Soul Blind
December 11, 2025 at 08:39PMIn this expansive piece for Hazlitt, Larissa Diakiw uses the mysterious echolocation skills of bats as a lens to examine how we perceive—and fail to perceive—other forms of consciousness. The essay explores “soul blindness,” our inability to see others as whole beings rather than objects. In mulling how we must learn to recognize the array of selves around us, it asks us to honor what we cannot fully know on faith, as a prophylactic against misunderstanding and fear.
We are so often illegible. We are so often not seen as a whole, instead turned into an object, a part, a limb. This is sometimes called soul blindness and makes it possible to devalue another life so much that we don’t care if a human or an animal lives or die. It makes us willing to kill. But soul blindness is also when we lose the ability to perceive other selves.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/11/othering/
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