ABSTRACT
We all of us intuitively know, as people who have parents, children, siblings, friends, neighbours, teachers, colleagues and so on, that comparison is fundamental to our daily lives. We’re engaged in comparison all the time. It’s part of how we get on in the world and, willy-nilly, we’re doing it, consciously or unconsciously, in every single one of our engagements with others in the world. We look at and listen to each one of the others whom we encounter and each one of them looks back at and listens to us. Comparison is implicit in that mutual looking and listening; it informs all our ideas of the peopled world.
