance
  
  A committed, bonded relationship including intellectual intimacy and trust requires propinquity without mental ditches.   
  The partner is the one person specially elected for the privilege of sharing a safe haven with.  He is the one chosen as deserving unrestricted full intimacy, even including the body.  
  He is not just a friend, he is the one best friend having a special significance, which would be disrupted by mental ditches. 
  
  

Asymmetry

• Anonymous partial significance
  
  Asymmetrical, anonymous propinquity of any degree can be experienced with persons, who are known by any media, books, movies, public events, newspapers.  
  Reading, watching, listening to their expression of the perceived propinquity reinforces their partial significance.  This is independent of their own ignorance of the existence of any individual person in their audience.     
  This can be any author, actor, philosopher, musician, scientist, politician, no matter if dead or alive.  
  
  
• Onesided significance and/or importance in personal interaction
  
  
  • Interaction based upon propinquity is sometimes a onesided choice.   Someone choosing a trainer for what he is fascinated with as an essential area of propinquity makes the trainer significant.  But if the trainer happens to be teaching, what does not really interest him, then the pupil is important as a source of income, but not significant due to lacking propinquity. 
    
    
  • A chosen guru or teacher can be very significant to the pupil, while for any guru each of a multitude of his many pupils is someone with propinquity but does not have the same significance for him.
    
    
  • Interaction based upon propinquity is a choice.  But there are many situations, where interactions are instead forced upon by circumstances in the absence of any propinquity and where there is no significance.  The school teacher of a disliked subject is an example.   So is the boss of a disliked but needed job.
      
    
  • Many dysfunctional relationships are pseudo-reciprocal in spite of being dyads. A woman, who has chosen a man by propinquity experiences him as significant for herself. But when he has followed his instinctive urges and objectifies her, then she can be an important utility, yet she is not significant.