whims of others. These others are not definite others. On the contrary, any other can represent them. What is decisive is only the inconspicuous domination by others that Dasein as being-with has already taken over unawares. One belongs to the others oneself, and entrenches their power. "The others," whom one designates as such in order to cover over one's own essential belonging to them, are those who are there initially and for the most part in everyday being-with-one-another. The who is not this one and not that one, not oneself, not some, and not the sum of them all. The "who" is the neuter, the they.
We have shown earlier how the public "surrounding world" is always already at hand and taken care of in the surrounding world nearest to us. In utilizing public transportation, in the use of information services such as the newspaper, every other is like the next. This being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of being of "the others" in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the "great mass" the way they withdraw, [127] we find "shocking" what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.
The they has its own ways to be. The tendency of being-with which we called distantiality is based on the fact that being-with-one-another as such creates averageness. It is an existential characteristic of the they. In its being, the they is essentially concerned with averageness. Thus, the they maintains itself factically in the averageness of what belongs to it, what it does and does not consider valid, and what it grants or denies success. This averageness, which prescribes what can and may be ventured, watches over every exception which thrusts itself to the fore. Every priority is noiselessly squashed. Overnight, everything that is original is flattened down as something long since known. Everything won through struggle becomes something manageable. Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Dasein, which we call the leveling down of all possibilities of being.
Distantiality, averageness, and leveling down, as ways of being of the they, constitute what we know as "publicness." Publicness initially controls every way in which the world and Dasein are interpreted, and it is always right, not because of an eminent and primary relation of being to "things," not because it has an explicitly appropriate transparency of Dasein at its disposal, but because it does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference