Project Vision 21

I recently came across the story of American musician Sixto Rodríguez, who, despite having little success in his home country, spent decades unaware that he had become famous in South Africa—where, at the same time, people believed he had already passed away. It took the arrival of the internet and the involvement of his daughter and some of his fans to correct that situation.

Rodríguez, from Detroit, recorded two albums in the early 1970s and soon faded into obscurity, turning to construction work to support his family. But in South Africa, he was a cultural icon: his songs were passed down from generation to generation. He was unaware of his fame due to the geographic and cultural separation of that era.

Rodríguez’s story made me reflect on how rarely the identity we construct for ourselves in our minds and hearts matches the identity others create of us through their interactions—even when we don’t know it. In other words, the “self” we are is not limited to our internal understanding of it, but is instead part of a shared narrative.

As psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham explained in 1955, there are things we know about ourselves that others also know; things that others know about us, but we don’t; things we know about ourselves that others don’t; and things neither we nor others know about us.

Rodríguez’s experience reflects and illustrates those four quadrants of what is known as the Johari Window (named after its creators): the open area, the blind area, the hidden area, and the unknown area. But seventy years later, social media and related technologies have created a situation in which the privacy of the blind, hidden, or unknown areas no longer truly exists.

This situation could be understood as what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice—a kind of harm in which a person is wronged either by lacking access to knowledge about themselves or the world, or by not being recognized as a credible knower of their own experience.

We might say Rodríguez suffered this kind of epistemic injustice by not being recognized by those who did know him, and by not knowing how well he was known in other parts of the world—or how inaccurately his story was being told.

The curiosity of his fans, the persistence of his daughter, and the power of the internet helped to correct these distortions and gave Rodríguez back a life devoted to music—a life he had unknowingly sparked in a distant place.

Today, despite all our technologies, we live with only a partial awareness of ourselves, disconnected from the feedback, reflection, and recognition we need. Our extended self—the version of us living in the minds of others—remains out of reach without dialogue, without witnesses, and without trust.

Perhaps someone, somewhere, in another time (the past or the future) or another dimension (digital space, imaginal realm), is waiting for us to discover who we already are—and have always been—for them.