1525 Unawareness

Unawareness is living your own life without being cognizant of how other people perceive you. People in a coma are certainly unaware; autistic people are unaware, and in general, innocence is a kind of unawareness. The opposite is, of course, self-awareness; more specifically external self-awareness. People with external self-awareness know and care what other people think of them, and make decisions with that knowledge at the forefront. Those without external self-awareness, go through life doing only what they want. They might have internal self-awareness, meaning they understand their own motivations, but they don’t know and can’t understand why others treat them like they do. Liberalism, in the form of libertarianism, purports to live and let live, but that’s not how people are in real life. For whatever reason, often just FOMO, the fear of missing out, many people want everyone to be just like them, with the same ambitions & goals, and anyone who thinks differently is suspect, which turns into resentment, which turns into contempt, finally leading to a feeling of malevolence toward the person operating outside the mold. Zoning boards, charters, and social engineering are examples of this control. Anyone who’s ever lived under the heavy hand of an home owners association has experienced this. HOAs are specifically set up to force everyone living under their auspices to keep their homes in an acceptable range of presentation: color, lawn, ornamentation, even access of family & friends. Unfortunately, unaware people are their easy prey.