The problem of identity
In the last few decades, the issue of identity has become so exaggeratedly relevant to our society that it’s become nothing more than a burden and a fetish.
We’re literally obsessed with identity. We’re surrounded by slogans such as: be yourself, be unique, be different, be unconventional, etc.
We’re constantly asking ourselves questions like: What am I? How can I express it in my clothing? What is my culture? How can I find other people like me? How can I show others how special I am? How can I distinguish myself from others?
We’re desperate for shared and stabilising values, we crave reassuring answers to our existential crisis, we need to know that our future is going to run smoothly and comfortably.
We either overload ourselves with too many and utterly useless responsibilities, values, tasks, and beliefs or we furiously try to push them away and act as if we’re the kings of the world.
In the last few decades, we’ve been witnessing a rebirth of religious fanatism, nationalisms, racism, misogyny, misandry, intollerance, idolisation of culture, political and social manichaesism, and a generalised need to put labels on people and things and to ghettoise everything and everyone.
This is especially evident on the internet. Even though this beautiful tool could help us learn new things and meet new people with their different realities, most of us experience the internet in a ghettoised fashion.
We don’t look for new perspectives, different points of view, and info that could make us change our minds or develop more wholesome views. On the contrary, we either look only for likeminded people who might help us strengthen our biases or we try to build ourselves an identity to constantly refine and sell to others.
Now, as I’ve written in other posts, identity is different from the self. The self is the mere feeling of being alive, it’s consciousness and it’s immutable, because it has no qualities. Identity, on the other hand, is something plastic, temporary, artificial, fluid. That’s why we shouldn’t try and give it stable and fixed qualities.
Identity is evanescent and volatile, it should be a tool for creativity, a vehicle of change. Therefore, any identity is temporary and bound to mutate. If it doesn’t, it will obviously start to rot. Nowdays, we’re surrounded by corpses.
I’m not referring only to people who support traditional values, but also to those who are fighting to impose new ones (that will eventually become tradition).
Think about how, for instance, the LGBT community has felt the need to support its own cause (which is actually a good cause) by advancing the myth that we LGBT people are just “born this way”. No, we’re not, and even if we were it wouldn’t imply that we couldn’t change.
Sexuality is a matter of taste and identity, therefore temporary and fluid. If your sexuality hasn’t changed at all through your life, that’s not because sexuality is fixed and innate per se, but because you just have a natural tendency to inner stability and are less prone to a certain kind of change. Either because you’re genuinely less fluid, or because the possibility of change scares you.
If sexuality was actually something fixed and innate for all of us, then it wouldn’t be possible for pedophiles to transform and control their impulses and tendencies. With this last sentence I’m not putting homosexuality and pedophilia on the same moral level, of course. We’re talking about identity here, not morals or legality.
Culture is another aspect in which the matter of identity is becoming extremist and dogmatic.
Nowdays more than ever, we don’t see culture as a richness to share, or as an historical tradition to break and reshape through this sharing. We see it as a divisor, as a watershed to separate us from them, educated people from ignorant ones, our nation from other nations, our religion from other religions, old people from younger people, women from men, whites from blacks etc.
(Note: I used the word black and not African American because this last words choice is a huge divisor: there are black people in Europe, Asia, and Oceania, too, you know, not just in Africa or America. US is not the centre of the world, by the way.)
We see culture as a series of codifications that must be strenghtened and transmitted. Codifications that only people from that same culture can understand.
That’s why we’re in desperate need for art and creativity, right now: we must break the walls we’ve built all around different cultures in order to let them mingle and change.
Since I don’t want to end up writing an essay, let me just add one last example: think about MBTI, and what Jung’s theory has become on the internet, partly thanks to Isabel Myers-Briggs.
Why are you all letting a stupid and faulted test tell you what your Type is? More importantly, why are some people taking said test multiple times, until they are satisfied with the results? Why do you need to be reassured?
Why do people feel the need to find all of the sixteen bloody Types in any given entertainment product? Why must the “coolest” characters always be intuitives?
What is this obsession with intuitives? Why are people so obsessed with rare Types? Why is it so hard for some people to realise that 1%, 2%, or 4% of more than seven billions is not rare at all?
Why do people rely on a test and its statistics to decide what career path they should take, what kind of people they should hang out with, what life choices they should make?
I’ll tell you why, but you’ve probably already guessed it: because we’re obsessed with identity and certainties, and the MBTI community is no exception.
We all want to be special, we all want to express this uniqueness, we all want to feel close to likeminded people, we all feel the need for certainties and reassuring answers. And I wrote we because I used to be like that, too, in the beginning.
Then I asked myself: what the hell am I doing? Don’t you realise how stupid all this is? Is it really important to talk about one’s own uniqueness and quirkiness? Or vent about our supposedly personal problems? Aren’t there more interesting and good things that you could do with this? Don’t you even realise that Psychological Types are not about identity? And how toxic this whole identity culture actually is?
I guess what I’m trying to say with this rambling is that we should give a lot less importance to identity, in order to be free. Or even better, no importance at all.
Identity shouldn’t be something heavy, manifest, thick, idolised, partisan, looked for, fixed, certain, and shared. It should be something light, playful, unimportant, unprejudiced, super partes, creative, flexible.
We should all learn how to live with a light heart, a creative mind, and not even one thought on the issue of identity.
