For Simmel, the stranger is someone who is outside of the group, but who, because of their social position, “often receives the most surprising openness—confidences which sometimes have the character of a confessional and which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person.” The stranger is someone both near and far, outside of the petty strife of our in-group dynamics, but privy to some of our closest secrets because of their distance. People implicitly recognize the value of the stranger when they talk to a therapist, spill their guts to a fellow traveler on an airplane, or,
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