Wow, thank you for your kind words, they really mean a lot to me.
I haven't heard of Buber before, however now I will check him out, he sounds right up my street. I like the parallel you draw, and yes, I would say I'm talking about a similar thing, it is about connection on a human level and the dropping of ego.
It is like the other story I reported on in the last article twinned with this one, Sarah Silverman could really have flexed her ego and wrote a response that would have had lots of people laughing and retweeting. However she decided to drop her egotistical response and try and connect with her abuser on a human level.
Sure enough, when she read his timeline, she recognised pain behind his anger, that revealed that his feelings of resentment came from being abused as a child and having chronic back problems, and not enough money to treat them.
Because of her dropping her ego and making that connection, she has not only given this man hope by paying his medical bills, but also spread some of that love and understanding by inspiring the man to try and give back to his community.
Human interaction is so complex, and often simplifying algorithms, like the Facebook learning AI, subvert and confuse our communications. However sometimes, we can see past that and just simply, connect.
Thanks again for the comment and Buber tip off :-)
You're very welcome! If you end up reading any of Buber's work, I'd love to discuss it! (As you can imagine, "Buber's Philosophy" isn't something that most people care to sit around talking about, so it would be uniquely enjoyable for me...and I do think your worldview seems to match up very close with his, and consequently, mine).
It's probably hard for a lot of people to hold the kind of cognitive dissonance in their heads that's required to accept what you said and grasp insofar as human interaction is very complex in a broadly conceptual sense, but, at the same time, extremely simple when you drill down to the basic idea that human beings want and need to connect. That kind of connecting seems largely supra-rational insofar as it requires the kicking out of the ego and the kicking in of a more basic empathy.
But while I flail around trying to explain it here, you said it much better in your post, so again, it's very much appreciated and I hope a lot of people really read and absorb this!
Thanks again, and you should read The Dice Man if you haven't already, it's a disturbingly hilarious work of fiction, about a man trying to completely destroy his ego by letting a dice take all his decisions.
Cg