Humans can merge into groups (fission) and split apart (fusion) into fragments.
Both require significant energy. While gravity is an attractant, others can be repulsive. Bonding can be destructive to the self, and yet once we are in a group long enough, we self-destruct to be free, even destroying ourselves to be a self.
Tag: identity
- Theme: Self
Human fission/fusion
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
individualism, narcissism, and war
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1–2 minutes“All individualism harbors a strain of narcissism”
Tim Wu
Consider that identity politics leverages narcissism, a self-focused vanity. Perhaps, in an attention economy, narcissism is equivalent to greed in a capitalist society: a systemic vice harnessed as fuel.
The opposition to identitarian narcissism would be communal, national, and external identification.
However, nationalism is the very thing the Frankfurt school fought against philosophically: national socialism (Nazi) led to the Holocaust, so let’s deconstruct power and tradition to empower the individual. Hence, identity politics claims the importance of individual sovereignty, agency, and authenticity, focusing on the particular at the cost of coherence.
Fascinatingly, this identity imperative should stop wars through multitudinous disfunction, but the narcissistic need for attention loves escalation, prompting a collective drama in which they can all star.
- Theme: Systems
to increase your agency is to become complicit
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1–2 minutesTo increase your agency within a system is to align more fully with it: power is achieved through functional value, which is making yourself available for use.
As this exchange occurs, there is less separation between you (subject) and task/society/economics (object). This merged state, a synthesis of mutual need, flattens you into passive codependency. Agency (the power to enact change) within the system is counterbalanced by the system’s pacifying, enabling support, which makes you less you (subject) and more it (object).
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– - Theme: Self
vitriolic freedom
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1–2 minutesWhen repeatedly tempted with the vice we have coined as "freedom," it is to exercise your desire as your agency. (Chasing what you want is who you are, is to be a free, active individual.)
Yet, the conflicted pursuit of desire disgorges a perverse acidic hate as you strive to earn your freedom, which is to gain yourself.
The issue is that freedom through desire fulfillment requires increased intensity to become more of what you are (your autonomous individuality), paradoxically leading to an angry, vitriolic exercise of self, which corrupts and degrades yet demands further pursuit to maintain your freedom.
- Theme: Self
Belief as community
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1–2 minutesTo say “I believe” is to say “I am part of a community of believers.” That is, “we believe.”
It is not an individual thing to believe.
- Theme: Self
freedom from desire
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1–2 minutesWe tend to consider freedom as the positive ability to fulfill our desires. This means we can identify more fully with the object of our desire, and over time, we consider ourselves (our identity) to be those desiring actions, those drives.
According to Lacan or Slavoj Zizek, we are "desiring subjects" captured before inception with ideology. So, our desires are programmatic and not unique. They may be "individual" or "subjectively felt." Still, they are not authentic, meaning we are manufactured to feel individually free in our pursuits, but that very pursuit is your training in action.
So, what if freedom is not the fulfillment of your desire but a negation of desire? By dissolving desire, like a Buddhist, you create the potential to encounter your authentic self (if that exists), not tarnished with pre-programmed base desires or complex transference.
- Theme: Systems
debt-ocrocy
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1–2 minutesAccessing capital finance (going into debt, being bought out) is considered normal for companies and individuals. Yet, when states, towns, or social support services access capital, the debt is paid back through public taxes, a version of plundering the citizens due to incompetent or unlucky government.
Instead of allowing collapse, like small or medium-sized businesses (the large ones are bailed out), the capitalist devil’s bargain allows rich citizens to capture the state’s taxing power. Once embedded, the rate is hiked, forcing the nation to cover the inflated costs. OR the shareholders remake and steer the social services to their enrichment.
It sounds more like a medieval oligarchy, legalized through lobbyists: we are all indebted serfs for sins we did not commit.
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– - Theme: Self
snapping tolerance
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1–2 minutesWhen does navigating difference within a community shift to ostracizing for the sake of homogeneity?
Tribal theory suggests limits to group cohesion (Dunbar’s number, about 100-150). Still, civilization relies on shared narratives that allow us to transcend local (individual) comfort for symbolic cohesion and grand survival strategies. And yet, these stories fracture as a spectrum of deviations that no longer intersect or overlap: justice, suffering, and rewards diverge into antagonistic beliefs.
While tolerance is a spectrum, it requires a center and only expands so far.
After that, a mutual process of marginalization occurs: the fringes refuse to come to the center, self-ostracizing in a complex model of maintaining freedom, agency, and authenticity the tolerant center cannot stomach. - Theme: Self
Revealing the new ideal
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1–2 minutesThere are moments in political history and even scientific thought when an “ideal” takes hold of a population, such as Reaganomics or identity politics. For 30 or 40 years, this ideal seems to explain who we are to ourselves, how strong or weak we are, and how we identify with the dream. Yet, eventually, the contradictions within it become increasingly unsustainable. A new ideal presents itself, forcing a break and allowing us to reestablish our identity with fresh attachment points.
Consider that this dispensation was always there; we were simply captured by an ideology that kept us blind to alternative options.
The process of disagreement to acceptance is a slow revelation, an enlightenment process of increased sight. And seeing is believing; thus, political action -symbolic warfare- begins until it too crumbles when our gleeful, shiny ideal impacts reality, becoming tarnished, used, and dingy.
From here, our alienation converts us back to seeking, looking for new words that align with our emotional vision of self. And magically, the cause was always there, merely waiting to be revealed and foisted high.
- Theme: Culture
Distancing sanctimony
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1–2 minutesFreddie deBoer discusses the moral sanctimony of claiming to be on the side of the poor, disenfranchised, and mentally ill by asking for money for them.
Consider money and social status as a feel-good distancing mechanism: write the check or post online rather than physically, personally engage with (or take responsibility for) those suffering.
The reality is difficult but not complex: ill people do not make rational, normative decisions, but declaring their lifestyle as a choice or unique expression of their autonomy is another clever avoidance of responsibility/reality wrapped in the rhetoric of individualist freedom.
By requesting funds without participatory understanding layered with evermore attenuated disclaimers about autonomy and agency, we are left to surround problems with resources: we encircle difficulties with money and abstract empathy, like walling off an invader or parasite, yelling our care over the barrier we created.